Constructing South East Europe: The Politics of Balkan Regional Cooperation (St. Antony's)

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St Antony’s Series General Editor: Jan Zielonka (2004– ), Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford and Othon Anastasakis, Research Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford and Director of South East European Studies at Oxford. Recent titles include: Dimitar Bechev CONSTRUCTING SOUTH EAST EUROPE The Politics of Balkan Regional Cooperation Julie M. Newton and William J. Tompson (editors) INSTITUTIONS, IDEAS AND LEADERSHIP IN RUSSIAN POLITICS ˘ ktem, and Philip Robins (editors) Celia Kerslake , Kerem O TURKEY’S ENGAGEMENT WITH MODERNITY Conflict and Change in the Twentieth Century Paradorn Rangsimaporn RUSSIA AS AN ASPIRING GREAT POWER IN EAST ASIA Perceptions and Policies from Yeltsin to Putin Motti Golani THE END OF THE BRITISH MANDATE FOR PALESTINE, 1948 The Diary of Sir Henry Gurney Demetra Tzanaki WOMEN AND NATIONALISM IN THE MAKING OF MODERN GREECE The Founding of the Kingdom to the Greco-Turkish War Simone Bunse SMALL STATES AND EU GOVERNANCE Leadership through the Council Presidency Judith Marquand DEVELOPMENT AID IN RUSSIA Lessons from Siberia Li-Chen Sim THE RISE AND FALL OF PRIVATIZATION IN THE RUSSIAN OIL INDUSTRY Stefania Bernini FAMILY LIFE AND INDIVIDUAL WELFARE IN POSTWAR EUROPE Britain and Italy Compared Tomila V. Lankina, Anneke Hudalla and Helmut Wollman LOCAL GOVERNANCE IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE Comparing Performance in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Russia Cathy Gormley-Heenan POLITICAL LEADERSHIP AND THE NORTHERN IRELAND PEACE PROCESS Role, Capacity and Effect Lori Plotkin Boghardt KUWAIT AMID WAR, PEACE AND REVOLUTION Paul Chaisty LEGISLATIVE POLITICS AND ECONOMIC POWER IN RUSSIA Valpy FitzGerald, Frances Stewart and Rajesh Venugopal (editors) GLOBALIZATION, VIOLENT CONFLICT AND SELF-DETERMINATION Miwao Matsumoto TECHNOLOGY GATEKEEPERS FOR WAR AND PEACE The British Ship Revolution and Japanese Industrialization Håkan Thörn ANTI-APARTHEID AND THE EMERGENCE OF A GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY

Lotte Hughes MOVING THE MAASAI A Colonial Misadventure Fiona Macaulay GENDER POLITICS IN BRAZIL AND CHILE The Role of Parties in National and Local Policymaking Stephen Whitefield (editor) POLITICAL CULTURE AND POST-COMMUNISM José Esteban Castro WATER, POWER AND CITIZENSHIP Social Struggle in the Basin of Mexico Valpy FitzGerald and Rosemary Thorp (editors) ECONOMIC DOCTRINES IN LATIN AMERICA Origins, Embedding and Evolution Victoria D. Alexander and Marilyn Rueschemeyer ART AND THE STATE The Visual Arts in Comparative Perspective Ailish Johnson EUROPEAN WELFARE STATES AND SUPRANATIONAL GOVERNANCE OF SOCIAL POLIC Archie Brown (editor) THE DEMISE OF MARXISM-LENINISM IN RUSSIA Thomas Boghardt SPIES OF THE KAISER German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era Ulf Schmidt JUSTICE AT NUREMBERG Leo Alexander and the Nazi Doctors’ Trial Steve Tsang (editor) PEACE AND SECURITY ACROSS THE TAIWAN STRAIT James Milner REFUGEES, THE STATE AND THE POLITICS OF ASYLUM IN AFRICA Stephen Fortescue (editor) RUSSIAN POLITICS FROM LENIN TO PUTIN

St Antony’s Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–71109–5 (hardback) 978–0–333–80341–7 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Constructing South East Europe The Politics of Balkan Regional Cooperation Dimitar Bechev Senior Policy Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations and Research Associate, South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX), St Antony’s College, Oxford

In Association with St Antony’s College, Oxford

© Dimitar Bechev 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–23972–2

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures and Map

vii

List of Tables

viii

About the Author

ix

Acknowledgements

x

List of Acronyms

xi

Introduction Divergent views of regional cooperation Bringing in identity politics Outline of the main argument Methodological orientations Overview of the chapters

1 4 6 9 11 14

Part I Drivers of Regional Cooperation 1

2

3

All in the Same Boat? Regional Interdependence and Cooperation in South East Europe Functional aspects of Balkan interdependence The webs of Balkan security Interdependence and cooperation

19 20 30 39

Pushing for Cooperation: External Actors in Balkan Regionalism The power of outsiders: historical legacies Western interventions in the 1990s Back to the Balkans: international policy after the Kosovo crisis The only game in town: the EU and the Western Balkans in the 2000s The dynamics of external push

57 60

Balkans, Europe, South East Europe: Identity Politics and Regional Cooperation Identity and the study of regionalism In search of Balkan identity

62 63 65

v

41 42 43 49

vi

Contents

The inside-out angle: the nation, Europe and the Balkans The outside-in angle: between othering and Europeanization A dichotomy revisited: identity and material interest in regional cooperation

68 74 79

Part II Areas of Regional Cooperation 4

Building Up a Regional Marketplace: Economic and Functional Cooperation Sectors of economic and functional cooperation Explaining and understanding functional cooperation

5 Defusing the Powderkeg: Security Cooperation First steps in cooperative security after the Cold War Towards a multilateral security regime The new security agenda in the Balkans Origins and dynamics of security cooperation in South East Europe 6

Between Lofty Rhetoric and Lingering Conflicts: Political Cooperation Balkan multilateralism relaunched New beginnings The Balkans on the road to membership in NATO and the EU Interests, norms and identities in Balkan political cooperation

85 86 104 108 109 111 120 126 129 130 137 142 149

Conclusion: Looking at the Big Picture

152

Appendix I

157

Appendix II

162

Notes

171

Bibliography

195

Index

207

List of Figures and Map Figures 1.1

Trade in South East Europe

25

2.1

Institutional structure of the SP

54

Map 4.1 South East Europe: core network

vii

99

List of Tables 0.1 Factors behind regional cooperation

9

0.2 Balkan regional cooperation: factors and outcomes

13

1.1 GDP growth in selected transition countries of South East Europe, 1990–2000 (%)

23

1.2 Trade figures for 1996 (million $)

26

1.3 Density and quality of roads in South East Europe (2000)

28

1.4 Density and quality of railways in South East Europe (2001)

28

2.1

52

SP participants

2.2 The Western Balkan countries on the path to European integration

59

3.1 External push vs. norms and identity

82

4.1 Trade flows in South East Europe in 1998 (share of total)

88

4.2 Pan-European corridors and SP funding

97

4.3 Functional cooperation – a cross-sector comparison

105

5.1 SEDM/MPFSEE in facts and figures

116

6.1 The Regional Cooperation Council at a glance

147

viii

About the Author Dimitar Bechev is a Senior Policy Fellow and Head of Sofia Office at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is also affiliated with South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX), a programme within the European Studies Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the sole author of the Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Macedonia (2009) and co-editor of Greece in the Balkans (2009) and Mediterranean Frontiers: Borders, Conflict and Memory in a Transnational World (2010). His reviews and articles on Eastern enlargement and the EU neighbourhood policy, the Balkans, Euro-Mediterranean relations, post-communist transitions and ethnopolitics have appeared in leading academic periodicals such as the Journal of Common Market Studies, East European Politics and Societies, Slavic Review, Millennium, Nationalities Papers. He has also been involved, as Region Head for Central and Eastern Europe, in Oxford Analytica, a leading provider of political and economic insight. He holds a D.Phil. in International Relations (2005) from the University of Oxford.

ix

Acknowledgements This book was made possible thanks to the support and inspiration by a number of individuals and institutions. First and foremost, I am indebted to Kalypso Nicolaïdis, who encouraged and guided my efforts leading to this monograph. I am also grateful to Richard Crampton, Richard Caplan, Jan Zielonka and Spyros Economides, who all helped me flesh out and refine my ideas along the way. Special thanks to South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX), a programme within St Antony’s College, and personally to Kerem Öktem and Othon Anastasakis. The affiliation with SEESOX brought me into contact with some of the leading minds in the Balkan Studies community, to the great benefit of my research. I also wish to thank the fellows and students at St Antony’s College, my intellectual and physical home for nearly a decade. I am also particularly grateful to Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo for the fellowship it awarded me in 2010, enabling me to complete the manuscript. Thanks to Ryo Oshiba as well as to the Faculty of Law and the EU Studies Institute run jointly with Keio University. I also wish to acknowledge the contribution of the BISA Working Group on South East Europe, which I co-convene together with Denisa Kostovicóva and James Ker-Lindsay, and the TRANSFUSE association. Special thanks to Ilia Markov for helping with the Index. I owe much to the ideas, comments and suggestions of the following colleagues: Milica Uvalic´, Vladimir Gligorov, Ivan Krastev, Aleksandar Fatic´, Dejan Jovic´, Leeda Demetropoulou, Laza Kekic´, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Duško Lopandic´, Svetlozar Andreev, Nathalie Clayer, Vesna Popovski, Peter Siani-Davies, Emilian Kavalski, Srd¯an Vucˇetic´, Alessandro Rotta, Kyril Drezov, Max Watson, Michael Taylor, Tanja Börzel, Jonathan Scheele, Vessela Tcherneva, Julian Popov, Svetlana Lomeva. Last but not least, I owe a great debt to my friends and family. My parents, Rossitsa and Christo, supported me all through my long postgraduate years. Finally, if there is one person without whom this book would never have been written is my wife Galya. To her I owe my greatest gratitude and, above all, love. x

List of Acronyms ATMs/ATPs

Autonomous trade measures/preferences

CSBMs

Confidence- and security-building measures

CSCE/OSCE

Conference/Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe

CEFTA

Central European Free Trade Association

CEI

Central European Initiative

CEPS

Centre for European Policy Studies

CFE

Treaty of Conventional Forces in Europe

EAPC

Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council

EBRD

European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

EIB

European Investment Bank

EEC/EU

European Economic Community/European Union

FDI

Foreign direct investment

FTA

Free-trade agreement

HLSG/ISG

High Level Steering Group, Infrastructure Steering Group

IFI

International Financial Institution

IMF

International Monetary Fund

KFOR

Kosovo force

MARRI

Migration, Asylum and Refugees Regional Initiative

MoU

Memorandum of Understanding

MPFSEE

Multinational Peace Force in South East Europe

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

PfP

Partnership for Peace

SAA

Stabilization and Association Agreement

SAP

Stabilization and Association Process

SBDI

South Balkan Development Initiative xi

xii

List of Acronyms

SECI

South East European Cooperative Initiative

SEDM

South East European Defence Ministerial

SEEBRIG

South East European Brigade

SEECAP

South East Europe Common Assessment Paper on Regional Security Challenges and Opportunities

SEECP

South East European Cooperation Process

SEEGROUP

South East European Steering Group

SEEI

South East European Initiative

SEETI

South East European Trade Initiative

SELEC

South East European Law Enforcement Centre

SEPCA

South East European Police Chiefs Association

SFOR

Stabilization Force, NATO’s peacekeeping mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina replacing IFOR

SP

Stability Pact for South East Europe

OECD

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

RCC

Regional Cooperation Council

PROSECO

Public Prosecutors’ Network

TINA

Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment

UCTE

Union for the Coordination of the Transmission of Electricity

UK

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

UN

United Nations

UNDP

United Nations Development Programme

UNMIK

United Nations Mission in Kosovo

US

United States of America

VAT

Value added tax

WB

World Bank

WT1

Working Table II of the Stability Pact (Democratization)

List of Acronyms

WT2

Working Table II of the Stability Pact (Economic Affairs)

WT3

Working Table III of the Stability Pact (Security Affairs)

WTO

World Trade Organization

xiii

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Introduction

On a recent trip to Brussels, Mirko Cvetkovic´, Serbia’s prime minister, observed that ‘[r]egional cooperation is a common value shared by Serbia and the EU, so we will do everything which is possible to support good and friendly regional relations and to encourage cooperation with neighboring countries’.1 His rhetoric, meant to reassure his hosts about Belgrade’s forthcoming approach to shaky Bosnia and Herzegovina, is representative of a political shift in Europe’s southeast. ‘Regional cooperation’ is nowadays one of the catch phrases in the Balkans, on a par with ‘European integration’, ‘democratic consolidation’, ‘reconciliation’, and ‘economic development’. The expression is present in nearly every official speech, policy paper and media article about the area’s politics. Local diplomatic jargon abounds with barely pronounceable acronyms such as SEECP, RCC or MPFSEE. The European Union (EU) and NATO see the promotion of regional institutions as a core objective on their Balkan fringe.2 Social scientists, policy analysts and the commentariat of the region discuss at length the opportunities offered to – and obstacles blocking – governments, businesses, civil society and the common people for carrying out joint projects across borders. Post-communist South East Europe is now halfway inside the EU, with the 2007 accession of Bulgaria and Romania and the efforts of Western Balkan countries to join, and gradual normalization has followed the decade of conflict in the 1990s. Despite numerous lingering issues, notably the rifts opened by Kosovo’s unilateral proclamation of independence on 17 February 2008 and the tensions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, South East Europe is more peaceful and integrated than 1

2 Constructing South East Europe

it was in the times of Yugoslavia’s bloody demise. In the autumn of 2008, not long after the declaration of the Prishtina Assembly, a representative sociological poll, run by Gallup in the Western Balkans, found that ‘only a minority of the respondents believe[d] that a new armed conflict could take place in the coming years’.3 The growth of regional cooperation has been a central feature in that story, whose starting point was the signing of the Dayton/Paris Peace Accords in late 1995. These days myriads of intergovernmental schemes operate across various policy areas, barriers to the free circulation of goods and people have been considerably lowered, Balkan leaders meet on a regular basis in political consultations and scholars speak of an emergent transnational civil society.4 As of the summer of 2008, the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC) operates in once war-torn Sarajevo, ‘regionally owned’ by the countries of South East Europe after long years of tutoring by the EU and the International Financial Institutions (IFIs). We have now a Balkan peacekeeping force, a free-trade area, an energy community, a centre on fighting cross-border crime, and so forth. Seen from the perspective of the summer of 1995, indelibly marked in memory by the genocide at Srebrenica, this surely counts for something. This process involves not only governments but also all manner of private actors, from businesses to sports associations. (A Balkan professional basketball league with teams from Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Romania and Montenegro was launched in 2008). It has been gathering momentum, especially in the areas that once constituted Yugoslavia. Journalist Tim Judah, covering Western Balkan affairs for The Economist, has recently written an illuminating piece about the re-emergence of ‘the Yugosphere’ (Judah, 2009). Once embroiled in conflict, the former federation’s inhabitants now travel freely inside what used to be administrative boundaries, trade and invest in their ‘near abroad’, attend en masse the concerts of the same post-Yugoslav performers and watch common TV programmes and reality shows.5 To be sure, the trend towards regional collaboration is just one among several facets of Balkan politics. When President Boris Tadic´ boycotted the Western Balkan summit convened by Slovenia and Croatia at Brdo pri Kranju on 20 March 2010, over the presence of high-ranking Kosovar politicians, a great deal of the tensions and festering disputes resurfaced. Cooperation and competition have long coexisted in the region – and they continue to do so, as any student of

Introduction

3

IR would expect. However, in the 1990s it was the divisions rooted in exclusionary ethno-national identities, rather than integration driven by functional imperatives, that set the dominant tone. The violent break-up of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia culminating in the wars in Bosnia (1992–5) and Kosovo (1998–9) was seen as a new instalment in a never-ending historical drama earning the Balkans and ‘balkanization’ an unenviable place in the global political lexicon. The televised images of the Yugoslav conflict – dubbed ‘the Third Balkan War’ in a reference to 1912–13 – coupled with entrenched associations with Kleinstaaterei, parochialism, intolerance and aggression against minorities and neighbouring countries, rendered the very notion of Balkan regionalism an oxymoron. Why and how, then, did regional cooperation make such advances in the space of 10–15 years? This is the subject this book engages with. From a certain perspective, it is a non-puzzle. Regional cooperation belongs to a category Americans commonly call ‘motherhood and apple pie’. Who would ever object to it, let alone problematize and dissect it? With its virtues being a priori obvious, especially in an area like the Balkans, regional cooperation has in fact rarely been the target of a more systematic scholarly exploration. More often than not, the key question has been how to make it work, not what the relative significance of this or that variable is. This explains the pronounced preference for policy-analytical research over lengthy academic treatises revolving around (seemingly) trivial questions. Yet a scholarly perspective adds fresh insights. It is very important to sketch out the concept of regional cooperation, prior to delving deeper into its Balkan subspecies. Regional cooperation is a type of a collective intergovernmental action that takes place within a geographically bounded setting, however vaguely defined or politically contestable. It denotes a process whereby three or more states adjust their behaviour in a coordinated way to achieve certain shared objectives.6 Outcomes might vary and may include: liberalized trade regimes; joint economic regulation; common functional and security projects; institutional arrangements and decision-making procedures; denser clusters of formal and informal rules creating stable mutual expectations in given policy-areas (regimes);7 and common responses to particular political issues. For Andrew Hurrell, a principal voice in the field, such intergovernmental actions (labelled ‘regional cooperation’ and ‘state-driven integration’) are key aspects


of the wider phenomenon of regionalism. Key too, is the definition of regionalism which, according to Hurrell, is the spontaneous growth of societal integration through a bottom-up process of social and economic interaction, and the emergence of a common regional awareness (Hurrell, 1995; Hurrell and Fawcett, 1995).

Divergent views of regional cooperation Such theoretical definitions, distinctions and refinements provide a useful lens through which to re-examine the existing literature on the Balkan case. Indeed, there are divergent accounts of what factors are at work in regional cooperation. The first-cut understanding of the phenomenon inevitably focuses on the functional gains that come from ‘regionalization’. The potential of integrated markets and of facilitating state policies in ‘flanking’ areas such as transport, energy, telecommunications, and so on, as motors of growth and development for the region, were recognized at an early stage. Drawing on the lessons of post-1945 Western Europe, the promotion of interdependent reconstruction and economic upsurge was seen as a strategy for remodelling the Balkans. That was the cornerstone of the Stability Pact for South East Europe (SP), an EU initiative in response to the Kosovo war. The policy community paid special attention to trade liberalization (inside the region and with the EU) and upgraded transport infrastructure as instrumental for forging cross-regional bonds (Emerson and Gros, 1999; Gligorov, Kaldor, Tsoukalis, 1999; Daskalov et al., 2000).8 For instance, Milica Uvalic´, an authority on Balkan political economy, at the time saw regional cooperation as a way to encourage trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) in post-communist South East Europe (Uvalic´, 2001).9 Tim Judah gives the example of retail conglomerates, such as Konzum, Delta or Merkator, who boost their earnings by opening outlets, across former Yugoslavia, that cater to a new generation of shoppers who are blind to ethnic prejudice (Judah, 2009, p. 5). Thus, inter-state cooperation is seen as a functional response to opportunities and challenges stemming from within the region. It seeks to maximize the positive linkages running across South East Europe while managing or containing negative externalities such as environmental degradation or the proliferation of transnational criminal networks – a lasting legacy of the Yugoslav wars of succession and the international

Introduction

5

sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro.10 In other words, the causation arrow points from regionalization to regional intergovernmental cooperation, though the opposite is also conceivable. Yet, in the Balkans, it is hard to overlook the ‘outside in’ aspects of regionalism. Presenting local governments with incentives to work together has been at the core of the Western strategy to stabilize Europe’s volatile backyard. Regional cooperation topped the agenda in the early 2000s, in part because it was a feature of the EU’s membership conditionality, applied to former Yugoslav republics and Albania (the Western Balkans), and was supported by an assortment of ‘carrots’: political concessions, market access, financial assistance. The theme of external involvement in intra-Balkan schemes goes even further back in time. One should mention Aurel Braun’s little-read volume SmallState Security in the Balkans (1983), which deals with the cooperation trends of the 1970s and early 1980s. Back then, Braun investigated, in a rather detailed manner, the constraints posed by extra-regional alignments on the incipient processes of intergovernmental ‘concordization’, as he put it.11 Removing such hurdles, the end of the Cold War has played a profoundly transformative role. The post-Dayton generation of Balkan initiatives exemplify the larger category of peripheral (sub)regionalism across the former bloc divide – represented by the Central European Initiative (CEI), the Black Sea Cooperation Process (BSEC) and, in a certain sense, the Central European Free Agreement (CEFTA) – all of which emerged in the early 1990s (Botsiou, 1998; Shtonova, 1998).12 Balkan regionalism therefore emerges as part of an overarching endeavour to promote security on the fringes of the EU and NATO (the catchphrase being ‘post-Cold War infrastructure’), with politics rather than economic development as the principal driver (Cottey, 1999; Dwan, 1999; Clément, 2000; Pop, 2001). There is a significant body of literature highlighting external push as the chief determinant of regional cooperation in the Balkans. It peaked after NATO’s campaign in Kosovo, when Western actors put a high premium on multilateral approaches. Key instances include the policy entrepreneurship by the German Presidency of the EU Council, which led to the launch of the SP in June-July 1999 (Biermann, 1999; Friis and Murphy, 2000). The continuous efforts of the EU to foster integration and reconciliation, through the cultivation of multicountry arrangements, particularly in the Western Balkans, have been widely acknowledged by academics and practitioners alike. Regional


cooperation has clearly been one of the hallmarks of the enlargement strategy pursued in former Yugoslavia during the 2000s.13 Obviously, both local interdependence and external push inform regionalism in the Balkan context. A number of scholars, mostly coming from inside the area, seek to restore the balance between the two. Duško Lopandic´ (whose monograph Regional Initiatives in South East Europe [2001] is a valuable snapshot of the state of regional cooperation at the time a democratization wave swept through former Yugoslavia in 2000), Thanos Veremis (1995), S¸ule Kut and Aslı S¸irin (2002), and Ekaterina Nikova (2002) all underscore the fact that the re-launch of inter-state cooperation in the mid-1990s capitalized on a local political tradition dating back to the period 1976–90 – or even to the Balkan conferences in the early 1930s.14 This view underpins two of the most detailed studies on the history of multilateral cooperation in South East Europe by Axel Sotiris Walden (1992) and Apostolos Christakoudis (2002). It is unfortunate that these works are available only in their original languages (Greek and Bulgarian respectively) and are, therefore, not accessible to a broader readership.15 The most recent wave of writings on regional cooperation (from the mid-2000s on) has also stressed the interplay between external and intra-regional factors contributing to the strengthening of collaborative institutions and frameworks already in place within the Western Balkans. A good example is provided by the essays included in the volume edited by Christophe Solioz and Wolfgang Petritsch, a senior Austrian diplomat who served as the international community’s High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1999 and 2002. Written from a policy perspective, the chapters address the question of how to make cooperation ‘regionally owned’ – that is how to delegate more power to local actors to decide on the horizontal issues that call for collective action (Petritsch and Solioz, 2009; Weichert, 2009). As we shall see, the issue of regional ownership has become one of the key nodal points in the debates surrounding the cooperative turn in the international politics of South East Europe.

Bringing in identity politics Of course, the above inside/outside typology is tentative, in that the literature tends to be empiricist, averse to theorizing and therefore not explicit about its conceptual and methodological leanings.16 In

Introduction

7

the rare cases when theory is summoned there is a conspicuous mismatch between the hypotheses derived from this or that model – for instance ‘New Regionalism’ – and the actual evidence.17 One of the striking shortcomings in the writings on Balkan regionalism, both policymaking and scholarly, is the partial or inadequate attention to the role of identity politics. How do collective and individual selfimages, shared by political elites, publics, and nations in the Balkans influence the project of building up an integrated region? Prominent students of comparative regionalism such as Amitav Acharya and Alistair Iain Johnston have argued that group identity considerations may affect the design and the membership of regional institutions.18 An empirical survey of elite opinion, published by Othon Anastasakis and Vesna Bojicˇic´-Dželilovic´ in 2002, showed that definitions and expectations of cooperation varied across the presumed ‘region’ of South East Europe (ex-Yugoslav republics, Albania, Bulgaria and Romania). For instance, countries who saw themselves as more advanced on the path to the EU and NATO downplayed or disavowed relations with neighbours as an undesirable hindrance (Anastasakis and Bojicˇic´-Dželilovic´, 2002). Such surveys suggest that negative or lukewarm attitudes about the idea that the Balkans should ‘stick together’ derive from grand narratives connecting today’s politics to past, and more recent, history of conflict and division. These evoke vivid memories and experiences of conflict with other countries, nations, and ethnic groups but, in certain cases, also a sense of cultural distance from an entity known as ‘the Balkans’. Taken in combination, identity constructs undercut the Emanuel Adler’s notion of ‘imagined regional community’ or Karl Deutsch’s ‘we-ness’ (Adler, 1997, 2005; Deutsch et al., 1957, p. 5).19 It is a common argument that the absence of ‘regional identity’ constrains or even precludes cooperation. The inherent disadvantage in this argument, as with so much of the literature on the Balkans, is that it treats the boundaries that define identity and, therefore, ‘regionness’ as rigid – set in stone. Policy analysts in the 1990s would reiterate that Slovenia, Croatia and, perhaps, Romania would identify with Central Europe rather than their ‘truly’ Balkan neighbours; but what distinguishes the Balkans from Central Europe?20 Cultural and historical boundaries seemed to be an immutable fact of life in the mid-1990s. Nowadays, however, one is confounded by the resurgence of transnational


identities which criss-cross the presumed civilizational frontiers; this is seen in such banal displays of solidarity such as the Balkan blocvote in the yearly Eurovision Song Contest or the dense, resilient societal links constituting that elusive entity, the ‘Yugosphere’. As we well know from the study of ethnicity, identity construction is a two-way negotiation. Internal cohesiveness is at times equally or less significant than definition from outside. There is a rich and ever-growing scholarship on the genealogy of regional subdivisions in Europe, with Larry Wolff’s (1994) and Maria Todorova’s (1997) contributions to the debate deserving special acknowledgement. One of the interesting findings, of course, is that the internal and external dimensions are linked. Todorova shows how the Balkan stigma, though rooted in the political ‘imagination’ of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Western Europe, has been internalized in local discourses on regional identity. Identity constructions are sustained by an inherently dialogical exchange between a Self and Other – a point that cuts right to the core of the Constructivist school in academic IR. How is this all related to the mundane subject of intergovernmental cooperation in South East Europe? One possible answer is to posit the crystallization of a common identity as the outcome of regionalism or, to use the language of social science, dependent variable.21 Indeed, ‘region-building’ has become a fashionable item in the conceptual toolkit of IR scholarship. The emergence of a shared sense of belonging to a transnational, geographically delineated, community – by elites and (one hopes) societies at large – ranks high in the list of requirements for turning a collection of states into a regional grouping. At the same time, the assumed malleability of regional identifications has given credence to facile constructivism. To paraphrase the film Field of Dreams, ‘if you build it they will come’. The mere institutionalization of regions, by foreign ministries and policy think-tanks, does not conjure them, in a linear fashion, into existence. There is the telling example of the Mediterranean, as demonstrated by the ill-fated Euro–Mediterranean Partnership (Pace, 2007) or, more recently, the notion of a Black Sea region. This is, by no means, an attempt to draw a sharp distinction between ‘real’ or ‘artificial’ regional units. It is rather a salutary reminder that viable regional constructs rest upon certain pre-existing structures of material connectivity and shared knowledge. The significance of ‘cognitive resonance’ is indeed acknowledged by some of the

Introduction

9

poststructuralist minded theorists behind the ‘region-building’ paradigm: for example Iver Neumann (2003), who sees the emergence of regions as an outcome of a complex interplay between external and indigenous discourses. This brings us to the second way in which identity politics meshes with regional cooperation. Echoing Acharya and Johnston, it treats constructions of a regional entity as a cause or, more broadly, a factor or force informing regionalism. Identity comes at the outset of the political process, though the latter may also reshape it as regional institutions take root. This perspective is indebted, in equal measure, to the insights of Balkan historiography and political anthropology and to the theoretical baggage of various IR schools of thought, notably Social Constructivism but also Rational Institutionalism. This enquiry into the drivers of regional cooperation, and the quick review of the extant literature, suggests that there are two sets of factors involved: (1) material incentives deriving from inside South East Europe or presented by external players; and (2) identity patterns (or politics, in light of the ‘essentially contested’ nature of identity) manifest in self-images or constructions from outside. Together these provide the ideational glue that animates, sustains and binds the regional unit. The discussion thus far is recapitulated by the two-bytwo matrix below (see Table 0.1).

Outline of the main argument There are two analytical levels at which one might address regional cooperation in the Balkans. The first revolves around the relative significance of the push from outside vs. the functional demand from within. As the empirical chapters included in Part II show unequivocally, cooperative outcomes – if not regionalism in South East Europe as a whole – have resulted from the actions and

Table 0.1 Factors behind regional cooperation

Material incentives Identity politics

Intra-regional

Extra-regional

Interdependence Self-images

External push Constructions from outside


initiatives undertaken by actors external to the region, pursuing stabilization, post-conflict rehabilitation and integration of a volatile periphery. Outside impulses have largely defined the scope, membership and timing of regional institutions. Such an explanation accords a relatively minor autonomous role to interdependence, a usual suspect when looking at the birth, institutionalization and expansion of regional frameworks. Conventional functionalist argument usually draws attention to the balance between supply and demand (cf. Mattli, 1999). While extra-regional forces are expected to either advance or constrain cooperation, ceteris paribus, a geographically contiguous grouping should be assumed to enhance economic and functional ties in pursuit of aggregate welfare gains. What the empirical analysis of cooperation suggests, in contrast, is that patterns of interdependence vary from one issue to another, as well as across subgroups within the wider South East European area. The pull of interdependence has been much more pronounced for pairs of neighbours or smaller clusters of proximate countries (e.g., the Serbia–Bosnia–Croatia triangle). Its explanatory power is therefore circumscribed when all-regional arrangements – spanning from Turkey to Croatia (sometimes even Slovenia) and from Romania to Albania – as the RCC or SEECP, come under scrutiny. The claim that foreign tutors or nannies, to borrow a metaphor from Ronald Linden (2002), matter more than the preferences of Balkan pupils is hardly original. There is a legion of writings on the crucial role of the EU in directing the course of regional cooperation in South East Europe.22 What is more interesting is the implicit distinction in the literature between politics of identity and politics of interest. As already mentioned, conventional wisdom sees the former as a hurdle regionalism needs to overcome. By implication, the maximization of collective self-interest in prosperity and development represents the best hope for regional institutions. If the rational pursuit of welfare, rather than identity-political passions, had reigned supreme, cooperation on bread-and-butter issues, rather than conflict, would have been the defining experience of the Balkans. Yugoslavia’s violent disintegration in the 1990s presented a lasting proof that ethno-national parochialism trumps economic rationality. Regional cooperation has therefore been perceived as reflective of the commitment by external actors and local, liberal, pro-Western elites to rein in the perilous influence of identity politics, as translated

Introduction

11

into state-to-state rivalries, mistrust, security dilemmas and the like. The shift from identity to utility has been the fundament of Balkan regionalism since the mid-1990s (Bechev, 2004). This book makes a frontal attack against the line of reasoning, just outlined, by portraying regional cooperation as reflective of, and indeed driven by, identity politics. Its key contribution to the field is the elucidation of the social context shaping the multilateral institutions and practices of inter-governmental collaboration leading to the emergence of a regional unit. The chapters that follow dissect not only structures of interdependence, putting countries ‘in the same boat’, but also formative concepts such as ‘region’, ‘Balkans’, ‘South East Europe’ and ‘Europe’. The core argument probed in the chapters to follow is that regional cooperation has been a symbolic strategy to transform and – to quote one-time Romanian foreign minister Mircea Geoana – to ‘rebrand’, the conflict-prone and semi-European Balkans into part of Europe and the West.23 In the aftermath of a brutal conflict, commonly referred to as a ‘Balkan’ and not ‘Bosnian’ or ‘Yugoslav’ war, a substantial segment of political elites were compelled to prove adherence to the constitutive norms and practices of the Western institutions they aspired to join. Mimicking the latter was conditioned by the gap, whether ‘real’ or perceived, between the outsiders’ normative expectations and the fragmented politics and economics of South East Europe. Seen from the perspective of modern Balkan history, this is clearly an instance of plus ça change. The advent of regional cooperation in the mid- and late-1990s was not unlike the continual importation of Western (European) political, economic, social and cultural institutions that had already been in place since the early nineteenth century (van Meurs and Mungiu-Pippidi, 2010). Ideational and material structures, anchoring and pulling the Balkan periphery into the orbit of the model societies in ‘core’ Europe, have in fact legitimated, in the eyes of the recipients, the projection of policies and institutions by extra-regional actors aimed to ‘de-Balkanize’ and ‘Europeanize’ the Balkans.

Methodological orientations Looking at regional cooperation from the vantage point of identity takes one to a methodological crossroads. Is the goal to understand


the ideational contents of regionalism, through the systematic study of the discourse that shrouds cooperative institutions? Or, is it explaining the dynamics of multilateral collaboration by government agents in specific policy sectors? Going all the way back to Max Weber’s famous distinction between Erklären and Verstehen, empirical researchers and philosophers of social science often posit interpretation and causal analysis as two non-commeasurable, though equally valid, modes of enquiry.24 Linking regionalism and identity might deepen our appreciation of the cognitive structures into which regionalization is embedded; but it is challenging, and some would even say undesirable, to treat identity as a cause explaining political outcomes. Material factors and constraints – that is the supply of and demand for cooperation – could yield a perfectly plausible account of the nuts-and-bolts aspects of intra-Balkan cooperation. This book highlights identity constructions’ causal effects on the contents and scope of cooperation, in addition to its deeper, constitutive role. Firstly, it demonstrates that certain states have resisted regionalist schemes because their elites have not identified with Balkan neighbours. More importantly, it shows that collective identity considerations have actually advanced cooperation. For example, as Chapter 6 shows, South East European countries established indigenous multilateral institutions, with no direct external mediation, in compliance with a certain logic of appropriateness25, predicated on the norms of ‘Europeanness’ as a cornerstone of a new regional self-identification. The Balkan stigma added to the salience of these normative standards, by elevating the commitment to regionalism into a benchmark of Europeanization. In such institutions considered authentically ‘regionally owned’, historical inertia has been more significant than the pull of interdependence. This has been the principal reason of their highly rhetorical, rather than functional, output. This does not mean that loose diplomatic processes such as SEECP are insignificant. Often blocked by the political conflicts in the region – notably the Kosovo issue – it has nonetheless fostered the practice of political consultation, produced new language of inter-state relations, and facilitated the transition to ‘regional ownership’ of cooperative schemes in the latter part of the 2000s. In sectoral cooperation, typically guided by the EU and other external players, identity and external push have worked in tandem. Key substantive steps in the development of regional cooperation – for

Introduction

13

example trade liberalization, the creation of an energy community or the establishment of a Balkan peacekeeping brigade – are traceable to policies and decisions pursued by the EU, NATO and US. However, they have been legitimized via the power of the regional cooperation norm, particularly where the external supply for cooperative frameworks have been at odds with demand from the region. This perspective takes into account the dual role of extra-regional agents as both providers of material incentives and harbingers of normative standards. The book accounts for variance in the dynamics of regional cooperation by investigating the interplay between the three master factors across multiple issue-areas. It contends that interdependence is the most potent predictor of cooperation in areas of ‘low politics’ and among smaller groups of countries (‘less-than-regional formats’) within the wider region of South East Europe. By contrast, ‘multilateralization’ has, in most cases, reflected the preferences of external actors. For their part, collective identity considerations have tended to come to the fore depending on the level of the politicization of the issue at hand. Understandably, they have been more salient in highprofile fora attended by the foreign ministers or heads of state and government of South East Europe rather than by sectoral ministries or specialized governmental agencies. Table 0.2 provides a summary of the main claims. A final clarification is due regarding the focus on the intergovernmental level of analysis. Pluralist-minded scholars are right that regionalization, region-building and ‘regionness’ are essentially transnational processes involving a wide array of actors – government or state being just one among many. This book consciously limits itself to the top layer, of the cake that is regionalism in South East Europe, which is a concession to rigour at the expense of comprehensive coverage.26 In addition, only cursory attention is paid to the

Table 0.2 Balkan regional cooperation: factors and outcomes Issue type/Cooperation format

Less-than-regional

Regional

Technical

Interdependence External push External push Interdependence

External push Interdependence Identity politics External push

Strategic


two-level games played by governments interacting with both their regional counterparts and domestic societies. While there have been instances when domestic interest groups have tried to block key steps on the path of economic integration, their role has not been so significant as to cancel the influence of extra-regional institutions on Balkan governments. This is not to suggest that domestic politics do not matter or, indeed, that they will be fully ignored in this story. On the contrary, ‘regime change’ in Belgrade and Zagreb, following the demise of the semi-authoritarian rules of Franjo Tud¯man and Slobodan Miloševic´, in 1999–2000, gave a great boost to the process at hand. Incoming elites have been more receptive to EU and NATO norms. The caveat here, of course, is that Miloševic´ had been an active participant in Balkan fora, which themselves went back to the Cold War days when democracy was not ‘the only game in town’ for the region. Coupled with the paramount role of extra-regional institutions in steering Balkan cooperation, this is a strong argument in favour of adopting a state-centric position and bringing in leadership and domestic political process factors only occasionally.

Overview of the chapters The book is in two parts; the first one explores in depth the three general factors shaping Balkan regional cooperation: interdependence, external push, and identity. The second part process-traces the emergence and development of institutions and schemes in three different domains: economics, military and soft-security cooperation, and diplomacy. Chapter 1 investigates the nature and scope of regional interdependence in South East Europe, with a special, though not exclusive, focus on the 1990s, when inter-state cooperation made it into the policy agenda. It draws a contrasting picture between the economic fragmentation of the Balkans – a legacy of the Cold War period amplified by the Yugoslav wars of succession – and the interwoven political and security relations between local states and societies. The main theme of the chapter is, however, the variable significance of cross-border linkages across various subregional clusters in wider South East Europe. Chapter 2 describes the role played by the external patrons of Balkan regionalism: the US in the aftermath of the Dayton Accords;

Introduction

15

the EU, which launched a number of schemes culminating in the SP and especially the SAP in the Western Balkans; and NATO and its Partnership for Peace (PfP) initiative. Identity politics is the subject of Chapter 3, which posits that the discursive orientation towards Europe, represented principally by the model societies in the western parts of the continent, has historically served as the common denominator in national narratives across the region. The peripheral predicament is therefore constitutive of a sui generis all-Balkan regional identity. The chapter discusses how the contents of Europeanness have been redefined through political norms such as regional cooperation projected by Western institutions towards the Balkans in the post-Cold War era. Chapter 4 takes stock of cooperation in various economic and functional areas, from trade, to transport, to energy. Its key finding is that regional cooperation in the Balkans has been, for the most part, a by-product of European integration. The EU’s normative projection has facilitated the carrot-and-stick approach for the export of integrative arrangements. This is very much the story in Chapter 5, which also deals with security affairs. NATO and the US have been the main anchors of Balkan schemes such as the South East Defence Ministerial (SEDM), while the EU has overseen cooperation on issues falling under the rubric of justice and home affairs. Yet symbolic politics have mattered too. Through high-profile initiatives such as the Multinational Peace Force for South East Europe (MPFSEE) local governments have attempted to build and sustain a positive image of the region in the eyes of the outside world. Chapter 6, examining multilateral diplomacy, presents the origins and dynamics of all-Balkan fora, the first and foremost of which is SEECP. Starting as a club of foreign ministers and heads of state and government, the institution has long been the primary channel for joint rhetorical action aimed at ‘rebranding’ the Balkans into a South East Europe that abides by the standards of European ‘normalcy’. The chapter traces the slow development of a functional dimension to the process and its institutionalization through the RCC.


