[ALBSA-Info] European Union and Albania

[Agron Alibali]

RFE/RL: THE EU TAKES A FRESH LOOK AT THE BALKANS, PART 1

RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol. 7, No. 12, Part II, 21 January 2003
THE EU TAKES A FRESH LOOK AT THE BALKANS, PART 1

By Patrick Moore

The countries of the western Balkans all seek rapid
integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions. The EU seems on the way
to realizing that it must offer them serious prospects of membership,
much as NATO already has.
On 14 January, the "Frankfurter Rundschau" published an
interview with Christoph Zoepel, who is one of the leading Balkan
policy experts within Germany's governing Social Democratic Party
(SPD). He warned the EU not to be "arrogant" toward the countries of
the western Balkans -- Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, and
Yugoslavia -- nor to leave them outside that organization. To neglect
the five countries would be a great "historic mistake," he added.
Zoepel thinks one way to defuse tensions surrounding such
delicate issues as the status of Kosova would be to hold out the
prospect of a common European citizenship to Serbs and Albanians
alike. To give weight to his argument, he suggested that Belgium
would have split up long ago along ethnic lines if it were not for
that country's membership in the EU. (And he might have also recalled
the positive role that European integration played in Western Europe
as a whole in the decades since World War II, particularly in terms
of Franco-German reconciliation.) 
The Social Democratic legislator also noted that people
throughout the Balkans are enthusiastic about joining the EU, adding
that he has not met a single serious politician there who is opposed
to membership. Zoepel recalled that Kosovar President Ibrahim Rugova
once told him that an independent Kosova could do without its own
foreign minister and leave that job to the EU. Zoepel added that he
has not seen such eagerness to delegate prerogatives to Brussels
anywhere else.
To bring the countries of the western Balkans into the EU, he
continued, amounts to nothing more than carrying out a decision that
was, in effect, made already in 1981 when the then-European Community
voted to admit Greece. Zoepel stresses that the decision in favor of
Greece meant Brussels accepted in principle that "everything to the
northwest of Athens" would some day belong to the EU.
That decision is well on its way to being realized by holding
out prospects of admission in 2007 to Romania and Bulgaria, he
continued. What Zoepel now misses is a readiness to engage the other
five countries of the region and give them realistic possibilities
for membership.
He noted there are several obstacles to doing so. One is
simple ethnic prejudice, particularly against peoples of Islamic
heritage, such as the Bosnian Muslims and many Albanians. This
prejudice is more intense than those against, for example, Poles or
Czechs and ignores the fact that Albania is a highly secular country,
much more so than Turkey.
When asked whether the five should be admitted as a group,
Zoepel suggested that Croatia is farther along toward meeting the
EU's criteria for membership than the others and could proceed ahead
of them. But the other four, in his view, are so "interdependent"
when it comes to ethnic and religious disputes that it would not be
practical or wise to separate them on the road to membership.
Zoepel noted that Macedonia has met the criteria for
membership that the EU leaders set down at their recent Copenhagen
summit -- but only formally. Albania is a democracy and has a market
economy, but has problems bringing its institutions into line with
European standards. Bosnia and Yugoslavia are handicapped by what he
called "unresolved status questions."
But the SPD legislator does not feel the EU should wait for
the five countries to meet its standards before engaging them. On the
contrary, he argued that they can develop modern market economies
only when they have a clear perspective for EU membership. And that,
Zoepel concluded, could be a reality in 10 years.




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