The European Union and the Balkans: enlargement or empire?

[Francesco Lauria <francescollauria at yahoo.it>]

The European Union and the Balkans: enlargement or
empire? 
 Ivan Krastev 
8 - 6 - 2005 

If northern Europeans succeed in halting European
Union enlargement, they could push the fragile
southeast of the continent back into violence and
darkness, says Ivan Krastev. 
 
A crisis is approaching in the Balkans that is both
dangerous and timely. What makes it dangerous is the
fact that the European public is totally unaware of
it. What makes it timely is the fact that this is the
crisis that the European Union badly needs at the
moment. 

In the aftermath of the French and Dutch rejections of
the European constitution it is in the Balkans where
the referendum on the credibility of the EU will take
place. It is in the Balkans that the EU should either
demonstrate that its transformative power can work in
regions where states are weak and societies are
divided or it will sink into irrelevance. The Balkans
is the make-or-break test for the union. The EU can
survive the premature death of its constitution but
the EU cannot survive a new Srebrenica. 
 
  A fracture zone

The outburst of violence in Kosovo in March 2004
failed to capture Europe’s attention. The
international community has decided to trivialise the
disruption and not focus public attention on it. In
comparison with the other international
nation-building sites like Iraq and Afghanistan, the
Balkans looked like a success story and nobody was in
a mood to challenge this success. 

Unfortunately the border between failure and success
is the least guarded border in the postmodern world.
And diplomats are the worst border guards. We can hope
that the wars are over in the Balkans, but the smell
of violence still hangs heavy in the air. What we face
in the region is not the prospect of a new Balkan war
but a nasty combination of state failures and small
criminal wars. 

The region’s profile is bleak – a mixture of weak
states and international protectorates, where Europe
has stationed almost half of its deployable forces.
Economic growth in these territories is low or
non-existent; unemployment is high; corruption is
pervasive; and the public is pessimistic and
distrustful towards its nascent democratic
institutions. Criminalisation of politics in the
Balkan states and statelets goes hand-in-hand with the
internalisation of the criminal networks. 

The international community has invested enormous sums
of money, goodwill and human resources here. It has
put twenty-five times more money and fifty times more
troops on a per capita basis in post-conflict Kosovo
than in post-conflict Afghanistan. But despite the
scale of the assistance effort in the Balkans, the
international community has failed to offer a
convincing political perspective to the societies in
the region. The future of Kosovo is undecided, the
future of Macedonia is uncertain, and the future of
Serbia is unclear. We run the real risk of an
explosion of Kosovo, an implosion of Serbia and new
fractures in the foundations of Bosnia and Macedonia. 

The report of the International Commission on the
Balkans makes clear that the real choice the EU is
facing in the Balkans is enlargement or empire. Either
the EU devises a bold strategy for accession that
could encompass all Balkan countries as new members
within the next decade, or it will become mired
instead as a neo-colonial power in places like Kosovo,
Bosnia, and even Macedonia. Such an anachronism would
be hard to manage and would be in contradiction with
the very nature of the European Union. 

Unfortunately the signs of such a debilitating future
are already visible in the quasi-protectorates –
Kosovo and Bosnia. With no real stake in these
territories, international representatives insist on
quick results to complex problems; they dabble in
social engineering but are not held accountable when
their policies go wrong. 

George Orwell’s lesson

Bosnia is the country that has received most democracy
assistance per capita in the world and at the same
time the Office of the High Representative using the
powers provided by the Dayton agreement is in the
business of dismissing elected officials almost on a
daily base. If Europe’s neo-colonial rule becomes
further entrenched, it will encourage economic
discontent; it will become a political embarrassment
for the European project; and, above all, European
electorates would see it as an immense and unnecessary
financial and moral burden. 

You do not need a colonial project to become a
colonial power. George Orwell’s 1936 essay Shooting an
Elephant, recalling his experience as a minor colonial
police officer in Burma, explains it best. One
morning, Orwell was told by his superiors that an
elephant was ravaging the bazaar, and that he should
do something. He took his rifle and moved in the
direction of the bazaar, deeply reluctant to shoot the
large animal. When he reached the bazaar, he found a
huge crowd of people. 

“And suddenly I realized,” Orwell wrote, “that I
should have to shoot the elephant after all. The
people expected it of me and I had to do it. To come
all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people
marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away,
having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The
crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every
white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle
not to be laughed at”.
Orwell’s Burma incident gave the writer “a better
glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of
imperialism – the real motives for which despotic
governments act”. It reminds me a lot of Europe’s
Balkans story today. The only alternative to imperial
Europe is enlarged Europe. But is the EU’s expansion
in the Balkans really possible in the context of the
“no” epidemics that started in France? Could the
Balkans survive the rise of the “bad public” in
western Europe? 

The most surprising feature of the current debate in
Europe is that enlargement – the most impressive
success of the union – has been turned into its most
vulnerable spot. Scared by the scale of the
anti-establishment uprising that is underway in
Europe, the elites are afraid to make their argument
in favour of the further enlargement of the union and
to defend the urgent need for integrating the Balkans.


What political commentators are inclined to represent
as a clash between “yes” and “no” camps is more a
clash between the “no” camp and the “sorry” camp. The
outcome is easy to predict. It is also easy to judge
that the Balkan public is not in a waiting mood. 

The land of “unknown unknowns” 

The policy of constructive ambiguity embodied in
documents like United Nations Security Council
Resolution 1244 for Kosovo (1999) or the
Constitutional Charter of Serbia and Montenegro (2002)
worked yesterday and it is not working today. It can
be credited with draining the tensions in the
post-Milosevic Balkans, but now the politics of
constructive ambiguity risks turning into the politics
of destructive ambiguity. The consensus among Balkan
observers today is that the region is at
breaking-point and there is an urgent need for
European action. The current status quo is a clear and
present danger. The decision of the international
community to move with the status talks on Kosovo is a
realisation of this dangerous reality. 

  
 Also by Ivan Krastev in openDemocracy: 

“We are all Brits today: Timothy Garton Ash’s Free
World” (September 2004) 

“Ukraine and Europe: a fatal attraction” (December
2004) 
 
The risk is that in the absence of a European Union
membership perspective the status negotiations for
Kosovo will open not the road to peace but a road to
war. Closing the status issues in the Balkans in a
constructive way is possible only in the EU accession
framework. In the absence of a clear perspective for
joining the EU, Macedonia will not survive as a state
and Kosovo and Bosnia will remain protectorates
forever.

So to the real question: is the European public ready
to endorse imperial Europe if it is not ready to
endorse enlarged Europe? And will this imperial Europe
be less costly in financial, political and moral
terms? 

Blocking the accession of the Balkans to the European
Union equals the destruction of pro-reform leaders and
constituencies in the region and turning the Balkans
into the land of “unknown unknowns”. The hope is that
in one of the unexpected twists in history the Balkans
will save the EU just before the EU saves the Balkans.
But in order for this to happen Europe needs leaders
who remember that at its foundation the primary
purpose of the European Union was to provide not jobs,
but peace and security. 


Further reading and resources:

Institute of War and Peace Reporting; reliable,
accurate reporting and analysis 
http://www.iwpr.net/balkans_index1.html 

Mark Mazower, The Balkans (2002); best short history
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=978081296621

Centre for Liberal Strategies, a Sofia-based
think-tank
http://www.cls-sofia.org/about_us/index-en.htm

European Union and southeast Europe 
http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/see/

School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
London-based research and teaching institution
http://www.ssees.ac.uk/

 


 
 





		
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