Part I Drivers of Regional Cooperation


1 All in the Same Boat? Regional Interdependence and Cooperation in South East Europe

Scholars approaching regionalism from various angles treat interdependence as a key factor pushing for collective action. States and substate actors interact with regard to issues that, figuratively speaking, put them ‘in the same boat’. They reap the benefits of cooperation or compete for resources concentrated in a more or less clearly bounded and cohesive spatial perimeter. It is shared geography that binds polities together, in both positive and negative ways, and Balkan politics furnish countless examples of this. This chapter explores the character and intensity of cross-border linkages across South East Europe during the 1990s – the decade when cooperative schemes took off – and their implications for the emergent regional arrangements. Generations of academics have tried to pin down the concept of interdependence in a systematic fashion. Following the classic work of Keohane and Nye, in the 1970s, IR commonly associates the concept with interconnectedness at the level of the economy and society which, in turn, creates the demand for rules and regimes to ‘internalize the externalities’ that arise (Keohane and Nye, 1972, 1977). In a somewhat circular manner, interdependence is thus seen as both the original cause and one of the main manifestations of the liberal order, hinging on institutionalized cooperation among governments, businesses, and other public and private agents. Yet interdependence, in the broadest sense, is not the sole preserve of theorists of progress in international affairs. It is equally embraced by those clinging to traditional concepts of state autonomy and power politics. Interdependent security relations are as valid an analytical vantage point as functional linkages to conceptualize the social 19


forces and structures that make a region stick together. To quote Barry Buzan, a security complex is ‘a group of states whose primary security concerns link together sufficiently closely that their security interests cannot realistically be considered apart from one another’ (Buzan, 1983, p. 190).1 Though functional, bottom-up dimensions of interdependence – much emphasized in the study of European integration for instance – may be contrasted with state-centric views stressing interlocking security concerns, balance of power and the like – the two paradigms are not incompatible, as any student of East Asia would readily testify. The sections below first explore the more benign face of regional interconnectedness and then proceed to the analysis of intertwined conflicts across post-Cold-War Balkans.

Functional aspects of Balkan interdependence Legacies of economic fragmentation and stagnation Even prior to the breakup of Yugoslavia, South East Europe was a highly fragmented economic space, owing to the diverse developmental paths and external alignments pursued by the local states and regimes. Beginning in the late 1940s, Bulgaria and Romania adhered to Sovietstyle economic model of central planning, rapid industrialization and collectivized agriculture. Yugoslavia steered its own course under the doctrine of self-management (samouprava), combining elements of planned economy and the market. From 1965 onwards, enterprises expanded their autonomy to trade and borrow money at home and abroad. In the 1950s, the leadership in Belgrade had also rolled back the ambitious and ruthlessly implemented land collectivization programme. By contrast, Albania, an outcast from the Warsaw Pact as a result of the Sino-Soviet split of 1961, remained faithful to the Stalinist model and drifted towards extreme forms of autarky. Part of the Western bloc, Greece and Turkey had, all the way to the 1980s, heavily statist economies, based on import substitution and underpinned by large public sectors. It was only Greece’s accession to the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1981 and the reforms of Prime Minister Turgut Özal in Turkey that altered the established economic order opening space for private enterprise and liberalization of foreign trade.2 In the Balkans, politics guided foreign economic relations. Albania, Romania and Bulgaria became founding members of the Sovietsponsored Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON)

All in the Same Boat?

21

while Greece and Turkey, recipients of Marshall Plan aid, signed association agreements with the EEC in 1961 and 1963. But even Cold War alignments failed to advance intra-bloc integration. Albania left COMECON in 1962, while Romania sought to minimize its dependence on the Soviet Union. It stayed outside the COMECON specialization arrangements and fostered economic links with the non-communist world. In 1975, the US accorded it Most-Favoured Nation status while EEC already accounted for nearly one-fifth of Bucharest’s overall trade. Both Romania and Yugoslavia concluded preferential trade agreements with the EEC in 1980, having acceded to the Global Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1971 and 1966. Unsurprisingly, intra-regional trade remained low throughout the period. In 1989, large neighbours Romania and Yugoslavia accounted for a mere 13.4 per cent of Bulgaria’s overall volume. If anything the trend was negative. Greek–Yugoslav exchanges dwindled once Greece joined EEC in 1981. The crisis of the 1980s affected adversely integration within Yugoslavia too, with republics like Slovenia concentrating on hard-currency exports to Western Europe (Uvalic´, 2001). Weak economic ties were further hampered by inadequate or simply non-existent infrastructure; Albania’s borders were virtually sealed off while only one crossing point operated between Greece and Bulgaria until 1989. The downturn across Eastern Europe in the 1980s was felt acutely in the Balkans. Negative growth, high inflation and chronic unemployment made Yugoslavia a prime target of the IMF structural adjustment programmes (Woodward, 1995, pp. 47–82). Growing trade deficits with the West and the oil shocks of the 1970s pushed up Romania’s foreign debt. In response, the country’s strongman, Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, embarked in the 1980s on drastic consumptioncurbing measures, which put living standards under a terrible strain and deprived industries of modern technology while doing little to bolster productivity. Bulgaria and Romania’s agriculture was in a sorry state due to the outdated technology and labour shortages in rural areas. Repression of national minorities such as the Turks and the Hungarians, who were often concentrated in the countryside, only worsened both countries’ predicament. The inefficient and resourceconsuming heavy industries, developed in previous decades, soon too proved a liability, while the Soviet decision to stop supplying


underpriced oil cut off the opportunity for re-export – one of the few ways to earn hard currency from the West. Albania’s break with its patron China, in the late 1970s, had analogous effects, though 60 per cent of the population still lived off the land, compared to 34 in Yugoslavia and 25 in Bulgaria. Post-communist economies in the 1990s It is widely acknowledged that post-communist Balkan countries, with the exception of Yugoslavia, started their transition to market economy under initial conditions that were disadvantageous in comparison with frontrunners Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia (dissolving in 1993 into the Czech Republic and Slovakia). Subsequent external shocks, the impact of war in ex-Yugoslavia and questionable policy choices made in the first half of the 1990s additionally widened the gap. The demise of COMECON hurt Bulgaria, as nearly two-thirds of its trade took place within the Eastern bloc. War-ridden Yugoslav successors fared even worse. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s industrial base was decimated during the 1992–5 conflict while Serbia’s economy was strangled by years of hyperinflation and international sanctions. Cut off from its markets in former Yugoslavia, and suffering from the economic blockade imposed by Greece in 1994, Macedonia saw unemployment rates rise to nearly 40 per cent. Wars and international sanctions blocked some important routes linking the region, Turkey and Greece included, to Western Europe. Bulgaria and Romania officially claimed billions of dollars worth of losses incurred as a consequence of sanctions that were not lifted by the UN Security Council until October 1996. Violence deterred foreign investors well into the 1990s, and negligible volumes of FDI flowed into the post-communist parts of the region at the time when Central Europe was already becoming an attractive destination (Petrakos and Totev, 2001, pp. 75–111). Halfway marketization, benefiting predatory elites, and entrenching corruption and mismanagement became the norm across South East Europe, constraining even further investment opportunities for foreign and domestic businesses, and ushering in periodic crises. As a result, the overall GDP of the region’s post-communist cluster actually shrank over the decade. As shown in Table 1.1, growth returned only in 1994. But even then it proved reversible and vulnerable to new shocks such as the state collapse in Albania in 1997, the

Table 1.1 GDP growth in selected transition countries of South East Europe, 1990–2000 (%) Country Albania Bulgaria Croatia Macedonia Romania FR Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) Average

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

–10 –9.1 –7.1 –10.2 –5.6 –7.9

–28 –11.7 –21.1 –3.2 –12.9 –11.6

–7.2 –7.3 –11.1 –6.6 –8.8 –27.4

9.6 –1.5 –8 –7.5 1.5 –29.6

8.3 1.8 5.9 –1.8 3.9 8.5

13.3 2.9 6.8 –1.1 7.1 7

9.1 –10.1 5.9 1.2 3.9 7.8

–7 –7 6.8 1.4 –6.1 10.1

8 3.5 2.5 2.9 –5.4 1.9

8 2.4 –0.3 2.7 –3.2 –18.3

6.5 5.8 3.8 5.1 1.6 7

–14.75

–11.4

–8.32

–5.92

4.43

6

2.97

–0.3

2.33

–1.45

4.97

Source: Dimitrov, Mandova and Stanchev (2002).

23


1999 war in Kosovo, the 1996–7 banking crisis in Bulgaria or the inability of Romania’s coalition governments to implement privatization and structural reform between 1996 and 2000. Instead of the classical U-shape trajectory that transition economies underwent in the 1990s (initial contraction followed by increase of output), the Balkans followed a W-shaped pattern (Cviic´ and Sanfey, 2010, Ch. 5). Trade relations The general economic downturn in the 1990s did not augur well for regional integration. Overall, troubled transitions accentuated preexistent centrifugal tendencies. The EU became the main recipient of the limited range of exports the Balkans had to offer. In the case of Bulgaria and Romania, the process was speeded up by the conclusion of Association (or Europe) Agreements in 1993. Whereas in 1989 29 per cent of Romanian exports went to the EU, in 1994 the respective figure stood at 45.9 per cent.3 By the mid-1990s, Albania already traded heavily with Greece and Italy. In 1995, Turkey completed the Customs Union with the EU, originally envisaged in the 1963 Ankara Agreement, which resulted into dramatic expansion of its economic integration with the major Western-European economies. To be sure, there were economic openings assisted by the pull of the EU and market reforms in the countries in question. Thus Greece became a principal trade and investment partner for Albania, but even more importantly for Bulgaria and, to some degree, Romania.4 Turkey, likewise, expanded its presence in the post-communist Balkans.5 The end of the Bosnian war saw Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Macedonia, expanding vital exchanges with Croatia and rump Yugoslavia. This process was helped by the presence of wellestablished networks that had survived the war and the international sanctions, and, in the case of Bosnia, by the absence of hard borders separating local Serb and Croat communities from their kin states. Of course, all trade figures quoted here should be taken with a pinch of salt, since in the 1990s substantial flows remained unaccounted for due to corruption and inefficiency in the customs and national statistical offices across the region (Uvalic´, 2001). Still, as sketchy as they might be, the data show unequivocally the main trends described above (see Figure 1.1). To put the above figures in context one has to bear in mind that, at the time, openness to trade, measured as the proportion of overall


25

Balkan exports in the mid-1990s (%) 100 80 60

Exports to the region

40

Exports outside the region

20 0 AL

BG

GR

YU

MK

RO

CR

TR

Balkan imports in the mid-1990s (%) 100 80 60

Imports from the region

40

Imports from outside the region

20 0 AL

BG

GR

YU

MK

RO

CR

TR

Figure 1.1 Trade in South East Europe Source: Petrakos and Toter (2000); Oxford Analytica, ‘Tarkey: Balkan Strategy’6

volumes to national GDP, was relatively low, except in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Romania, (see Table 1.2). Despite the absence of FR Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the sample, the figures for Croatia – which at the time was similarly lagging behind in terms of trade liberalization with the EU – hint at the general state of affairs in the mid-1990s. The resuscitation of trade in the mid-1990s did not lead to the natural emergence of a cohesive regional space. Typically, significant flows took place between geographically adjacent countries. Instead of a dense regional web of trade links, one saw bilateral connections: Greece with Albania and Bulgaria, Macedonia with FR Yugoslavia and so forth. By the end of the decade, trade among the (then) seven Balkan post-communist states accounted for as little as 13–14 per cent of their total turnover (World Bank, 2000). Economic links with neighbours were relatively more important for the


Table 1.2 Trade figures for 1996 (million $)

Albania Bulgaria Croatia Greece Macedonia Romania Turkey

Exports

Imports

GDP

Trade to GDP ratio, %

200 5,500 1,662 10,602 1,357 9,291 25,150

650 5,500 1,082 30,587 1,618 10,669 30,050

2,407 13,400 17,334 111,758 4,146 30,750 149,300

34.41 82.08 15.83 36.86 71.76 64.91 36.97

Source: ELIAMEP and Hellenic Resources Institute (1997), Southeast Europe. Factbook and Survey, 1996–1997 (Athens: Hellenic Resources Institute); ‘Balkans: Economic Integration’, Oxford Analytica Daily Brief, 12 November 1997.

post-Yugoslav republics, who continued trading with the other parts of the former federation (Uvalic´, 2001, p. 63).7 In 1998, Bosnia’s trade with its neighbours was greater – both in imports and exports – than with the EU. The same was true of Serbia and Montenegro’s exports in the same year, though not of imports where the EU was far ahead (Gligorov, 1998). Aside from the history of poor political relations and the gravitational pull of external markets, low levels of integration had economic roots too. Excluding Greece and Turkey, Balkan economies were characterized by similar product structures with agriculture, textiles and raw materials heavily represented on the export side. The share of services in GDP was everywhere negligible (Petrakos and Totev, 2000). Coupled with economic volatility, the lack of complementarity presented a lasting obstacle to integration that is observable to this very day. The different pace of reforms was yet another handicap. While countries like Bulgaria and Macedonia liberalized relatively quickly their foreign trade regimes, FR Yugoslavia and Albania were trailing behind. The closer institutional relationship of Romania and Bulgaria with the EU, and their accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), gave a further push for reforms, which in turn widened the gap with some of their neighbours in what was to become (towards the end of the 1990s) the Western Balkans. All in all, in the 1990s South East Europe saw much more economic compartmentalization than integration. The significance of external poles of attraction such as the EU, and individual member states within it such as Germany, Italy, Austria and Greece, increased.


27

This limited local demand for institutionalized multilateral cooperation within the region. The notable exception was former Yugoslavia where, however, political divisions trumped economic considerations. Loose, bilateral cooperation was the more likely course of action for states in South East Europe. Transport Even if it was pulling South East Europe apart, the increasing economic prominence of the EU presented incentives for cooperation in sectors such as transport. Distance from key export markets in Western Europe increased costs, as did the appearance of new borders following the disintegration of Yugoslavia (Petrakos, 2002).8 As a rule, border crossings bottlenecked regional traffic due to inadequate infrastructure, equipment, human capital and pervasive corrupt practices. The quality of roads and railways deteriorated in the course of post-communist transition and the conflicts in the region. Not only was South East Europe more distanced from the core of the EU than the Central European and the Baltic countries (CEE8), but on the average the quality of physical connections was lower too. This is illustrated by Tables 1.3 and 1.4 below. Yugoslav conflicts changed the pattern of regional transport. Countries such as Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, and to a lesser degree Albania and Romania, were dependent on thoroughfares passing through the collapsing federation. After 1991, many Turkish Gastarbeiter chose to travel by boat to Italy instead of crossing rump Yugoslavia en route to Austria, Germany and the Netherlands. Ferry lines between the Greek Ionian port of Igoumenitsa and Italy also increased in importance.9 With the closure of access to Thessaloniki, because of the Greek embargo, Macedonian businesses switched to the port of Durrës in Albania and Burgas on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. Similarly, during the war, Bosnia and Herzegovina lost access to the Croatian port of Plocˇe. East–west connections were hampered by underdeveloped infrastructure. Neither the Albanian nor the Greek ports on the Adriatic and Ionian Sea were connected to major cities in the Balkans. This challenge was particularly pronounced in Albania due to its substandard – even by Balkan measures – roads and railways. NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia further damaged the vital north–south connections linking the Balkans with key export

28

Table 1.3 Density and quality of roads in South East Europe (2000) Length in km Albania Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Macedonia Moldova Romania FR Yugoslavia Average CEE8 average Spain, Portugal, Greece (EU S3) average EU12 (without S3) average

Km/ 1000 km2 Area

Km per 1 million Inhabitants

Motorways km/1000 km road

18,000 21,846

626 427

5,743 5,493

1 1

37,286 28,123 12,522 12,657 198,603 49,805 47,355 122,870 284,111

336 497 487 375 833 487 585 1,348 1,169

4,691 6,419 6,156 3,478 8,852 4,684 6,511 13,317 14,329

9 15 11 0 1 8 4 2 13

258,827

1,238

9,819

13

Source: Christie and Holzner (2004).

Table 1.4 Density and quality of railways in South East Europe (2001)

Albania Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Macedonia Moldova Romania FR Yugoslavia Average CEE8 average EU S3 average EU12 average

Lines in km

Km/ 1000 km2 Area

Km/ 1 million Inhabitants

Double track as % of the total

447 1,032

16 20

143 260

0 9

4,320 2,727 699 1,121 11,364 4,058 3,221 5,927 6,353 10,941

39 48 27 33 48 40 40 65 26 52

543 622 344 308 507 382 443 642 320 415

22 9 0 15 24 7 17 30 23 39

Source: Christie and Holzner (2004).


29

markets. The destruction of the Danube bridges at Novi Sad blocked traffic towards Hungary and Croatia as well as river navigation. Added to the political isolation of the Miloševic´ regime, this unwelcome development contributed momentum for the upgrade of the east–west links. It also highlighted the need to build up alternative north–south routes bypassing Serbia: notably a second bridge between Bulgaria and Romania. The relative underdevelopment of transport infrastructure incentivized governments to act jointly. Towards the middle of the decade, interest in trans-regional infrastructure was peaking and becoming a high political priority. Unlike trade, where the benefits of greater integration at the regional level were seen as marginal to the gains offered by enhanced links with the EU, in the field of transport infrastructure the regional and EU policy vectors were highly compatible. Energy Similar to transport infrastructure, energy was a sector where the external and intra-regional linkages were mutually reinforcing. Shipping Caspian oil to Western Europe through the Balkans created incentives for cooperation for groups of local countries. For instance, terminals located on the Black Sea coasts of Romania and Bulgaria provided an alternative to the heavy traffic through the Bosporus, raising environmental concerns in Turkey. However, as we shall see in Chapter 4, the presence of at least three potential routes for oil pipelines resulted as much in competition as in opportunities for collaboration (Lesser et al., 2000, pp. 93–6). In contrast to oil, gas infrastructure was well developed, with substantial facilities in place in both Romania and Bulgaria. The Bulgarian gas network, shipping gas from Russia, gradually expanded into neighbouring Turkey, Greece, and Macedonia. Russian gas reached Serbia via Hungary too. Still, there was a clear deficiency in cross-border interconnections, which would be reversible and ship gas from the South to the North, a fact that became obvious towards the end of the 2000s. However, as early as the 1990s, the Western efforts to diversify supplies away from Russia located wider South East Europe at the centre of potential alternative routes for Caspian and Central Asian gas, presenting governments with opportunities. There was an even stronger motive for cooperation in the sector of electricity, owing to the relative complementarity between the


regional countries. Greece, and especially Turkey, the largest and most dynamic economies in wider South East Europe, were lacking capacity, as expanding output created further energy demand. Insufficient supply was also a challenge for the post-Yugoslav republics and Albania. At the same time, Romania and Bulgaria had overcapacity, due to the rapid shrinkage of their industrial sectors after 1989 (Lesser et al., 2000, p. 86). As was the case with gas, however, the poor state – or the sheer absence – of cross-border infrastructure, a problem exacerbated by the Yugoslav conflicts, emerged as an obstacle to cooperation and market integration. Like transport, energy was a sector where functional interdependence generated clear-cut incentives for collaborative sectoral strategies. However, the spatial linkages in those policy-areas did not predetermine an optimal institutional design of cooperation. Balkan states could equally well attain their goals through an inclusive allregional body or bodies addressing and managing the issues and through ad hoc coalitions of immediate neighbours pursuing specific projects in a flexible, non-institutionalized manner.

The webs of Balkan security While economic fragmentation supported the contention that South East Europe was a region only in the geographical sense of the word, interlocking security issues portrayed it as a single geopolitical space in the 1990s. Indeed a great deal of the international actors’ efforts to pacify the area through the encouragement of regional cooperation rested on the assumption that the Yugoslav wars were a piece in a larger regional puzzle. Contemporary policymakers and analysts saw the Balkans as an integral security unit defined by a common history of violence and traditions of enmity, but also by long-standing ties of friendship between pairs of countries and nations. Interlocking conflicts The re-emergence of the Balkans as a geopolitical whole reflected the understanding that the end of the Cold War had unearthed the region’s pre-communist past. Long marginalized by ideological divisions, issues of borders and minorities were back on the agenda. The Yugoslav conflict presented the ultimate proof of Balkan history repeating itself, evoking the memories of the scramble for the spoils


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of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and the ensuing turmoil in the interwar period. Back then the Balkans had been a distinctive arena of power politics. Thus the Balkan Pact (1934) signed by Greece, Turkey, Romania and Yugoslavia was essentially a regional instrument containing the revisionist aspirations of Bulgaria, Albania and, to a lesser degree, Italy, and not an externally imposed arrangement. The diversity of external alignments, which came with the Cold War, made the region look much less like a self-contained security complex. But ‘de-regionalization’ certainly did not mean that nationalism-fuelled rivalries were as completely swept aside as the ‘back to the future’ theorists of the post-Cold War era would imply. By the mid-1950s, the Greek–Turkish honeymoon under NATO’s aegis was over, thanks to Cyprus, the pogroms against the Istanbul Greeks in September 1955, and the resulting repressions against the Turks and other Muslims in the Greek province of (Western) Thrace.10 The conflict deepened with Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus and the dispute over territorial rights in the Aegean that arose in the 1970s. Athens and Ankara concentrated considerable military forces along common borders. Greece remilitarized several eastern Aegean islands as well as the Dodecanese, contrary to its obligations under the Lausanne Convention of 1923 and the 1947 Paris Treaty, arguing that this was a legitimate response to the Turkish deployments around Izmir.11 Socialist solidarity was no recipe for good-neighbourliness either. Yugoslav and Bulgarian communists were close to creating a common federal state after the Second World War, but after the Cominform schism in 1948 ties became hostile – despite bouts of rapprochement like the one during Nikita Khruschev’s term as Secretary-General in Moscow. As of the mid-1960s, the ever-present dispute about the nationality of Macedonian Slavs turned into the main bone of contention. Both Yugoslavia and its constituent Socialist Republic of Macedonia cultivated a separate Macedonian national identity. They insisted that the population of Pirin Macedonia (the southwestern corner of Bulgaria) should be granted national minority rights. The communist leadership in Sofia, by contrast, insisted that Macedonian Slavs shared the same language, ethnicity and history with Bulgarians. The dispute would grow acrimonious each time Belgrade and Moscow clashed: for instance, in the wake of Josip Broz Tito’s condemnation of the 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia.12


The Macedonian issue was a constant irritant in relations between Greece and Yugoslavia too. Successive Greek governments opposed the Yugoslav stance that a Slav national minority was present in Greece’s north-western provinces (Aegean Macedonia). At the same time, Tito and the federal institutions in Belgrade pursued good political and economic relations with Athens. The positive trend continued even after the collapse of the so-called Second Balkan Pact (1953–5), under the weight of the Greek–Turkish conflict and following Khruschev’s conciliatory policy towards Yugoslavia. Belgrade tended, with varied success, to keep at bay Macedonian irredentism, unwilling to see its relations with Athens hijacked by Skopje. An informal agreement to that end was reached by Evangelos Averoff and Kocˇa Popovic´, the two foreign ministers, in July 1960 (Kofos, 1991, 7–12). The period saw the security interests of erstwhile enemies Greece and Bulgaria converging. No longer the proverbial ‘threat from the north’, Bulgaria had abandoned its claims to the Greece’s border provinces. The end of the colonels’ regime in 1974 and Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis’ overtures to his Balkan counterparts added further momentum to rapprochement, as did common fears of Turkey in the wake of the Cyprus intervention of 1974. The forced assimilation of Bulgaria’s Turkish minority, numbering some 800,000 in 1984–9, made relations with Turkey overtly hostile but cemented the semi-formal alliance with Greece. In 1986, Greece’s socialist Prime Minister, Andreas Papandreou, signed with the Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov a bilateral friendship agreement, which also contained military cooperation clauses (Cviic´, 1990, p. 102). In contrast, Greece’s relations with neighbouring Albania remained uneasy. The state of war between the two countries, dating back to the Italian invasion of Greece in the autumn of 1940, lasted until 1987, sixteen years after re-establishing diplomatic relations. Of course, the removal of an anachronism did not lead to improvements for the Greek community in the southern parts of Albania (‘Northern Epirus’). Yet it hinted at a reversal of Albania’s isolationist doctrine, in the wake of the 1985 death of Enver Hoxha, the country’s longstanding communist leader. As early as 1948, at the time of the Cominform crisis, Hoxha had severed all links with Yugoslavia, the Albanian communists’ one-time patron, including a customs union and a currency arrangement pegging the lek to the Yugoslav dinar. It was only after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968


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that Hoxha and Tito re-engaged. The more cordial relationship in the 1970s conditioned the Yugoslav leadership’s decision to allow lecturers and textbooks from Tirana into the University of Prishtina, a magnet for the intelligentsia of the large Albanian ‘nationality’ present in Kosovo, Yugoslav Macedonia and Montenegro. This episode, however, ended with the 1981 unrest in Kosovo. Romania’s policy towards the Balkans was, by and large, not burdened by historical quarrels, and Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, coming to power in 1965, enjoyed a good rapport with most regional leaders. Furthermore, Romania was supportive of all regional initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s. It saw multilateral arrangements in the Balkans as a way to secure its diplomatic independence from Moscow (Braun, 1983). The other principal enemy of Ceaus¸escu’s brand of national communism was Hungary, especially in the 1980s when the Hungarian minority in Romania was persecuted. Despite diverging external alignments, South East Europe could be treated, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, as a Buzanian regional complex.13 The latter was comprised of several triangular security relationships: (1) Greece–Turkey–Bulgaria: the question of Turkish and Muslim minorities, disputes over the Aegean, military deployments; (2) Yugoslavia–Bulgaria–Greece: the ever-present and mutating Macedonian Question; (3) Greece–Albania–Yugoslavia: cross-border ethnic minorities and disputed territories. Romania’s involvement was of a different nature. Rather than responding to challenges from inside the Balkans, it aimed to balance Soviet influence. The new old powderkeg: Balkan security in the early 1990s The end of the Cold War put in question shaky regional balances and created opposing expectations. For some, democratization promised pacific inter-state relations. Others saw the bloodshed in Romania in December 1989 as an omen. Coupled with the removal of the bipolar straitjacket, rapid political transformation threatened to rekindle old grievances, poisoned memories and long-standing rivalries. As early as 1990, Stephen Larrabee wrote ‘the Balkans have traditionally been a region of instability and ferment, and with the end of the Cold War conflicts are likely to re-emerge’. ‘In the 1990s’, he continued, ‘the main threat to European security is likely to come not from Soviet military power but from ethnic conflict and political fragmentation in the Balkans’ (Larrabee, 1990, pp. 58–9).


The secessionist tendencies in Yugoslavia, triggered by Slobodan Miloševic´’s drive for centralization in Serbia, seemed to confirm the worst of fears. The breakout of war in Slovenia and Croatia in the summer of 1991 and then Bosnia in March 1992 set the whole region on a downward spiral. The Yugoslav crisis was seen as a detonator which had the potential to set a regional domino effect in motion. Apprehensions were vindicated by the tacit Greek support for Miloševic´ and the Bosnian Serbs, matched by Turkey’s support for the Muslim Bosniaks.14 In 1992, Bulgaria and Turkey were quick to recognize Macedonia’s independence, which Greece interpreted as a hostile move, given the escalating tensions with Skopje. The pursuit of closer military links with both Macedonia and Albania by Ankara fed a perception of ‘encirclement’ (Anastasakis, 2004, pp. 121–35). Importantly, Turkey also normalized its relations with Bulgaria after the human rights of ethnic Turks had been restored in late 1989. Shortly after Bulgaria recognized Yugoslav Macedonia’s independence, Foreign Minister Andonis Samaras declared that the erstwhile alliance with Bulgaria was over (Tziampiris, 2000). It looked as if Macedonia, thanks to its central location, was becoming again the focal point of interlinked, competing interests. In contrast to Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, the Yugoslav People’s Army withdrew from Macedonia peacefully in the spring of 1992, taking away with it all heavy weaponry; but the 40,000-strong Serb minority showed signs of radicalism. There were suspicions that Miloševic´ had made an offer Greek and Bulgarian leaders to jointly partition Macedonia.15 For its part, Greece pressured Skopje not to use the star of Vergina, the emblem of Alexander the Great and the reigning dynasty of Macedon, as its coat-of-arms, and to change its name and drop all references to (Slav) Macedonians living in neighbouring countries from the constitution. Bulgarian authorities continued the policy of non-recognition of a Macedonian nation and language, fuelling suspicions that territorial claims had not been fully abandoned. The republic’s domestic politics were equally fraught. In 1992, the Macedonian Albanians organized a referendum proclaiming a ‘Republic of Illyrida’ in minority-populated areas. Many observers feared that, ‘the New Macedonian Question’ – a term coined at the time by a British expert – might inflame the Balkans. Misha Glenny, a well-known observer of Balkan affairs, called Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina ‘twins’ in a piece written for Foreign Affairs (Glenny, 1995, cf. Pettifer, 1999).


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There were fears that a Serbo–Albanian conflict over Kosovo could spread south to Macedonia drawing in Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece as in the times of the Balkan Wars (1912–13). Greek involvement could in turn provoke Turkey, which had embraced the mantle of a protector of all Balkan Muslims.16 Although the early 1990s saw the Balkans disintegrate even further in terms of political geography, to the outside world the region appeared as tightly-knit as back in the days of the Eastern Question. The talk of rival alliances, and the spread of violence beyond the borders of Yugoslavia, dominated security discourse. Ironically, nationalism and conflict were both dividing South East Europe and contributing to its identity as a coherent entity. In reality, the logic of historical recidivism and interdependent enmities proved overstated. In Bosnia, Turkey refrained from unilateral action and adhered to NATO’s joint policy. Bulgaria and Romania also supported the international institutions’ efforts at conflict management, including the costly sanctions imposed on rump Yugoslavia. Albania as well as Bulgaria also lent assistance to Macedonia in the critical years of the Greek embargo. Miloševic´ kept a low profile on Macedonia and distanced himself from the inflammatory rhetoric of radicals like Vojislav Šešelj. Albania supported Kosovo’s independence – proclaimed after an informal referendum in 1991 – but could do little to challenge directly Belgrade’s sovereignty. Even firebrand politicians like President Sali Berisha were immune to foreign adventurism. If anything, Albania moved closer to the US policy in the region. The country joined Partnership for Peace (PfP) as early as February 1994 and offered NATO its airfields for reconnaissance operations over Bosnia. Thus, non-involvement and reliance on outside mediation and security provision, rather than diplomatic and military activism, became the norm in the foreign policy of ex-Yugoslavia’s Balkan neighbours. The conflict was more or less contained within the boundaries of the former federation, both in 1991–5 and during the crisis in Kosovo (1998–9) which spilled over into Macedonia. Security interdependence did not translate automatically into violent conflict as at previous historical junctures. New transnational issues and threats The profound impact exercised on the region by that first episode of the Yugoslav drama had to do less with the world of diplomacy and


military balances than with the pervasive weakness of state institutions. Instead of igniting a larger conflict, the wars generated a range of soft-security problems spilling over both old and newly-instituted borders in the Balkans. The spread of transnational organized crime, illegal trafficking and cross-border corruption as well as forced migration affected both ex-Yugoslavia and its members. These linkages were, admittedly, among the strongest bonds bringing together previously compartmentalized South East Europe.17 Refugees and internally displaced persons were a key issue for a number of Yugoslav successor states. By late 1995, there were 850,000 in Bosnia, Croatia and FR Yugoslavia as well as in Western Europe and North America. Bosnia suffered the most: at the time of Dayton up to a half of its population resided abroad or was internally displaced. August 1995 alone saw the exodus of nearly 150,000 Krajina Serbs as a result of the Oluja (Storm) operation carried out by Croatian forces against the breakaway enclave. Miloševic´ tried to resettle some of the incomers to Serbia in Albanian-populated Kosovo fuelling further local discontent. Most of the refugees, however, flocked into the large Serbian cities where they added to the army of unemployed. The refugee influx was a real burden for the shattered economy. Many new arrivals joined the thriving underworld. Very often those were young people with considerable experience in using arms gained during the conflict. The growth and proliferation of organized crime was the 1990s wars’ most durable legacy. Warlords like the notorious Željko RažnatovicÁrkan took a key part in the hostilities as commanders of paramilitary units, engaging in weapons trafficking and the sale of looted property. Criminal networks, often bridging ethnic divisions, profiteered through supplying necessities to the civilian populations caught in the conflict. During the war in Bosnia, a number of ‘free-trade zones’ enabled traffickers from all sides met to exchange goods. Bosniak and Croat groups supplied oil to the Serbs while the latter procured food and other essentials to Sarajevo and other besieged enclaves. After Dayton, former paramilitaries quickly reverted to criminal activities making use of established channels and patronage networks.18 Cross-border smuggling was, at least initially, linked closely to the process of state-building. Smugglers operated under protection from governments. In Croatia, Franjo Tud¯man and the 1990s Croat Democratic Union (HDZ) drew financial support from syndicates


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originating from Herzegovina. Gojko Šušak, a prominent Herzegovinian Croat émigré who served as defence minister (1991–98), was involved in illicit imports of weapons for both Croatia and for Herceg-Bosna, the self-proclaimed Croat entity in Bosnia (Hockenos, 2003). Because of the UN arms embargo, the government in Sarajevo similarly found itself dependent, in the period 1992–4, on supply lines operated by semi-criminal actors. Bosnian Serbs and Croats were in a better position due to the absence of border controls along the Drina River and in Herzegovina. Further south, the parallel state institutions run by the Albanians in Kosovo were, according to reports, partly funded by gangs trafficking heroin from Turkey into Western Europe. In the mid-1990s, the Kosovars started smuggling weapons too. Many of the assault rifles looted from the army depots during the 1997 riots in Albania finally made their way into neighbouring Kosovo. Thanks to its central position in the Balkans, Serbia connected all the pieces of the puzzle. The sanctions aimed at the Miloševic´ regime gave rise to a veritable economy based on breaking the embargo. The authorities – the leadership in Belgrade, the customs, the secret services and the police – formed and sponsored networks run in partnership with criminals from both inside the country as well as from Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia and Albania. In all those places, cadres of the former regimes’ secret police were often in the forefront of the operations together with government officials. Much of the illicit trade focused on oil that was shipped into Serbia from Ukraine and Russia over the Danube and through the country’s porous land boundaries with post-communist neighbours who had substantially relaxed border-crossing rules. Most of the revenues were funnelled into the loss-making enterprises and the pockets of the pro-regime oligarchy thereby perpetuating Miloševic´’s hold on power. The wars and sanctions contributed to the trans-nationalization of crime in the region. In contrast with the interethnic wars, crossborder criminal syndicates and smuggling networks became an all-Balkan, and not specifically post-Yugoslav, problem. It affected Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria and Romania, which otherwise managed to stay out of the conflict. Criminal syndicates developed wellfunctioning alliances across national boundaries. Sanction-busting crime additionally weakened state institutions that were already hampered by economic downturn and the common practices of state capture. As the traffickers often enjoyed protection from politicians


and civil servants, the nexus between trans-national crime and corruption was visible. Such cross-border networks outlived the lifting of the sanctions in 1996. In Serbia, channels were ‘privatized’, with control passing from the regime fully into the criminals’ hands. With no restrictions on oil imports, and hence no rent opportunities, the illicit transactions focused on stolen goods, counterfeit money and especially excise-duty goods like cigarettes. Political elites continued to partake in the smuggling operations, with Montenegro presenting a vivid example. A case brought by an Italian court against President Milo Ðukanovic´ on counts of contraband made the headlines in 2002. That was not exceptional; scandals related to links between politicians and smugglers were not rare in Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria.19 Sanctions consolidated also trafficking channels that predated the end of communist regime. Initially, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia disrupted the so-called Balkan drug route into Western Europe, passing Turkey, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Alternative routes linking Bulgaria with Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania, or with Romania and Hungary, were developed by regional criminal syndicates. The classical route was re-opened in the mid-1990s and, according to some estimates, 80 per cent of the heroin in Western Europe arrived through the three Balkan corridors. In addition, there were considerable amounts of amphetamines, synthesized and exported from South East Europe by local mafias. The wars helped new forms of criminal activities, such as human trafficking, to take root. During the Bosnian conflict numerous refugees were helped by criminals to escape into Western Europe. After 1995, these channels were used to transfer migrants from outside the region (Kurds, Iranians, Arabs, Afghans, Chinese etc.). With its liberal visa regime, Bosnia became, for a period of time, a home base for the traffickers. Greece’s borders with Albania, Bulgaria and Turkey became entry points into EU territory. With the help of state-of-the-art speedboats, outlaws from the Albanian coastal towns shipped migrants into Italy across the Otranto Straits. Human trafficking involved mainly women from various Eastern European countries (typically Moldova and Ukraine but also Albania, Bulgaria, Romania) employed the criminal-run sex industry in the West and, to a lesser extent, in former Yugoslavia.


