Nations within the European Union are hardening their attitudes towards migrants from those eastern European countries that have recently joined, or soon hope to join, the EU. Meanwhile the western Balkans, though promised entry, have been left to wait.
REFERENDUMS were organised in 2005 in France and the Netherlands on the proposed European Union constitution, and in both the no campaigns won by sizeable margins. At the heart of the campaigns were debates about enlargement of the EU after the arrival of 10 new members in 2004. The image of the Polish plumber, the incarnation of collective ideas about cheap eastern European labour flooding the market of old Europe, expressed the reservations about enlargement.
The immigration debate has become lively again recently. In Britain, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Poles since 2004 has provoked calls for a restriction of eastern European immigration, and members of the Labour government have already promised tighter restrictions on future jobseekers from Romania and Bulgaria. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy, frontrunner in France’s 2007 presidential election, has reiterated his doubts about further enlargement.
National politicians have responded to immigration fears by reconsidering their commitment to further enlargement. Some countries, such as Romania and Bulgaria, are too far along the process of accession for any U-turn. At the end of September the EU Commission recommended in its final progress report that Romania and Bulgaria join in January 2007. But both countries have faced tighter EU demands on anti-corruption measures, organised crime and agriculture (1). Other countries have not been given any fixed dates for their entry into the EU. This has left the door open to long negotiations, where measures may be introduced to stem the fears of populations within member states. In France, future enlargements will probably be subject to national referendums.
In Serbia, enlargement fatigue is a serious problem for some. Ksenija Milivojevic, the secretary general of the European Movement in Serbia, thinks that while the basic framework of conditionality and negotiations will not change, negotiations over entry will take more time. She thinks, too, that the differences between first- and second-class membership, where access to all EU funds and institutions is not open to all members, will grow.
Doubts back home
Jovan Ratkovic, Serbia’s presidential adviser on European affairs, also feels that the EU is falling short of its commitment to a full membership perspective. He believes the EU should demonstrate its commitment to the integration of the western Balkans by extending the Thessaloniki promise of 2003. However, in the context of the evolving relationship between the EU and Serbia, and under the present conditions of enlargement fatigue, there are fears that the EU may not even honour that promise.
Oliver Dulic, chairman of the European Integration Committee of the now-defunct parliament of the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro (2), remains pessimistic. In June 2003, at the joint European Council and western Balkans meeting in Thessaloniki, the EU offered the Balkans its “unequivocal support to the European perspective of the western Balkan countries”. It also stated clearly that “the future of the Balkans is within the European Union”.
The reasons behind this reaffirmed commitment to Balkans membership of the EU are clear. Greece had the presidency of the EU in the first half of 2003 and, for its own reasons of regional stability and influence, placed closer integration of the western Balkans at the top of its list of priorities. In March 2003 the pro-reform prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated. According to Milica Djilas, a professor at Belgrade’s faculty of political science, the killing was a formative moment for the EU. It signalled to Brussels that reform in Serbia was not inevitable and needed to be supported from the outside.
Dulic observed that, since Thessaloniki, little has been done to reassure the western Balkans. Recent attempts to reaffirm the Thessaloniki promise have been made with little fanfare, as if the EU had something to hide. The British presidency of the second half of 2005 organised nothing for the western Balkans. The Austrian presidency of the first half of 2006, widely touted as an opportunity to push the EU’s western Balkans agenda forward, only heightened speculation about flagging support for enlargement within the EU.
There was no high profile western Balkans summit. Instead, the enlargement agenda was discussed at a two-day, informal meeting in Salzburg in March. While the Austrian foreign minister, Ursula Plassnik, stated that “European unification is incomplete without the Balkans”, there was also much talk of the “absorption capacity” of the EU (3). For Dulic, the difference in tone between Thessaloniki and Salzburg was a sign that enlargement had become a cause of trepidation rather than celebration in Europe.
For all this pessimism, fatigue has not overwhelmed the enlargement process. In spite of the postponement of the stabilisation and association agreement (SAA) negotiations, because of Serbia’s failure to hand over Ratko Mladic to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the EU Commission is keen to maintain contractual relations with Serbia. It uses any opportunity it has to engage with the ministries in Serbia on issues of legal harmonisation with EU standards. It also continues to make full use of the enhanced permanent dialogue meetings, which are the only formal instance that remains for dialogue between the EU and Serbia now that the SAA negotiations have been put on hold (4).
A Potemkin village
Some conclude from this that enlargement fatigue only applies to Europe’s national politicians. While the EU Commission and its directorates take the lead on enlargement, the member states drag their feet. A simple explanation is that the Commission’s isolation from the European public enables it to move forward on unpopular dossiers; national leaders are far more conscious of public opinion, and have less room for manoeuvre.
The former foreign minister of Serbia, Goran Svilanovic, has little time for the idea of enlargement fatigue. He claims it reflects Europe’s inability to adapt to the challenge of globalisation. This challenge demands that EU member states reform their welfare states, liberalise their labour markets and adapt themselves to outsourcing to India, China and eastern Europe. Rather than confront this reality, EU governments are blaming enlargement. He believes that tensions caused by globalisation take the xenophobic form of the Polish plumber, leaving enlargement a victim of Europe’s internal battle with its own social reform.