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Interdependence and cooperation Beyond doubt, regional interdependence is a factor that matters for the Balkans. Whether they liked it or not, in the 1990s local states found themselves bundled by their politics, security concerns and geography, and to a lesser degree by their economies. Even divisive forces such as the legacies of conflict gave coherence to the notion of one South East Europe. In addition to common threats, interdependence also meant developmental opportunities. If it did not offer an economic structure, shared geography did offer potential gains in sectors such as transport infrastructure and energy. However, interdependence could be seen as a necessary, but certainly not a sufficient, condition for cooperation. It is hard to make predictions on the scope, depth and institutional design of regional institutions and schemes from the 1990s onwards based on this factor alone. For instance, one was as likely to see multilateral institutions and schemes as ad hoc initiatives by immediate neighbours. Taken on its own, interdependence is also a poor predictor of the depth of institutionalization, since issues at hand could be tackled both through loose forms of intergovernmental coordination and regional bodies with decision-making powers. Comparing the various faces of interdependence, one tentative conclusion is that intra-regional demand for cooperation has varied from one policy-area to another. It was limited in the field of trade due to the pull effect of the EU. Balkan states had little incentive to launch comprehensive all-regional arrangements, though improved economic relations with larger partners in their neighbourhood (for instance, Greece or Turkey) would be beneficial. By contrast, there has been demand for regional projects in transport and energy. Even there, spatial contiguity could prove a divisive factor and spurn a competitive dynamic, with groups of countries competing on the construction of oil pipelines. Turning to security, interconnectedness charts at least two possible strategies. On the one hand, in the 1990s, there was a strong incentive for local states to rely on outside powers (US, EU) as guarantors of stability. On the other, problems could be addressed through forms of bilateral or multilateral cooperation generated inside the region. However, it is hard to see how security interdependence, in and of itself, would automatically produce cooperation. The presence


of a regional complex is perfectly compatible with zero-sum thinking and divergent interests inhibiting collective action. At the end of the day, as the following chapter elaborates, external intervention set the conditions for cooperation at the regional level. Even the assumption of ‘indivisibility’ of Balkan security, widely shared in the 1990s, has not proven immune to questioning. Yugoslav conflicts failed to draw in or seriously destabilize neighbouring countries. As a result, all-regional solutions to problems specific to the former federation have been bound to cause tension. By contrast, soft security has been, in the 1990s and beyond, an area where the demand for cooperation has been stronger. However hard it is to measure its threat potential, trans-national crime necessitates collective response by a wide circle of affected states and societies, notwithstanding the argument that criminal networks have become part of the political system and social fabric rather than a challenge to it. To the extent they have the capacity and political will, Balkan governments can be expected to coordinate policies. Again, the interdependence cannot predict, a priori, the depth of institutionalization or indeed the extent of membership in the schemes to arise. Due to the complex patterns of interdependence cooperation can take place both on a regional scale as well as in the context of all-European or even global regimes relevant to that particular policy field.

2 Pushing for Cooperation: External Actors in Balkan Regionalism

Whatever the significance of regional interdependence, cooperation among Balkan states has largely been a product of external pressure or inducement. Anastasakis and Bojicˇic´-Dželilovic´’s 2002 survey found that local elites saw regional schemes as designed, promoted and implemented by powerful outside actors. That regionalism has been an import commodity is a small wonder, given South East Europe’s legacies of conflict, economic downturn and post-1989 political volatility described in the foregoing chapter. This chimes well with what Iver Neumann (1994, 2001) defines as the ‘outside-in’ trajectory of regionalism. The outside-in understanding is particularly amenable to the notion of hegemony, central to both Neorealism and Neoliberal Institutionalism – arguably the dominant perspectives in IR over the past three decades or so. The development and growth of regimes and institutions, be they regional or global, are sustained or facilitated by the presence and actions of (benign) hegemonic power. In the Balkan case, one may well point at the Western interventions of the 1990s as well as the deployment of the EU’s ‘soft power’ in the following decade. Compared to anywhere else in post-communist Europe, it is in the Balkans that regional cooperation has been singled out, most explicitly, as a precondition for joining prestigious international clubs such as the EU and NATO. This chapter examines the Western strategies and initiatives for pacifying South East Europe through the encouragement of regional cooperation. It traces the origins and subsequent evolution of policies and schemes as well as the nature of the models, institutional arrangements and material stimuli extended towards the countries of the region. 41


The power of outsiders: historical legacies External interventions in the Balkans have a long and rich history going back to the early nineteenth century. The concert of European great powers nursed the birth of independent states, starting from Greece in 1830 and finishing with Albania in 1912–13. Empires, nearby or distant, such as Russia, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary managed conflicts and orchestrated alliances between local clients, but also occasionally obstructed local efforts at integration; the Habsburg Monarchy, for example, vetoed a customs union between Serbia and Bulgaria in 1905. Later multilateral initiatives such as the Balkan Conferences of 1930–4, ostensibly intended to assert local interests against outside meddling, failed due to the tensions between the supporters and the opponents of the post-1919 territorial status quo, each looking towards patrons beyond the boundaries of the region. The 1934 Balkan Pact, which was shunned by Bulgaria and Albania (Kerner and Howard, 1936), ended in a failure. Meanwhile the economic pre-eminence of Germany, felt across the region in the latter part of the 1930s, proved too short-lived to deepen political and trade links across the area – which the Nazi Reich saw as a source of raw materials (Nikova, 2002; Lampe, 2006).1 As we have already seen, the Cold War parcelled the region even further. The quarrel between Stalin and Tito stemmed the plans for a Yugoslav–Bulgarian federation, which could also embrace communist Albania. The US-promoted Second Balkan Pact faltered, while Albania left the Soviet orbit. Intergovernmental cooperation, championed after 1976 by newly democratic Greece, focused on lowsensitivity issues like transport, energy and tourism. In the 1980s, the socialist government of Andreas Papandreou treated Balkan connections as a bargaining chip in its dealings with NATO and the EEC. Yet, bipolarity set the limits of the process, which culminated with the summits of foreign ministers in Belgrade (February 1988) and Tirana (October 1990) (Lopandic´, 2001, p. 55; Stojkovic´, 1997, pp. 475–86). Thus, Bulgaria was unwilling to pursue closer links with neighbours without the approval of Moscow, while Turkey was averse to the anti-NATO slant in Papandreou’s policies (Braun, 1983; Kofos, 1991; Veremis, 1995; Nikova, 2002). In that sense, the end of the Cold War augured well for Balkan multilateralism. The collapse of Yugoslavia, however, cancelled what little progress had been achieved and the ministerials did not resume until the summer of 1996.

Pushing for Cooperation

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Western interventions in the 1990s The impact of the Dayton Accord Western efforts in the 1990s to contain and halt the wars in Yugoslavia were not without historical parallels. As in the past, Balkan instability had become a target of power projection. The maintenance of regional order emerged as a strategic imperative, as the weak and incoherent response to the protracted conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina damaged the West’s credibility. The war cost more than 100,000 human lives; the EU and its nascent Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) was a casualty too. It was only the 1994–5 military involvement of NATO, led by the US, that brought an end to the conflict and paved the way to the Dayton/Paris Peace Accords of November-December 1995.2 Elements of a regional approach had been in place even prior to Dayton. The governments in Sofia, Bucharest, Tirana and Skopje were pressured to implement the UN sanctions against rump Yugoslavia. To contain conflict spillover, and avoid a nightmarish domino scenario in the southern Balkans, in December 1992 the UN deployed, along Macedonia’s undemarcated boundary with FR Yugoslavia, the first preventive mission in its history – first as an extension of UNPROFOR (UN Protection Force) and then as UNPREDEP (UN Preventive Deployment Force). In 1993, the US contributed 300 troops to the mission, which was the first such American contingent to land in the Balkans.3 The end of the Bosnian war added further layers to fledging regionwide strategy. The Dayton Accords introduced a 60,000-strong implementation force (IFOR) under NATO to oversee the stabilization and reintegration of Bosnia (Siani-Davies, 2003, p. 20). The country’s new constitutional framework, adopted in Dayton, granted ample executive and legislative powers to the Office of the High Representative (OHR); these were extended further in December 1997.4 The backing of accord signatories Croatia and FR Yugoslavia, meaning essentially Franjo Tud¯man and Slobodan Miloševic´, was of paramount importance for keeping Bosnia’s radical Croats and Serbs at bay. In the year following Dayton, the duo met several times, under EU and US auspices, with Alija Izetbegovic´, the Bosniak member of the tripartite presidency in Bosnia. To be effective, regional arrangements had to embrace the whole of South East Europe. Symptomatically, Article 5 of Annex I-B to the Dayton Accord put forward ‘regional stability in and around former Yugoslavia (emphasis added)’ as a core political


objective. As they had been in the 1980s, multilateral schemes were once again de rigueur in the Balkans, but this time external powerbrokers played a largely positive role. US initiatives The Southeast European Cooperative Initiative (SECI) was the main US multilateral scheme in the region.5 Designed to reinforce the peacekeeping effort in Bosnia, SECI was launched in July 1996 with a letter by President Bill Clinton to all Balkan foreign ministers.6 SECI sought to promote functional cooperation through infrastructure development and fighting trans-national crime. The scheme relied on funds drawn from IFIs rather than direct financial support from the American government whose patronage was, nonetheless, considered essential.7 US diplomacy defined eligibility criteria. Originally, SECI targeted the post-communist countries of the region, Turkey, Greece and Hungary. Slovenia and Croatia first declined to take part fearing that SECI was covertly recreating Yugoslavia. The US persuaded Slovenia to join, while Croatia opted for an observer status. Originally part of the initiative, FR Yugoslavia was excluded after Miloševic´’s attempt to partly annul the local elections in the autumn of 1996, in which key municipalities such as Belgrade had been won by the anti-regime opposition. Admitting Yugoslavia was considered again in 1998, but the crisis in Kosovo dissuaded the US policymakers (Shtonova, 1998, pp. 31–6; Lopandic´, 2001, pp. 125–36). SECI’s launch raised eyebrows in Brussels as the EU had its own policies in the region. The Union vetoed the US proposal to assign coordination to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Secretariat in Prague. It took a year of consultations to adopt a compromise solution, which was ratified by an inaugural conference in Geneva on 5–6 December 1996.8 SECI’s founding documents accepted that the scheme would play a complementary part to the EU’s Regional Approach as well as to the Pre-accession Strategy for Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia.9 Formally placed under the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the initiative was underwritten by a coalition of Western states, notably the US, Germany, Austria and Italy, who financed the establishment of a coordinator’s office in Vienna in March 1997. It was headed by the former Austrian Vice-Chancellor Erhard Busek, answerable to the OSCE Chairman-in-Office.


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In addition to SECI, Washington was keen to foster cooperation among smaller groups of friendly countries. In late 1995, President Clinton announced the initiation of the South Balkans Development Initiative (SBDI), comprising Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria, and working towards the development of an energy corridor linking the Black Sea and the Adriatic. The SBDI was originally instituted with a grant from the US Trade and Development Agency, promising to attract private investment (Hinkova, 2002, p. 21). The AMBO (AlbaniaMacedonia-Bulgaria Oil) corporation was subsequently formed for the purpose of developing a pipeline for shipping Caspian oil from the Bulgarian port of Burgas to Vlorë (Vlora), on Albania’s Adriatic coast.10 AMBO, whose feasibility study was financed by the US, was embraced by the Albanian, Macedonian and Bulgarian governments, who followed up with regular meetings at the ministerial and heads-of-state level to oversee implementation (Lesser et al., 2002, pp. 95–6). EU and the Balkans, 1996–8 The peace in Bosnia presented an opportunity for the EU’s Balkan policies, following a series of humiliating failures. To guide postconflict reconstruction, democratization and economic development, the Union designed a policy of incentives vis-à-vis Yugoslav successor states, together with Albania: unilateral autonomous trade measures (ATMs) to improve market access for the countries in question; subsequently, Trade and Cooperation (‘first generation’) Agreements (TCAs); and financial aid under the PHARE (Poland and Hungary Assistance for Restructuring their Economies) and OBNOVA (renewal) programmes.11 Such benefits were made conditional on political and market reform, post-conflict reconciliation and, importantly, regional cooperation (Papadimitriou, 2001). Collectively, they formed the so-called Regional Approach for South East Europe (RA). The RA excluded Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania, which were assigned to a different category in light of the more advanced institutional relationship. In the period 1993–6 all three had signed Europe Agreements and lodged membership applications, becoming, in effect, candidates covered by the commitment extended at the European Council’s Copenhagen Summit (June 1993), and keeping a healthy distance from the Yugoslav scramble.12 With the RA at best a ‘pre-pre-accession’ framework, the EU resolved that good neighbourliness and economic integration at the regional level had


to accompany or even precede integration into its institutions. The Union highlighted, inter alia, the return of refugees and internally displaced persons as well as cooperation with the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY).13 The cooperation requirement marked a shift, compared to the EU policies of other regional clusters in post-communist Europe (the Visegrád four/CEFTA, the Cooperation Council of the Baltic States). True, the Balts were asked to make ‘every effort’ to cooperate with each other, and the 1996 Europe Agreement of Slovenia urged the country to reach out to the other candidates (Phinnemore, 2003, p. 87). The Union looked favourably at the regional institutions in its newly acquired sphere of influence to the east. However, as the ex-Yugoslav republics (save Slovenia) and Albania were not accession countries, cooperation could be considered an end in itself rather than a step towards joining the EU. By contrast, with the decision taken at the 1997 Luxembourg Council to open negotiations with Estonia, but not with Lithuania and Latvia, the Union indicated that each country was to be judged on its own merits. In Luxembourg, the EU Council abandoned, on the Commission’s behest, the practice of multilateral ‘structured dialogue’ with the candidate countries that had been inaugurated in 1992, largely because of resistance from the latter (Smith, 1999, pp. 132–3). In the Balkans, the trend was reverse: regional bundling driven by security concerns trumped differentiation. EU policies differed in their design. For instance minority issues in Central Europe, such as, the plight of Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia, typically involved pairs of neighbouring countries rather than regional complexes. This reflected on the EU’s approach to inter-state cooperation, as exemplified by high-profile initiatives such as the Pact for Stability in Europe, which was originally proposed by French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur in April 1993 (Ueta, 1997; Smith, 1999, pp. 155–60). The Pact spelled out ‘good neighbourliness’ as a key accession condition. To quote the then French Minister of European Affairs, Allain Lamasure, ‘admission [to the EU] is only possible for countries that maintain good relations with their neighbours. No country with unsettled border or minority conflicts will be allowed to join’.14 This would be done through bilateral collaboration as opposed to institutionalized regional frameworks. In 1995–7, the Pact led to the signing of 21 friendship treaties between dyads of states (Gal, 1999).15 It is worth noting that, with


47

the notable exception of Romania, the Pact did not apply to South East Europe.16 Bilateralism also shaped EU functional instruments on cross-border cooperation under the PHARE programme.17 In a special report, the European Commission pointed out that the enlargement the strategic goal and the Union had to support only regional initiatives, which were compatible with the participants’ bilateral arrangements with the EU and its members.18 The effect of the RA was therefore threefold: (1) it outlined the borders of the future Western Balkan grouping; (2) it established a conditionality regime loosely linked to the 1993 Copenhagen criteria, but with no explicit reference to accession; and (3) it made regional cooperation a prerequisite for inclusion into its institutions and policies (Vukadinovic´, 2001, pp. 447–8; cf. Lopandic´, 2002, pp. 31–2). Yet, while demanding collective action, the new template reinforced the pre-existing differentiation. It benefited Albania and Macedonia whose cooperative attitude and commitment to democratization had been rewarded, even prior to the launch of the RA, with TCAs and early admission into the PHARE programme. Conversely, it penalized Croatia and FR Yugoslavia, due to the authoritarian politics of Tud¯man and Miloševic´ (Papadimitriou, 2001; Lopandic´, 2001, pp. 183–4). Bosnia occupied a middle position, as it did not have a TCA, but enjoyed better access to the EU market and received PHARE assistance. In addition to the RA, the EU considered all-Balkan multilateral frameworks along the lines of the US-promoted SECI. The Royaumont scheme involved Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia together with the Western Balkans. In essence, this French initiative, adopted on the margins of the Paris conference (December 1995) ratifying the Dayton Accord, was an attempt to match, if not balance, US activism in South East Europe (Shtonova, 1998, pp 26–7). Inspired by the Pact for Stability, it called for multilateral cooperation and civil society. The participating states started meeting regularly at the level of political directors, but never convened a summit of foreign ministers. At the same time, Royaumont sponsored meetings among parliaments, municipalities, civil society, media, trade unions and so forth in the region, with a particular emphasis on the ex-Yugoslav republics (Shtonova, 1998; Lopandic´, 2001, pp. 117–24). Compared to both SECI and the RA, Royaumont remained of secondary (at best) significance. It was not until 1997 that the EU


Council of Ministers appointed the former Greek minister and parliamentarian Panagiotis Roumeliotis as a coordinator (Lopandic´, 2001, p. 120). Although it had been assumed that OSCE would eventually take Royaumont, the scheme was brought under the EU’s CFSP.19 As usual there was more rhetoric than substance: grants from the European Commission and several member states did not exceed $2m. Unsurprisingly, the initiative remained little known outside diplomatic and NGO circles (Lopandic´, 2001, p. 124; ESI, 1999, pp. 4–5). NATO’s policy on regional cooperation Like the EU, NATO, crafted its own regional cooperation policy in the mid-1990s, under the Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme aimed at the post-communist countries. Launched in January 1994, the PfP envisioned various collaborative activities with third countries, including joint exercises and exchange of military personnel. Through the PfP, NATO extended forms of good-neighbourliness conditionality to the former Eastern bloc, where many sates had identified membership in the Alliance as a principal foreign policy goal.20 In institutional terms, the PfP model was identical to the one by the Balladur Pact, and thus differed from the RA’s multilateral template. The North Atlantic Council’s Study on NATO Enlargement (1995) singled out two particular features: Fostering in new members of the Alliance the patterns and habits of cooperation, consultation and consensus building which characterize relations among current Allies; Promoting goodneighbourly relations, which would benefit all countries in the Euro-Atlantic area, both members and non-members of NATO.21 As the EU’s Enlargement policy, the PfP was, at the end of the day, a bilateral platform involving NATO and individual partner governments. Its key vehicles were the Individual Partnership Programmes, which focused on critical areas such as defence planning and budgeting, civil-military relations and so forth, rather than on such classical good-neighbourliness issues as disarmament or confidence-building.22 In comparison to the EU, however, NATO-style bilateralism accommodated multilateral cooperation more successfully. An example of this success was the Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) concept, which oversaw the formation of multinational units


49

with the participation of members and PfP states, to be deployed in humanitarian and peacekeeping operations.23 Endorsed at the 1994 Brussels Summit, which also launched the PfP, the concept was implemented with the establishment of joint battalions by Poland and Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine, and Hungary and Romania, as well as by the three Baltic states. These PfP units took part in the IFOR (later SFOR) contingent in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Acceding to the PfP, in 1994–95 several South East European states also signed up to NATO’s multilateral agenda.24 The attraction of NATO membership incentivized governments to implement the entry criteria in assorted political and military policy-areas. Along with members Greece and Turkey, these PfP countries (Romania, the first ever state to sign a partnership agreement, Bulgaria, Albania and Macedonia) formed a pro-NATO cluster in South East Europe supportive of multilateral initiatives coming from Brussels and Washington. NATO’s influence was felt even in countries outside the PfP. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Alliance implemented a range of confidence-building measures between the armies of the BosniakCroat Federation and Republika Srpska, pursuant to the clauses of the Dayton Accords. However, the NATO and PfP’s regionalizing effect in the 1990s was constrained due to the exclusion of pivotal, yet semiauthoritarian, countries such as FR Yugoslavia and Croatia.

Back to the Balkans: international policy after the Kosovo crisis The war in Kosovo and the launch of the Stability Pact for South East Europe The Kosovo crisis of 1998–9 threatened the precarious stability established in Dayton and also proved, to the Western policy-makers, that Balkan problems were intimately interrelated. The influx of hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees into Albania and Macedonia, after March 1999, put both countries under tremendous strain and, in the Macedonian case, raised once more the spectre of inter-ethnic turmoil. For its part, NATO’s operation Allied Force damaged vital infrastructure located within Serbia with adverse effects on trade, transport and investment across the region. The campaign, which led to the establishment of an international protectorate in Kosovo, sanctioned by the Kumanovo Agreement and the UN


Security Council Resolution 1244 (10 June 1999), paved the way for a relaunch of the Western policies in the Balkans based on a revamped regional approach. The response came by way of the Stability Pact for South East Europe (SP), proposed by the German Presidency of the EU Council in the summer of 1999. The Pact was intended to reassert, once more, the Union’s role, in the wake of an intervention that was, like the one in Bosnia, heavily reliant on the US military clout.25 The EU saw its advantage in the fields of democracy-promotion and economic reconstruction but also aspired to engage in security management. As noted by Lykke Friis and Anna Murphy (2000), these ambitions were in line with the so-called Petersberg Tasks incorporated in the 1996 Amsterdam Treaty (in force as of 1 May 1999). Germany presented the SP to the EU Council on 1 April, days after the bombing commenced.26 Despite the echoes of the first (‘Balladur’) Stability Pact of 1994–5, a much heavier emphasis was laid on regionalism and multilateralism, seen as the right cure for the endemic instability in the Balkans.27 Countries previously covered by the RA were to be given new incentives in exchange for reforms at home and cooperation with neighbours. The German Presidency envisioned more advanced types of association agreements extended to the Western Balkans, on the model of the Europe Agreements of the 1990s. However ambitious it was, the SP was hastily assembled, under the pressure of events. It reflected the EU’s conviction that ‘something had to be done’ (Friis and Murphy, 2000, pp. 773–4). This realization helped Germany’s Auswärtiges Amt sell the Pact to other member states’ foreign ministries as well as to the international community. The SP was supported by a joint IMF and World Bank conference, by NATO and by the G8 foreign ministers meeting in May (Siani-Davies, 2003, p. 174). The scheme was put under OSCE as a way to bring in the US and Russia. OSCE’s model also inspired the Pact’s institutional set-up comprising a regional ‘table’ and three issue-specific ‘subtables’ (see Figure 2.1 below). The negotiations were marred by frictions. Toning down NATO’s involvement was crucial for securing Russia’s support. In reaction, the UK government insisted on giving the SP a limited mandate in the field of military security, in order to avoid competition with existing PfP programmes. Meanwhile several EU members were voicing their discontent with the US. They


51

perceived that the Clinton administration was using the SP as a way to make the EU open its doors for more membership demandeurs, in addition to the candidates in Central and Eastern Europe. The level of EU commitment emerged as a stumbling block during both the planning and the intra-EU negotiation stage (Biermann, 1999, pp. 14–8). At the end of the day, under pressure from France and others, the German Presidency abandoned its initial proposal to specify EU membership as the Pact’s ultimate goal; its mission was vaguely defined as ‘draw[ing] the region closer to the perspective of full integration’. The SP framework document contained no reference to the specific articles on enlargement, within the Amsterdam Treaty as it was originally envisaged. To balance that, the endorsed text mentioned the Copenhagen criteria and, in the very long run, membership.28 The EU adopted the SP at the General Affairs Council on 17 May but inaugurated it only after the end of hostilities, during a ministerial in Cologne (10 June 1999), which was followed by a high-profile summit in Sarajevo on 30 July 1999. The framework document and the summit declaration outlined an ambitious set of economic, political and security objectives.29 Regional cooperation was one of them: The EU will draw the region closer to the perspective of full integration of these countries into its structures. In case of countries which have not yet concluded association agreements with the EU, this will be done through a new kind of contractual relationship taking into account the individual situations of each country with the perspective of EU membership, on the basis of the Amsterdam Treaty and once the Copenhagen criteria have been met. We note the European Union’s willingness that, while deciding autonomously, it will consider the achievement of the objectives of the Stability Pact, in particular progress in developing regional co-operation [emphasis added], among the important elements in evaluating the merits of such a perspective.30 While regional cooperation and EU association were part of the same package, the EU saw itself as a coalition leader, rather than a unilateral actor. In the words of Friis and Murphy, ‘the EU consciously launched the initiative but did not own it’ (2000, p. 773).


The SP assembled a motley collection of states, both from South East Europe and further afield, international organizations and IFIs and cooperative schemes (see Table 2.1). As far as the beneficiaries were concerned, the Pact targeted not only the Western Balkans but also Romania and Bulgaria, which had concluded Europe Agreements, had a candidate status, and were implementing European Accession Partnerships. Unlike the RA of 1996–9, the SP operated on the assumption that there were important economic, political and security linkages and similarities that justified clustering all post-communist countries in the region together (Biermann, 1999, pp. 10–2). That included FR Yugoslavia, still under the rule of Miloševic´, which though not formally present in the initiative was considered eligible pending a democratic breakthrough in Belgrade.31 Western-friendly Montenegro, though still part of FR Yugoslavia on paper, participated informally in the Pact from day one. An open-ended process rather than a regional organization, the SP nevertheless institutionalized cooperation. It was headed by a Special Coordinator, based in Brussels, with the senior German politician Bodo Hombach appointed to the position.34 Funded by the EU and helped by a small staff of officials seconded from the participating states, the Special Coordinator was in charge of mediating between the various participants.35 Target states met twice a year at ministerial level within a ‘Regional Table’ monitoring the Pact’s activities. The

Table 2.1 SP participants Participating states (beneficiaries) Participating states (non-beneficiaries) Facilitating states International Financial Institutions International Organizations Regional Cooperation Initiatives

Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania32 Hungary, Slovenia, Turkey EU Member States, Japan, Russia, US, Canada, Norway (after 2000), Switzerland (after 2000) European Investment Bank (EIB), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), World Bank, Council of Europe Development Bank OSCE, EU (via the European Commission), OECD, Council of Europe, NATO South East Cooperation Initiative (SECI), South East European Cooperation Process (SEECP), Central European Initiative (CEI), Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC)33


53

bulk of the work was carried out by three working tables (WTs) focusing, following the CSCE/OSCE format, on: projects in the fields of human rights and democracy (WT1), economic reconstruction and development (WT2), and security (WT3). The Royaumont Process merged with WT1 on account of overlapping priorities. SECI, by contrast, continued running parallel to the SP’s WT2 on economic affairs. The WTs were co-chaired by seconded international functionaries (coming from the international organizations and the ‘facilitating’ countries) and the participating countries, rotating each six months (Figure 2.1). The SP was designed to channel reconstruction aid to the Balkans; but it had no budget of its own. It effectively became an intermediary between donors and beneficiaries. The principal driving forces, therefore, were those who footed the bill: notably the EU, its members, and the IFIs, which all formed the so-called High Level Steering Group (HSLG co-piloted by the European Commission and the World Bank). The World Bank and the Commission co-convened two donor conferences in Brussels (March 2000) and Bucharest (October 2001) to vet projects submitted by the Balkan governments. The two donor conferences made WT2 the Pact’s leading segment, in line with the demand coming from the region. Infrastructure development was the main focus of the funding agencies’ strategy.37 A report released by the think-tank European Stability Initiative in 2001 estimated that projects falling under WT2 accounted for 81 per cent of the a1.6bn in grants and loans pledged at the Brussels conference as compared to a340m (16 per cent) for WT1 and a55m (3 per cent) for WT3. An additional a800m was pledged for ‘near term projects’ under WT2 (ESI and East West Institute, 2001, p. 11). Rather than an overarching security framework, the SP became a road-building venture. Still, the Pact was greeted with cautious optimism in South East Europe, which saw it, by and large, as a symbolic step forward towards the EU and, more generally, the West. As one Macedonian official put it, ‘the Stability Pact would not have had any value in itself if it did not contain a membership perspective’ (Friis and Murphy, 2000, p. 770). It was commonly argued that most of funds pledged under the SP would have reached the Balkans anyway through programmes run by bilateral donors.38 While the political content of the SP was perhaps more significant than its economic impact, some anxieties

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High Level Steering Group Co-chaired by the World Bank and the European Commission, finance ministers of the G8 and the country holding the EU presidency

Special Coordinator Appointed by the EU Council in consultation with the facilitating states and organizations. Supported by 30 staff seconded by national governments

Regional Table Intergovernmental body chaired by the Special Coordinator. All SP participants are represented. Follows the work of the Special Coordinator and the Working Tables.

Working Table I: Democracy and Human Rights Issues and taskforces Minority and human rights, Refugee returns, Good governance, Gender, Media, Educatio and youth, Parliamentary cooperation, Szeged Process1

Working Table II: Economic Reconstruction, Cooperation and Development Issues and taskforces Regional trade, Infrastructure (led by EIB), Economic reform, Investment compact (led by OECD), Private sector development (led by EBRD), Business Advisory Council, e- Balkans, Environment, Vocational training, Social cohesion

Working Table III: Security Subtable on defence issues Defence planning and demoblization, Arms control, Small arms, Military contacts, Demining (Reay Group), Disaster preparedness Subtable on justice and home affairs Anti-corruption, Fight against organized crime, Migration and asylum, Human trafficking

Figure 2.1 Institutional structure of the SP36 Source: www.stabilitypact.org


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harking back to the RA were very much alive, with the relationship between regionalism and bilateralism based on differentiation being the most prominent one. Finally, candidate countries like Bulgaria and Romania were unsure whether they fit into a post-conflict framework such as the SP. The governments in Sofia and Bucharest were torn between their desire to make a positive contribution to the Western strategy in the former Yugoslavia and their misgivings about the negative fallout of regional embroilment, especially after failing to secure a start of EU accession negotiations at the 1997 Luxembourg Council. The Stabilization and Association Process Their grand rhetoric aside, EU policymakers were aware of the SP’s inherent limitations. Having given a green light to Romania and Bulgaria to start membership talks at the historic Helsinki Summit in December 1999, which also saw Turkey promoted to candidacy, they also moved to upgrade policy vis-à-vis what was already commonly known as the Western Balkans. The outdated RA was replaced by the Stabilization and Association Process (SAP), an institutionally more advanced framework. SAP offered the Western Balkans Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAAs) modelled on the 1990s Europe Agreements. Such bilateral deals were made conditional on democratic and market reforms and the observance of minority rights, but also on commitment to regional cooperation. It was, therefore, hardly a coincidence that Macedonia, thus far spared by violent ethnic conflict and conducting a pro-Western policy, was the first country to obtain a positive feasibility study from the European Commission in 1999 for opening SAA talks.39 The outliers were Croatia, still governed by the nationalist Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ) of Franjo Tud¯man, and Slobodan Miloševic´’s Serbia. SAP sought to improve trade access for Western Balkan industrial products covered by autonomous trade preferences (ATPs). ATPs upgraded the system of TCAs and ATMs introduced by the RA, allowing the Western Balkans to keep tariffs for EU imports for a period of ten years, which was a much more generous offer in comparison to what Central and Eastern Europe had obtained in the early 1990s (Michalopoulos, 2002). Even more importantly, at the 2000 Feira Council the Western Balkan states were recognized as ‘potential members’.40 As noted by Milica Uvalic´ (2001), the membership


prospect was perhaps the most significant upgrade, as much of West Balkan exports already entered the EU market duty-free, while substantial amounts of foreign aid was available even without SAP. SAP developed further the RA’s notion that regional integration should go hand-in-hand with inclusion in the EU. That involved political issues but also functional sectors as trade, cross-border infrastructure and justice and home affairs. Readiness to engage in both neighbour-to-neighbour and multilateral cooperative schemes was an essential condition for the Western Balkan states for concluding an SAA (Altmann, 2003, p. 144). Over time, it became patent that SAP was also a step forward compared to the SP, too. Unlike the SP, it was limited only to the (then) five Western Balkan countries and was firmly anchored into the EU’s external policies. With SAP, the EU gradually shifted to a Western-Balkans-focused approach, treating Romania and Bulgaria as a separate case. This raised questions as to how SAP and the SP related to one another. In 1999–2000, all official documents referred to SAP as the EU’s contribution to the SP, the leading framework (Kavalski, 2003, pp. 202–5). After 2001–2, with the signing of the first SAAs with Macedonia and Croatia, this changed and, as we shall see below, SAP came to the driver’s seat (Bechev, 2006). NATO and South East Europe after the war in Kosovo At the time of Kosovo, NATO also ripened to the idea that the Balkans necessitated a special regional strategy. The Washington Summit of April 1999, taking place in the middle of the allied air strikes against Serbia, observed that there was a ‘[a] need for a comprehensive approach to the stabilization of the crisis region in south-eastern Europe and to the integration of the countries of the region into the Euro-Atlantic community’.41 The Alliance unveiled its South East Europe Initiative (SEEI) intended to supplement the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) and the PfP at the regional level.42 It targeted all Yugoslav neighbours including Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, which at the were outside the PfP. Many saw the initiative as a quasi-Article 5 guarantee by NATO for the security of the ‘frontline states’ during the Kosovo war (Noev, 2002, p. 11). The SEEI featured a strong multilateral component while the EAPC launched an ad-hoc Working Group on Regional Cooperation. By late 2000, it produced several projects such as SEEGROUP, dealing with border security and


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illicit trafficking as well as with general security policy coordination. Owing to NATO’s high-profile role, Balkan PfP countries preferred cooperating on security matters through SEEI/SEEGROUP rather than SP’s third working table. The post-1999 period saw the PfP countries in South East Europe actively pursuing NATO membership. Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Romania all became part of NATO’s Membership Action Plan (MAP) initiated in April 1999 to speed up their accession preparations. They were followed by Croatia after it entered PfP in May 2000. Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro joined PfP only in December 2006 delayed by hurdles such as (the lack of) cooperation with ICTY, the slow pace of security sector reform or the absence of an integrated army in the case of Bosnia.43 Thus the PfP/MAP promoted at the same time cooperation and differentiation. Its significance declined over time as NATO enlarged towards the Balkans. Bulgaria and Romania were invited to join NATO at the Prague Summit (November 2002), while Albania and Croatia received an invitation at the Bucharest Summit in April 2008.44 Macedonia, though formally part of that latter wave, saw its accession delayed due to Greece’s veto – motivated by the so-called name dispute between the two neighbours.

The only game in town: the EU and the Western Balkans in the 2000s Political changes in Croatia and especially Serbia in 1999–2000 strengthened immensely the EU’s hand in South East Europe due to the incoming reform-minded governments’ commitment to the twin processes of integration into the Union and regional cooperation. At the November 2000 Zagreb Summit between the Western Balkans and the EU, leaders of the former pledged to cooperate in areas such as political reconciliation, trade liberalization, fighting organized crime, trafficking, and cross-border corruption, and the closing communiqué explicitly noted that: ‘the deepening of regional cooperation will go hand in hand with rapprochement with the EU’.45 In support of this two-dimensional process, the EU allocated substantial funds to assist institution-building at home, and economic cooperation with neighbours. In 2001, it inaugurated the CARDS (Community Assistance for Reconstruction, Development and Stabilization) programme for


the Western Balkans, which replaced PHARE and OBNOVA. CARDS was based on a financial package of some a4.9bn to the five Western Balkan countries in 2001–6, and included a regional component.46 That has continued, after 2007, with the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA), CARDS successor. For the European Commission, overseeing such instruments, ‘programmes funded under this envelope will be complementary to national programmes and will only be eligible if they provide an added value to the pre-accession process’. The so-called multi-beneficiary programmes were allocated a401.4m in 2007–9, out of a total budget of a4.12bn.47 Thus, after the 2000 threshold, the EU has wielded the full arsenal of instruments for encouraging regionalization within Western Balkans, as identified by Karen Smith (2003, pp. 86–93): cooperation agreements, group-to-group political dialogue (EU-Western Balkans summits), economic assistance and conditionality.48 This is reflected in the annual monitoring reports issued by the Commission each autumn since 2002 which assess the individual countries on their commitment and compliance with regional initiatives, institutions and projects backed by the Union (in the section on political criteria). By extending a clearer membership offer, SAP has allayed fears that regional cooperation might be an alternative or delaying tactic, which surrounded the SP. The Pact, for its part, was growingly marginalized. The new coordinator after 2002, Erhard Busek, who once headed SECI, pushed for streamlining the wide range of activities under the scheme; the number of priorities was diminished and the grand rhetoric jettisoned.49 The Pact turned into a de facto supplement to SAP’s regional dimension.50 The relegation to a secondary role, coupled with the new focus on ‘regional ownership’, towards the mid-2000s paved the way to the phasing out of the Pact and the establishment of the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC), in February 2008, in partnership with the South East European Cooperation Process; this is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 6. The EU put trade at the forefront of SAP. By the time of the summit, the EU had largely fulfilled its promise to grant privileged access to the Western Balkans. In November 2000, it also extended the relevant regulation to post-Miloševic´ Yugoslavia, now fully integrated into SAP.51 The EU demanded that liberalization should also include dismantling tariffs inside the region, a point to be elaborated further in Chapter 4. The two SAAs signed, in the course of 2001,


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with Macedonia and Croatia contained identical clauses whereby the two countries were required to conclude in the following two years FTAs with the rest of the Western Balkans. They were also encouraged to do so with the accession candidates, but this was not spelled out as a mandatory condition (Article 14). Furthermore, Article 12 of the SAAs referred to cooperation on labour and capital mobility, services, reciprocal rights of business establishment.52 Turning for a moment back to Andrew Hurrell’s (1995) typology of regionalism, this was the point where the step from intergovernmental cooperation to integration was made, given Brussels’ insistence that the pace of intra-Western Balkans’ removal of barriers have to match that of opening to the EU.53 This did not offset the prevalent bilateralism and differentiation in EU–Western Balkan relations. The early conclusion of SAAs helped Croatia and Macedonia break away from the group, despite the inter-ethnic conflict they went through in 2001. Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro (independent as of May 2006) all failed, for various reasons, to move at the same speed as the frontrunners. Croatia and Macedonia’s progress was bolstered by the outcome of the EU–West Balkan summit in Thessaloniki, convened in June 2003 by the Greek Presidency of the Council. Thessaloniki upgraded SAP into a full-fledged enlargement framework equipped with all the political, financial and institution-building tools already deployed in Central and Eastern Europe. In December 2005, the EU resolved to open accession negotiations with Croatia and upgraded

Table 2.2 The Western Balkan countries on the path to European integration

Albania Bosnia and Herzegovina Croatia Kosovo Macedonia Montenegro Serbia

Stabilization and Association agreement (SAA)

EU Candidate membership status application

Accession negotiations

12 Jun 2006 16 Jun 2008

29 Apr 2009 No

No No

No No

29 Oct 2001 No 9 Apr 2001 15 Oct 2007 29 Apr 2008

21 Feb 2003 No 22 Mar 2004 15 Dec 2008 23 Dec 2009

18 Jun 2004 No 17 Dec 2005 17 Dec 2010 No

3 Oct 2005 No No No No


Macedonia into an official candidate. The following year, Albania and Montenegro signed SAAs. Serbia and Bosnia followed suit in the spring of 2008 but the issue of ICTY cooperation, in the case of the former, and policy reform, for the latter, have effectively blocked the process. Kosovo, which proclaimed unilateral independence on 17 February 2008, is at present still only halfway involved in the process, as it is still unrecognized by several EU members, including Greece and Romania (Table 2.2).

The dynamics of external push External interventions have been a recurrent feature of Balkan politics. The conflicts in 1991–5 and 1998–9 brought into the region various Western players, from governments to international institutions, to sui generis actors like the EU, which all pushed for regional cooperation as a means to stabilize and pacify South East Europe, considered an interdependent whole. A major impediment for those external initiatives was, beyond any doubt, the lack of coordination. In 1996, the EU and the US found themselves at loggerheads, each promoting its own pet scheme. After 1999, however, the EU emerged as the undisputed leader in the SP and, even more unambiguously, within the regional dimension of SAP. Regional cooperation was advanced through a policy of incentives. In the case of both NATO and the EU, this meant first and foremost the promise and prospect of future membership. However, the mix between regionalism and accession raised further complications. With the SP and SAP, the EU attempted to craft a policy combining regionality and differentiation but the balancing act proved elusive and often sparked political tensions. Put eloquently by a group of prominent observers, ‘the EU [was] de facto dividing a region with the left hand, while promoting multilateral cooperation among the states of the same region with the right hand’.54 The tension was resolved only towards the middle of the 2000s when it became clear that membership was SAP’s top priority while regional cooperation played an auxiliary, yet significant, role. Overall, NATO proved more successful in avoiding a clash between regionalism and bilateralism. The high-profile involvement of the US and other member states in regional initiatives reinforced the dynamic towards opening, rather than local ghettoization.


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Though clearly a more powerful agent of regional cooperation, in comparison to the indigenous linkages and structures of interdependence examined in Chapter 1, external push varied in intensity and scope over time. In the mid-1990s, the EU required East European candidates (Romania and Bulgaria included) to resolve problems and establish good bilateral relations with neighbours but was less insistent on institutionalized cooperation on a regional scale. In the post-Dayton Balkans, it shifted towards multilateralism, which variably targeted Yugoslavia’s successors and the wider neighbourhood. The US, by contrast, pursued a policy of inclusiveness which sought to engage also countries like Turkey, Greece, Slovenia and Hungary (e.g., in SECI), and as we shall see in Chapter 5, Ukraine and Georgia, following the wave of ‘colour revolutions’ in the mid-2000s. The SP involved the Western Balkans, Bulgaria and Romania, and even Moldova, but SAP’s more robust and comprehensive regional cooperation conditionality, written into the individual SAAs, was restricted to the Yugoslav successor states and Albania. There were variations in priorities, too. In the period of 1996–8, the EU focused mainly on political dialogue, while the US emphasized sectoral cooperation in areas such as trade facilitation, cross-border infrastructure and combating organized crime. By contrast, the SP, at least initially, aimed to regionalize every single policy-area from the media all the way down to cross-border water management. The SAP marked the return to a more priority-driven, yet in-depth, approach focused on market integration and cooperation in justice and home affairs. This has been the case of NATO too, with its more or less straightforward emphasis on political-military issues. In sum, external push has been a pervasive force in a region traditionally divided by conflict and dependent on the outside world. At a closer look, however, one sees a story about different actors pressing and inducing different groups of South East European states to do different things at different times.

3 Balkans, Europe, South East Europe: Identity Politics and Regional Cooperation

Countries belong beyond their boundaries on a map to where their spirit takes them. N. Iorga (1940, p. 8) It is certain that neither regional interdependence nor external push give a fully satisfactory answer to the question of what sustains the Balkans as a regional unit. As noted, different external initiatives have mapped the area in variable ways, though the centre of gravity has been former Yugoslavia. However, South East Europe is used in political discourse to denote a grouping spanning well beyond the confines of the Western Balkans. We have also seen that interdependence typically binds territorially contiguous countries, yet by that token Romania would form a region with neighbouring Hungary or Moldova, rather than with Albania or Bosnia. Turkey and Greece’s security concerns might be interdependent but what, if any, is the common thread that links them to, say, Montenegro’s relations with Serbia and Croatia? Geographical criteria help little in deciding where South East Europe begins or ends. The Balkan Peninsula has no clear northern border although the Danube and Sava rivers or, alternatively, the Drava and the Carpathian Range are obvious candidates. The region has an ill-defined south-eastern frontier insofar as it is hard to include the Turkish portion of Thrace and half of Istanbul but write off the rest of the country where one could often find people and communities with roots in what used to be known as ‘Turkey-in-Europe’.1 62

Balkans, Europe, South East Europe

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The debates about the Balkans’ frontiers are not exclusively preoccupied with (physical) geography but equally zoom in on history, culture and the political legacies shaping a collective regional identity. While received wisdom has it that the Balkans lack a common notion of Self, because of historical divisions and present-day political fragmentation, this has been no obstacle for studying the region as a relatively stable geopolitical whole. What, then, is ‘regionness’, and how does it impact on inter-state politics, notably the build-up of cooperative institutions in South East Europe? This chapter locates a thin, though shared, sense of belonging or ‘we-ness’ within the constructions of national identity in the region. Its common denominator is the notion of being on the periphery of Europe rather than a ‘thick’, communal understanding built around references to a common indigenous culture and historical heritage. Still the identification as peripheral, and the discourses it is articulated through, have empowered the institutions of the EU and other Western actors to legitimately project political standards and frame normative expectations, notably regional cooperation, vis-à-vis South East Europe.2

Identity and the study of regionalism As the Introduction pointed out, positing shared identity as either a driver or a feature of regionalism in the Balkans is in tune with various traditions in the study of international politics. For instance, Andrew Hurrell concurs with Emanuel Adler that ‘regionness’ is rooted in mental maps rather than being a simple reflection of material structures of connectivity or institutional frameworks. Mental maps are the cognitive frames that assist agents in interpreting society and politics and, in this particular instance, political geography. The key issue is how those ideational foundations of regionalism come into existence and play into the political process. One possible root is to understand identity as a primordial monolith: unchangeable and located outside time, space and social context. Such an essentialist take, typical for nationalist ideologies in the Balkans and elsewhere, is often also projected beyond the nation state. A clear example is furnished by Samuel Huntington’s depiction of international conflict and cooperation as driven by civilizational loyalties determined by essential traits of culture and religion (Huntington, 1996).


There is no shortage of writings on Balkan cultural distinctiveness, authenticity and therefore cultural unity.3 Thus Fernand Braudel’s disciple Traian Stoianovich views the Balkan Peninsula as a millennia-old cultural area, part of what he describes as ‘the first Europe’ of classical antiquity (Stoianovich, 1967, 1994). In a similar mode, early-twentieth-century anthropogéographes such as Jacques Ancel and Jovan Cvijic´ made much of the commonality of dress, architecture and conceptions of space and time (Ancel, 1929; Cvijic´, 1918; cf. Pippidi in Bracewell and Drace-Francis, 1999, pp. 93–107). Cvijic´ even went a step further, by elaborating the notion of homo balcanicus, defined by a particular mentalité. These views have recently been harshly critiqued, notably by Paschalis Kitromilides who contends that the advent of national particularisms destroyed common identities and mentalités which had been viable in the specific context of the Orthodox oecumene of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Kitromilides, 1996). Even more problematic is anthropogéographie’s amenability to the ‘ancient hatreds’ reading of the Balkans, which came to the fore with the war in Bosnia.4 If we believe in homo balcanicus and the persistence of mentalités, why not claim that these are the source of the Balkanites’ irrational proneness to violence?5 ‘Culturing’ regionness is fraught and, at worst, a conceptual dead-end street. At the other end of the spectrum are social constructivists such as Iver Neumann, who claim that ‘regions are invented by political actors as a political programme, they are not simply waiting to be discovered’ (Neumann, 2001, p. 58). Regional identity is taken as an open-ended social process enacted through discourse. To quote Charles King, an eminent student of Balkan and East European politics, For well-established regions, just as for well-articulated national identities, the temptation is to read back into the past the settled parameters of the region itself, to see the existence of the region as analytically prior to the forms of political cooperation that emerge within its borders. As with the existence of nations, though, it is easy to forget that the delineations of the boundaries and characteristics of the regional unit emerge from an essentially political process: just as there were no nations before elites – cultural, political and economic – came to imagine them as such, so too are


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there no regions until one particular vision of the region’s shape and features manages to outstrip rival definitions. (King, 2001, p. 57) The methodological path charted by Neumann, King and others suggests inquiring into Self-Other dialogical relationships as constitutive of regional cohesion.6 As with nations, the presence of an ‘Other’ helps trace a common past as well as a discursive boundary around social identities (Neumann, 1999). Thus the critics of essentialism are interested in the dynamics, rather than the statics, of identity. This perspective provides the conceptual tools to unpack the notion of Balkan identity, which is the purpose of the following section.

In search of Balkan identity Constructivist theories invite us to ask not what is regional identity but rather who constructs it, for whom and, most importantly, against whom it is constructed and enacted. Until recently, the scholarship on the Balkans had relatively little to say on the latter set of questions. Comparative or transnational historiographers, seeking to transcend parochialism and methodological nationalism, have shed light on the commonalities and patterns of the area. Rather than culture, comparativists see regionness at the level of social structure and process: belated and half-way modernization, peripheral position in relation to Western Europe, the ethnization of citizenship and stateformation, and the pervasive rifts between the state and society. There are differences as to how far back common features reach. For instance, Nicloae Iorga’s Byzance après Byzance, traces ‘regionness’ to the times of the medieval Byzantine Commonwealth, whereas others stress the Ottoman period (Iorga, 1929, 1939). To be fair, historians remain sensitive to context and social change. Echoing Paschalis Kitromilides, Maria Todorova reasons that the Ottoman legacy, hence ‘Balkanness’, has been eroded by modernization, Westernization and nation state formation (Kitromilides, 1996; Todorova, 1997, pp. 161–84).7 She seconds Alexandru Dut‚u’s (1995) claim that the region can be taken as a meaningful whole only in view of the common set of problems related to social development, as well as, turning to the post-1989 period, political and market transition (Todorova, 2004).


Another group of scholars focus on the interwoven character of Balkan politics, presenting similar arguments resembling the ones explored in Chapter 1. Despite multifaceted divisions, local countries have always formed an interdependent system characterized by lasting patterns of cooperation and conflict.8 Geographical contiguity and overarching legacies are translated into intertwined political destiny. In Stevan Pavlowitch’s words, the Balkans are ‘[a] unity imposed by history’ (Pavlowitch, 1999). Thinking on regional identity was seriously challenged by Maria Todorova’s seminal book Imagining the Balkans, which appeared in 1997, in the aftermath of the Bosnian war.9 In Todorova’s view, the critical issue is how Balkan history and societies have been stereotypically represented within, but more significantly outside, the region. More specifically, she inquires into the ways essentializing discourses have framed and explained violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as during the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. Rather than an objective identity, ‘Balkan’ emerges as a discursive phenomenon woven into popular perceptions and representations. As Leeda Demetropoulou (1999/2000) observes, the label ‘Balkan’ is, in the language of Saussurean semiotics, a signifier that has a complex – and often rather problematic – relationship with the ‘signified’. What deserves consideration is the politics of identification with or rejection of that label.10 Todorova argues that towards the end of the nineteenth century a negative image of the Balkans had crystallized in the Western psyche as the antipode of the self-congratulatory vision of enlightened ‘Europeanness’. If Europe set the standard of civilization and progress, the Balkans was a site of backwardness, perpetual strife, tribal warfare and resistance to modern rationality. The entrenchment of the term ‘balkanization’ in the global political lexicon testifies to the power of what Todorova names, with more than a nod to Edward Said, as ‘Balkanism’. The conflict in former Yugoslavia, commonly referred to as ‘the war in the Balkans’ or even as ‘the Third Balkan War’, was seen as a mere repetition of earlier cycles of ethnic bloodshed. Such a reading justified non-intervention and was instrumental in demarcating a boundary with civilized Central Europe moulded by its Austro-Hungarian memories and legacies. Indeed, political elites in emerging Central Europe sought to project their closeness to Europe,


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in opposition to the imploding Balkans, by flagging up their commitment to Western-style democracy, tolerance and liberal values. Todorova’s analysis implies that Europe and Europeanness are dominant reference points in the mental mapping of Balkan history and geography. As elsewhere on the post-communist fringes, identification with Europe has had a powerful legitimating and mobilizing effect.11 Thus, Milica Bakic´-Hayden and Robert Hayden investigate how nationalists across Yugoslavia professed cultural superiority over orientalized ‘Balkan’ Others – be it Byzantine-Orthodox Serbs or Muslim Bosnians and Kosovars – raising the banner of their own imputed ‘Europeanness’ and ‘Westernness’ (Bakic´-Hayden and Hayden, 1992; Bakic´-Hayden, 1995; cf. Said, 1979). In contrast to those authors, Todorova maintains that Balkanist discourse places the Balkans both inside and outside Europe, a sort of twilight zone on the margins of the continent. While the Haydens portray the area as Europe’s Other, Todorova insists on the impossibility of a fullyfledged binary relationship, akin to the one between Edward Said’s Occident and Orient. Devoid of the Orient’s exotic appeal to Western imagination, the Balkans are very much a facet of Europe’s Self, a repository of the fraught memories in the collective psyche of the ‘Dark Continent’: genocide, intolerance, war, authoritarian politics (Todorova, 1997, pp. 17–8; cf. Mazower, 2000, 2001, pp. 5–1). What does all that tell us about regionalism in South East Europe? The Balkanism debate recasts regional identity as a sui generis intersubjective structure resting on the twin pillars of Europeanness and Westernness. Collective identifications are built around discourses of partial belonging or exclusion from Europe presented as an ideal, yet often unattainable, Self. State institutions and societies in the Balkans have persistently failed to meet the standards and norms constitutive of Europeanness, despite their repeated claims to European past and future. This worldview is reproduced by external, but also by internal, actors who are co-opted and indeed shaped by the Balkanist discourse. The latter either accept the stigma of being ‘Balkan’ or project it onto their neighbours in order to construct and uphold regional hierarchies of symbolic power (Todorova, 1997, Ch. 2).12 Todorova’s critique offers a relevant heuristic lens through which to examine inter-state politics in South East Europe. It reconceptualizes shared identity as a dynamic connection between the representations of


the region from outside and the local actors’ self-positioning vis-à-vis imaginary Europe.

The inside-out angle: the nation, Europe and the Balkans The empirical question that arises from the foregoing section is: How do political elites and institutions across South East Europe, the principal dramatis personae in regional cooperation, relate to certain understandings of the Balkans and Europe? There are at least two possible methodological approaches to cracking that question. One is to examine how the Balkans and Europe are represented in local political discourse and, more broadly, in the national grand narratives. The other is to measure the perceptions of the local elites at a particular juncture with the help of the standard sociological toolbox. Understandably, social scientists prefer the latter approach, which draws conclusions on the basis of empirical data. Thus Anastasakis and Bojicˇic´-Dželilovic´ interviewed a non-representative sample of more than 50 political, business and civil-society elites in the post-communist Balkans (Greece and Turkey excluded) and found a strong identification with the EU. They found that their respondents did not consider the Balkans or South East Europe a genuine community – here one suspects that they take the nation groups as benchmark – but a product of geography, political contingency and external engineering. Regional identifications were ‘more warmly embraced by the representatives of academia, business and NGOs than by the politicians and media representatives’ (Anastasakis and Bojicˇic´-Dželilovic´, 2002, p. 40). Where more durable and recent social links had been in place, as in former Yugoslavia, the survey registered higher level of acceptance of shared identity. For instance, the report found that elites in Bosnia associate themselves much more readily with their former partners in Yugoslavia, including Slovenia, than with Albania, Romania or Bulgaria (pp. 58–60). Croatian respondents predictably showed a predilection towards the countries of Central Europe (p. 63). Finally, Romanians felt closest to neighbouring Hungary, Moldova and Bulgaria. Of all interviewees, those in Serbia and Montenegro matched most closely the authors’ definition of regional awareness, in that they stressed links with nearly all other countries in both former Yugoslavia and wider South East Europe (p. 71).


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To understand those perceptions and put them in perspective, one needs to delve deeper in the social context they stem from. While the interviewed elites did not identify strongly with a Balkan or South East European collectivity, their responses point at mental frames and ideas regarding Balkanness and its relationship to Europe. Self-images make sense only when juxtaposed to grand, national narratives and historical contexts. To make a broad generalization, the articulations of regional identity ‘from within’, while varying from one society to another as well as across time, rest on a triple structure of nation, regional community, and macro-region (Europe). This is very much consistent with the ‘nesting’ relationship observed by social scientists and historians with respect to the interplay between European and national identities within the EU.13 While the first and third poles of this structure are relatively clearly discernable, the second one (Balkans) remains elusive. It tends to be subsumed by, inscribed on or nested into the other two foci. In other words, a country’s Balkan identity is a function of how the national Self is positioned vis-à-vis Europe and the West. Since the Enlightenment, elites in Modern Greece have been eagerly asserting their nation’s contribution to European civilization (Kitromilides, 1995). The (re)discovery of ancient Hellenic heritage by the nineteenth-century Greeks, exemplified by the adoption of a new national name ⬘Ellhne (Hellenes) or the cultural tastes of the emergent urban classes, highlighted the symbolic link of the young nation state with western European culture, itself inspired by the legacy of classical Greece and Rome.14 This westward orientation, however, has not been accompanied by discursive boundaries between Greece and the rest of South East Europe. On the contrary, Greek elites – both in the early nineteenth century and the post-Cold War era – have had little doubt as to Greece’s leading role in its immediate neighbourhood, often as a economic intermediary and channel of Western (European) influences. This is only partly offset by the perception of ethno-cultural and linguistic difference intertwined with the spectre of ‘the threat from the north’ in the dominant security discourse from the interwar period until the 1960s and, more recently, to migration from Balkan neighbours.15 Still, the defining Other in the Greek case is Turkey (and earlier the Ottoman Empire), seen as the epitome of the alien and perilous Orient. This is not to ignore alternative constructions of Greek national identity as opposed to the interventionist


West, be it the Great Powers of olden days or more recently US hegemony. Linked to the ‘underdog mentality’ scholars have discussed at length, they came to the forefront in the foreign policy pursued by Andreas Papandreou and Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) in the 1980s. Anti-Westernism has also underpinned the calls for return to the country’s Orthodox roots and a rediscovery of connections with the former Byzantine oecumene, primarily in the Balkans, at the time of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s.16 In similar ways, Albanian national narratives underline the country’s ‘natural’ connection with Europe. It is embedded in the myth of Skanderbeg (Albanian: Skënderbeu, 1405–68) as the last defender of Europe from the invading Ottoman hordes (Nixon, 2010). Like their counterparts elsewhere in the Balkans, Albanian historians have invariably portrayed the Ottoman conquest as a fateful turning point severing Albanians’ link with Europe, their rightful place by virtue of cultural attachment.17 The ‘National Revival’ (Rilindja Kombëtare) at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, culminating with the establishment of an independent state, has been seen as a move to mend this historical injustice.18 As in the case of Greek, Bulgarian, Serb, Croatian and Romanian grand narratives, Albania’s struggle against Ottoman domination has been elevated into a contribution to the cause of rolling back Asiatic backwardness in the name of European civilization. Coming out from the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha’s successors in the 1990s, Albania readily embraced the ‘return to the West’ discourse calling for restoration of cultural and political ties with the EU and the US. This choice reflected in national foreign policy, however, has rarely been accompanied with symbolic rejection of an imaginary Balkanness and/or its externalization onto other societies in South East Europe.19 Constructions of Romanian national identity have traditionally overemphasized the country’s linguistic and cultural uniqueness as a Latin island within the sea of barbaric Slavs and Magyars. At the same time, one should not forget the oeuvre of Nicolae Iorga who invested much intellectual energy in the study of the Romanians’ link to their southern neighbours, not least through the Romance-speaking communities south of the Danube, envisioning Romania as a regional political and cultural hegemon of sorts. The Latin liaison reigned supreme prior to 1945, when the country’s elites received their education in France and Germany, while Bucharest was known as Le Petit


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Paris.20 Later, Ceaus¸escu’s brand of nationalism shifted the emphasis by exalting indigenous roots and privileging Dacian forebears to the Roman substrate (Boia, 2001, pp. 46–7). This vision was fully coherent with an intellectual discourse of the interwar years defining Romania as a no-man’s land at the crossroads of the West and the East. Despite all those turnarounds, the Balkans have never been at the forefront of Romanian identity politics; but still the label itself is laden with pejorative connotations. Thus, the inhabitants of Transylvania and the Banat, once parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, would blame their ills on the centralized rule by ‘Balkan’ Bucharest. This pattern of identifying closely with Western Europe and keeping a representational distance from genuinely Balkan neighbours impacted on foreign policy too. For a good part of the 1990s, Romanian governments looked towards budding Central Europe while keeping out from the ‘Balkan quagmire’ (Zamfirescu, 1995; Gallagher, 1997). Turkey’s relationship with the Balkans has rarely been a prominent question in the symbolic battles over national identity. The nostalgia for the lost lands of Rumeli has been overshadowed by the ceaseless anxiety over the country’s Western or European identity and vocation. Turkey is an ideal-type case that illustrates European construct’s ideological traction towards peripheral societies. Though fuelled by an anti-colonial rhetoric, Atatürk’s modernization and secularization reforms turned upside-down domestic society, by transplanting political and socio-economic models from Western Europe (referred to as ‘contemporary civilization’, muasır medeniyet in Turkish), a trend harking back to the Tanzimat era in the nineteenth century. This gravitation towards the West is the common thread linking Turkey with its north-western neighbours, much more robustly than the vestiges of Ottoman legacy. However, it is worthwhile to remember that Turkey, as posited by the Justice and Development Party’s chief foreign policy strategist Ahmet Davutog ˘ lu, is part of various overlapping regional clusters: in addition to the Balkans, it also belongs to the Middle East, the Caucasus and the Eastern Mediterranean.21 Former Yugoslavia’s anxieties about its Balkanness came into the spotlight with the outbreak of violent conflict in the early 1990s. Until that time, the country had perceived itself, and indeed had been perceived by the wider world, as the most liberal segment of communist-ruled Eastern Europe. Its citizens enjoyed the benefits of a self-managing economy and free travel in the West. President


Tito, moreover, claimed a role in global politics as one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement. While ‘Balkan’ was widely used as a self-designation – for example in the popular film Balkan Spy (1984) scripted by Dušan Kovacˇevic´ – it did not correspond to a strong positive identification with countries in the area, particularly those in the Soviet bloc. It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that the stereotypical image of Balkan otherness was most blatantly instrumentalized by nationalism across the crumbling socialist federation. Pro-independence elites in Slovenia and Croatia justified their cause with the popular desire to break away from the ‘Balkan’ political traditions of Yugoslavia and Serbia and return to Europe.22 The erstwhile frontier between the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires was recast, Huntington-style, as the boundary of the European civilization to which Croats and Slovenians aspired.23 Ironically, one of the chief protagonists in the ‘Third Balkan War’, President Franjo Tud¯man, was among the most ardent exponents of the flight from ‘the Balkans’. A professional historian, he viewed the Yugoslav state as dominated by ‘Byzantine’ Serbia, forcibly keeping Croatia apart from its authentic cultural roots and traditions.24 Only in the post-Tud¯man era did the government in Zagreb, then dominated by the post-communist Social Democrats, adopt a more neutral stance, conceding that Croatia was a Mediterranean, Central European and South East European (but not Balkan!) state at the same time.25 As we will see in the following chapters, the politicization of regional identity had also implications for the Croatian policy towards the Balkans. Serb nationalism, too, justified the conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia by recourse to civilizational theories woven around the East vs West dichotomy. Serbdom was portrayed as attached to a putative Orthodox world facing up to and resisting the expansionist West, led by either the US or Germany and the Vatican, the alleged patrons of Catholic Croats. There was a burgeoning literature in the 1990s presenting bold designs for a union of Orthodox nations to resist foreign domination in the Balkans, a quintessential Serb virtue. These parochial visions of Serbia’s identity were consistently challenged by the democratic opposition, which fully embraced the ‘return to Europe’ rhetoric common across post-communist Eastern Europe.26 Much in common, the regimes in Belgrade and Zagreb blamed the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina on the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism;


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and therefore Serbs and Croats defended Western civilization from its foresworn enemy.27 This common Balkan mythological line was present, for instance, in the infamous speech delivered by Slobodan Miloševic´ on the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the battle at Kosovo, on 28 June 1989. The closing part of the speech dwelled the link between Europeanness and national ideology, (ironically part and parcel of modern Albanian nationalism too): Six centuries ago, Serbia heroically defended itself in the field of Kosovo, but it also defended Europe. Serbia was at that time the bastion that defended the European culture, religion, and European society in general. Therefore today it appears not only unjust but even unhistorical and completely absurd to talk about Serbia’s belonging to Europe. Serbia has been a part of Europe incessantly, now just as much as it was in the past, of course, in its own way, but in a way that in the historical sense never deprived it of dignity.28 All across former Yugoslavia, Balkan identity came to be equated with the rapid loss of status. The 1980s and especially the 1990s saw the slippage into social and economic crisis, disintegration and eventually fratricidal bloodshed. Yugoslavia and its successors, bar Slovenia, did not enjoy the privileged position that they had during the Cold War. ‘Balkan’ came to signify war, destruction and isolation from ‘Europe’ as the former Warsaw Pact countries were gradually achieving what Yugoslavia had possessed and lost (Drakulic´, 1993).29 As noted by Todorova, Bulgaria is perhaps the only case where the adjective Balkan has both positive and negative connotations: Among the Balkan nations, the Bulgarians share in all the frustrations of being Balkan, and yet they are the only ones who seriously consider their Balkanness, probably because of the fact that the Balkan range lies entirely on their territory. (Todorova, 1997, p. 54). In contrast to Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, Slovene and Macedonian, Bulgarian clearly distinguishes between Balkan (in singular, meaning the Balkan range or a mountain, more generally) and the Balkani (always in plural, meaning the region). It is only the former that


occupies a prominent place in national mental maps as the backbone of Bulgaria’s authenticity and perseverance through the centuries. Concerning the latter, while Bulgaria’s historical and geographical place within the region is never challenged, the idea about ‘Balkan mentality’ as the ultimate roadblock on the way to full-fledged participation in the prestigious and coveted club of European states and societies has been well entrenched, both before and after the 2007 EU accession. Similar to their neighbours, Bulgarians insist on having a European identity but often locate Europe beyond the imagined frontiers of the Balkans. If for a Briton ‘going to Europe’ means crossing the Channel, Bulgarians (much like Greeks and other Balkanites) go to Europe when their destination is past Vienna.30 In summation, the Balkan label is salient, in various degrees, in discourses on national identity across South East Europe, save Turkey. Whether begrudgingly accepting it or passionately externalizing it, local elites have had to confront and handle the Balkan stigma in different historical periods. While identity constructions vary, this stigma emerges a pivotal locus communus. At its core is the sense of marginality, peripheral location or outright separateness from Europe and the West.

The outside-in angle: between othering and Europeanization Indigenous perceptions and discourses provide only part of the picture and it is essential to also consider the external gaze towards South East Europe. Contrary to what many voices in the Balkanism debate imply, there has not been a single dominant outside narrative on the region. Depending on the political dynamics, political institutions, elites, analysts, media and popular historiography in the West have variably read the Balkans or South East Europe as both a primordial ‘Other’ and a legitimate part of the European ‘Self’. Much of the analytical work on external perceptions of the region coincided with the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s. However, the ‘Balkan Ghosts’ imagery prevalent in the early 1990s was soon challenged by authors with longstanding engagement with the politics and societies of the area. Some of them, like James Gow, questioned the term Balkans as ‘obfuscatory, indeterminate, contested, counterproductive and even harmful’ (Gow, 1998, p. 158). Other prominent scholars, such


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as Mark Mazower or Noel Malcolm, have critiqued the stereotypes of Balkan otherness by emphasizing the region’s embeddedness in the continent’s history (Mazower, 2001; Malcolm, 1996; Glenny, 1999). Institutional discourses, for their part, have followed shifting international and domestic politics. If in the 1990s it was customary to talk about the Balkans as a battlefield on the margins of Europe, where ethnic and religious communities driven by their primordial memories and attachments settled scores, phrases like ‘European vocation’ and ‘European future’ came to the fore in the 2000s. Continuities are arguably still present. One is that Balkans or South East Europe, in most cases excluding Greece and Turkey, are seen from the outside as a single grouping. On the whole, Western perceptions have posited the post-communist cluster as a relatively more homogenous collection of countries than the locals would be inclined to believe. The awareness of heterogeneity has gained ground, as NATO and the EU both have expanded towards the region since 2004, but outside observers have not lost sight of common patterns. In the 1990s, these boiled down to the threat of nationalist conflict within and between states. Subsequently, shared problems related to weak statehood, (lack of) good governance and structural challenges to economic development and modernization informed perceptions of South East Europe as a whole. One has to take a particular note of discourses emanating from the EU. It is the Union that has played an undisputed role as a reference point in identity constructions, not least by appropriating the symbolic capital of ‘Europe’ in the Balkan periphery.31 In the post-Cold War era, the EU defined the standards of Europeanness and Westernness and projected a set of norms, framed as membership conditions, towards the transition countries of the former Soviet bloc. The EU’s policies have also created regional taxonomies by grouping and bundling countries and thereby reshaping the symbolic geography of the Balkans as well as of other peripheral regions. It is off the mark to claim that EU-rope identified the Balkans of the Yugoslav wars as its defining ‘Other’ back in the early 1990s. Writing roughly at that time, Ole Waever claimed that the borderlands of Europe were populated by societies that were best characterized as ‘less-Europe’, rather than as ‘anti-Europe’ (Waever, 1998). Rather than ontologically opposed and therefore constitutive of ‘Europe’ these societies both resemble and differ from the European


norm. As Timothy Garton Ash (2004) observes, Europe does not have a boundary but it gradually dissolves as one goes eastwards, the only undisputable ‘Other’ being Europe’s own conflict-ridden past.32 Added to that is Europe’s ambiguity about its own identity, resulting in dissonance and confusion concerning the strategic aims and territorial scope of its eastwards engagement (Zielonka, 2006, Ch. 1). In-betweenness, a theme explored by Todorova, is very much linked to the inclusion-exclusion nexus that underlie relations between the Balkans and the EU. As the previous chapter demonstrated, the Union has been pursuing a policy of cautious and gradual expansion towards South East Europe. Starting from 2000, when Bulgaria and Romania embarked on membership negotiations, and the Thessaloniki Council of 2003, which reached out to Yugoslavia’s successor republics and Albania, the post-communist Balkans (Turkey being a rather different case) have been inserted, step by step, into a political dynamic similar to that of Central Europe and the Baltic in the 1990s. The Stabilization and Association Process (SAP), firmly anchored in the enlargement clauses of the EU treaties, redefined ‘the Western Balkans’ as part and parcel of the Union’s ‘in-group’. Local states have been expected to demonstrate adherence to the EU’s functional standards (the acquis communautaire) but also deeper, constitutive norms of democratic governance and peaceful foreign policy. Indeed, the EU has seen itself as norm promoter, socializing its future members, or more precisely their elites, into foundational values and principles.33 The values and norms in question were made explicit by the 1993 Copenhagen criteria, put forward for the Central and East European candidates.34 For the most part, the criteria cover domestic issues such as democracy, market reform and, not least, the ability to take onboard the acquis. However, they also relate to the aspirants’ foreign relations, which is very significant with respect to regionalism in South East Europe. As the 1994 Pact for Stability showed, the (sub)condition related to the observance of minority rights, part of the first Copenhagen criterion, was interpreted more broadly to include also the pacific resolution of inter-state disputes and good-neighbourly relations. At the minimum, the requirement prescribed avoidance of conflict, especially over historical issues related to territorial sovereignty and borders that had plagued Eastern Europe between the two world wars. The development of


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EU-inspired integrative frameworks among the applicant states was an instance par excellence of the Union’s self-assumed role of a promoter of regional cooperation in world politics.35 In the 1990s, the EU was particularly keen to export forms of functional cooperation.36 Arrangements like CEFTA were meant to enhance the participants’ institutional capacity to cooperate on economic matters, but also to prove their commitment to integration as an overarching foreign policy principle. To highlight the normative contents of inter-state cooperation, the European Commission has habitually pointed out that, through SAP, the Western Balkan aspirants had ‘to establish normal relationships between themselves’ [emphasis added]; cooperation rather than competition and the balance of power are taken as the ‘norm’ of state-to-state behaviour.37 As noted by Karen Smith, the export of regional cooperation has ‘altruistic’ (that is, normative) dimensions, in addition to the more obvious instrumental purposes (in this case, related to containing the undesirable effects of instability in the Balkans) (Smith, 2003, pp. 84–5). The norm of regional cooperation has been singularly salient in South East Europe. That has to do with the greater gap or ‘misfit’ between the EU standards and the perceived level of compliance in the Balkans, compared to the 1990s batch of candidates – with the recent experience of war, the ‘frozen conflicts’ in Kosovo and Bosnia and nationalism remaining a potent force. Initiatives by the EU and other Western institutions, from the Regional Approach (1996), through the Stability Pact (1999), to SAP (2000), all covered in the previous chapters, demonstrate that regional cooperation has been a pivotal element in the ‘normalization’ of South East Europe, alongside domestic reform and institution-building. Prior to SAP, the norms of appropriate inter-state behaviour were articulated vis-à-vis the Western Balkans, but were not institutionally enforced through a coherent set of rewards and punishments. The case of Bulgaria and Romania was different owing to their early insertion in the enlargement process in the 1990s, so their participation in cooperative schemes has been more of a matter of following the norm than a direct response to carrot-and-stick conditionality. The principle of cooperative foreign policy was firstly promulgated by the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) – for example, Principle IX, on cooperation among states in the Helsinki Final Act (1975) – through the 1990 Paris Charter for a


New Europe. References to the Charter, along with the other CSCE documents, were inserted in the preambles of the Europe Agreements concluded by the EU and the Central and Eastern European candidates in the 1990s. OSCE, CSCE’s successor, was the institutional umbrella of both the Stability Pact I (1994) launched by France and its Balkan namesake of 1999. The Paris Charter set forth two distinct, though related norms: good-neighbourly relations and economic cooperation. The conceptual linkage of political rapprochement with functional collaboration, all the way to integration, reflects a certain reading of (western) Europe’s post-1945 history. Indeed, reconciliation through cooperative projects has been projected to the Balkans as ‘the European way’ of dealing with conflict. For instance, the Stability Pact was hyped with multiple references to the Marshall Plan of 1947–51.38 In the words of first Special Coordinator Bodo Hombach: The countries of the region recognize that the Stability Pact gives them the opportunity – and the duty – to meet EU standards and to draw the lessons of post-war European history. (quoted in Vucˇetic´, 2001, p. 118) To become part of Europe, the Balkans were under the duty to reenact the 1950s, following the EU script of standards, and transform from a conflict-ridden region to a zone of peace and prosperity. This historical analogy has also gone a long way to legitimize the EU’s normative projection towards South East Europe. Regional cooperation initiatives have been framed not merely as a matter of expedient policy choice but as a mission to salvage the participating countries from their haunting past. Leading politicians such as the US President Bill Clinton and Carl Bildt, prominent Swedish politician and former High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, hailed it as a bold effort to ‘debalkanize the Balkans’.39 While on the surface the language of Europeanization is polarly opposed to the othering discourses of the early 1990s, it portrays the Balkans in similar ways: as a self-contained grouping defined by its distinctive historical and political characteristics. Because of the shared historical baggage, Balkan states have been required to demonstrate compliance with the EU norms in a collective fashion, rather than only through bilateral measures as the Central European candidates did in the mid-1990s. As already shown in Chapter 2, this


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‘bundling’ approach adopted by Western institutions applied, to a greater degree, to the so-called Western Balkans rather than to wider South East Europe, including Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and perhaps other countries like Moldova, Cyprus or even Slovenia. The case of the Western Balkans demonstrates quite vividly that the practices of norm diffusion by the EU and other external actors have relied on mental maps but are also capable of remaking political geography. Though the term ‘Western Balkans’ was first put forward by the Austrian Presidency of the EU Council, it became standard only after 1999 when Bulgaria and Romania embarked on accession talks with the Union. The countries of the region were therefore ‘repackaged’ into segmented clusters, in contrast to other periods – for example, in 1988 when Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Turkey, Yugoslavia held the inaugural conference of foreign ministers in Belgrade. In the case of the Western Balkans, the common denominator has been the containment of conflict and inter-ethnic tensions through reconciliation, cooperation with the ICTY, and, importantly, membership in various integration schemes. The level of convergence with EU standards set apart the ‘Western Balkans’ to from Romania and Bulgaria, even prior to 2007. The latter two countries, however, have not been labelled ‘Eastern Balkans’ but considered part of ‘Central and Eastern Europe’, another item in the post-communist taxonomy sustained by the Western policy from the 1990s onwards. When referring to the Western Balkans together with Bulgaria and Romania, the EU routinely speaks of ‘South East Europe’. Greece and Turkey are rarely included, since ‘Balkans/South East Europe’ is, in the main, reserved for ‘countries in transition’. This is striking not least because of Athens and Ankara’s participation in key indigenous institutions such as SEECP. In the final analysis, the diverse institutional links with the EU serve as an overarching criterion. The Union exerts power not solely through appropriating the symbolic capital of ‘Europeanness’ but also through its capacity to map and remap the political geography of its south-eastern fringe.

A dichotomy revisited: identity and material interest in regional cooperation Social Constructivism, a broad church within IR theory, treats regional cooperation and regionalism as derivative of, or indeed


as enhancing, the ‘we-feeling’ or ‘we-ness’ of the parties involved. Actors are animated not solely by the pursuit of utility but also by common identities and norms constitutive of a regional community. The institutional deepening of regional political arenas is expected to enhance cohesiveness within the in-group, through processes of socialization. It might also harden the symbolic boundaries that define ‘Others’, entrenching inside-outside distinctions and hierarchies – not unlike the process of nation-building in modern times. This chapter has argued that the post-Cold-War Balkans have not followed such a script. Their trajectory has been shaped by the gravitation towards the model societies of ‘core’ Europe. The formation of local transnational solidarities has either remained a purely intellectual project or has been confined within the bounds of former Yugoslavia. However, the chapter also suggests that ‘we-feeling’ has a more complex sociology than what either IR scholars or empirical surveys of elite opinion believe. The ideational traction of external centres is a focal point of identity construction in its own right. To put it crudely, being Balkan means being a European who falls short of the normative expectations that make up ‘Europeanness’. Collective identity has deep symbolic bonds with Europe, which serves as a model, identification reference and building block in the discursive mapping of a regional community on the periphery. It is EU-rope that has constructed South East European countries into a regional grouping and has legitimized the nascent forms of multilateral cooperation, through the normative discourse of ‘European standards’. For their part, while pursuing strategic gains such as political stability, financial rewards, market access and voice in Western institutions, local players have acted against the backdrop of historically established structures of ideas and knowledge, notably the role of the Balkan societies as recipients of models, norms and standards from outside. If the sovereign and homogenous nation state was the most significant import in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europeanization in the 2000s has been framed, inter alia, by models of economic integration and multilateralism. The centre-periphery relationship moulding Balkan identity politics is also visible in the practices of naming. Beyond the Western Balkans’ example discussed above, one should also consider ‘South East Europe’. From the mid-1990s onwards, the label prevailed to


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replace ‘Balkans’, which was laden with negative associations. This move was consistent with the local elites’ efforts to transcend the discursive boundaries drawn between them and Europe, in the early 1990s, and at least partly overcome marginalization.40 Unpacking regional identity enables us to understand and interpret the normative clout of the EU, NATO and other Western institutions in promoting regional cooperation and integration. Externally driven initiatives have been legitimated by those institutions’ role in extending or withholding recognition as part of the Western or European in-group. For the Balkans, the drive for recognition has proceeded from cultural codes embedded in national and regional identities, underpinned by the historical experience of marginality. Western institutions are not solely a source of material gains but also symbolic gatekeepers guarding the recognition resources of the centre. But does identity also explain the political processes under investigation, to revisit the distinction made in the Introduction? Is it a causal factor like interdependence and external push, dissected in Chapters 1 and 2? The link between substantive institutional and policy outcomes, on the one hand, and the constructions of regional identity, on the other, is the focus of Part II of the book. It is still possible to put together two ideal-type scenarios to distinguish analytically how the two factors manifest themselves as well as to put forward hypotheses at the level of process. In the case of outside push, one would look at the material incentives extended by the external actor, including market access, investment, financial assistance and inclusion in decision-making. In the case of norms as independent causes facilitated by identity constructions, the likely course is voluntary compliance, often accompanied by claims about shared identity with the external institution (EU, NATO). These unilateral forms of compliance would not come in response to any specific initiative from outside, and would therefore not be contingent on direct conditionality on regional cooperation reliant on carrots and sticks. In the former instance one would observe the workings of relational power, that is the capacity of A to induce B to deliver outcome C, whereas in the latter it would be a dynamic informed by normative-structural aspects of power, that is, the capacity of the agent to define standards of ‘normalcy’ (Barnett and Duvall, 2005). Table 3.1 below juxtaposes the two models.41


Table 3.1 External push vs. norms and identity

External actor Type of engagement

Type of power Logic of action Compliance payoff

Enabling conditions

External push

Norms and identity

EU, NATO, US, IFIs Direct conditionality, material incentives and punishments Relational Logic of consequences Financial transfers, trade preferences, access to resources and decision-making power proceeding from membership (in the case of EU and NATO) Power differentials between internal and external agents Demand for external engagement Local interdependence

EU, NATO, OSCE Norm projection

Structural-Normative Logic of appropriateness Symbolic admission into the in-group

Europe-centric constructions of national and regional identity

Though they provide valuable analytical insight into collective action, we should bear in mind that these are ideal-typical distinctions. The two causal logics, that of appropriateness and that of consequences, are most often present side by side. To quote the obvious example, membership conditionality established through the EU’s Copenhagen criteria has constituted both normative expectations and a cost-benefit structure informing actors’ strategies. As the second part of the book shows, norms and identity have a legitimizing effect as regards external push. Despite their calculations, Balkan states have been likely to comply with external pressures to cooperate because of the high normative standing of regional cooperation as a model. The EU’s regional cooperation conditionality has been reinforced by the framing power of the discourse and norms of Europeanness.