Svilanovic is not alone in believing this. Enlargement fatigue is, in the words of another Serbian politician, Gordana Comic, a Potemkin village designed to hide the seedier side of western European politics. The underlying problem is a lack of political will: hiding behind the label of enlargement fatigue, Europe’s elites absolve themselves of responsibility. We can see this by comparing the economics and politics of immigration.
The economic benefit for the EU-15 of the recent 2004 enlargement has been considerable. Britain and Ireland, two countries that opened up their labour markets fully to workers from the new EU member states in 2004, have benefited hugely. A recent study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that 75% of employers in Britain felt that EU enlargement had been good for business, and that migrant workers from eastern Europe did jobs that British-born workers were often unwilling to do (5).
The Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, has argued that cheap immigrant labour has dampened wage inflation, keeping interest rates low. King said in 2005: “In an economy that can call on unlimited supplies of migrant labour, the concept of output gap is meaningless” (6). In Britain there are even discussions around how to take advantage of a new phen-omenon, the Polish pound.
In spite of this, national politicians in EU member states have increased fears of enlargement by hardening their line on immigration. Svilanovic bitterly comments that not all the slabs of the Berlin wall are in museums. He says: “A new Berlin wall is being built around the western Balkans, with it becoming increasingly difficult to obtain visas to travel in the EU.” Visa facilitation remains a dream for Serbia and in Belgrade long queues form outside embassies, with some people sleeping overnight in the hope of obtaining the necessary travel documents. The situation seems to be worsening as neighbouring countries join the EU. Hungary’s entry into the EU in 2004 provoked considerable tensions with the neighbouring Serb province of Vojvodina, which has an important Hungarian minority. The introduction of visas prevented many families from regularly seeing close relatives.
This lack of visa facilitation is a feature of the hardening immigration debate within the EU. A particularity of the direction currently taken by immigration policy is that there is both an introduction of less liberal immigration regimes and a greater tightening of integration requirements. Traditionally, liberal immigration regimes were accompanied by tight integration requirements, and vice versa. Today there is a tightening in both directions.
Svilanovic explains this situation by pointing to the mediocrity of European politicians. He laments that there are no great leaders any more in Europe, echoing François Mitterrand’s claim that: “I am the last great president, after me, there will only be financiers and accountants”. The debate over immigration in Europe reflects the problem of weak political will. Rather than directly combat the racist arguments of the French Front National (FN) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the French Socialists stressed the threat in order to weaken the Gaullist right. Leaders on the right brought the FN’s hard-line immigration stance into the mainstream, most famously in the 1991 comment by Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, about the “noise and smell” of foreigners (7).
There has been a similar approach in other European countries, such as Italy, with the rise of neofascist parties such as Gianfranco Fini’s Allianza Nationale. Instead of recognising their role in heightening immigration fears, Europe’s leaders turn to enlargement fatigue as an excuse for further restrictions.
In Belgrade, enlargement fatigue is believed to be slowing down Serbia’s chances of joining the EU. Enlargement, the EU’s most successful foreign policy, has been transformed into a liability. Only the EU Commission, isolated from European public opinion, still remains firmly attached to the vision of a Balkans enlargement. The view from Belgrade is that responsibility for this lies with Europe’s elites. Public scepticism over enlargement expresses the outlook that the political elites themselves fostered. Those paying the price for this are the people of the western Balkans, whose freedom of movement is today far more limited than it was in Tito’s Yugoslavia.
http://mondediplo.com/2006/10/09serbia
Comments
October 13, 2006 09:41 AM
Fascinating. With all due respect, how does one win the Nobel Peace Prize by being the first to leave the negotiating table? I am not aware of a single success having come out of the Pristina-Belgrade talks in Vienna. If Ahtisaari had found a way to help these two parties find some common ground before throwing up his hands, THEN I would say, "That guy deserves a Nobel." (BTW, I am an American living in Pristina, been here for five years. I came to Kosovo/a as a bridge-builder, and I'll leave the same -- though I must say, it's killing me. BTW2: My country is not SCG. If you were to add 'Kosovo' to the pop-up list on your registration page, you'd make a lot of people happy down here -- the *compromise* being that Kosovar Albanians spell it with an 'a'.)
October 13, 2006 10:41 AM
Who is Agim Ceku? It's great to see that Margaret Beckett greeted him with such respesct.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/total_coverage/kosovo/ceku.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldbriefing/story/00,,1920947,00.html
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/polbet0306.htm
http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/july00/hed292.shtml
How can anyone be the Prime Minister of a PART of a country? The only comparison I can make is say, being Prime Minster of Scotland, Wales or Ireland!
Kosovo and Metohija are a part of Serbia and no amount of ethnic cleansing by the Albanians of all other minorities is going to chage that fact. NATO occupation will not change that fact either. It will end for them just like Iraq.