Part II Areas of Regional Cooperation


4 Building Up a Regional Marketplace: Economic and Functional Cooperation

Trade, investment, transport, and energy are all at the core of any regionalist undertaking. Concepts such as regionalization and regional cooperation – the staple of the debates on ‘New Regionalism’ (Söderbaum and Shaw, 2003) – are heavily biased towards forms of functional cooperation, dismantling boundaries constraining crossborder commercial activity and collective market governance. Not unlike the early integration experience of Western Europe in the 1950s, the leading policy assumption in the Balkans has been that the gradual removal of economic barriers would catalyse political stability anchored in economic growth. This expectation has largely materialized. Following a decade of wars and economic turmoil, the region saw a period of expansion, particularly before the global economic crisis struck in 2008 (Cviic´ and Sanfey, 2010, Ch. 5). Over the period 2002–6, growth averaged at 4.74 per cent for the Western Balkans and 5.55 for Romania and Bulgaria.1 These figures indicate that, though lagging behind other regions in terms of growth rates, the post-communist Balkan countries have experienced an economic turnaround. This turnaround has been fuelled by increased domestic spending and an influx of FDI, and has included such previously stagnant sectors as steel production (Cviic´ and Sanfey, 2010). Regional cooperation has played a role, albeit secondary to integration into the EU. It has helped spur economic exchanges and established functional regimes in various policy-areas assisting growth. But what has been the dominant force shaping cooperation: functional linkages demanding collective action on the part of local governments? Material incentives set forth by external sponsors? Or 85


the pull of EU norms and practices? Conventional IR thinking suggests that cooperation may occur even in conflict-ridden regions as long as it is concentrated on ‘low politics’; and there were modest examples of such cooperation in South East Europe over the period 1976–91.2 This interpretation privileges interdependence as a causal factor and sees cooperation, in the main, as an intra-regional, rather than an outside-in affair. Yet, as shown in Chapter 2, the new wave of cooperative initiatives in the Balkans, from the mid-1990s onwards, has been underwritten by the financial resources and political clout of Western institutions and states. To the chagrin of the advocates of ‘regional ownership’, the demand for policies, regimes and institutions, on a regional scale, has reflected existing cross-border linkages; interdependencies have had only facilitating, as opposed to causal, influence. The focus on external supply and intra-regional demand suggests that the dynamics of regional cooperation, in the economic sphere, have been largely governed by cost-benefit considerations. However, a purely utilitarian take on the process tells us only part of the story. For the Balkan countries drawn into the EU enlargement exercise, the commitment to functional cooperation, as part and parcel of European vocation, has continually legitimized a growing number of ever more ambitious external initiatives. It has also constrained the local states’ ability to opt out of the schemes, as well as to design their institutional features. The present chapter is divided into two parts. First, it examines the record of cooperation in several key policy sectors; second, it surveys the underlying dynamics accounting for variance across issue-areas and offers some tentative conclusions as regards the causal factors at play.

Sectors of economic and functional cooperation Trade Bolstering intra-regional trade flows was singled out as an objective for South East Europe very early on. At the Sofia conference in July 1996, Balkan foreign ministers pledged to expand and intensify economic links. Ambitious declarations contrasted sharply with the realities of fragmentation, and hub-and-spoke relations with external trade partners, described in Chapter 1. Because of economic

Building Up a Regional Marketplace

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hardships resulting from delayed marketization, political instability, and violent conflict, across the post-communist grouping within South East Europe, only Greece and Turkey had the potential of becoming regional centres for trade and investment. Local countries, however, made some tentative steps towards trade liberalization, by way of bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs). Macedonia was particularly active; it signed such treaties with FR Yugoslavia (1996), Croatia and Slovenia (1997), and Turkey and Bulgaria (1998). Bulgaria and Romania liberalized their mutual trade in industrial goods with their accession to CEFTA in 1999 and 1997 respectively. This partial lifting of tariff barriers resulted in a patchwork of arrangements with differing scope and product coverage, and yielded only limited results. As aptly captured at the time by Vladimir Gligorov, a respected economist and policy analyst: [F]or many Balkan countries the other Balkan countries are not important trading partners; that for some Balkan countries the other Balkan countries are not trading partners at all; that for almost no Balkan country is another Balkan country the main trading partner; and that although the region as a whole plays a more important role for some countries, trade with the EU is by far more important for every single Balkan country. (Gligorov, 1998, p. 3) Though on the rise, regional trade flows were confined to exYugoslavia. Thus, the former members of the federation were the second most important partner for Macedonia after the EU. In 1998, 66.6 per cent of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s exports and 52.8 per cent of its imports went to the region, mainly to neighbouring Croatia and Serbia.3 In aggregate terms, intra-regional trade was low, accounting, according to the European Commission, 6–7 per cent of the overall volume (see Table 4.1).4 The initial push for multilateral cooperation on trade came from the US-backed South East Cooperative Initiative (SECI), which worked on fostering connections among local governments and business communities as well as ‘trade facilitation’ – that is improvement of the physical infrastructure and regulatory framework as regards border crossings and customs. However, all-out liberalization became a strategic goal only after the Stability Pact (SP) was


Table 4.1 Trade flows in South East Europe in 1998 (share of total) EU share in exports (per cent)

EU share in imports (per cent)

SEE share in exports (per cent)

SEE share in imports (per cent)

88.8 21.9

77.9 29.5

3.0 66.6

7.2 52.8

51.7 48.7 50.3 64.6 32.9

46.5 62.6 46.4 57.9 38.7

7.7 25.2 23.4 1.9 35.1

3.4 12.2 32.8 1 16.3

Albania Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Macedonia Romania FR Yugoslavia Source: Uvalic´ (2001).5

installed in 1999. The trade agenda of the Pact was in line with the EU’s general approach to stabilizing neighbouring regions, through employing its own integration toolbox; for instance, the littoral states of the Middle East and North Africa who participated in the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (the so-called Barcelona Process). At the inaugural summit in Sarajevo, SP members made a commitment to ‘work together to remove policy and administrative obstacles to the free flow of goods and capital, in order to increase economic cooperation, trade and investment in the region and between the region and the rest of Europe’ [emphasis added].6 A workgroup on trade, bringing in government official and representatives of the European Commission, was assembled in January 2000 under its WT2 (economic affairs). It foresaw a two-stage process: in the beginning participating countries were to suspend introduction of new tariff barriers and administrative hurdles; in the second, accompanied with accession to WTO, they were to work towards a free-trade area. The Commission steered the process from the very start. It had already unveiled its strategy for the Western Balkans in October 1999, envisioning the creation of a regional body charged with trade liberalization.7 Membership in the latter body was cast as a precondition for the conclusion of a Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA).8 To no one’s surprise, such ideas evoked mixed reactions. Critics asserted that trade liberalization within the Western Balkan cluster would create a regional ghetto and also reintroduce previously


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abolished barriers vis-á-vis the EU candidate states, including Bulgaria and Romania. A superior scenario, preventing closure, was the simultaneous liberalization of trade with the EU, accession to CEFTA and WTO membership (Daskalov et al., 2000; Gligorov, Kaldor and Tsoukalis, 1999). Meanwhile, George Soros, the prominent financier and philanthropist, made even more radical proposals, including the establishment of a customs union with the EU, along the lines of the one already in place for Turkey, coupled with the adoption of a common currency – first the Deutschmark and later the Euro.9 Slobodan Miloševic´’s fall from power in October 2000 gave EU policies a new momentum. In November 2000, the Council adopted a regulation extending duty-free access for roughly 95 per cent of Western Balkan products through ‘autonomous trade measures’ (ATMs).10 The concessions to the emergent reformist governments were explicitly linked, by the Commission, with pulling down hurdles to trade within the region, and were intended to bring political dividends, encourage FDI, and facilitate further market reforms at the domestic level.11 The closing statement of the EU-Western Balkans Summit at Zagreb (November 2000) featured a commitment to regional cooperation, and mentioned explicitly the build-up of a free-trade area.12 However, Balkan governments opted for a model whereby liberalization would take place through bilateral agreements, rather than a regional instrument, and would therefore complement integration into the EU and WTO. This preference was articulated at a summit in Skopje on 22–3 February 2001, which was attended also by FR Yugoslavia’s new President Vojislav Koštunica.13 As the SP provided the institutional umbrella for what was essentially an EU initiative, the regional trade bloc covered its target countries: both the Western Balkans and Bulgaria and Romania. The government in Sofia, headed by Ivan Kostov, resolutely opposed the linkage, owing to fears of delay on the EU accession path. Ultimately, Bulgaria and Romania had little choice. The European Commission could not make use of trade concessions as leverage due to the advanced status accorded by the Europe Agreements. Yet, Sofia and Bucharest had already committed to deepening economic ties with neighbours, through participation in the South European Cooperation Process (SEECP, see Chapter 6) and SP. Persuaded by the SP Special Coordinator Bodo Hombach, Kostov embraced the scheme in early 2001.14 Yet tensions lingered on: in May 2001 the Bulgarian


government openly criticized Hombach and threatened to withdraw from the Pact.15 The next critical step was marked by the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on trade liberalization, signed on 27 June 2001 in Brussels, by the SP beneficiary countries, in the presence of the EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy. It provided for a network of bilateral FTAs to be negotiated by the regional states. To ensure consistency, all those country-to-country deals had to contain the following provisions: • abolish export duties, charges and quantitative restrictions; • lift import duties or charges on at least 90 per cent of mutual trade, calculated according to the products’ value and tariff lines; • reduce charges on sensitive goods no later than six years after entry into force; • bring the existing trade agreements in line with the MoU; • foresee future liberalization of trade in services.16 To calm down local anxieties, the MoU reiterated that regionalization was directly linked to integration into the EU and the WTO. It also highlighted the Union’s acquis as the fundament of the new regional trading bloc midwifed by the Commission. From day one, Brussels was in the driving seat regarding implementation which, as expected, dragged on. Commission experts, as well as World Bank and WTO staff, took part in drafting the bilateral FTAs, as a number of governments lacked the requisite capacity to conduct negotiations.17 Even those who had the ability, , had little commitment, and/or faced opposition, at home, which also made EU mediation and leadership indispensable. At the end of 2001, when Croatia signed its SAA, the right-wing HDZ, then in opposition, attacked Ivica Racˇan’s government for tying the country’s fortunes to the Western Balkan group in exchange for doubtful rewards. For their part, Racˇan and other key cabinet members, such as the European integration minister Neven Mimica, though supportive of the SAA, lambasted ambitious regional schemes such as the customs union floated by George Soros. Foreign Minister Tonino Picula dismissed outright similar ideas advocated by his German counterpart, Joschka Fischer: ‘Croatia is ready to develop bilateral relations with all of its neighbours, but it will support and begin integration processes only


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with the EU’.18 The ‘spaghetti bowl’ of bilateral FTAs therefore could be read as a compromise, balancing the preferences of the EU and its interlocutors in South East Europe. Bulgaria and Romania, having inaugurated their accession talks with the EU as of early 2000, took a view similar to that of Croatia. The two governments delayed negotiations with laggards such as Bosnia and Herzegovina and Albania until late 2002. It was only after the positive signals from the EU’s Copenhagen Council in December 2002, which set January 2007 as a target date for accession, that the two countries paid more attention to trade talks with the Western Balkans (Ranchev, 2002, p. 25). The outstanding status issues in former Yugoslavia posed additional challenges. Serbia and Montenegro’s negotiations with the other signatories of the MoU stalled because the two constituent parts in the loose federation, orchestrated by the EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana in 2003, failed to harmonize their separate external tariffs.19 While outward-oriented Montenegro lacked a substantial rural sector and insisted on low tariffs on agricultural imports, Serbia wanted to protect its farmers. The deal between Albania and the UN mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), concluded in the summer of 2003, was contested by the authorities in Belgrade as an encroachment on Serbia’s sovereignty.20 Because of all these problems, the original deadline of 2003 was missed, and full ratification of the whole package of 32 FTAs was not a done deal until January 2004.21 The completion of the network of agreements brought the multilateralization of the incipient trade regime back to the diplomatic table. There was the realization that the spaghetti-bowl model was suboptimal, as it was difficult to administer and enforce. The bilateral approach also left loopholes as regards public procurement, rules of origin and other ‘behind the border’ issues to do with national regulations (Delevic´, 2007, p. 58). The transition to a multilateral template was facilitated by the imminent accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU, which, in effect, left only the Western Balkans, including UNMIK-run Kosovo, in the scheme – a much more homogenous group. As parts of the Western Balkans were already firmly on the pre-accession path (Croatia entering membership negotiations and Macedonia recognized as a candidate), CEFTA was seen as the most suitable institutional shell binding together the regional and the


EU track. On 1 May 2004, the original founders from the Visegrád group (Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia) left, together with Slovenia (member since 1995). As the founders were set to leave, Croatia acceded on 1 January 2003 to join the remaining members Bulgaria and Romania. In addition, the government in Zagreb argued that CEFTA’s enlargement towards South East Europe would be a more desirable alternative to a Balkano-centric grouping.22 However, the relatively high entry requirements – membership in WTO membership and EU association agreement – ruled out all other countries in the Western Balkans save Macedonia, which was admitted in July 2006. It was Macedonia’s membership application, in April 2004, that resuscitated the CEFTA option (Dangerfield, 2006, p. 316 ff). In 2005, the SP workgroup on trade resolved to replace the bilateral FTAs with a regional framework – a decision endorsed by the recipient countries’ ministers of economy and trade gathered in Sofia in June 2005. The new agreement, known as CEFTA 2006, was signed in Bucharest on 19 December 2006 and entered into force on 21 November 2007. It relaxed the entry criteria, dropping erstwhile conditions such as WTO membership and having an SAA with the EU. This is the reason that CEFTA 2006 has been fully harmonized with WTO rules, thereby ensuring that Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Kosovo – not part of the global organization – are in compliance. In addition to an already negotiated duty-free regime on agricultural and industrial goods, the agreement features commitments in areas such as services, investment, intellectual property and public procurement (Chapter 6 of the agreement), as well as provisions on rules of origin.23 It also marks a step forward in terms of institutionalization. CEFTA 2006 is administered by a Brussels-based Joint Committee with dispute settlement powers backed by a secretariat. There is also an association of regional chambers of commerce attached to the new trade institution. The completion of CEFTA 2006 set the stage for a regional trading bloc encompassing the Western Balkans flanked by EU members Greece, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria. However, integration rested on a political, rather than on a strictly economic rationale. Indeed, many experts have raised doubts as to their contribution to growth and development, as opposed to the beneficial political effects in terms of fostering better relations between governments


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and preparation for EU membership. While the region – meaning here principally the Western Balkans – remains important for some countries’ exports, this is rarely the case on the side of imports. There have been concerns that, due to the different levels of regulatory development – in the area of competition policy, for example – trade liberalization would actually distort trade, by allowing monopolistic collusion across borders, as allegedly is the case of the merger between the Serbian retailer Delta and the Croatian Agrokor (Delevic´, 2007, p. 62). There are questions, too, regarding the potential of CEFTA 2006 to lower barriers in agricultural trade in accordance with its Chapter 3. To protect domestic agriculture, Bosnia and Herzegovina adopted a law in June 2009 that reintroduced previously abolished customs duties for Croatian and Serbian imports, and breached the agreement as well as the SAA signed with the EU.24 The law was struck down by the country’s Constitutional Court in September 2009 amidst protests by farmers.25 The European Commission reports that an additional protocol on agriculture to CEFTA 2006, has been blocked due to the clashes over Kosovo’s independence.26 It is also worth considering the effects of trade liberalization over time. A comprehensive report on the Balkan economies released by the World Bank in 2008 found that over the period 2000–5 the value of intra-regional (Western Balkans, Romania, Bulgaria) exports had grown from $2.88bn to some $7.6bn, while imports expanded from $2.70bn to $7.83bn. However, most of the flows still take place within the Western Balkans, which accounted for 65 per cent of the intra-regional exports and a staggering 79.4 per cent of the intra-regional imports in 2005. Still, this did not mean that the regional trade flows were that significant: they corresponded to 26.9 per cent of the Western Balkans’ total exports and 15.2 per cent of the imports – compared with 13.2 and 7.9 for post-communist South East Europe as a whole. In the period 2000–5, the intra-regional chunk of Western Balkan exports grew by 2.8 per cent and the imports by 3.2 per cent – compared with 0.6 and 1.5 for the Western Balkans, Romania and Bulgaria. The most active traders were Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, as well as Croatia (on the side of exports) (Kathuria, 2008, pp. 36–8).27 The above snapshot demonstrates that, for all their political value, the trade liberalization initiatives of the 2000s have done little to alter the trade patterns inherited from the 1990s. What they have


also done is bolster economic ties across the territory of former Yugoslavia (with the partial exception of trade between Serbia and Croatia28), adding credibility to the contention that an informal Yugosphere is being recreated. This is evidenced, inter alia, by the high profile of Slovenia as a trade and investment powerhouse in the Western Balkans (with the exception of Albania), a development related to the favourable regimes established as a result of the region’s closer integration into the EU. In 2008, Slovenia was Bosnia and Herzegovina’s second most significant trade partner after Croatia (16.8 per cent of Bosnian exports, 12.8 per cent of imports). In 2002–4, half of the country’s investment outflows went to other former Yugoslav republics (Kathuria, 2008, p. 77). One caveat is due here. The picture of a South East Europe integrated only within the confines of ex-Yugoslavia changes noticeably if one is to include Greece in the region in focus. The country is a leading trade partner for all its immediate neighbours to the north: Bulgaria, Albania and Macedonia. In 2008, it was the second most important source of imports for Albania and Macedonia (12.5/12.4 per cent of the total) and third for Bulgaria (5.4 per cent). 9.9 per cent of Bulgarian exports went to Greece (the top destination) compared with 12.5 and 11.8 per cent for Macedonia and Albania. One should also add Turkey, which is the third largest export market for Bulgaria as well as a source for significant share of imports to Romania (4.9 per cent), Albania (6.9 per cent) and Macedonia (5.6 per cent).29 Investment Investment is a policy-area inextricably linked to trade. Lifting trade barriers in South East Europe has been partly motivated by the potential gains, for foreign and domestic investors, from an enlarged marketplace – home to some 55 million consumers – with a privileged access to the EU. As early as 2000, the SP (WT2) identified the development of regulatory and institutional environment as a key area for joint action by the participating Balkan governments and the scheme’s international sponsors, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the UK and Austria. Cooperation was based on the Compact for Reform, Investment, Integrity and Growth (Investment Compact) adopted February 2000 in Skopje. A set of best practices, rather than a legallybinding instrument, it contained a list of 587 policy measures in


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ten areas, including structural reform, taxation and fiscal policy, FDI promotion, corporate governance, competition, financial markets, and SMEs. The process was conceived as a means of sharing experience and encouraging reform by the relevant national ministries, not unlike the Open Method of Coordination launched within the EU the same year. The scheme was institutionalized, in 2007, through the SEE Investment Committee, bringing together senior officials. Though it was notionally linked to SEECP and the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC), the committee continued to operate under the auspices of OECD.30 Transport As explained by Chapter 1, the transport sector rose in importance in the mid-1990s owing to the poor state of connections running through South East Europe, which had been damaged further by the conflicts, neglect and mismanagement. Because of the historical links with external regions and countries, as well as the legacy of political and economic fragmentation, the north-south axes were, and in fact still remain, developed much better than the east-west vector. In the 1990s, inadequate cross-border connections were recognized as a major impediment to trade within the region as well as with Western Europe; they also rendered meaningless coordinated reforms harmonizing the transport sector legislation with international and EU technical standards. SECI played a pioneering role in aligning regulatory frameworks under the World Bank-sponsored Trade and Transport Facilitation Project (TTFSE). Running between 2001–6 the TTFSE helped reduce clearance time for lorries at border crossings.31 Reconstruction, upgrade and development of infrastructure were the focal points in the strategy for post-conflict stabilization and gradual integration into the EU, operationalized through the SP. Transport infrastructure attracted the bulk of funds allocated by the SP donors, as well as a hefty chunk from the total volume of financial assistance coming to South East Europe in the wake of the Kosovo war.32 For instance, the two funding conferences in Brussels (March 2000) and Bucharest (October 2001) allocated nearly a4bn for 24 ‘quick-start’ and 27 near-term projects in that field. As in other policy-areas, the EU has been the most robust driver of regional cooperation in cross-border infrastructure development. The European Commission co-chaired together with the World Bank the


High Level Steering Group (HSLG) overseeing the implementation of SP projects. Even more importantly, the Union provided the frame of reference through the so-called Pan-European Transportation Corridors worked out at serial of ministerial involving the EU member states and the post-communist candidate countries in Prague (1991), Crete (1994) and Helsinki (1996).33 The process, known as Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment (TINA), was piloted by the European Commission as part of Agenda 2000, which was aimed at facilitating the functional and budgetary aspects of eastern enlargement.34 As Table 4.2 below shows, a number of these corridors traversed South East Europe which, in turn, stimulated cooperation at the local level. The TINA template also encouraged the SP recipient states in South East Europe to link national programmes with regional priorities. Even single-country projects, such as the highway linking Zagreb with the port of Rijeka, were to be integrated into larger cross-border networks. The specialized Infrastructure Steering Group, set up by the European Commission and the World Bank, called for ‘[the] submission by two or more countries of the region, or, in case of submission by one country, thorough explanation about regional impact’.35 However, external impetus also spurred competition, contrary to the intentions of the Pact’s patrons and the spirit of the TEN exercise. In the 1990s, Greece launched the Via Egnatia highway (completed in 2009), linking the port of Igoumenitsa, on the Ionian Sea, to the border with Turkey. Backed by the US and Italy, Albania, Bulgaria and Macedonia pledged to upgrade Corridor VIII (Black Sea and the Adriatic), which Greek policymakers saw as a rival endeavour.36 Corridors X and IV connecting Greece and Central Europe through Serbia and Macedonia, and through Romania and Bulgaria could also be seen as competing.37 Occasionally, such rivalries were cushioned through the SP: for example, the Bulgarian–Romanian dispute over the location of a second Danube bridge linking the two countries. It was through the intervention of Bodo Hombach that Vidin-Ca ˘la ˘fat, at the westernmost section of the common border, was agreed by the two prime ministers, Ivan Kostov and Mugur Isa ˘rescu, during the Pact’s first donor conference in March 2000, a concession to Bulgaria.38 However, neither the SP nor the HLSG could arbitrate or resolve all similar clashes, since key players in South East Europe such as Greece and Turkey were not present in the Pact (Lesser et al., 2000).

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Table 4.2 Pan-European corridors and SP funding Corridor

Sections in South East Europe

IV: Dresden/ Budapest– Nüremberg – Istanbul Arad(1)Bucharest– Constanţa (2)Craiova–Sofia– Thessaloniki (3) Sofia–Plovdiv– Istanbul V: Venice–L’yv Branch B: Rijeka– Zagreb–Budapest Branch C: Plocˇe– Sarajevo–Osijek– Budapest VII: Vienna–Danube Danube Delta VIII: Durrës–Burgas/ Durrës –Tirana– Varna Skopje–Sofia– Plovdiv–Burgas/Varna

IX: Helsinki– Alexandroupolis X: Salzburg– Thessaloniki

Chis¸ina ˘u–Bucharest– Dimitrovgrad– Alexandroupolis Salzburg–Villach –Ljubljana–Zagreb– Belgrade–Niš–Skopje– Thessaloniki Branch A: Gra – Maribor – Zagreb Branch B: Belgrade – Novi Sad – Budapest Branch C: Niš – Sofia – Corridor IV Branch D: Bitola – Florina – Via Egnatia – Igoumenitsa

Source: www.stabilitypact.org

SP quick-start projects Upgrade of the Craiova– Turnu Severin section of Highway 6; Bucharest– Cernavoda, Vidin-Ca ˘la ˘fat bridge; Electrification of the Plovdiv–Svilengrad railroad Rijeka–Zagreb highway, Upgrade of the Croatian rail networks along Corridor Vc, Sarejevo bypass on E73, bridge at Šamac (Bosnia) Clearance of debris near Novi Sad (Serbia) Skopje bypass, Durrës port reconstruction, rehabilitation of the Elbasan–Libraxh road, rehabilitation of the Lushnje – Fier road, Fier–Vlorë highway (branching towards Vlorë, Albania), Pogradec–Korçë Bucharest–Giurgiu road

Upgrade of the border crossing at Horgoš (Serbia and Montenegro/Hungary); Upgrade of the Negotino – Demir Kapija and Demir Kapija–Gevgelija sections of E75 (Macedonia)


Much of the EU effort in the 2000s concentrated on the Western Balkans. In October 2001, the European Commission released a paper on road infrastructure identifying basic policies, guidelines and principles.39 One overarching priority was to connect the Adriatic coast of Albania, Montenegro and Croatia with the interior of the Western Balkans, reinforcing the east-west axis.40 As in other areas, the Commission took the driver’s seat, marginalizing the SP as an intermediary. European Investment Bank loans and grants from the CARDS programme, succeeded in 2007 by the Instrument for PreAccession Assistance (IPA), funded large projects such as the construction of new border crossings or motorways.41 For their part, the SAP countries, urged by the EU, committed themselves to intensifying cooperation, through the Memorandum of Understanding on the Development of South East Europe Core Regional Transport Network (June 2004). Beyond infrastructure (roads, railways, inland waterways, ports, airports), the MoU concerns coordination of institutional and policy reform in the area of transport (see Map 4.1, Core Regional Transport Network). The CARDS regional component financed the establishment of a South East Europe Transport Observatory (SEETO) in Belgrade, tasked with providing support to the multiannual plans implemented at the national level and, more significantly, deciding on the relative priority of projects in need of EU funding. Starting with a conference in Skopje (10 November 2005), the process is steered through annual meetings of Western Balkan transport ministers, backed by a steering committee and various working groups (Delevic´, 2007, p. 70). The original MoU was updated in 2007 with a new multilateral commitment backed by national multi-annual plans for the period until 2013, corresponding to the EU budget cycle and the operation of IPA. There is currently an effort to institutionalize cooperation even further. In the first half of 2008, the Slovenian Presidency of the EU Council initiated proposals for the establishment of a Transport Community in the Western Balkans, an entity modelled on the pre-existing Energy Community (see below). The plan, under negotiation as of November 2008, envisages regionalization through the inclusion of the participating countries in the EU’s legislative frameworks, which would involve the early adoption of the acquis governing the sector, with the European Commission overseeing the process. The initiative’s aim is the establishment of ‘an integrated


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market for infrastructure and land, inland waterways and maritime transport’, reflective of the ‘true spirit of Jean Monnet’, in the words of Jacques Barrot, Vice-President in charge of transport in the first Barroso Commission (2004–9).42 Yet, negotiations, scheduled to end in late 2009, have dragged well into 2010, partly because of interinstitutional coordination issues inside the EU and partly due to the problem of how Kosovo should be involved in the new framework. A similar framework has emerged in the area of air transportation. In May 2006, the then EU member states, Bulgaria and Romania, the Western Balkans (Kosovo included), Moldova (SP participant), and Iceland and Norway (part of the European Economic Area) resolved to establish a European Common Aviation Area (ECAA) based on the EU’s Single Sky Agreement by 2010. Rather than launching yet another regional forum, this initiative aims to deepen the EU’s Single Market in the area of aviation services, and to extend it to proximate third countries. At the same time, the Commission has been pursuing a bloc, as opposed to strictly bilateral, approach to the post-communist countries of South East Europe.43 It is worth

Map 4.1 South East Europe: core network Source: www.seeto.int


noting that liberalization is expected to bring tangible benefits to the region’s expanding tourist industries. Countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia are already capitalizing on the low-cost flights from major cities in Western Europe. As in the case of the planned Transport Community, here regional cooperation, contingent on internal institutional and policy reforms, is a by-product of European integration. However, this is not a straightforward process, given the political and institutional roadblocks. The 2009 Commission report, for instance, found Kosovo adopting legislation that clashes with ECAA commitments.44 Transborder waterways have also been the subject of intergovernmental collaboration. In 2002, Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia launched an initiative on the Sava basin under the auspices of the SP. Transformed by the Yugoslav disintegration into a de facto international thoroughfare, the Sava River, together with its tributaries, account for more than 80 per cent of the water resources of the riparian states. In December 2002 their representatives, gathered in Kranjska Gora (Slovenia), adopted a framework agreement which internationalized the Sava, and established a navigation regime, a joint commission (not unlike the long-standing Danube Commission) and a dispute settlement mechanism. The commission started working in 2005 and is aided by a permanent secretariat located in Zagreb.45

Energy Energy has been a top priority for all countries in South East Europe, partly because of their lack of resources and the corresponding dependency on imports, and partly owing to the advantages of their intermediate position between the suppliers around the Caspian Sea and in Central Asia, and the consumers in Western Europe. Starting from the early 1990s, governments eager to reap the economic and security benefits have touted various schemes for the construction of oil pipelines. Some routes have remained on paper: Burgas-Vlorë (Bulgaria, Albania and Macedonia), Constant‚a to Omišalj/Trieste (Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Italy), and the connection of the Druzhba pipeline with the Adria system (Hungary-Croatia). Limited resources, technical difficulties, environmental cost and, most conspicuously, the uncertainty of future supplies have presented serious obstacles


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(Delevic´, 2007, pp. 68–9).46 Only smaller-scale projects, such as the pipe connecting Thessaloniki and Skopje, have been completed. While a tripartite agreement on Burgas–Alexandroupolis was signed in Athens by Prime Ministers Kostas Karamanlis (Greece) and Sergey Stanishev (Bulgaria) and President Vladimir Putin of Russia in March 2007, the future prospects of the project are uncertain, due to internal opposition in Bulgaria and, to a lesser degree, in Greece; also problematic is the progress of the Samsun–Ceyhan pipeline, which is located entirely in Turkish territory. Similar to oil, gas, too, has fuelled both cooperation and competition in South East Europe.47 When, in November 2007, Gazprom signed a deal with the Italian energy firm ENI for a gas pipeline under the Black Sea – bypassing Ukraine, which was engaged in several political and commercial disputes with Russia – Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia hurried to jump on the bandwagon and ensure that the route would pass through their territories. South Stream is in competition with the Nabucco project, supported by the European Commission and the US government, and inaugurated in July 2009 through an intergovernmental agreement signed in Ankara by Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria. The future of both pipelines is far from clear owing to the prohibitive costs and, similar to oil, the uncertainty whether there will be sufficient supply of gas from the exporters (Russia, Azerbaijan, the Central Asian republics). For all the buzz generated by grand projects worth billions of euros, regional cooperation in the area of gas has been served best by much more practical, lower-key, initiatives, such as the interconnection of Turkey and Greece’s networks completed in the autumn of 2007. Another interconnector is currently under construction between Greece and Bulgaria, while the European Commission has been drawing plans for a Western Balkan gas ring (proposed originally in 2003 by the Greek and Turkish public companies DEPA and BOTAS¸), which involves, among other things, linking Serbia’s network with those of neighbouring Croatia, Bulgaria and Macedonia.48 These small-step arrangements help the diversification of gas supplies to the Balkans and reinforce the integration of local energy markets. Despite the political salience of oil and gas, the electricity sector has seen the most remarkable advancement. Cooperation in that area has been facilitated by the intra-regional complementarities. While some have been suffering from chronic shortages (the Western Balkans,


Turkey, Greece), others, like Bulgaria (up until the closure of Units 3 and 4 of the Kozloduy Power Plant in 2007) and Romania, have excess capacity due to the rapid deindustrialization after the fall of communism. Until 2003, however, the two countries were not part of the Union for the Coordination of the Transmission of Electricity (UCTE), which brings together the EU member states.49 Serbia and Montenegro and Macedonia, though applying the UCTE technical standards, were disconnected from the grid in the early 1990s.50 Many national grids in the Balkans were not interconnected, while the 1990s severely damaged the transmission infrastructure in Eastern Croatia and Bosnia. As a result, the SP tabled the connection between Albania and Montenegro and between Bulgaria and Macedonia as a priority, while SECI negotiated in 2001 a regional memorandum on grid connectivity. In the 2009 regular reports, the European Commission notes that several 400kV transmission lines have either been completed (Gjueshevo [Bulgaria]–Deve Bair [Macedonia] and Niš- Leskovac [south Serbia, to be extended to Skopje] or are under construction (Elbasan [Albania]–Podgorica [Montenegro]). Balkan governments made some early steps towards integration. In September–October 1995, the Albanian, Bulgarian, FR Yugoslav, Greek and Macedonian authorities carried out a successful test for a synchronous connection of national grids. In 1999, energy ministers (excluding Croatia and Turkey) set 2006 as a target date for the launch of a regional market.51 From that point onwards, the European Commission (DG Transport and Energy), which had originally developed the plan – derived from the intra-EU energy liberalization initiatives – assumed leadership (Renner, 2009, p. 9). It set an expert body bringing together representatives from assorted IFIs and governments (US, Italy, Switzerland and Greece).52 Consultations yielded a detailed technical design of the scheme which was endorsed by SEECP energy ministers.53 In November 2002, the EU, Western Balkans (including UNMIK/ Kosovo), Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey signed in Athens a MoU, pledging to open retail markets to operators from the other participating countries by January 2005, by implementing the EU Electricity Directive (96/92/EC).54 This would involve the set-up of independent national regulators, the ‘unbundling’ of vertically integrated national electricity companies, and the establishment of a transmission and distribution system accessible to multiple market players.


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The memorandum prepared the ground for the South East European Regulatory Forum, a regulatory body with partial dispute-settlement powers. Modelled on the so-called Florence Forum within the EU, the body represented national regulators, and was chaired by the Commission, and the country holding the rotating presidency, of what came to be known as ‘the Athens process’. In December 2003, energy ministers adopted another memorandum extending the same framework to gas, in line with Council Directive 2003/55/EC.55 The Commission pushed for further institutionalization, through the Energy Community Treaty signed in Athens in October 2005, by the European Community, Bulgaria, Romania, the Western Balkan governments (including UNMIK/Kosovo), and coming into effect in July 2006 (Renner, 2009, p. 11). When Bulgaria and Romania entered the Union in 2007 their status changed from ‘Contracting Parties’ to the treaty, to ‘Participants’ (currently, a group of 14 EU member states). Turkey chose to stay out of the treaty, preferring to delay harmonization with the acquis to a future point in its membership negotiations (Renner, 2009). The Energy Community’s organizational structure copies that of corresponding bodies within the EU itself. The bulk of the work is carried out by a permanent secretariat in Vienna, with the EU budget covering 98 per cent of the operational cost – not unlike the CEFTA 2006 secretariat in the first year of its existence.56 A ministerial council monitors its activities, aided by a permanent high-level group of senior officials. A Regulatory Board brings together representatives of the national regulatory authorities, much like the European Regulators’ Group for electricity and gas (ERGEG).57 There are also four issue-specific fora: electricity (going back to the 2002 memorandum), gas (established with the 2005 treaty), social impact of energy reform (October 2007), and oil (December 2008).58 Notionally, this intergovernmental framework interacts with (semi-) indigenous institutions such as SEECP and RCC.59 As early as 2001, SEECP called for regional ownership in the process; but it has always been clear that the European Commission’s role remains indispensable.60 This has to do with the variable willingness and capacity of participating countries to implement the institutional and regulatory reforms listed in the Athens Treaty and its annexes, which, in turn, highlights external anchors. In October 2009, the European Commission found that within the Western Balkans only Croatia had aligned its legislation to


a sufficient degree.61 Disputes between governments and private sector firms benefiting from liberalization and privatization of the electricity sector – for example, the Austrian EVN and the Macedonian authorities in 2009 – have shown that progress is difficult. There are multiple outstanding problems concerning continued cross-subsidies, the lack of reliable statistical data, weak domestic enforcement, political interference in pricing tariffs, and so on. All in all, the Energy Community is an example of the EU’s piecemeal export of its legislation and institutional templates to a geographical area drawn into its orbit; this is sometimes described by the term ‘external governance’. It is a de facto extension of the Union’s policies in the Western Balkans, though other countries currently engaged in accession negotiations (Turkey), aspiring to deepen relations with the EU (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia) or already part of advanced institutional arrangements (Norway in the European Economic Area) are also involved as observers. Moldova and Ukraine joined the Community in 2010 as a way to enhance energy security – a sensitive issue, given the continual spat between Kyiv and Russia’s Gazprom – and advance their integration with the EU.62

Explaining and understanding functional cooperation The overview of various functional issue-areas largely confirms the initial hypothesis emphasizing external push as a primary causal factor. Sectoral cooperation intensified and expanded in scope after 1999, and particularly after the collapse of the Miloševic´ regime in October 2000. The incentives put forward by external actors, principally the EU but also IFIs and the US, account for the advances in regional cooperation during the decade that followed. The leading role of the Union is demonstrated by the variable degree of institutionalization across policy-areas. As shown in Table 4.3, below, the level of EU engagement in terms of political and financial resources – as well as the provision of legal standards which in itself is contingent on the degree of integration inside the Union – correlates with the ‘deepening’ of the schemes at hand. In addition, as the case of trade liberalization suggests, the presence of the EU as an external anchor accounts for the transition from bilateral to multilateral arrangements. Finally, the variance in institutional links with the EU dictated the format and membership in most sectoral

Table 4.3 Functional cooperation – a cross-sector comparison Outcome

Degree of institutionalization

Input by extra-regional actors

Intensity of EU involvement

Local demand for cooperation

Trade

Bilateral FTAs, CEFTA 2006

High

SAP conditionality, policy coordination, funding, political pressure

High

Medium

Investment

Set of best practices, intergovernmental dialogue

Medium

Funding, policy coor- Low dination

Low

Road transport

Political framework, Transport Community under negotiation

High

Funding, policy coordination, legal standards (EU acquis)

High

Medium

Aviation

Common Aviation Area

High

Funding, policy High coordination, legal standards (EU acquis)

Medium

Transborder waterways

Sava Commission international regime

High

Funding, policy coor- High dination

High

Oil

Intergovernmental agreements, joint companies, policy dialogue

Low

Mediation, funding, political pressure (Russia)

Low

High

Gas

Intergovernmental agreements, joint companies, Energy Community

Low

Funding, mediation, political pressure

Medium

High

Electricity

Intergovernmental agreement, Energy Community

High

Funding, policy High coordination, legal standards (EU acquis)

High 105


initiatives. After 2007, multilateral cooperation was narrowed to the Western Balkans, leaving Bulgaria and Romania – incoming members of the EU – aside. Turkey and Greece, though actively involved in Balkan affairs, are not directly implicated in cooperation on trade, investment and transport, which are strictly limited to the EU membership candidates and potential candidates in the Western Balkans. In none of the cases has functional interdependence at the regional level directly induced governments to independently deepen and multilateralize cooperation. What interdependence, hence intra-regional demand for integration, has done is to condition a more favourable local response to initiatives coming from the EU and the IFIs. Balkan governments dragged their feet when negotiating trade liberalization with neighbours, preferring an ad hoc, bilateral approach. Thinking counterfactually, and assuming the EU gravity pole was absent, one would expect the presence of a much patchier regime based on neighbour-to-neighbour deals, which was more or less the state of affairs in the 1990s. By contrast, local states have embraced integration of electricity markets, the establishment of common rules on aviation, or joint road infrastructure planning as a way to accrue direct economic benefits through opening to the region. The dynamics of functional cooperation, therefore, is largely a reflection of the incentives presented to South East Europe by external players. This leaves little room to employing identity, as discussed in Chapter 3, as a fully-fledged explanatory factor. To the extent that it matters, it does so only in the negative sense: by making states unwilling to engage with other states they wish to dissociate from. Thus, Slovenia and Croatia chose to stay outside SECI in the 1990s while President Franjo Tud¯man, in January 1997, went as far as proposing a constitutional amendment prohibiting Croatia from taking part in schemes that could resurrect former Yugoslavia (Vukadinovic´, 2000; Vranyczany-Dobrinovic´, 1997).63 Yet things look different if one shifts the mode of enquiry from causal to interpretative analysis. Beyond its material implications, functional cooperation at the regional level has had an intrinsic symbolic value in terms of bringing Balkan states closer to the European mainstream, through the replication of core EU norms and practices. This link has been evident, inter alia, through the choice of institutional shells for organizing cooperation. For instance, Croatia opted


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for CEFTA because of its already established status of an antechamber for EU membership – evident in the cases of the Visegrád quartet, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania (Dangerfield, 2000, 2006). In addition, governments that were sceptical about the value of Balkan integration and prioritizing relations with the EU, have still found it difficult to avoid regional entanglements that are seen as a test of commitment to ‘European’ ways. This was clearly the case of the Romanian, and especially the Bulgarian, governments at the time the SP was launched,64 as well as that of Croatia under both Ivica Racˇan’s centre-left administration (2000–4) and the revamped HDZ. While the conclusion and implementation of CEFTA 2006 has sought to reproduce the Central European experience in the Western Balkans, the new generation of schemes such as the Energy Community, the ECAA, and the projected Transport Community add a novel dimension of regionalism on the edges of the EU. In essence, they are an extension of policies and regimes that function inside the Union. Participation in those, formally regional, initiatives amounts to early inclusion in the EU’s functional space. From the perspective of the European Commission, it extends benefits to countries for whom membership is only a long-term perspective (all Western Balkan countries with the exception of Croatia and, to a lesser degree, Turkey). However, the package on offer is not very generous, especially in light of the financial and political costs of early implementation of onerous legislation (for example, unbundling of energy monopolies). Benefits are often asymmetric. Thus the Transport Community, currently under negotiation, will, in effect, open the markets of Western Balkan to operators from the EU member states, while restricting local firms’ rights to offer transport services inside the Union because of potential low-cost competition. Local governments have subscribed to the treaty owing to the symbolic reward of inclusion in a policy steered by Brussels and keeping integration’s momentum. This is particularly valuable at a time when enlargement is perceived to be slowing down.65 Thus, the identity-political dimension of regional cooperation, orchestrated by the EU, trickles down even in unlikely technical areas.

5 Defusing the Powderkeg: Security Cooperation

Even if the rhetoric of cooperation emphasizes the economic dimension, security issues have always played a paramount role in South East Europe. Suffice to note, yet again, that reconstruction and integration have been conceived as instruments of stabilization in the wake of conflicts and external interventions in ex-Yugoslavia. However, the notion of security itself has evolved over time. In the early 1990s, the key challenge was managing territorial conflict between states and ethnic groups fuelled by historical animosities. In the following decade, attention shifted to the dysfunctionality of state institutions and the resultant deficits concerning the rule of law, both domestically and across borders. From mitigating political tensions through multilateral security arrangements, reconciliation and economic interdependence, the focus of cooperation has shifted to tackling transnational crime and corruption. As Chapter 1 explained, the legacy of the Yugoslav wars has been a new set of threats, going well beyond military security, stemming from state weakness.1 The intertwined security of the region, especially in what Eurospeak calls Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), has created demand for policy coordination, but also obstacles for the development of multilateral responses in the region. Cooperation has been stymied by the divergence of interests, limited resources and institutional capacity at the regional and national level, and the entrenchment of domestic veto players. However, after the Kosovo war, regional schemes in this policy-area expanded in terms of issue-coverage and participants. Though challenges persist to this day, especially in Western Balkan hotspots such as Kosovo and Bosnia, the proliferation of multilateral 108

Defusing the Powderkeg

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frameworks testifies that the countries of South East Europe have gradually adopted a shared outlook and are now contributing to regional stability. What accounts for this shift from competition to cooperation: the push from external actors such as NATO, EU and OSCE? the common transnational threats faced by Balkan societies and states? the desire to redefine the region’s identity as an integral part of the EuroAtlantic island of stability? Looking at the evolution of security cooperation, this chapter argues that regional institutions and initiatives have emerged as part of individual and collective effort to integrate into NATO and the EU. External push explains the multilateralization of security policy, but to understand fully its impact one must take into account the desire of local countries and governments to cast off the negative image that ‘stuck’ to them in the 1990s. Taking up the burden of collectively managing Balkan stability, has played a secondary role in the motivation of regional actors, who are reliant more often than not on external anchors. The chapter begins with an overview of the arms control and confidence-building arrangements that were put in place in the early and mid-1990s. It then examines the institutionalization of politico-military cooperation under the tutelage of NATO and the US, primarily through the South East European Defence Ministerial (SEDM) process. Finally, it discusses various schemes and initiatives in the field of judicial and law enforcement cooperation or, broadly speaking, soft security.

First steps in cooperative security after the Cold War The end of the Cold War and the ensuing disintegration of Yugoslavia were the two events that shaped the Balkans in the 1990s. Coupled with older conflicts in the vicinity, such as the longstanding Greek–Turkish tensions, the Yugoslav crisis raised the spectre of a larger regional conflict in South East Europe. Post-Cold-War instability aside, the end of the bipolar contest also had a positive effect on the region, owing to developments at the European level. The 1990 Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE), adopted within the Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), set armament ceilings which also applied to the Balkans.2 In addition, the CSCE’s Vienna documents of 1992 and 1994 envisaged a number


of confidence- and security-building measures (CSBMs), including advance warning prior to military exercises, regular external monitoring and evaluation visits, and on-site inspections. The CSCE/OSCE regime improved security relations between neighbouring countries. In 1991–2, for example, Bulgaria and Turkey signed two agreements that led to, among other things, the withdrawal of substantial military units deployed along the border areas in Thrace. Bulgaria concluded similar agreements applying the Vienna standards, and sometimes going beyond them, with Greece, Romania (December 1995), and Albania; Turkey did the same with Albania (July 1992) and Macedonia.3 Despite the positive trend set by the CFE and the bilateral CSBMs, their impact on wider South East Europe was limited. For some observers, CFE cemented already existing imbalances and exacerbated the military inferiority of the former Warsaw Pact countries (Bulgaria and Romania) in relation to Turkey and Greece (Tsipis, 1996; Tsakonas, 1999). Greece itself saw the danger that the CFE imposed quantitative, but not qualitative limits on Turkey, allowing the latter the strategic advantage of modernizing its arsenals. In addition, rump Yugoslavia, expelled from OSCE in July 1992, was not part of the agreements, while it maintained one of the strongest militaries in the Balkans. Understandably, that was a cause of concern for all neighbours (Hirschfeld, 1994, p. 171). Conflict-ravaged Bosnia and Herzegovina was not part of OSCE either, and only the Dayton settlement led to the introduction of CSBMs between the forces of Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation. On 14 June 1996, the two entities signed, together with FR Yugoslavia and Croatia, an Agreement on Subregional Arms Control under the auspices of the OSCE. Implementing the Dayton Accord, and in line with the CFE, it reduced the number of troops and armaments in the three countries and established an intergovernmental commission in charge of monitoring.4 Slovenia, Macedonia and Albania remained outside CFE, though their military weakness and peaceful foreign policy ruled out any negative fallout. The gap in collective security provision was clearly a concern for the external powers involved in the pacification of the Balkans. The Dayton Agreement envisioned arms control negotiations ‘in and around’ former Yugoslavia, but such talks never followed on a multilateral basis. While Balkan foreign ministers referred to a


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regional system of CSBMs in the final communiqués of the Sofia and Thessaloniki conferences (SEECP), in 1996 and 1997, there were no follow-up steps. Arms reduction talks were impossible as long as Bulgaria, Romania and Greece refused to disarm to levels lower than the ones under CFE, which in turn made it impossible for a Balkanspecific regime to emerge parallel to the OSCE framework (Centre for Liberal Strategies, 1997, pp. 33–6).5 A genuinely multilateral body dealing with arms control and CSBMs was established only with the EU-initiated Stability Pact. In October 2000, the SP launched in Regional Arms Control Verification and Implementation Assistance Centre (RACIVAC) located near Zagreb. Like all other SP projects, the centre relied exclusively on contributions from donors, notably Germany, which concluded, in September 2002, a bilateral agreement with Croatia providing the legal basis of the centre. It was initially placed under the chapeau of OSCE and also brought in extra-regional states as associate members.6 As of 2008, RACIVAC was transferred to regional ownership with local participants (essentially the SEECP membership, including the Western Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Turkey and Moldova) financing its core operational costs and contributing staff (including the Director), while donors from the associated countries fund individual projects. RACIVAC has made a contribution to a regional security, though its main area of activity is training defence and security-sector experts through courses, workshop, seminars and other joint activities.7

Towards a multilateral security regime The South East European Defence Ministerial It was thanks to the Clinton administration that cooperation in security and defence matters was advanced and institutionalized. As Washington viewed the Balkans as an inter-connected complex, it sought to supplement NATO’s peacekeeping effort in Bosnia with a multilateral framework. US leverage was bolstered by the involvement of a number of Balkan countries in the PfP, and their aspiration to join NATO, where Greece and Turkey had been members since the early 1950s. In March 1996, US Secretary of Defence William Perry proposed the South East European Defence Ministerial (SEDM) process at a conference in Tirana attended by his counterparts from Albania,


Turkey, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Italy. The choice of venue was not accidental; Albania had proved a valuable ally during the Bosnian war and showed restraint in its policy towards Macedonia and FR Yugoslavia, both of which were home to sizeable Albanian minorities.8 The American scheme raised a great deal of anxiety at first. Displeased by the absence of Romania and FR Yugoslavia, the Greek Defence Minister Gerasimos Arsenis squarely turned down the invitation to attend the talks.9 His Bulgarian colleague’s decision to come was reluctant, and he was quick to point out that Russia would have to be part of subsequent gatherings.10 At the time, Greece and Bulgaria were preparing a conference of Balkan foreign ministers, after a six-year hiatus, which they saw as the forum in which to discuss regional security. The second defence ministerial (3 October 1997, Sofia) saw Bulgaria’s new pro-NATO government backing fully the American initiative. Russia was not invited, as Bulgarian authorities argued that it was neither a South East European nor a NATO candidate country. This caused a diplomatic fracas, culminating in a Russian protest note to Bulgaria; but the US stood by Prime Minister Kostov’s decision.11 The conference agreed on the membership of the new forum: Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania (PfP partners), Greece, Turkey and Italy (NATO members) became full participants, while the US and Slovenia chose to remain observers. The conspicuous absence of FR Yugoslavia spurred a wave of press speculation on the initiative’s underlying objectives.12 Greece objected to what it saw as the creation of new division lines in the Balkans, and its defence minister, Akis Tzohadzopoulos, advocated the establishment of a ‘Balkan Security Council’ to manage regional affairs from within. In all fairness, the PfP criterion excluded two further countries, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thus, from the very start, SEDM was not merely an intra-Balkan security arrangement but an instrument of US and NATO policy. This understanding was accepted by the PfP governments, who underscored that the road to regional stability passed through inclusion in the Euro-Atlantic structures, with SEDM perceived as a stepping-stone to NATO. Despite their commitment to Dayton, rump Yugoslavia and Croatia were still mavericks, due to the authoritarian politics of Slobodan Miloševic´ and Franjo Tud¯man. Bosnia, on the other hand, still had no unified military or defence ministry. SEDM’s


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restrictive approach, premised on institutional links to NATO, was in contrast with the inclusiveness of other political fora, such as the South East European Cooperation Process (SEECP, see Chapter 6). It was also at odds with the policy of re-engaging FR Yugoslavia in regional dialogue. Aware of the dual risk of either isolating or over-accommodating Belgrade, Bulgaria proposed a comprehensive regional defence conference in the future (presumably under SEECP), while SEDM was to keep its separate identity. Despite its link to NATO, SEDM was still seen as a Balkan institution. This was why Janez Drnovšek’s government came under fire in Slovenia for attending the Sofia ministerial. There was the perception that the country risked being ‘dragged back’ into the Balkans after the hard-won emancipation from Yugoslavia. The defence minister pointed out, in response, that SEDM would undoubtedly increase Slovenia’s chances to join NATO in the second wave of expansion. He added that although not belonging to South East Europe, the country participated ‘as a role model for that region’.13 The observer status was a compromise solution catering both to Slovenia’s identity concerns and to its desire to be firmly on the NATO bandwagon. The Sofia ministerial also defined the SEDM’s area of activity. US Defence Secretary William Cohen highlighted priorities such as military personnel training and exchange, the PfP exercises, and assistance in restructuring the Soviet-style armed forces in the individual Balkan partners to make them interoperable with NATO. He also envisaged a regional arms control agreement featuring CSBMs and arms reductions.14 Participants agreed to hold regular meetings of ministers and chiefs of staff, exchange personnel and data, participate in joint exercises, and discuss the creation of a regional crisis prevention council. More substantially, the delegates accepted Turkey’s proposal to establish a regional unit along the lines of NATO’s Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) template, which had already been applied by the Baltic Battalion formed by Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as well as an Italian–Hungarian–Slovenian joint force. The unit could be involved in UN or OSCE-mandated peacekeeping similar to NATO’s IFOR/SFOR mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Multinational Peace Force for South East Europe (MPFSEE) During the Sofia ministerial, a senior US defence official accompanying Cohen characterized the SEDM mission in the following way: ‘on


the one hand, including these countries more in Western institutions, including involvement with NATO, and two, ensuring that they work together better than historically they have.’15 Negotiations around the Balkan peacekeeping force proved that the second goal was not easy to attain, as attitudes and expectations diverged. Some SEDM members, such as Bulgaria, tended to see military cooperation as a way for achieving greater degree of interoperability with NATO, and they opposed quick deployments in areas like Bosnia, which was Turkey’s original idea. In addition, Bulgaria argued that future missions should not be limited to the Balkans, and the force should participate in the widest possible range of PfP activities to bring it fully into NATO structures. Choosing a name turned out to be almost as contentious. Bulgaria insisted on the label ‘South East European’ arguing that the alternative ‘Balkans’ was laden with too many negative connotations – yet another evidence of the salience of symbolic politics. For his part, Macedonia’s Minister of Defence Lazar Kitanovski objected to the standard designation of ‘rapid reaction’ or ‘rapid deployment force’ on the grounds that it could justify unwelcome interference of one member state into another, reflecting Macedonia’s concerns about its neighbours’ perceived irredentist designs.16 The end result, Multinational Peace Force for South East Europe (MPFSEE), was therefore a compromise reflecting the regional states’ apprehensions (Angelov, 1999, pp. 56–8). Agreeing on the unit’s HQ proved an even more serious hurdle, as nearly all SEDM participants put forward rival bids. Turkey wanted the MPFSEE to be stationed in Edirne, adjacent to its borders with Bulgaria and Greece. Greece itself preferred Kilkis, north from Thessaloniki and close to Macedonia and Bulgaria.17 Bulgaria lobbied for Plovdiv pointing at the city’s location in the centre of the Balkans. Hosting the force was of significance, given that the MPFSEE was portrayed as a key step in ‘debalkanizing’ the conflict-prone South East Europe, and many governments were keen to take credit. Greek–Turkish antagonism was also at play. From very early on, Turkey’s active involvement in SEDM was being monitored warily by Athens. Ankara’s insistence on hosting expert negotiations on the MPFSEE led to allegations that its real goal was to marginalize Greece. This had implications for the choice of HQ too. Although Turkey could claim ownership of the initiative, it was conceivable that


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Greece would lose interest and not send a contingent to the MPFSEE, should the Turkish town of Edirne were chosen. At the end of the day, the Bulgarian bid was seen as a Greek–Turkish compromise, with key stakeholders as the US and Italy, and ultimately Greece too, ripening to the idea that a PfP country, rather than a NATO member, should be the first host.18 Turkey finally acquiesced in April 1998, during a meeting between Prime Ministers Ivan Kostov and Mesut Yýlmaz. Yýlmaz declared Turkey’s support for Plovdiv, while Kostov backed Turkey’s bid for a non-permanent place at the UN Security Council in 2000–1.19 As a result, Plovdiv was approved for a period of four years, upon which the force would move to Romania, Turkey and Greece. Turkey provided the force’s commander, Brigadier General Hilmi Zorlu, later in charge of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan.20 Greece obtained the chairmanship of SEDM and the MPFSEE PoliticoMilitary Steering Committee for a two-year term. Another gesture to Greece concerned the official labelling of participating countries as Nation 1, 2, 3 and so forth (in alphabetical order). Macedonia figures as Nation 5 in order to avoid complications regarding the name dispute with Athens. The intergovernmental agreement on the MPFSEE was formally signed by SEDM members (US and Slovenia stayed out but promised to contribute military personnel) during the third ministerial held in Skopje (26 September 1998). Despite the obligatory champagne, the tone was understandably far from optimistic, given the escalating violence between the KLA and Serb forces across the border with Kosovo. William Cohen remarked that the MPFSEE agreement was bringing security and stability to the region where many people would rather ‘dig fresh graves than bury old hatreds’.21 A rare example of a Balkan multilateral treaty, the agreement contained political and military-technical clauses.22 Outlining regional stability and interoperability with NATO as its goals, it defined the MPFSEE’s mission as participation in conflict prevention, peacekeeping, peacemaking, and humanitarian operations under NATO, WEU, OSCE and the UN.23 Decisions to deploy the MPFSEE were to be taken by unanimity on a case-by-case basis, and each participating country could specify its own contribution. The link with NATO was paramount: the force had to operate ‘in line with and supportive of PfP programmes’, ‘within the spirit’ of the partnership, while all PfP agreements were recognized as, mutatis mutandis, applicable.24


Importantly, Article 2 made it clear that the force did not imply the formation of a military alliance against any country, which was clearly a message to FR Yugoslavia, while the treaty was open to other NATO/PfP states from the region (see Table 5.1 below). Although its HQ opened in August 1999, and the first exercise was conducted in September 2000 at the Koren military polygon near Haskovo (Bulgaria), it took a long time before the MPFSEE was activated. Although the US pressed for deployment in Bosnia and Herzegovina or UNMIK-administered Kosovo, regional governments were not forthcoming.29 They set 31 December 2000 as a target date to render the unit operational but were cautious about its future missions. While the incoming administration of George W. Bush insisted on the Balkan partners’ shouldering at least a part of the international community’s peacekeeping responsibilities, the latter dragged

Table 5.1 SEDM/MPFSEE in facts and figures Political components Committee of foreign ministers

Decision on participation in peacekeeping operations.

Committee of defence ministers

Meets annually to review the initiative and discuss political and military issues.25

Committee of chiefs of staff

Discusses military-technical issues and has advisory functions.

Politico-Military Steering Committee

Meets twice a year. Makes proposals for deployment to the foreign ministers. Rotating presidents: Greece (1999–2001), Romania (2001–03), Turkey (2003–05), Albania (2005–07), Macedonia (2007–09), Bulgaria (2009–11)

Military components Military command South East European Brigade (SEEBRIG)

6 officers from the participating countries headed by brigadier general, convening during joint activities; nucleus staff based in the HQ.27

Engineer Task Force26

11 mechanized and 3 light infantry companies (3000–4000 troops) stationed in the respective home countries. The brigade is assembled only during joint exercises.28


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their feet. As this line was enunciated by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the Antalya ministerial (20 December 2001), it provoked concern that the US was disengaging from the Balkans.30 Non-NATO members considered that the MPFSEE’s most important function was to advance their relationship with the Alliance, rather than to take ownership of regional stability (Bourantonis and Tsakonas, 2003, pp. 78–9). The conflict between the Skopje government and the guerrillas of the ethnic Albanian National Liberation Army in 2001 tested the limits of the MPFSEE. An extraordinary SEDM session was convened in Skopje on 5 April to discuss possible collective responses. According to reports, talks revolved a Bulgarian-Greek initiative to deploy the MPFSEE/SEEBRIG in Macedonia, either independently or as an adjunct to the Kosovo-based KFOR. The proposal resulted from consultations between the two countries’ defence ministers, followed by a visit by Prime Minister Kostov to Athens on 2–3 April.31 The MPFSEE military command reacted positively: on 4 April, General Zorlu declared that the brigade was prepared to patrol the border between Macedonia and Kosovo, yet adamantly ruled out any engagement in the ongoing hostilities.32 The Bulgarian–Greek initiative was, vetoed, however, by Albania whose deputy defence minister opposed any SEDM involvement in either Kosovo or Macedonia, arguing that NATO should remain in charge.33 This stance was informed by suspicions that Bulgaria and Greece were biased in favour of the Georgievski government in Skopje. Both countries had supplied armaments to the Macedonian forces, while President Petar Stoyanov had also spoken about sending a Bulgarian military contingent to the conflict zone. To Albania, the SEDM option fuelled further the crisis and, as a result, the deployment of the MPFSEE/ SEEBRIG was off the agenda. Despite the political bickering, progress was made on the militarytechnical front. In May 2001, the SEDM notified the UN, OSCE and EU that the MPFSEE/SEEBRIG was prepared to take part in peace support operations. Parts of the Balkan brigade had already conducting annual exercises and participated in NATO/PfP activities. In October 2002, several weeks before NATO’s Prague Summit to decide on enlargement, the Romanian SEDM chairmanship presented to the Alliance a force package proposal of the MPFSEE capabilities available, as well as a deployment timeframe, which was subsequently ratified


by the seventh SEDM conference (Rome, 11 December 2002).34 These bold declarations, however, did not wholly correspond to the situation on the ground. The MPFSEE lacked, at that point, a fully functioning communication and information system for two out of the four HQ command posts located in different participating countries. More importantly, the SEDM states were slow to allocate sufficient funds for SEEBRIG to participate, even on short-term basis, in peace operations.35 Several years passed before the force was judged fit to be sent on a mission by the NATO Joint Force Command in Naples in 2004. It was only in February–August 2006, that the brigade’s HQ, together with a Staff and a Signal Companies (350 troops), was deployed in Kabul as part of NATO’s ISAF operation. Though no mean achievement for the Balkan unit, this is the only operational deployment to date, while SEEBRIG’s most important undertaking remain the yearly exercises which are presently coordinated by Turkey, as host of the HQ in 2007–11. SEDM enlarged and deepened SEDM enlarged towards the Western Balkans but also in the former Soviet Union. After it joined the PfP and SEDM in 2000, Croatia became an observer in the MPFSEE.36 When Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina acceded to the PfP at NATO’s Riga Summit in November 2006, they all joined SEDM as observers, rendering the institution truly regional in coverage. Serbia and Montenegro were subsequently upgraded into full membership in 2010. Further expansion brought in NATO hopefuls like post-Orange-Revolution Ukraine, which became part of SEDM in December 2005, at the first ministerial to be held in Washington. In recognition of its role, Kyiv hosted a ministerial in October 2007. Georgia and Moldova continue to attend as observers. All these new members therefore participate in the political leg of the institution, but not in the military one. Still, what is very visible is that SEDM has become, over time, a regional antechamber of NATO adding a more advanced and multilateralized dimension to the PfP. SEDM has also declared its intention to expand in scope. Beyond the MPFSEE, it currently runs several projects in fields; these include border security and non-proliferation, a simulation network, military education, research and technology, and interconnection of military hospitals. Security experts such as Jeffrey Simon, of the US National


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Defence University, have proposed that it should branch out into matters of intelligence and policing, and also engage in aiding security-sector reform at the domestic level (Simon, 2007, pp. 140–1). This would certainly raise questions about division of labour with other regional schemes dealing with these issues, notably SECI (more of which below). Such questions already arise with respect to the EU’s own Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), which already has a Balkan dimension thanks to the 1,500-strong battle-group, launched by Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Cyprus (HELBROC) in July 2007 (with Slovenia joining subsequently). All in all, SEDM and the MPFSEE/SEEBRIG started as prime examples of rhetorical or ‘showcase’ regionalism. Politically, the MPFSEE had considerable symbolic value as evidence of the Balkans’ shift from rivalry to cooperative security. During the 1998 Skopje ministerial, William Cohen hailed the MPFSEE agreement as historic and heralding a new era for South East Europe.37 The forum’s contribution to peacekeeping in the region is secondary at best, as proven by its deployment in Kabul rather than Kosovo. Its chief function has been to assist the PfP militaries implement NATO standards by various means and the development of technical projects, all under US tutelage. As an extension of NATO and Washington’s policy of alliance-building in post-communist Europe, SEDM has proven a magnet for other countries further afield, for example, Ukraine. While this eastward turn dilutes the Balkan colouring of the scheme, it underscores its embeddedness in the Western strategy of projecting stability across Europe’s periphery. Security and defence cooperation within EAPC SEDM’s activities have been running parallel to other NATO-driven schemes inside the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC). SEDM countries launched the South East Europe Security Cooperation Steering Group (SEEGROUP) when they met on the margins of the Stability Pact Working Table 3 (WT3) meeting in Sofia (October 2000). Part of the reason was that the SP had turned out to be a disappointment when it came to defence cooperation, since it allocated little attention or funds in the area. SEEGROUP was embraced by Bosnia and Herzegovina, still not part of the PfP and, after May 2001, by Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) (Noev, 2002). It drew support from NATO countries (US, UK, Italy, Greece, and Norway) as well as


from Austria and Switzerland, all of whom joined as full members. Its key achievement was the South East Europe Common Assessment Paper on Regional Security Challenges and Opportunities (SEECAP), a joint strategic document adopted in Budapest in May 2001. The paper articulated a common security vision of the region, identifying common threats: notably the weakness of institutions and the spread of transnational crime.38 The paper put it clearly that no South East European state saw its neighbours as posing a military threat, a significant statement given the Balkans’ recent and more distant history. In addition, the participating governments highlighted a set of risks necessitating joint responses. This shared vision of Balkan security, however, was not a sufficient reason to pursue region-specific cooperation arrangements. SEECAP focused on Euro-Atlantic integration as the optimal way to tackle risks. Institutionalized at the ambassadorial level in 2005, SEEGROUP was conceived as an upgrade of NATO’s South East Europe Initiative (SEEI) that had already been running for a number of years (see Chapter 2). The release of SEECAP helped the group launch, from 2001 onwards, various projects in assorted areas such as a comparative study of defence policies, crisis management, border security management, civil-military relations, security-sector reforms, fighting terrorism and defence planning (cf. Pop, 2003, pp. 118–9). With the inclusion of Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the PfP (and SEDM), however, SEEGROUP lost a great deal of its raison d’être as a bridge between those three countries and NATO. Its role as a regional framework also overlaps with the activities of the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC) which sponsored, in 2008–9, multilateral dialogue by ministries of defence in South East Europe.39

The new security agenda in the Balkans The turn towards JHA The launch of the SP in 1999 added new dimensions of security cooperation in South East Europe. The NATO framework remained the principal institutional anchor for initiatives in fields such as defence, peacekeeping operations and so forth. But the EU and the other backers of the Pact perceived a need to address issues like corruption, trans-border crime, illegal trafficking, and migration management – all of which had become prominent in the region,


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and had spilled over into Western Europe (see Chapter 1).40 The SP’s WT3 featured a subtable on JHA reflecting the assumption that many challenges had to be tackled at the regional level. Due to Serbia’s central position in the region, a truly Balkan set of initiatives became possible only after Slobodan Miloševic´’s ouster in October 2000. The Zagreb Summit (November 2000) launched a joint EU-Western Balkans consultative body on JHA and earmarked CARDS funds for projects in that policy-area. The SP initiated an expert-level forum on organized crime (SPOC) coordinated by Austria, a country concerned about the issue owing to its location close to the Western Balkans. SPOC was a peer-review mechanism, which oversaw the transposition into domestic legislation of international instruments such as the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, as well as its two additional protocols on human trafficking and illegal migration.41 There was a perceptible duplication with the tasks assigned to the US-supported SECI. In May 1999, SECI members Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania and Turkey signed an agreement to open regional centre on cross-border crime in Bucharest. Opened in 2001 and housed in the massive Casa Popurului (alongside the country’s Chamber of Deputies and other institutions), the centre’s task has been to help the exchange of information among 15 liaison officers seconded by participating interior ministries and customs authorities. Their work is supported by a number of issue-specific taskforces as well as by a Prosecutors Advisory Group (SEEPAG) based in Belgrade.42 While the centre scored practical results,43 initial assessments indicated that participating countries commitment was limited, especially concerning financial contributions.44 Even under these constraints, SECI centre was, from the outset, judged more successful than SPOC, not least because of its more inclusive list of participants – from Hungary to Turkey – rather than the Western Balkans only. It was credited, for example, with a series of multi-country operations leading to the neutralization of human trafficking, smuggling and drug networks over the period 2002–9 (Matei, 2009, p. 13). As a result, SPOC came under pressure to coordinate more effectively with SECI, and in late 2003, it established a permanent secretariat, which was hosted by the Bucharest centre. Such efforts at streamlining were only half-successful because of the


copious bilateral programmes run by the EU, the Council of Europe and other institutions involved in South East Europe (Pop, 2003, p. 113). Like SPOC, the impact of other WT3 taskforces within the SP was limited, because their chief goal was managing bilateral donor assistance rather than fostering regional cooperation. They were geared towards common problems, as opposed to tranasnational/regional problems requiring joint action.45 A good example was the Pact’s anti-corruption initiative (SPAI) supported by OECD. SPAI initiated a series of projects aimed at the implementation of international anti-corruption standards, the promotion of transparency in public administrations, and, generally, the advance of good governance. Its efforts were complementary to the Regional School of Public Administration that opened at Danilovgrad in Montenegro (May 2006) with CARDS funding.46 However, SPAI was little more than a peer-review mechanism, with limited implementation monitoring capacity (a regional liaison office in Sarajevo), whose programmes duplicated those of other agencies.47 This was the reason why RCC, the successor of the SP, convened in September 2008 a conference in Sarajevo to work out synergies by the multiple regional organizations and initiatives involved in JHA issues, not least SPAI, which had been renamed, as of October 2007, ‘Regional Anticorruption Initiative’ in line with the trend towards ownership of cooperation.48 Institutionalizing JHA cooperation As soft security came to the top of the agenda, the 2000s saw movement towards cooperation from within the region too. In December 2001, the interior ministers of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Romania, Turkey and FR Yugoslavia agreed to share police information and strengthen border controls in order to combat cross-border crime.49 In the wake of the a high-profile conference on Balkan organized crime, hosted in London on 25 November 2002 by the UK Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Belgrade organized a meeting of the region’s interior ministers in March 2003 under SEECP; this was followed by two further conferences in Sarajevo.50 Subsequent annual gatherings, typically attended also by the EU Home Affairs Commissioner, institutionalized dialogue among the interior and justice departments in national executives, though the implementation of joint projects was delegated to


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the RCC. The RCC has sought to cooperate with the SECI centre in Bucharest. The first outcome of this link is the upgrade of the SECI unit into a South East European Law Enforcement Centre (SELEC), with an intergovernmental convention signed on 9 December 2009, a project which had been underway since 2007.51 The new agreement solved the data protection issue that previously had prevented full interoperability with Europol, one of the EU agencies steering the process.52 There is a trend towards intensified cooperation, centred on the Western Balkans as opposed to wider South East Europe. In June 2001, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and FR Yugoslavia signed a special agreement along the lines of the Palermo Convention on human trafficking; and in February 2002, the three interior ministers agreed on a set of joint measures by the respective police forces.53 The establishment of regional bodies such as the Public Prosecutors’ Network (PROSECO, established in March 2005) or the South East European Police Chief Association (SEPCA), originally initiated by the SP, has put those coordination efforts on a more permanent basis.54 The RCC has also assisted the establishment of the Secretariat of the Police Cooperation Convention (PCC) for South East Europe, located in Ljubljana (September 2008). It is hard to judge how successful such initiatives have been in tackling cross-border threats. Unresolved status issues and deadlocked reforms, such as the endless saga concerning the creation of a unified police force in Bosnia, have created grey zones, both in geographical and institutional terms, which in turn weaken the impact of intergovernmental coordination. In addition, even if corruption and crime are a trans-border issue, the key locus of institution-building and transformation remains the domestic arena. The unequal progress towards the EU, and the variable capacity of national governments to secure the rule of law, are also bound to dilute cooperation. For instance, the absence of data protection legislation in some Balkan countries initially prevented the exchange of information between the SECI centre and both Europol and national law enforcement agencies.55 However, there have been high-profile cases where intergovernmental frameworks have yielded visible results. Following the car-bomb assassination of Ivo Pukanic´, a prominent investigative journalist working the Zagreb weekly Nacional, on 23 October 2008,


Serbian and Croatian police were able to arrest members of a criminal network operating in both countries. The trial opened in February 2010, a few days after one of the indicted surrendered to the police in Banjaluka, Bosnia and Herzegovina.56 Another trial, against the Serbian underworld boss Sreten Jocic´ (Joca Amsterdam), who is implicated in the murder of Pukanic´ (who had written widely on the Balkan tobacco mafia), is set to start in Belgrade at a special court on serious crime.57 Cooperation in matters of justice has also made inroads into sensitive issues such as the war crimes committed in the 1990s. There is now a web of agreements between the War Crimes Prosecutor in Serbia and the Prosecutors General in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Significantly, regional cooperation has been singled out by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as a precondition for delegating cases to national authorities. As Milica Delevic´ notes, at times cooperation faces constraints. As a rule, countries in the Western Balkans have constitutional clauses prohibiting the extradition of their nationals. This prevents prosecutors and judges from effectively investigating and hearing cases, given that more often than not indictees hold the passport of another post-Yugoslav state. In some bilateral relations this has not been a problem: for instance, Croatia has consented to Montenegro trying cases for war crimes committed on its territory, for example, during the siege of Dubrovnik in late 1991 (Delevic´, 2007, p. 74). Intergovernmental agreements such as the two treaties signed by Bosnia and Herzegovina with Croatia and Serbia in February 2010, which work out measures for preventing dual citizens from evading justice by crossing the border, is certainly a step in the right direction.58 Liberalizing visa regimes The field of policy regarding visas and free movement of people is of particular importance. The liberalization of travel within the region – an issue lying at the intersection between law enforcement and economic integration – has been, from the very outset, tied to the question of visa-free access to the Schengen Zone, which was instituted in 1995 and later brought into the EU framework by the Amsterdam Treaty (1997). The aspiration to join the EU led to the erection of new barriers across South East Europe. By the early


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2000s, regional frontrunners like Bulgaria and Romania had imposed visas on Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were seen as sources and channels for illegal migrants into the EU. To align with the EU policies, Romania introduced visas to citizens of then Serbia Montenegro in 2004, while Bulgaria did the same at in relation to neighbouring Serbia and Macedonia only on 1 January 2007, the date of its accession. With the 2007 enlargement, the Western Balkans transformed into an enclave within the Union’s territory. With the exception of Croatia, their citizens needed to go through a long and costly procedure to obtain visas and enter EU territory. The situation mirrored that of Turkey, another membership aspirant. Turkish citizens needed visas to enter the EU, but could access all non-members in the Balkans (save Serbia) either visa-free or by buying a permit at the border.59 Progress towards intra-regional liberalization was slow, and was achieved on a bilateral, rather than multilateral, basis. Benefiting from visa-free travel into Kosovo, Albania negotiated flexible arrangements with Montenegro and Macedonia, enabling citizens to obtain entry permits issued at border crossings.60 As a goodwill gesture, the Croatian government temporarily lifted visa requirement for citizens of Serbia and Montenegro during the summer season of 2003, but thereafter the arrangement was extended at the end of each year. Croatian nationals could enter Bosnia and Herzegovina on their ID card, and a reciprocity arrangement operated between Bosnia and Serbia and Montenegro. In other words, for the most part, exYugoslavs moved freely across the territory of the former federation in the 2000s.61 The EU Council launched negotiations on visa facilitation and readmission agreements with the Western Balkan countries only in November 2006, deciding a year later, in January 2008, that rather than facilitation – involving lower cost and shortened processing times – liberalization was the ultimate goal for Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Albania. After protracted negotiations, roadmaps, and the fulfilment of a range of institutional and policy conditions (e.g., the readmission agreements and introduction of biometric passports) in December 2009 citizens of Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia were enabled to travel to the Schengen area visa-free. This liberalized travel to the Union’s member states in the Balkans, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. Disappointed at having been left out, Albania


and Bosnia and Herzegovina struck, in March 2009, an agreement on the abolition of visas. EU interior ministries decided to lift the visa requirement for the two countries in November 2010. Lacking even a roadmap for visa liberalization, Kosovo is the only country to be left out. Still, Kosovars, who hold mostly passports issued by UNMIK, can travel freely to all neighbouring countries.