NATO is desperate enough to get out and leave the region in a worse mess than when they went in. If they don't deliver on their promises the Albanians will have their guts for garters. Not a nice prospect. The soldiers on the ground have seen what the Albanians are capable of.
October 13, 2006 11:09 AM
I think it would be wrong to see Russia as utterly opposed to Kosovan independence. In fact the only reason I can see for them opposing it is that they want to maintain close relations with Serbia. It would certainly be wrong to see them as opposed because it might encourage secessasionary struggles in the former Soviet Union. Russia WANTS secessationary struggles.
Not on its own territory obviously, but many years of appalling brutality and bloodshed have seen that Russia's territorial integrity is intact. If Kosovo gets its independence however, then Russia will feel free to call for independence in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Trandniestria, Eastern Ukraine etc etc. In fact Kosovan independence would almost definitely strengthen Russia's hand in its backyard.
October 13, 2006 11:47 AM
If full independence can be granted to Kosovo - from which a large proportion of the Serbain minority has fled due to intimidation - where would that leave the future status of Republika Srbska? Why should the Bosnian Serbs be expected to accept a Bosnian Muslim-dominated government in Sarajevo while the Albanians in Kosovo are granted independence from the Serb-dominated government in Belgrade?
October 13, 2006 12:00 PM
The "bad news" from Kosovo is that 240,000 people remain ethnically cleansed from their homes. Meaningless "independences" that get handed back the next day to Brussels and other EU elite unaccountable structures are not worth a single death.
October 13, 2006 12:31 PM
Ah yes ... Kosovo. The part of Serbia which NATO (without the UN resolution which "progressives" seem to think is mandatory nowadays) fought so hard to remove from Serbia and hand to a bunch of terrorists (the KLA) - and without so much as a squeak of protest from the BBC (but that was the nice Mr Clinton - wasn't it. Not the nasty Mr Bush).
From a part of the world where all the artificially created (by Tito) internal boundaries of Yugoslavia are considered sacrosanct and unchangeable ... except Serbia's.
This being a place which NATO went into to "prevent a humanitarian catastrophe", which ... erm ... only kicked off *after* the bombing started - to Clare Short's apparent surprise (she not having made any preparations for the unforseen fact that civilian populations tend to run away from places that are being bombed - and where NATO has fulfilled its promise of preserving a "multi-ethnic Kosovo" by presiding over a colony which has seen the systematic ethnic cleansing of a large proportion of its ethnic Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, Macedonians and even non-Albanian Muslims (most of whom had to take refuge in nasty racist Serbia).
A place chock-full of as yet undiscovered "mass graves" and "rape camps" alleged to have been created by people who had the cheek to believe that they had the right to put down a terrorist uprising within their own country.
As somebody else has pointed out - why should Serbia be liable to be carved up according to demography, but not Bosnia? It is no wonder that the Serbs believe that double-standards are being applied here.
And the result of all this wonderful western intervention? The re-Balkanisation of the Balkans, a Bosnia which has even less independence now (and for the foreseeable future) than it had when it was part of Yugoslavia (and which even had to suffer having Paddy Pantsdown as its Grand Poobah for a while), and a Balkans where the only remaining multi-ethnic society is ... erm ... nasty racist Serbia.
Way to go.
October 13, 2006 12:50 PM
"Warrant for the arrest of Agim Ceku has been withdrawn because of his new prime ministerial status," quotes an Interpol release issued on March 24.
http://www.ccmr-bg.org/vesti/frommedia/media0180.htm
So much for 'the end of impunity'. NATO and their thuggish allies are still immune from prosectuion for the crimes they committed in Kosovo.
October 13, 2006 12:56 PM
Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, managing director of the Grameen Bank, was awarded the Nobel for his efforts toward eradicating world poverty. [MSNBC] Mr. Ahtasaari is a shoe-in for 2007. I'm assuming, of course, that he'll find a way to get a picture of Agim and Vojislav shaking hands -- with smiles on their faces.
October 13, 2006 02:05 PM
Agim Ceku was one of the greatest generals in Croatian army. He has won nine major awards for achievment during the Croatian-Serbian war.
What people don't know is that he never fought in Kosova/o. He was only appointed the head of KPC (Kosovo Protection Corps) only few weeks before the end the war in 1999.
As a person he is very nice, honest and friendly. He is a former Army University tutor in Belgrade-Serbia.
October 13, 2006 02:39 PM
Aim Ceku was only great because he killed and cleansed Serbs as did Godovina. And if they were great then Milosevic was great too. He could have been appointed the head of KPC but that does not do him justice for heading the KLA so I am sorry, but your statement does not clear his name. Second, your other statement that he is very nice, honest and friendly, is impossible, because as we have seen he is a successful politician and no politician gets there by being nice, honest and friendly. Look at George Bush!! Politicians are greedy, driven, full of B.S. and can lie to your face. Those are the facts don’t try to make it seem like he is innocent and a nice guy because we all know its untrue, otherwise Kosovo would be a stable region within Serbia if this all was true but in fact even without Serb "ethnic cleansing" and "aggression" it is the most violent and unstable region in the Balkans. Thank you very much.
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