Origins and dynamics of security cooperation in South East Europe External push for cooperation has been a particularly potent factor in the security field. Outside actors such as NATO, the US and the EU have been closely involved in the establishment, agenda-setting and resourcing policy initiatives and regional bodies involved in that sector of intergovernmental action. First, external institutional links have determined the membership of such schemes: Croatia, FR Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) and Bosnia and Herzegovina were long excluded from SEDM owing to their non-involvement in the PfP. The aspiration to move closer to NATO and consolidate the alignment with the US, in contrast, brought in the likes of Ukraine and Georgia. Second, external push also defined the institutional design of cooperation. The US played a critical role in promoting multilateral politico-military cooperation from the mid-1990s onwards. Likewise, the SP donors and especially the EU were the principal reasons for multilateral structures to emerge in the policy-area of JHA in the wake of the Kosovo war. Where it existed prior to the mid-1990s, defence collaboration took place bilaterally and was often hard to distinguish from the alliance-building strategies of key players such as Greece and Turkey. Third, the external initiatives defined the content of cooperation. The emphasis on soft-security issues related to transnational crime, corruption, illegal trafficking and migration was clearly linked with the preferences of the EU and its individual member states. That in turn has contributed to the deepening degree of institutionalization through intergovernmental platforms such as the EU–Western Balkan JHA dialogue, the SP’s initiatives on organized crime and corruption, the RCC, the professional associations of police and prosecutors, and so on.


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By contrast, intra-Balkan functional demands for cooperation, though visible in the ministerial conferences under SEECP, have not been a sufficient condition for cooperation to advance. Security agendas and perceptions differ across wider South East Europe, which has constrained a priori the formation of a truly multilateral regime on a regional scale. For instance, while Turkey and Greece have faced a set of traditional challenges stemming from a territorial dispute and military balance, the Western Balkans are beset by dysfunctional institutions concerning the rule of law, with only Kosovo remaining a hard-security issue. Finally, the presence of overarching security institutions such as NATO or even OSCE has limited the scope of bottom-up regional endeavours for security-regime creation. As in other policy sectors, interdependence has driven Balkan governments to cooperate in smaller, more homogenous groups: a trend evident both in the CSBM arrangements in the early 1990s and some of the intra-Yugoslav JHA bilateral and trilateral agreements of in the 2000s. Even where states faced common issues and threats, security interdependence has not been limited within the geographical borders of South East Europe. Threats like transnational crime have spilled over into core countries in Western Europe, a reason for the Union’s attention to the subject in relation to the post-communist Balkan countries. That is why, to be fully functional, regional bodies such as the SECI centre in Bucharest have been supported by the broadest possible array of actors, including EU agencies, member states, international institutions, and the US. By virtue of the nature of the transnational linkages in focus, cooperation on issues related to the rule of law therefore has come close to the model of open regionalism (as advocated by authors such as Christophe Solioz [2008]), where Balkan networks are inserted into wider networks at the European and global level. Balkan governments have taken part in security fora such as SEDM and SEEGROUP in order to strengthen links with NATO and the US, advance security-sector reforms and implement military-technical standards to meet the Alliance’s membership conditionality. Regionspecific objectives such as the participation in peacekeeping activities or the development of multilateral arms control regimes have been of secondary importance. In a similar vein, the abolition of visa regimes with the EU has topped the agenda of South East European countries, with the liberalization of intra-regional arrangements


coming as an afterthought and practiced on an ad-hoc, neighbourto-neighbour basis. The empirical evidence presented in the chapter suggests that, in security affairs, identity politics have played a more pronounced role compared to the economic and functional sectors reviewed in Chapter 4. This has to do with politicization. Highly visible initiatives and institutions such as SEDM (and the multinational brigade it launched), have been underpinned by a discourse of bringing normality to the turbulent and lawless Balkans. Symptomatically, the SEECAP paper argued that the perception of South East Europe as an unstable area was a serious obstacle to integration and, therefore, a sui generis security threat. Cooperation has been an instrument for change external perceptions. In the words of a Romanian officer, SEDM and the MPFSEE were instruments, which could ‘slowly but steadily change [Balkan countries’] status, from “security consumers” to “security providers”’.62 In a 2002 interview, Ovidiu Dranga, the chairman of the SEDM political-military committee, elaborated that point further: ‘We are all presented with the image of the Balkans as the powder keg of Europe … The results of the South-East Europe initiative is deep agreement that they [the member nations] are not enemies to one another.’63 Eager to take credit for the initiatives, governments also discussed at length symbolic issues, such as naming of the MPFSEE/SEEBRIG, to ensure that the right message was conveyed to the outside world. The contingent has never had a chance to fulfil its ‘historic’ mission due to the stakeholders’ reluctance to shoulder responsibilities in Balkan hotspots. Until the 2006 deployment in Afghanistan, the MPFSEE’s significance had been related, first and foremost, to its mere presence as a cooperative security project in a conflict-prone region. Though, in purely functional terms, the MPFSEE has facilitated the adoption of NATO technical standards, the PfP states could achieve that goal by other means than a regional military force, notably through the bilateral cooperation programmes. Regional cooperation has been a value in and of itself not only because it has brought direct benefits but also because it recast the Balkan states into a part of the Western community represented by NATO and the EU.

6 Between Lofty Rhetoric and Lingering Conflicts: Political Cooperation

Summits and high-profile diplomatic conferences are, beyond doubt, the most visible part of any regional endeavour around the globe. Even if such major get-togethers do not give birth to momentous political decisions, national leaders and top officials never miss a chance to air a message to the outside world and their domestic publics – complete with the obligatory family photo. Events of that sort have marked the ebbs and flows of regionalism in South East Europe since the mid-1990s. To grasp its dynamics, one must consider not just sectoral collaboration, discussed at length in Chapters 4 and 5, but also the Balkan brand of political summitry. Originating in the immediate aftermath of the Dayton peace accords, the South East European Cooperation Process (SEECP) has emerged as a central arena of intra-regional multilateral exchanges, alongside a plethora of ad hoc consultation fora. It is now a common argument that such institutions foster ‘regional ownership’ in the multiple schemes initiated from outside the Balkans, not least through their contribution to the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC). They have furthermore improved relations among states, especially in comparison to the early 1990s when fragmentation and rival alignments were the norm. At the same time, institutions such as SEECP, for all their rhetoric in favour of pragmatic cooperation, have opted for open-ended dialogue rather than formalization and engagement in ambitious integration schemes. Whether one believes that Balkan diplomatic fora have made a real difference or sees them simply as OSCE-style talking shops, it is worth investigating their emergence, continued existence and function. Three possible scenarios might be derived from the causal factors and 129


hypotheses pinpointed in the introductory chapter. First, interdependence highlights the bottom-up convergence of interest, and the functional benefits accrued, from joint action and policy coordination. Issues of common concern – primarily economic – animated the multilateral dialogue among Balkan governments in the 1970s and 1980s, despite the Cold War divisions and the outstanding political disputes. Some might see a constant intra-regional demand for common approaches and actions, coming to the forefront again in the mid-1990s. Second, one might focus on the policies of outside sponsors of Balkan cooperation such as the EU, NATO, the US and the IFIs – all so influential in shaping sectoral cooperation. The third argument, going back to Chapter 3, links political multilateralism with the aspiration to project a rebranded image of the Balkans, or more properly South East Europe, purged of associations with ethnic conflict, virulent nationalism and economic decay. Political cooperation would thus be a local reflection of a certain (‘European’ or ‘Euro-Atlantic’) code of norms, setting scripts for appropriate state behaviour and sustaining Balkan institutions. In order to explore further these three perspectives, this chapter traces the growth and development of multilateral fora in a chronological fashion. It concentrates first on the period immediately following the conflict in Bosnia, which was marked by the appearance of SEECP in 1996 and which ended with the Kosovo war in March–June 1999. Second, it explores regional institutions’ response to key developments in the early 2000s, such as the launch of the SP and SAP in the Western Balkans, and the 2001 conflict in Macedonia. Finally, the chapter discusses the period following the 2003 Thessaloniki Summit, which saw the acceleration of the EU and NATO enlargement in South East Europe, a new emphasis on regional ownership of cooperative schemes through strengthening the role of SEECP, and crucial developments such as the 2006 independence referendum in Montenegro and the unilateral proclamation of sovereignty by Kosovo, on 18 February 2008.

Balkan multilateralism relaunched Multilateral dialogue after Dayton The meeting of foreign ministers in Tirana (October 1990) marked the end of the multilateral Balkan diplomacy of the 1970s and

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1980s. It was not until after the Dayton/Paris Peace Accords that regional cooperation would be back, owing to initiatives such as SECI and the Royaumont Plan introduced by the US and the EU. Though international attention was mostly focused on the Dayton trio, Slobodan Miloševic´, Franjo Tud¯man and Alija Izetbegovic´, who met again in Geneva in June 1996, political consultations proceeded more smoothly outside former Yugoslavia, where interests converged to a greater degree. Even before the settlement in Bosnia, on 26 August 1995, the Greek Foreign Minister Karolos Papoulias hosted his Romanian and Bulgarian counterparts Teodor Meles¸canu and Georgi Pirinski in Ioannina, next to the border with Albania. Seen as a Greek move to thwart Turkey’s advances in the Balkans, the trilateral meeting discussed economic affairs and trans-boundary infrastructure, and issued a call for an end to the damaging sanctions against FR Yugoslavia. Such meetings at the level of foreign ministers and also presidents became regular and took part each year. By 1998 they had yielded a tripartite agreement on fighting cross-border crime.1 At the same time, Sofia and Bucharest sought to engage Greece’s rival Turkey, an important regional power and potential supporter of their NATO bids. Annual summits of the three countries’ presidents kicked off in 1997, in parallel with the trilaterals conducted with Greece. It was not until the Greek–Turkish rapprochement in 1999 that Greek and Turkish leaders would be at ease holding four-way meetings with their Bulgarian and Romanian colleagues. The birth of SEECP At the margins of the Paris Peace Conference for Bosnia (13–14 December 1995), all neighbours of ex-Yugoslavia signed the Royaumont declaration pledging to work on good-neighbourly relations. In February 1996, Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Jean Videnov followed up with a proposal for a regional summit. The idea was co-championed by Greece; it was especially dear to Foreign Minister Papoulias, a participant in the Belgrade conference of 1988, who had been the architect of normalization of relations with Albania in 1987 and, more recently, the Interim Agreement with Macedonia (September 1995). The Bulgarian–Greek initiative was further cemented by the long-standing links by the ruling PASOK and Videnov’s Bulgarian Socialist Party, heir to the once omnipotent


Communist Party. Sofia had been scheduled to host such a meeting in 1991 but the breakout of the Yugoslav conflict had cancelled the plans (Walden, 1992, p. 321). As the conference was formally reviving the pre-1990 Balkan process, all regional countries had to be involved, unlike parallel schemes as SECI, which included only the pro-Western governments, leaving out the likes of FR Yugoslavia. Videnov invited all participants in the Belgrade and Tirana ministerials plus the newly independent postYugoslav republics. The invitation to Miloševic´ was conveyed in person, during the Bulgarian premier’s visit to Belgrade in mid-February. Miloševic´ was positive, not only because of Greece’s involvement, but also because the conference was yet another instance of rump Yugoslavia’s return to the international stage after long years of isolation. It was furthermore consistent with the customary rhetoric of the regime, which portrayed Serbia as a pivotal, strategically important country in the region – a role begrudgingly recognized by the drafters of Dayton through the policy of engaging, if not accommodating, Miloševic´. Serbian attitudes were in contrast with Turkey’s. The summit’s original date in June coincided with the UN Habitat conference in Istanbul – thereby ruling out Foreign Minister Emre Gönensay’s participation – which bred suspicion of a Bulgarian–Greek–Serbian plot to marginalize Turkey.2 As Albania’s Foreign Ministry also complained that the meeting was coming too soon after the parliamentary elections in the country, Georgi Pirinski, the head of Bulgarian diplomacy, postponed the conference for 6 July 1996. Turkey despatched a lowerranking diplomat, while Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina were represented by their deputy foreign ministers. Croatia and Slovenia initially declined the invitation as they saw the initiative as an inwardlooking Balkan affair, uncomfortably reminiscent of the Yugoslav past and thus harmful for their efforts at joining the West. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Zagreb ultimately changed its stance but ensured that Croatia was present solely as an observer. The dispute between Athens and Skopje, however, caused the greatest embarrassment, when Foreign Minister Ljubomir Frcˇkovski cancelled his trip to Sofia at the very last minute, in response to the Greek insistence that the prefix ‘former Yugoslav’ had to be added to his country’s name.3 The Sofia conference, attended also by prominent international functionaries such as the High Representative in Bosnia and


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Herzegovina, Carl Bildt, was nonetheless a success by virtue of having taken place at all. Symbolism ruled the day. In his opening address, Jean Videnov called for support from the EU, stressing that the Balkan multilateral dialogue would have ‘a powerful positive impact to overcome the negative idea of the region as a zone of insecurity and conflicts, a zone substantially falling short of European criteria of democratic and stable development’. The joint declaration observed that South East Europe shared a legacy of multilateral cooperation, and set the goal of ‘transforming the region into an area of stability, security and cooperation in line with the general developments throughout Europe’.4 In line with the CSCE/OSCE postulates, ministers called for continuation of dialogue on four fronts: • Security through confidence-building measures, support for the implementation of the Bosnian peace agreement; • Trade, investment, transport and energy infrastructure, telecommunications and the environment; • Humanitarian, social, civil-society and cultural cooperation; • Justice, combating of organized crime, illicit drug and arms trafficking and the elimination of terrorism. These laudable goals were to be pursued in tandem with the EU and all other external actors engaged in South East Europe. According to the Romanian and Bulgarian foreign ministers, Balkan cooperation had to be outward-oriented and linked to broader frameworks like the Central European Initiative, Black Sea Economic Cooperation, SECI and Royaumont. This contrasted with views expressed by Greece and FR Yugoslavia, underscoring the regional dimension of the endeavour, and also echoing the populist nineteenth-century motto Balkan Balkancima (‘the Balkans to the Balkanites’), which had been revived by Miloševic´ and nationalist intellectuals in Belgrade during the years of international isolation. The rest of the countries shared a more detached perspective. Albania failed to have Kosovo mentioned in the declaration, while the Turkish representative regretted that Macedonia was not in attendance.5 Differences aside, it was clear that the process would continue. Greece’s Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos stated in Sofia: ‘[t]his is the point of no-return. Balkan cooperation is here to stay.’6 While Pangalos and the Sofia declaration referred to the Balkans, from


1997 onwards the forum opted for the heading ‘South East European Cooperation Process’ (SEECP). As also testified by the South East European Defence Ministerial (SEDM), the Balkan label was generally being avoided, as it was considered a term laden with numerous negative connotations. South East Europe, by contrast, appeared more neutral and inclusive, and therefore generally acceptable.7 Greece, which succeeded Bulgaria as presiding country, pushed for energizing SEECP. It struck a compromise with Macedonia whereby participating states would be identified solely by their flags, not names.8 The principal goal for the Foreign Ministry in Athens was institutionalization. Gathered in Thessaloniki (5–6 June 1997), foreign ministers decided to hold regular consultations at the level of political directors, discussing other measures such as meetings of trade ministers, an association of chambers of commerce, a network of centres for small- and medium-size enterprises and technology. However, Romania and Bulgaria, the latter no longer governed by the Socialists, vetoed the Greek proposal for a permanent secretariat in Athens, preferring a loose political forum to a Greek-led regional organization (Alp, 2000). Fears that Balkan entanglements might hamper EU integration were paramount, and also underpinned the references to ‘the European orientation of [the] states of this region’ in the final document. Yet the Greek chairmanship ended in a success: the first-ever allregional summit of heads of state and government in Balkan history, held on 3–4 November 1997 at the Cretan resort of Agia Pelagia.9 The symbolic weight of the event was reflected in the unprecedented media interest.10 Aware of the significance of the occasion, Balkan leaders sought to demonstrate their strong commitment towards the standards projected by the international community and emphasize the forthcoming enlargement of NATO and the EU: We consider that the European orientation of our counties is an integral part of their political, economic and social development. We aspire to transform our region into an area of co-operation and economic prosperity, and, to that effect, we decided to promote good neighbourly relations and respect for International Law. We believe that Europe cannot be complete without our countries and our peoples representing civilisations and historical traditions which are essential to the establishment of a contemporary


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European identity. European and Euro-Atlantic integration is essential in promoting the aforementioned objectives. This rhetoric was largely driven by a sense of exclusion that became growingly accentuated as Central Europeans made confident strides towards the West. After the European Commission’s negative avis, it was patent that the imminent European Council in Luxembourg was unlikely to invite either Bulgaria or Romania – the only post-communist countries in the region that had at the time association agreements – to start accession negotiations alongside frontrunners like Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia and, significantly, nearby Slovenia and Hungary. In addition, NATO’s Madrid Summit (July 1997) had stemmed the hopes for the early membership of Romania, undoubtedly the most advanced candidate of the South East European cluster, which was furthermore governed by the centre-right, proWestern Democratic Convention of President Emil Constantinescu.11 However, the pro-Euro-Atlantic tone was not palatable for everyone. There were reports that Slobodan Miloševic´ insisted on deleting an entire paragraph on NATO and advocated setting up a Balkan military alliance to manage the region’s security – a line that was expounded at the time by the Greek Defence Minister Akis Tzohadzopoulos (see Chapter 5).12 As a concession to Greece, the joint statement also mentioned the secretariat and called the foreign ministers to work for its establishment.13 The procedural rules adopted by the summit nevertheless cast SEECP as a non-institutionalized consultative forum based on annual conferences of foreign ministers and quarterly meetings at the level of political directors steered by a presidency rotating each year. Leaders also discussed hot bilateral issues. Slobodan Miloševic´ and Prime Minister Fatos Nano held the first Yugoslav-Albanian meeting of leaders since Josip Broz Tito and Enver Hoxha’s talks in 1947 (Lopandic´, 2001, p. 107). Reportedly, Miloševic´ committed himself to observe the basic human rights of the Kosovar Albanians, while Nano conceded that Kosovo was an internal Yugoslav problem, prompting ex-president Sali Berisha to accuse Nano of serving the interests of Athens and Belgrade.14 Other tête-á-têtes – Miloševic´– Kiro Gligorov (Macedonia’s president), Nano–Gligorov, Gligorov– Ivan Kostov (Bulgaria’s prime minister), and Kostas Simitis–Mesut Yılmaz – all led to nowhere.15 Crete would be remembered for its political symbolism, not its political breakthroughs.


In the shadow of Kosovo From the spring of 1998 onwards, the simmering Kosovo crisis posed a serious challenge to Balkan regional cooperation. Compared to the early 1990s, the response by the South East European states through SEECP, presided over by Turkey, was much more cohesive. On 10 March 1998, a day after the Contact Group had met in London, the foreign ministers of Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Macedonia and Romania called for ending the suppression of peaceful demonstrations, respect for human rights, renunciation of violence by ethnic Albanians, implementation of the 1996 Miloševic´–Rugova agreement on Albanian education and the restoration of Kosovo’s autonomy.16 Bulgaria’s Foreign Minister Nadezhda Mihaylova was convinced the declaration had ‘a symbolic value’, given the unity of the region.17 This assessment was exaggerated. At the Istanbul ministerial (8–9 June 1998), FR Yugoslavia’s Foreign Minister Živadin Jovanovic´ vetoed a reference to Kosovo in the final declaration, and the rest of the participants issued a separate statement expressing their ‘profound concern’.18 Yugoslavia’s intransigence was hard to swallow even for Greece; Pangalos, known for his outspoken ways, objected that concerning human rights there was ‘no such thing as “an internal matter”’.19 SEECP overcame the deadlock only after the US envoy Richard Holbrooke’s eleventh-hour mission to Belgrade on 13 October. As Miloševic´ agreed to halt police operations and let OSCE observers into Kosovo, SEECP’s second summit in Antalya succeeded in reaching a common position, which supported both FR Yugoslavia’s integrity and the restoration of Kosovo’s autonomy, in line with the UN Security Council Resolutions 1160 and 1199.20 The downbeat mood, and lowest-common-denominator output of collective deliberation, were a far cry from the triumphant rhetoric in Crete. The Financial Times noted that Momir Bulatovic´ had – unsurprisingly – spent, most of the time talking on the phone with Belgrade about the latest developments in the standoff with NATO and the US.21 SEECP was soon to be paralysed, when the Kosovo conflict exploded with renewed power in December 1998. On the eve of the impending NATO campaign against Serbia, Balkan foreign ministers held an extraordinary conference in Bucharest (19 March 1999) – not attended by either FR Yugoslavia or Albania – which urged, in vain, Belgrade authorities


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to sign the Rambouillet deal and allow an international force into Kosovo. The war marked the end of the first period of regional cooperation in the post-Cold War era. On the positive side, SEECP resuscitated Balkan multilateralism and gave it greater public prominence. However, political declarations were at odds with the outstanding conflicts cutting across South East Europe. Kosovo, in particular, seriously disrupted political dialogue, preventing SEECP members from discussing common policies on regional issues.

New beginnings Balkan states and the Stability Pact The war in Kosovo was a serious setback for regional cooperation. Serbia was de facto expelled from all initiatives, while SEECP itself had to postpone its annual ministerial in Bucharest twice. Once it took place, on 2 December, foreign ministers made it clear that Miloševic´’s regime was the real problem, a point reinforced by the Romanian Presidency’s insistence that FR Yugoslavia’s place was only ‘temporarily vacant’.22 They also hailed the Stability Pact (SP) and its promise to boost Western involvement, economic development and cooperation in the region.23 The SP was also significant, as it distinguished Montenegro from Serbia. President Milo Ðukanovic´ did his best to secure his country’s participation in the scheme, and even pledged to open the hitherto sealed borders with Albania and Croatia, to pursue common projects in the field of infrastructure and trade. The SP urged local states to reiterate their commitment to reconciliation, economic integration, and political and market reforms, as a contribution to the international effort to ‘de-balkanize the Balkans’. SEECP, listed as one of the institutions supporting the Pact, adopted the Charter for Good-Neighbourly Relations, Stability, Security and Cooperation in South East Europe at its third summit (Bucharest, 12–13 February 2000).24 Marking ‘the highest level of declarative diplomacy’ (Lopandic´, 2001, p. 110), the Charter was a cross between a code of conduct and an action plan. SEECP’s ultimate goal was ‘the Euro-Atlantic values of peace, democracy, prosperity and respect for human rights [to] take root in South-Eastern Europe’. A number of areas of cooperation, at both the bilateral and multilateral level,


were mapped out: politics and security, economics, justice and home affairs, democratization and civil society, and environmental issues. This ambitious agenda was rooted in the belief that political dialogue was meaningful only if translated into actions and projects in specific policy fields, a laudable goal, which, however, was still not in sight.25 SEECP’s functional dimension remained overshadowed by the SP and its three working tables, which were drawing international donors’ resources. The institution would continue to work mostly as a highprofile discussion forum. Still, an annex to the Charter on procedural matters envisioned meetings by sectoral ministers, in addition to the already established summits and foreign ministerials. At the same time, the document reconfirmed unanimity as a principle of decision-making, and set up a troika comprising the current, past and future chairmanship to ensure continuity. The impact of political changes in Croatia and Serbia After Croatian parliamentary elections, in January 2000, ended the decade-long rule of the late Tud¯man’s HDZ, the new governing coalition of Social Democrats and Liberals reversed the policy of boycotting regional cooperation.26 In July, Foreign Minister Tonino Picula attended the ministerial convened by the Macedonian SEECP Presidency in Ohrid. For him, ‘Croatia no longer agree[d] to play a passive role on the international scene, and Southeast Europe [wa]s a region it want[ed] to be more present in than before.’ Picula also noted that the very name SEECP, where ‘Balkans’ was replaced by ‘South East Europe’, was an ‘open invitation to Croatia and its government to in some way leave behind all prejudices and uncertainties which encumbered Croatia not long ago’. With the proviso that Croatia was a country bordering South East Europe, he nonetheless promised that his country would contribute to the faster improvement of the region’s image.27 Croatia turned from observer into a fully fledged participant, though it officially became a SEECP member only in 2004. Macedonia’s chairmanship-in-office culminated in the re-integration of Serbia into regional institutions – facilitated by the spectacular fall of Slobodan Miloševic´ on 5 October 2000, which was cheered by many as the long-awaited breakthrough in South East Europe. FR Yugoslavia’s new president, Vojislav Koštunica, was welcomed into SEECP at an extraordinary summit held in Skopje on 25 October 2000 attended by the Balkan political A-list as well as the EU High


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Representative for Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana and the US President’s special envoy Richard Holbrooke. The summit also welcomed Bosnia and Herzegovina as a full member. With pro-Western governments in power across the ex-communist Balkans, post-conflict reconstruction could give way to economic development and integration into the EU and NATO. The EU seemed more responsive than ever: it launched membership talks with Romania and Bulgaria in January 2000 and offered the Western Balkans association agreements at the Zagreb Summit in November (see Chapter 2). A second summit convened in Skopje (22–3 February 2001) was held back-to-back with an economic forum attended by the SEECP ministers of economy and trade and representatives of the business community.28 Trade liberalization, infrastructure development and foreign investment promotion were identified as areas for joint action, especially after Serbia had also joined the SP as a beneficiary and was made eligible for CARDS funding. Things were more complex at a second glance. It was clear that the SP funders, be they states or international agencies, not SEECP, were to play the leading role regional projects. The Skopje summit supported the Romanian initiative to hold a second donors’ meeting in Bucharest during the first half of 2001 – a reminder that external actors continued to foot the bill. Bodo Hombach, the SP coordinator, articulated a different approach, stressing the regional dimension. His message was ‘help yourself so that we can help you’29 and he criticized governments’ viewing regional cooperation as a hurdle on the road to the EU and NATO.30 Bulgaria and Romania had already expressed reservations about being packaged together with the troublesome ex-Yugoslav republics (Stefanova, 2001). Croatia continued to argue that any formalization of relations in the region would lead to unwanted ghettoization.31 Regional integration could only be a by-product of the shared effort to join the EU. The Macedonian Parliament’s Speaker, Stojan Andov captured that mood: ‘[t]he desired regional cooperation is not and cannot be a substitute for our integration into European structures. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, building new barriers is simply unacceptable’.32 The crises in southern Serbia and Macedonia, 2000–1 The second Skopje summit had to confront the developments in the Preševo Valley in southern Serbia, adjacent to the border with


Macedonia, where Albanian guerillas and Serb security forces were clashing.33 While most attendees supported the peace plan proposed by Belgrade and denounced the Albanian paramilitaries, Tirana dissented.34 President Rexhep Meidani declined to participate in the summit and dispatched Prime Minister Ilir Meta whose intervention helped tone town the closing declaration.35 Meta also opposed Koštunica’s advocacy for the return of Serbia’s military and police to UNMIK-run Kosovo. Tensions rose again with the conflict between the ethnic Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA) and the government in Skopje, escalating in the spring of 2001. SEECP foreign ministers met extraordinarily in Skopje on 12 April, on the initiative of the US Secretary of State Colin Powell, and subsequently in Tirana (16 May 2001). They called on ‘Albanian extremist groups’ to end violence, release hostages and lay down arms, but refrained from using the word ‘terrorists’ despite Macedonia’s insistence.36 Albanian Foreign Minister Paskal Milo supported the neighbouring country’s territorial integrity but did not shy away from blocking its diplomatic moves.37 Ultimately, SEECP dignitaries agreed that speedy integration into the EU and NATO was key for dealing with the crisis.38 The regional forum continued to be held hostage by neighbourhood squabbles. In August 2001, Macedonia’s Defence Minister Vlado Bucˇkovski accused Albania of training, and supplying arms to, the NLA guerrillas. The ensuing cool-down of diplomatic ties was aggravated by a further scandal. As SEECP Chairman-in-Office, Milo issued a statement to welcome the Ohrid Framework Agreement ending the conflict. He had consulted a number of Balkan capitals, including Belgrade, but not Skopje. In response, the Macedonian foreign office sent official letters to all SEECP states accusing Albania of ‘hijacking’ the forum.39 Overall, the Macedonian crisis demonstrated unequivocally SEECP’s inherent limits as a regional pacifier, a role it had consistently claimed over the years. Expanding SEECP’s scope The implementation of the Ohrid Agreement under Western tutelage eased tensions, and the SEECP regular summit (Tirana, 28 March 2002) could concentrate on priorities such as the creation of a regional electricity market, the interconnection of the national power grids, and the fight against terrorism and organized crime.40


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Attended for the first time by the head of UNMIK, Michael Steiner, the summit de facto integrated Kosovo in SEECP– a priority for Albania. It was one more step in Croatia’s re-engagement with its neighbourhood, as President Stjepan (Stipe) Mesic´ also made his maiden appearance in the forum. It was in Tirana that regional ownership was identified as a chief goal for South East European institutions. In his address, Greek Premier Kostas Simitis stated that in order to be effective SEECP should be upgraded and turn from a political process into a full-fledged regional body.41 The objective of making SEECP more efficient was advanced by Serbia and Montenegro, succeeding Albania at the helm. During the inaugural Belgrade ministerial (19 June 2002) Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic´, a high-profile figure in the anti-Miloševic´ opposition of the 1990s, described the process’ purposes in the following manner: we need regional responses to regional problems. In that sense, the South-East European Cooperation Process should play a very important role and become our common voice as an autochthonous process of regional cooperation.42 He welcomed the newly launched troika formed by representatives of the SEECP Chairman-in-Office, the European Commission, and the SP Special Coordinator, and intended to ensure better coordination among the various cooperative schemes, and he called for an enhanced SEECP role in policy-areas like trade and investment, border security and combating organized crime.43 Serbia and Montenegro hosted several sectoral ministerials, a practice that was continued by the Romanian presidency in 2004–5, and that would become standard and expand in the years to follow.44 While everyone subscribed to the idea to upgrade SEECP and make the regional countries collectively responsible for managing their own affairs45, it was still unclear how to divide labour between the process and the externally driven initiatives (SP, SECI and others). Despite Simitis’ suggestions, formal institutionalization, an idea that had been dropped in 1997, was not in sight. SEECP did not do much beyond providing political support for initiatives such as the free-trade zone and the common electricity market scheme, both proposed, designed and guided by the European Commission (see Chapter 4).


The Balkans on the road to membership in NATO and the EU The year 2003 marked another turning point in Balkan regional cooperation. With the impending eastern enlargement, South East Europe had become even more firmly drawn into the EU’s orbit. The Greek Presidency of the EU Council, in the first half of the year, sought to strengthen the Union’s commitment to further expansion towards the Western Balkans and an upgrade of the Stabilization and Association Process (SAP), equipping it with the political and technical toolbox of eastern enlargement. For their part, Bulgaria and Romania, though separated from the 2004 entrants, had managed to secure at the Copenhagen Summit (December 2002) a pledge for accession in 2007 or 2008 at the latest. The two countries were furthermore making confident strides towards NATO membership, having also stood by the US in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘New Europe’. The region’s gravitation towards Western institutions reinforced regional cooperation, as it toned down apprehension that Balkan entanglements diverted attention from the key foreign-policy priority of joining NATO and the EU. At the same time, as discussed in Chapter 2, developments called into question institutions, such as the SP, that dated back to the post-conflict stage. It emphasized flexible forms of political cooperation, notably within the Western Balkans, as well as the shift towards ‘regional ownership’ of cooperative institutions through the linkage between the SP and SEECP in the framework of the RCC. The variable geometry of political cooperation From the early 2000s on, the variable speed of EU and NATO integration tended to favour ‘less-than-regional’, thematic fora to the allencompassing SEECP multilaterals. Thus, Greece and Turkey, entering a phase of rapprochement after 1999, launched the ‘two-by-two’ consultations with NATO hopefuls Romania and Bulgaria. In the run-up to the Alliance’s Prague Summit (November 2002), the four countries’ foreign ministers met in Istanbul (13 February) and then Athens (29 March) to support its extension towards the south-east.46 This example was replicated by other subgroups. At the Prague Summit, Croatia, Albania and Macedonia, next in the membership


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queue, proposed a joint strategy for NATO accession, modelled on the 1998 Baltic Charter implemented by Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Signed by Foreign Ministers Tonino Picula, Ilinka Mitreva and Ilir Meta, in May 2003, the new Adriatic Charter set out a programme for coordinating policies in the security sector in order to meet NATO’s entry criteria.47 The document was countersigned by US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who attended the launch in Tirana. The Charter paved the way to the integration into NATO of the three countries, with Albania and Croatia receiving invitations in April 2008, while Macedonia was vetoed by Greece. The grouping grew over time. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro joined in December 2008, after they entered the PfP, while Serbia has remained an observer. ‘Subregionalization’ of cooperative schemes illustrated the prominence of divisions rooted in the differentiation promoted by eastern enlargement. The landmark EU–Western Balkans summit in Thessaloniki (21 June 2003), convened by the Greek Presidency, elicited a coordinated response by the target countries, but not by Bulgaria and Romania who could already foresee the closure of accession negotiations in 2004 and membership in 2007. In March 2003, a joint letter by Stipe Mesic´, Boris Trajkovski, Macedonia’s president, and Zoran Živkovic´, who had just replaced the assassinated Zoran Ðind¯ic´ as Serbian premier, was published in Financial Times. On 2 June 2003, Trajkovski convened a Western Balkan conference in Ohrid, which argued for an open-door policy by the EU while pledging to step up cooperation, particularly in areas such as fighting organized crime. This was a show of solidarity in the run-up to Thessaloniki, but was frowned upon by Greece, which was not directly involved in steering the process.48 The Western Balkan focus also reflected the denser webs of interdependence across former Yugoslavia. Since the threshold year of 2000, some crucial steps had been made. On 11 April 2001, representatives of the then five successor states signed an agreement in Brussels that accepted the IMF-proposed formula for the division of former Yugoslavia’s assets.49 On 27 June 2001, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and FR Yugoslavia signed, under the auspices of the SP, an agreement for the return of the refugees from the 1990s wars, covering issues like citizenship, property rights, housing, international assistance and reconstruction. In July 2002, Presidents Stipe Mesic´ and Vojislav Koštunica met, in Sarajevo, the three members of Bosnia’s collective presidency, Beriz Belkic´, Živko Radišic´ and Jozo


Krizanovic´ to discuss the return of refugees, economic cooperation and cross-border crime, and to sign an agreement on cooperation with the ICTY. Such declarations were followed by institutional and policy measures (intergovernmental taskforce, national roadmaps) but, as reported by Milica Delevic´, progress was slow. The goal of 2006, for solving the refugee and IDP issue, was not met, and the issue remains unresolved. A number of issues, for example, the tenancy rights of Croatian Serb minority members, remain outstanding – a state of affairs confirmed by the 2009 regular reports on Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro by the European Commission.50 Another obstacle is Kosovo’s exclusion from the process, which leaves out Serbian and Roma expellees (Delevic´, 2007, p. 75). Such moves were facilitated by symbolically important actions such as the exchange of apologies, during a visit to Belgrade in September 2003 by Stipe Mesic´, between the Croatian president and Svetozar Marovic´ (president of the loose Serbo-Montenegrin entity that had been instituted in 2002–3 under EU pressure) for the suffering inflicted in the 1990s wars. Two months later Marovic´ issued a similar apology, on behalf of Serbia and Montenegro, to the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina.51 Given Marovic´’s association with Montenegro, much more significant were the words of remorse offered by Boris Tadic´, president of Serbia, to Bosnia and Herzegovina on 6 December 2004, as well as the Serbian Parliament’s resolution – narrowly adopted on 31 March 2010 – to denounce the genocide at Srebrenica. Newly elected Croatian President Ivo Josipovic´ delivered his own apology while visiting Sarajevo on 13 April 2010; he also acknowledged the massacre of 100 Bosniaks, by Bosnian Croat forces, at the village of Ahmicí in central Bosnia in April 1993.52 These steps towards facing up to the difficult past, catalysed by the wish to move closer to the EU, have played a key role in deepening regional cooperation, in spite of bitter memories and lingering grievances. Prominent examples include the genocide cases at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), originally launched by Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia against FR Yugoslavia,53 and assorted border demarcation disputes: most significantly, those over the territorial waters in the Gulf of Piran that led Slovenia to block Croatia’s membership negotiations with the EU between December 2008 and September 2009. Other disputes include those over the Prevlaka Peninsula (Montenegro–Croatia), the islets of Veliki and Mali Skoj


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and the valley of Una River (Bosnia and Herzegovina–Croatia), the islets of Vukovar and Šarengrad in the Danube (Croatia–Serbia),and Kosovo’s boundaries with Montenegro. SEECP and regional ownership By the time Greece assumed the SEECP chairmanship in May 2005, the notions of regional ownership and streamlining regional schemes enjoyed wide acceptance. Meeting in Sofia in May 2005, the SP’s Regional Table mandated a senior review group, chaired by Ambassador Alpo Russi of Finland, Goran Svilanovic´ (since November 2004 leading WT1 on Democratization and Human Rights), Vladimir Drobnjak (a high-ranking Croatian diplomat who had chaired WT3 on Security), and Franz-Lothar Altmann, a fellow at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin. The 2006 Regional Table in Belgrade endorsed the group’s report, calling for the integration of the SP and SEECP. Elements from the SP would work as the functional arm of regional cooperation; a ‘substance-oriented’ approach, in Altmann’s words (Altmann, 2007, 114). It would furthermore institutionalize cooperation. For its part, SEECP would provide political leadership, in lieu of the Regional Table, which involved senior national officials rather than ministers or heads of state/government. A year of intense intergovernmental bargaining followed. Balkan countries accepted that, collectively, SEECP should contribute onethird of the new RCC’s annual budget – about a1m. The remaining two-thirds were to be covered, in equal shares, by the EU and the International Financial Institutions. This money was allocated principally for the operational costs of the RCC Secretariat and the small liaison office in Brussels. There were, however, squabbles over the Secretariat’s seat, with Belgrade’s early bid being voted down. At an informal meeting in Plovdiv (September 2007), SEECP foreign ministers settled in favour of Sarajevo. Serbia’s candidature had been in part undermined by the Koštunica cabinet’s withdrawal of Svilanovic´’s nomination as Secretary General of the RCC. Considered a frontrunner, Svilanovic´ had fallen out of favour with the government due to his support for Kosovo’s independence, which was in the spotlight due to his participation in the International Commission for the Balkans chaired by Guliano Amato. (That was despite, or perhaps owing to, his being born in the Kosovar town of Gnjilane). The SEECP yearly summit (Zagreb, May 2007), held back-to-back with a session of the SP


Regional Table, selected Hidajet (Hido) Bišcˇevic´, a Bosniak confidante of Croatia’s premier Ivo Sanader, who had been part of the Croatian diplomatic service since 1992.54 Bosnia and Croatia, two countries that had shunned the incipient SEECP conferences in the mid-1990s, had now moved the centre-stage of regional cooperation. The RCC was officially inaugurated at the closing meeting of the SP Regional Table in Sofia on 27 February 2008. It also included new members Moldova (which signed the SEECP Charter in October 2006 – in Bucharest, rather than in Croatia which held the chairmanship at the time) and now independent Montenegro, formally accepted into the regional forum in 2007. The Secretariat and the Liaison Office, headed by Stanislav Daskalov, one-time Bulgaria’s ambassador to the EU, became functional too.55 Nearly a decade after the launch of the Pact, Balkan governments seemed to be in the driving seat of regionalism – just at the moment when Slovenia held the Presidency of the EU Council. SEECP’s Charter was duly amended in 2007 to include a reference to the RCC as the scheme’s operational branch. An ambitious plan was drafted, singling out five areas for joint projects: economic and social development (investment, trade, employment, health, etc.); infrastructure and energy; JHA; security and defence; and human capital (science, education, parliamentary cooperation.) (see Table 6.1 below).56 This upbeat assessment should be taken with a pinch of salt. The most significant sectoral policies were largely coordinated by the European Commission while the greatest chunk of RCC funding comes from outside South East Europe. The share is even more significant if one takes into account the financing of specific country projects, an area where the significance of external vehicles such as the multi-beneficiary component of EU’s Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) is paramount.57 As Alessandro Rotta notes, having a Secretary General from within the region works both ways. Erhard Busek was perceived as an impartial mediator whereas Bišcˇevic´ has arrived as a Croatian appointee (Rotta, 2008, p. 69). SEECP in the wake of Kosovo’s independence declaration That the talk of ownership and maturity was not fully substantiated was proven by SEECP’s response to Kosovo’s unilateral proclamation of independence on 17 February 2008. The event exposed rifts across South East Europe. Albania and Turkey extended recognition immediately and EU members Slovenia and Bulgaria, as well as Croatia,


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Table 6.1 The Regional Cooperation Council at a glance Participants

Regional countries: SEECP members, Kosovo/UNMIK International institutions: EU (represented by the Council Presidency, the Commission, and the Council Secretariat), NATO, OECD, OSCE, UN, UNECE, UNDP Financial institutions: European Investment Bank, EBRD, World Bank Donor countries: Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US Cooperation schemes: SECI

Board

Participants contributing to the Secretariat’s budget; SEECP members, Austria, Czech Republic, EU, Germany, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Kosovo/UNMIK, USA

Secretariat

25 officials in the Sarajevo HQ; 7 at the Liaison Office in Brussels

Process

RCC annual meetings of national coordinators (senior civil servants), quarterly meetings of the Board prepared by the Secretary General and the SEECP Chairman-in-Office

followed suit in March. Montenegro and Macedonia joined the proindependence group on 9 October. Other countries, such as Greece, Romania and Cyprus (not a SEECP member) stood firmly behind Serbia’s insistence on border inviolability, while an ultimatum by Serb leader Milorad Dodik, to Bosniak and Croat parties, effectively ruled out any coherent position by Bosnia and Herzegovina. As had been the case during previous moments of crisis, SEECP’s key achievement was surviving the storm rather than working out a common stance. Kosovo’s independence nearly derailed the annual summit, convened by the Bulgarian Presidency in the Black Sea town of Pomorie on 21 May 2008, several months after Sofia’s recognition. Serbian President Boris Tadic´ walked out of the conference room after Jolyon Naegele, representative of UNMIK yielded


the floor to the Kosovo foreign minister Skënder Hyseni. Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic´ threatened to veto the closing declaration of foreign ministers, and later wrote to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to protest what he saw as UNMIK misconduct.58 The joint declaration, which was nonetheless adopted, indicated that SEECP members had agreed to disagree on Kosovo.59 As a result of the rift, UNMIK did not take part in the annual meeting of the RCC in Chishinau on 4 June 2009, while Moldovan authorities declined to issue visas to Kosovar officials to attend SEECP meetings during the country’s presidency (Moldova has not recognized Kosovo and its passports).60 Meanwhile, the Secretary General insisted that Kosovo should continue to be listed under ‘UNMIK/Kosovo tag’ in line with UNSC Resolution 1244.61 In the section on regional cooperation, the European Commission’s strategy paper for the Western Balkans, covering 2010, observes: Disagreements relating to the participation of Kosovo in regional meetings, initiatives and agreements are becoming an obstacle to regional cooperation. The normal functioning of important structures such as the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA), the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC) or the Regional School for Public Administration (ReSPA) could be jeopardised, if present practices do not change. The Commission strongly encourages all parties concerned to seek practical and pragmatic solutions in order to ensure the inclusiveness of regional cooperation, without prejudice to the differing positions on the status issue. The track record in pursuing regional cooperation is assessed as part of the Stabilisation and Association Process conditionality in all stages of the enlargement process.62 The conditionality stick referred to here has not been the sole channel explored by the actors. Diplomacy and persuasion have played an equally significant part. Reviving SEECP’s mediating role has been the ambition of Turkey, which succeeded Moldova at the helm of the regional institution in 2009–10. The respected Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutog˘lu, considered the architect of Ankara’s policy of engagement with all neighbouring countries and region, has taken a special interest in Bosnia and Herzegovina, beset by a prolonged constitutional crisis since 2006. As tensions between Republika Srpska


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and the Bosniak elites escalated, Davutog˘lu convened a trilateral meeting with Jeremic´ and Sven Alkalaj, Bosnia’s top diplomat, on the margins of a SEECP conference in Istanbul (October 2006). The meeting set off a series of monthly meetings, which yielded some modest results. The fifth trilateral, in Ankara, resulted in Bosnia’s decision to send an ambassador to Belgrade, ending a three-year hiatus.63 Davutog ˘lu also hosted a summit with Serbia’s President Boris Tadic´ and the Bosniak member of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Presidency, Haris Silajdžic´ (26 April 2010).

Interests, norms and identities in Balkan political cooperation Unlike so many of the sectoral schemes examined in Chapters 4 and 5, SEECP and other political fora functioning in the Balkans have been driven primarily by the local states themselves. SEECP has been constantly praised by politicians and academic observers alike as the ‘authentic voice’ of the region, owing to its indigenous roots, which reach as far back as the 1970s.64 Its merger with the functional initiatives, via the RCC, has been intended to serve the purpose of ‘regional ownership’, which became salient as Euro-Atlantic integration accelerated in the mid-2000s. Other ad hoc consultation initiatives have also had an ‘inside-out’ character. Trilaterals pioneered by Greece and Turkey in the mid-1990s reflected local power dynamics, not outside push. Even when looking towards external anchors, political cooperation has often been driven by internal causes. In the run-up to Thessaloniki, Western Balkan leaders sought to forge a common strategy towards the EU, not because of SAP conditionality, but to maximize their voice vis-à-vis Brussels. External push has been a critical factor only in the case of the US-launched Adriatic Charter. The autochtonous impetus for cooperation seems to privilege an explanation centred on functional and security interdependence. However, the causal link is disputable. All the way to the launch of its thematic dimension (sectoral ministerials) and institutionalization (RCC), SEECP output consisted, in the main, of rhetoric stressing the value of cooperation between governments and peoples, and the European identity and vocation of the participating countries. For a long time, the deepening of cooperation, notably through the


formalization of SEECP, was cancelled by differing perspectives on the institution’s place in Balkan affairs. Economic fragmentation and outstanding security issues have been tackled principally by the EU and NATO. The transfer of responsibilities to the region itself is a relatively new development, but even here the RCC institutional design stands as a proof that external sponsorship remains paramount. The various linkages that, figuratively speaking, put South East European countries and governments in one boat, have often undermined cooperation. The crisis in Kosovo (1998–9), southern Serbia and Macedonia (2000–1) and the unilateral proclamation of independence of Kosovo in February 2008 have all but blocked SEECP, whose main task should have been to build consensus on such challenges. Interdependence would also predict that Bosnia, Croatia and even Slovenia would choose to take part of the grouping – and this has not been the case. Their original preference was to stay out, in the case of Croatia and Slovenia largely because of SEECP’s unmistakably Balkan pedigree. As neither interdependence nor political conditionality and other push factors have been central, this singles out the ‘pull’ effects of norms and expectations in sustaining diplomatic clubs such as SEECP. Starting from the mid-1990s, the indigenous scheme has had a largely symbolical value as it conveyed to the West common messages by the political elites of South East Europe. In the wake of Dayton, this was the inviolability of borders, a proof that Balkan irredentist nationalism had been consigned to the past. This could be understood only in conjunction with the fears of a wider conflict, fuelled by historical animosities and legacies of violence spilling over the confines of ex-Yugoslavia, that were so prominent in the early 1990s. Such normative expectations of good neighbourly relations grew stronger with the end of the semi-authoritarian regimes in Croatia and Serbia in 2000, when the new democratic elites pledged to pursue their own ‘return to Europe’. In addition, to the peaceful resolution of territorial and minority disputes, an old CSCE/OSCE principle, NATO and the EU added a new emphasis on integration and cooperative security. SEECP discursively embraced this credo, symbolizing the region’s transformation from a volatile semiEuropean ‘powder keg’ into a community governed by ‘European’ standards and practices.


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The outward-oriented and rhetorical character of SEECP points in the direction of the ‘logic of appropriateness’, discussed at the end of Chapter 3. True, states have acted in pursuit of strategic interests. Greece pursued a leadership position in the Balkans, while Turkish governments claimed a stake in order to balance Greek influence, whether real or potential. In 1996–8, FR Yugoslavia sought to overcome isolation. As a rule, however, strategic gains have been made not by SEECP, unwieldy because of its heterogenous membership and unanimous decision-making, but by ‘less-than-regional’ schemes (trilateral cooperation, Adriatic Charter, Western Balkan dialogue, etc.). In such cases, cooperation can be easily traced to the convergence of actors’ interests and a structure of incentives that proceeds from the region and, even more significantly, from outside poles of attraction such as the EU. The perspective of identity politics gives the best analytical lens through which to understand the story of SEECP. The rhetorical dynamic sustaining SEECP, as well as its questionable utility as a regional trouble-shooter, does not necessarily mean that the institution is politically irrelevant. The inevitable ‘so what?’ question should be answered with a reference to its slow, yet steady, upgrade, manifest most recently by the RCC. Even before that, thanks to its very existence, SEECP fostered better multilateral relations across the Balkans, especially given the very low starting point in the early 1990s. SEECP remains a unique institutional bridge linking Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia’s successors, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Moldova. Finally, the discourse it has articulated, casting South East Europe as an inseparable part of the European and Euro-Atlantic community, has left its clear mark on the multi-layered process of transformation seen in the Balkans over the past two decades.

Conclusion: Looking at the Big Picture

Why has regional cooperation advanced and taken root in the Balkans, after a period of wars, political instability and economic hardship in the 1990s? This book argues that the reasons include the push from outside and, more interestingly, the Balkans’ historical identity as a European periphery. Exclusion has stimulated local elites to mimic the practices of the international clubs of their choice in order to reposition their countries on the post-Cold War mental maps of Europe. Functional and security linkages have rarely provided a sufficient inducement for Balkan actors to coordinate policies and establish institutions, especially in large and diverse groups and coalitions. Across various issue-areas, falling under both ‘low’ and ‘high politics’ rubrics, deepening and widening of cooperation reflected external impulses: first and foremost, the EU, but also NATO, the US, and the IFIs. SAP, designed by the EU for the conflictridden Western Balkans, deserves much of the credit. Conflict management and reconstruction were the primary reasons that external actors inaugurated regional cooperation. Their input has been indispensable: calming down suspicions, overcoming local opposition, providing encouragement – both diplomatic and financial – and prescribing agendas, institutions, timetables and targets. But why has such external imposition not been resisted, even if governments would often recourse to lip-servicing or procrastinating tactics? The argument presented here has to do with the legitimacy of the demands and expectations vis-à-vis the Balkans. The latter derive not just from the expertise or know-how of the foreign patrons but also their capacity to harness the long-standing 152

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symbolic capital of Europe as a harbinger of modernity and civilization for societies on the south-eastern fringe. At the same time, the normative contents of the centre–periphery relationship have evolved. The EU-rope of the 1990s and 2000s is a different animal from the Europe of sovereign nation-states that guided the vision of Balkan nation-builders during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.1 In that sense, regional cooperation has been not just a functional instrument but a transformative experience, whose value derives from the foundational norms and practices of the EU and the wider Western community. To what extent does the empirical material corroborate this claim? In functional and economic sectors cooperative outcomes are clearly explainable with reference to intra-regional demand and, even more importantly, the external supply of policies and institutional frameworks. Even in areas where demand has been weak, for example, trade, outside push kept the process afloat. Normative expectations of ‘Europeanized’ foreign policy, meanwhile, have limited local resistance, and facilitated and legitimized the actions of external power centres, notably the EU. That has been particularly visible with states sharing a clear preference for bilateral integration with the EU and NATO (e.g., Bulgaria, Romania, post-Tud¯man Croatia) which have nonetheless complied with the standards of regional cooperation, whether explicit or implicit. Institutions dealing with military security and the rule-of-law issues have followed a similar script. They have been largely an extension of the stabilization, and subsequently, enlargement policies of NATO and the EU. However, from the perspective of local states, such institutions have been significant conveyors of a positive image vis-à-vis the outside world, and only in the second instance regional solutions to regional problems. As Chapter 6 has demonstrated, this logic has been tremendously significant for high-profile political platforms such as SEECP, who speak on behalf of ‘the region’ (identified as more often as ‘South East Europe’ than as ‘the Balkans’). Despite its markedly rhetorical orientation, SEECP has strengthened trust among countries, especially by rejecting territorial revisionism (at least outside the special case of Kosovo), and presented evidence of the Balkans’ political maturity and ‘normalization’. The latter increasingly means also the capacity to take ‘ownership’ of regional affairs through arrangements and bodies such as the RCC.


Going back to the distinction drawn in the Introduction, identity politics advanced and sustained political and even functional cooperation, while cost-benefit calculus has at times undermined it. Indeed the pull of the EU has limited the extent, scope and depth of regional cooperation in wider South East Europe (as opposed to the Western Balkans) as it did in Central Europe prior to 2004. By contrast, the expectation that the backward and conflict-prone Balkans should ‘debalkanize’ in order to gain recognition by the EU, NATO and the international community-writ-large, continue to legitimize regional frameworks. Thus the involvement of external agents has been both a boon and a bane for Balkan regionalism. What is the larger significance of South East Europe’s case? Surely, it cannot serve as an empirical test for the theories of regionalism and regional integration; the sheer size of the region and its marginal – to put it mildly – place in the global economy, disqualify it from doing so. Yet the considerable attention generated by the Yugoslav wars of succession in the 1990s makes the story significant for the IR generalist. It is worth reflecting on two themes in particular: the changing paradigms of statehood and the issue of power. The shift to regional cooperation and integration in the post-conflict Balkans is indicative of a evolving notion of statehood in Europe and elsewhere. Previously fixated on exclusive territorial control and jurisdictional autonomy, nowadays, the measure of success for a small country in the international system is its ability to integrate and benefit from access to larger markets at various levels: subregional, regional, continental, and global. This notion of liberal openness has been instrumental in the policies pursued by the international institutions in South East Europe. As John Ruggie notes, multilateral organizations, bodies of legal rules, institutions and technocratic agencies have replaced the old-style diplomacy that was centred on shifting alliances and customary norms (Ruggie, 1993). Domestically, the triumph of democracy has redefined relations between states, economies and societies and contributed to the exponential growth of transnational flows in goods, services, capital and people. In Europe, economic openness, intergovernmental cooperation and the spread of democracy have been greeted as the pillars of a new order, superseding the one imposed by the Cold War.2 During the 1990s, the Balkans stood as a warning for post-1989 utopians, and illustrated the destructive potential of cultural particularisms, identity

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politics, the pursuit of sovereignty and self-determination.3 Regional cooperation – as state practice, normative framework or even a rhetorical tool – testifies that South East Europe has come, belatedly or not, under the sway of the liberal wave in world politics. However, this transformation has largely followed the operation of power politics: a theme with which liberals are not always at ease. US-led military interventions halted violence in ex-Yugoslavia. The EU used its economic and political resources to engineer cooperation across various policy-areas. Indeed Balkan regionalism reflects, first and foremost, the power asymmetry between local and external players. There are, still, two further caveats to keep in mind, both of which touch on the effects and nature of power. First, the external exercise of power has not compromised or eroded the capacity to act, and the legitimacy, of Balkan governments and states. On the contrary, the intention behind the push for multilateral arrangements has been to render local institutions more functional and effective as regards their provision of ‘public goods’. Regionalism has been one of the strategies to address the condition of weak statehood, pervasive in parts of the Western Balkans, but by no means a non-issue elsewhere in wider South East Europe. This is particularly salient in such policy areas as police and justice cooperation but also in assorted functional fields such as energy or transport. Rather than diluting statehood and institutional capacity, regionalism – and more broadly EU integration – adds to them. The second point concerns the very notion of power. At its most fundamental, the Western institutions’ clout in South East Europe has been rooted in such collective identity constructs as ‘Europe’, ‘modern civilization’, and ‘the West’. In the Balkans, the desire for recognition and inclusion has been a social force legitimating the importation of domestic and international governance norms from outside. To be sure, this ideological or symbolic power harnessed by the EU, among other institutions, has not remained uncontested – whether by critical minds challenging the facile dichotomy between the ‘barbaric’ Balkans and ‘civilized’ Europe/the West,4 or by nationalist advocates of state autonomy and cultural authenticity, hostile to the liberal catechism. However, the latter are rarely consistent in their rejection. Long before the HDZ in Croatia, or factions within the Serbian Radical Party, embraced the EU in the 2000s, ethno-national entrepreneurs and paramilitaries in Bosnia or Kosovo


‘defended’ Christendom, by implication Europe and the West, from its Islamic Other.5 Intellectual critics cannot deny that ideological hegemony has contributed to peace in the region. Their rejection of essentializing discourses has rarely led to an outright dismissal of Western policies. The EU forms a key part of this story as it is now right at the centre of this structural, centre–periphery power relationship inherited from history. The Union’s leading involvement in South East Europe hints at the ways it has constructed, projected and employed its power, both material and ‘normative’ – that is the ability to define what counts for ‘normal’ in international politics (Manners, 2002). As Kalypso Nicolaïdis and Robert Howse observe, ‘[the EU’s] power rests on the synergies between [its] being, its political essence, and its doing, its external actions, or what some later referred to as the contrast between its simple presence and its agency or “actorness” (emphasis original)’ (Nicolaïdis and Howse, 2002, p. 771). While conditionality and the diverse methods of regime-setting exemplify the Union’s doing mode of shaping regional cooperation in South East Europe, the being mode is very important in understanding the linkage between model-projection, legitimization, and, ultimately, the diffusion of the practices and standards of regional cooperation towards the periphery. Animated by a complex interplay between identity and utilitarian motives, Balkan regional cooperation reflects many of the dilemmas salient in the era of globalization: the tension between inclusion and exclusion, the triumph of liberalism versus the self-reproducing logic of power, and Europe’s tangled quest for a place in world politics.

Appendix I Regional Institutions in South East Europe: An Overview Regional institution

Established

Participants

Issue coverage

Structure

Adriatic Charter Process

2003

Albania, Croatia, Macedonia, US (initiator), Montenegro (2008), BiH (2008); Serbia (observer)

Security-sector reform; NATO accession; joint military exercises

Ad-hoc ministerials, interparliamentary dialogue, conferences of senior officials and military staff

Adriatic-Ionian Initiative

2000

Italy (initiator), Slovenia, Croatia, BiH, Montenegro, Albania, Greece

SMEs; transport and maritime cooperation; tourism, culture education; environment and fire protection

Conferences of foreign ministers and senior officials organized by an annually rotating presidency; secretariat (2008)

2006 (1992)

Western Balkans, Bulgaria and Romania (until 2007)

Trade in industrial goods, agriculture products, services; non-tariff barriers; investment and intellectual property issues

Joint ministerial committee and subcommittees chaired by a rotating presidency; secretariat; chambers of commerce forum

www.seadriatic.net/aii

Central European Free Trade Association (CEFTA) www.cefta2006.com

(Continued)

158

Regional institution

Established

Participants

Issue coverage

Structure

European Civil Aviation Area (ECAA)

2006

EU (initiator), Western Balkans, Norway, Iceland

Air transport

For the Western Balkans: bilateral Stabilization and Association Process committees (implementation monitoring); civil aviation authorities dialogue under the Stability Pact/RCC; EUROCONTROL bodies

2005

Parties: EU (initiator), Western Balkans, Moldova and Ukraine; Participants: Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, UK; Observers: Georgia, Norway, Turkey

Electricity, gas, oil – regulatory cooperation

Ministerial council; permanent high-level group (senior officials); regulatory forum; secretariat; fora on electricity, gas, social affairs, oil

ec.europa.eu/transport/air/ international_aviation/ country_index/ ecaa_en.htm

Energy Community www.energy-community.org

Appendix I

Continued

Investment Compact for South East Europe

Western Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, OECD (initiator)

Foreign and domestic investment reform

Annual ministerial conference; Investment Compact Committee overseeing implementation; Working groups (human capital, tax policy, investment promotion, regulatory reform)

2008 (successor to the Stability Pact, 19992008)

SEECP members (including Kosovo/ UNMIK), EU, donor countries and international organizations and financial institutions

Economic and social development; infrastructure and energy; justice and home affairs; security; human capital and parliamentary exchange

Annual meeting (senior officials or foreign ministers) held back-to-back with SEECP ministerials/summits; RCC board (meeting quarterly); secretariat headed by Secretary General

2001

BiH, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia

Transboundary waterways; water management; natural disaster prevention and protection

Intergovernmental commission; secretariat; permanent and ad-hoc expert groups

www.investmentcompact.org

Regional Cooperation Council www.rcc.int

Sava Commission www.savacommission.org

(Continued)

Appendix I

2000

159

Continued 160

Established

Participants

Issue coverage

Structure

South East Europe Security Cooperation Steering Group (SEEGROUP)

2000

Albania, Austria, BiH, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Turkey, UK, US

Security-sector reform; threat assessment

Dialogue of ambassadors to NATO; expert groups

South East European 1996 (1988) Cooperation Process (SEECP)

Albania, BiH (2000), Bulgaria, Croatia (2005), Greece, Kosovo/ UNMIK, Macedonia, Montenegro, Moldova (2006), Romania, Serbia , Turkey

Political affairs; trade and economic cooperation; energy and transport; justice and home affairs

Annual conferences of foreign ministers and heads of state and government organized by a rotating presidency; committee of political directors; parliamentary cooperation; sectoral ministerials; meetings of senior officials

South East European Cooperation Initiative (SECI)

Albania, BiH, Bulgaria, Croatia (2000), Greece, Hungary, Kosovo/ UNMIK, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia (2000), Slovenia, Turkey

Cross-border infrastructure; trade facilitation; transnational organized crime

Secretariat (under OSCE); Business Advisory Council; Regional Centre for Combating Transborder Crime; (Bucharest); SECI PRO network

www.nato.int/seei

www.secinet.info www.secicenter.org www.secipro.net

1996

Appendix I

Regional institution

South East European Defence 1996 Ministerial

Security-sector reform, peacekeeping operations, counter-terrorism, defence research and development

Stabilization and Association 1999 Process (regional dimension) (successor to the Regional ec.europa.eu/enlargement/ Approach, index_en.htm 1996-99)

EU (initiator), Western Balkans

Transport community

EU (initiator), Western Balkans

Political affairs; EU-Western Balkans economic cooperation; ministerial conferences; EU integration sectoral dialogue: justice and home affairs, visa regimes, infrastructure, energy and transport Transport (road, rail, Ministerial conferences; air, waterways) – South East European infrastructure Transport Observatory and regulatory (SEETO, 2004) harmonization

www.seebrig.org

www.seetoint.org

negotiations ongoing

Conferences of defence ministers organized by annually rotating chairmanship; Multinational Peace Force for South East Europe (MPFSEE/ SEEBRIG): chiefs of staff committee, Politico-Military Committee, military command

Appendix I

Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Macedonia, Romania, Turkey; Non-MPFSEE members: US (initiator), BiH (2007), Croatia (2000), Montenegro (2010), Serbia (2010), Slovenia, Ukraine (2005); Observers: Georgia, Moldova

161

Appendix II Regional Cooperation in South East Europe: A Timeline 1988–94 25–6 February 1988 24–5 October 1990 June 1991 April 1992 25 June 1992 November–December 1992 22–3 June 1993

10–11 January 1994 January–March 1994

Balkan foreign ministers meet for a first time in Belgrade Second conference is held in Tirana War breaks out consecutively in Slovenia and Croatia War breaks out in Bosnia and Herzegovina Black Sea Economic Cooperation established in Istanbul Romania and Bulgaria sign Europe Agreements with the EU The EU Copenhagen Council declares the countries of Central and Eastern Europe eligible for membership and adopts entry criteria NATO’s Brussels Summit initiates Partnership for Peace (PfP) Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Slovenia join PfP

1995 20–1 March 22 June 26 August

13 September 15 November 21 November/ 14 December 13 December 16 December

The EU inaugurates the Pact on Stability in Europe Romania submits EU membership application Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian foreign ministers meet in Ioannina calling for renewal of the 1980s Balkan ministerials Greece and Macedonia sign an interim agreement normalizing relations Macedonia joins PfP Dayton/Paris Peace Accords end the war in Bosnia Launch of the Royaumont Process Bulgaria applies for EU membership

1996 19 February 26–7 February

Presidents Tud¯man, Izetbegovic´ and Miloševic´ meet in Rome and commit to implement Dayton EU Council inaugurates the Regional Approach towards the Western Balkans 162

Appendix II

163

Continued 27 February 21 March 6–7 July 15 August 2 October 5–6 December

The European Council adopts a common position on Royaumont’s objectives Balkan defence ministers establish the South East Defence Ministerial (SEDM) in Tirana Balkan foreign ministers meet in Sofia after a six-year interruption. SEECP is launched Tud¯man, Izetbegovic´ and Miloševic´ meet in Geneva The European Commission presents an outline of the Regional Approach The South East European Cooperative Initiative (SECI) is activated after a US-EU agreement

1997 29–30 April

9–10 June 1 July 3–4 November 3 October 12–13 December

The EU Council of Ministers lays out its conditionality vis-à-vis Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and FR Yugoslavia SEECP foreign ministers meet in Thessalonki Romania joins the Central European Free Trade Association (CEFTA) Balkan heads of state and government meet for a first time in Crete. SEECP is inaugurated Second SEDM ministerial in Sofia In Luxembourg, the EU Council invites certain candidate countries to start membership negotiations. Bulgaria and Romania are excluded while Turkey not recognized as candidate

1998 February 10 March

8–9 June 26 September 13 October 12 November

Violence in Kosovo escalates Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Macedonia and Turkey reach a common position on the unfolding Kosovo crisis FR Yugoslavia blocks a joint SEECP position In Skopje, SEDM ministers agree to establish a multinational peace force (MPFSEE) SEECP Summit in Antalya supports Kosovo autonomy within FR Yugoslavia EU Council integrates Royaumont into CFSP

1999 January March–June

Bulgaria joins CEFTA War in Kosovo (Continued)

164

Appendix II

Continued May 1999 10 June 30 July August 1999 27 September September 10–11 December

Agreement on the establishment of a SECI regional centre on transnational crime in Bucharest Stability Pact for South East Europe (SP) is adopted by the EU Council in Cologne SP unveiled in Sarajevo, German politician Bodo Hombach is appointed special coordinator MPFSEE stationed in Plovdiv SP work plan adopted stressing regional cooperation Greek-Turkish rapprochement begins after the earthquake in western Turkey The EU Helsinki Council decides to start membership negotiations with Bulgaria and Romania as well as to grant Turkey candidate status

2000 January January 7 February 12–13 February 16 February March 29–30 March 19–20 May 25 May 19–20 June

14 July 18 September 5 October 5 October October 20 October

Croatian elections bring to power a centre-left coalition led by Ivica Racˇan SP group on trade liberalization convened Bodo Hombach brokers a deal on a second Danube bridge between Bulgaria and Romania SEECP Charter on Good-Neighbourly Relations, Stability and Cooperation adopted in Bucharest SP starts its anti-corruption initiative (SPAI) SP environment reconstruction programme SP donors pledge a2.4bn in grants and loans to Balkan countries The Adriatic-Ionian Initiative is inaugurated in Ancona Croatia joins PfP The EU Feira Council declares the five Western Balkan countries potential candidates for membership Croatia attends a SEECP ministerial for a first time The EU adopts a regulation liberalizing trade with the Western Balkan states SP initiative on organized crime (SPOC) Miloševic´ falls from power South East Europe Security Cooperation Group (SEEGROUP) is launched Regional Arms Control Centre (RACVIAC) opens in Zagreb

Appendix II

165

Continued 25–6 October 24 November 15 December

Extraordinary summit in Skopje welcomes Serbia back into SEECP. Serbia joins SP First EU-Western Balkans Summit in Zagreb EU CARDS programme for the Western Balkans is activated

2001 22–3 February February–March 5 April 9 April 11 April 1 May 27 June 27 June 28 June 13 August 25–6 October 30 October 28 November

20 December

In Skopje SEECP adopts an economic action plan. Bosnia and Herzegovina becomes a full member. Conflict erupts in Macedonia Balkan states fail to agree on deploying MPFSEE in Macedonia Macedonia signs a Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) with the EU Successor states reach an agreement on dividing former Yugoslavia’s assets MPFSEE is declared operational SP beneficiaries sign a memorandum on trade liberalization SP launches regional agenda on refugee return Moldova joins SP The Ohrid Framework Agreements ends the conflict in Macedonia Second SP donor conference held in Bucharest Croatia sings a SAA with the EU Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and FR Yugoslavia agree to internationalize the Sava River and establish a joint regulatory commission. At a SEDM meeting, the US urges participating states to deploy MPFSEE in peacekeeping operations in the Balkans

2002 1 January 13 February

28 March 15 July

Erhard Busek appointed SP Special Coordinator Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania launch the ‘two-by-two’ cooperation linked to NATO expansion SEECP Summit in Tirana calls for deepening economic cooperation In Sarajevo, Presidents Stipan Mesic´ and Vojislav Koštunica and the three members of Bosnia’s collective presidency agree to cooperate on refugee returns, ICTY, economic matters and organized crime (Continued)

166

Appendix II

Continued 6 November 11 November 21–2 November 12–13 December

Intergovernmental conference on Balkan organized crime in London Energy ministers initiate the integration of regional electricity markets in South East Europe Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia are invited to join NATO at the Prague Summit The EU’s Copenhagen Council sets 2007 as target for Bulgaria and Romania’s Accession

2003 21 February March 3 March 9 April 16 April 2 May June

3 June 21 June 10 September

13 November 8 December

Croatia applies for EU membership Croatia joins CEFTA SEECP interior ministers meet in Belgrade SEECP sixth summit held in Belgrade. Bosnia and Herzegovina assumes chairmanship Cyprus, Malta and eight Central European and Baltic states sign EU accession treaty in Athens Albania, Croatia and Macedonia sign the Adriatic Charter aimed to facilitate their accession to NATO Croatian government announces lifting the visa requirement for citizens of Serbia and Montenegro for the summer season. As of December 2004, it extends the arrangement on an annual basis Western Balkan presidents sign a joint declaration calling the EU to speed up their integration EU-Western Balkans summit at Porto Carras near Thessaloniki Presidents of Serbia and Montenegro and Croatia extend mutual apologies for atrocities committed by each side during the wars of the 1990s The completion of bilateral FTAs is announced at a trade ministerial in Rome Second Athens memorandum calling for the establishment of an energy community in South East Europe

2004 21 April 1 May 11 June

SEECP summit in Sarajevo. Romania assumes chairmanship EU enlarges to eight post-communist countries, Malta and Cyprus Western Balkan ministers sign a memorandum on Core Regional Transport Network. Transport Observatory (SEETO) established in Belgrade

Appendix II

167

Continued 18 June 6 December

Croatia recognized as a candidate country President Boris Tadic´ offers apology to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s citizens

2005 January

March 11 May June 3 October October December 17 December

The governments of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia launch an initiative on refugee returns in Sarajevo (3X4 initiative) Public Prosecutors’ Network (PROSECO) established Summit in Bucharest. Greece assumes SEECP chairmanship Trade ministers adopt CEFTA 2006 agreement Croatia invited to start membership negotiations with EU Energy Community Treaty is signed in Athens Ukraine and Moldova join SEDM Macedonia recognized as candidate country,

2006 Feb–Aug 11 March 4 May

21 May 9 June 12 June 26 June July November 13–14 November

1 December

SEEBRIG HQ is deployed in Kabul EU-Western Balkans ministerial conference at Salzburg SEECP summit in Thessaloniki welcomes Moldova as a full member. Croatia assumes chairmanship European Common Aviation Area is launched SEE Police Chiefs Association (SEPCA) established in Vienna Regional School of Public Administration opens Danilovgrad, Montenegro A majority of Montenegrin citizens vote for independence at a referendum Treaty on the European Civil Aviation Area signed Albania signs SAA Regional Framework for Investment adopted by the Investment Compact countries in Vienna Macedonia joins CEFTA Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina join PfP EU foreign ministers approve visa facilitation and readmission agreements with Western Balkan countries SEETO ministerial in Brussels (Continued)

168

Appendix II

Continued December 19 December

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia ratify the Energy Community Treaty CEFTA 2006 is signed in Bucharest

2007 1 January

March 2007

11 May 1 July September 15 October October November

4 Dec

Bulgaria and Romania join the EU EU launches the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA) Prime Ministers Putin, Karamanlis and Stanishev sign an agreement on the Burgas-Alexandroupolis oil pipeline in Athens Summit in Zagreb. Bulgaria assumes SEECP chairmanship Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Cyprus establish a joint batallion (HELBROC) Visa facilitation and readmission agreements signed Montenegro and EU sign SAA. SEE investment committee established Energy Community social forum set up Gazprom and the Italian energy firm ENI sign an agreement on the South Stream gas pipeline Tirana ministerial of SEETO

2008 28 Jan

February 17 February February 28–9 March 29 April 21 May 16 June 19 June September

EU launches structured dialogue on visa liberalization with Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Albania Transport Community proposed Kosovo Assembly declares independence from Serbia Regional Cooperation Council is inaugurated Slovenia hosts a EU-Western Balkan Summit at Brdo pri Kranju Serbia signs SAA SEECP summit in Pomorie sees serious frictions over Kosovo. Moldova assumes chairmanship Bosnia and Herzegovina signs SAA The Adriatic-Ionian Initiative inaugurates its secretariat in Ancona RCC convenes a conference on streamlining JHA initiatives

Appendix II

169

Continued September December 4 December 15 Dec

The Police Cooperation Convention (PCC) for South East Europe opens a secretariat in Ljubljana Energy Community oil forum established Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro join the Adriatic Charter Process Montenegro submits membership application

2009 March 1 April

29 April 1 June 5 June

13 July 31 July

9 October 9 December 19 Dec 23 Dec

Bosnia and Herzegovina and Albania remove bilateral visa regime Albania and Croatia join NATO, Macedonia’s entry is deferred because of the unresolved name issue with Greece. Albania submits membership application Serbia and Turkey sign a FTA Summit in Chis¸ina ˘u held back-to-back with RCC annual conference. Turkey assumes SEECP chairmanship Nabucco pipeline agreement signed in Ankara by Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria Prime Ministers Jadranka Kosor and Borut Pahor reach agreement to settle border dispute between Croatia and Slovenia. Slovenia unblocks its neighbour’s EU membership negotiations Unofficial SEECP summit in Istanbul Convention on SEE Law Enforcement Centre (SELEC) signed in Bucharest by SECI members Schengen visas for short-term travel abolished for citizens of Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia Serbia submits membership application

2010 January February 17 March 20 March 31 March 13 April 23 June

Serbia becomes full member of SEDM Bosnia and Herzegovina signs extradition treaties with Croatia and Serbia Moldova joins the Energy Community Boris Tadic´ boycotts Western Balkan summit in Brdo pri Kranju Serbian parliament adopts by a narrow majority a resolution condemning the Srebrenica genocide Croatian President Ivo Josipovic´ apologizes for his country’s involvement in the Bosnian war Montenegro assumes SEECP chairmanship

170

Appendix II

Continued 22 July

30 August 8 November 9 November

The International Court of Justice rules that Kosovo’s 2008 proclamation of independence was legal National railways of Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia establish a joint company, Cargo 10 EU grants abolish visas for Albania and Bosnia Herzegovina European Commission recommends that Montenegro be given official candidate status

Notes Introduction 1. BalkanInsight.com, 5 March 2010. 2. There is no single agreed definition of South East Europe, as there are different, often clashing, criteria including geography, political history, culture, economic development and so forth (see Chapter 3). This book opts for inclusiveness and covers Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Romania, and Turkey. Slovenia, Moldova, Hungary and even Ukraine are also occasionally brought into the narrative to the extent that they have taken part in certain regional institutions. 3. The number of those who thought so was highest in Macedonia (29 per cent) and Serbia (29 per cent). Gallup, Balkan Monitor. Insights and Perceptions: Voices from the Balkans, 2008, p. 62. . 4. On transnational civil society, see Sotiropoulos (2005). 5. Judah’s starting point is the post-Yugoslavs’ reference to ‘our countries’, pp. 1ff. Similar observations had been made earlier by Tihomir Loza in ‘Yugoslavia: Rising from the Ashes’, Transitions Online, 7 March 2007. 6. This definition draws on Keohane and Axelrod (1993, p. 85). 7. Following the definition given by Krasner (1983, p. 2). 8. For a snapshot of the issues at hand in the period before the Kosovo conflict, see Centre for Liberal Strategies (1997). 9. For a sceptical assessment of the economic value of regional cooperation see Simic´ (2001). See also his chapter in van Meurs (2001, pp. 72–93). 10. For the argument that regional challenges, including organized crime, necessitate regional responses, see Altmann (2003). 11. Radovan Vukadinovic´ (1994) has taken an even more radical position, positing these initiatives as an extension of external patrons’ alliancebuilding strategy, rather than resulting form an indigenous impulse. This viewpoint is in contrast with the perspective of Greek scholars emphasizing intra-regional drivers and not least the leadership role of Konstantinos Karamanlis and Andreas Papandreou in the 1970–80s (Kofos, 1991; Veremis, 1995, pp. 32–51). 12. Alison Baylis, one-time fellow at the WEU Institute for Security Studies (now EUISS), has famously characterized those groups as the ‘Cinderellas of European security’. See ‘Sub-regional Organisations: The Cinderellas of European Security’, NATO Review, 45 (2), March 1997, pp. 27–31. On the case of CEFTA in the 1990s, see Dangerfield (2000). 13. For a detailed account, see Delevic´ (2007). 171

172

Notes

14. See also Minic´ (2000, pp. 69–86), Lopandic´ (2002). Other authors seeking a balance between ‘inside-out’ and ‘outside-in’ perspectives include Tsipis (1996) and Tsakonas (1999). 15. Other contributions deserving a mention include Dinkov (2002) and, concerning the 1970–80s period, Colt (1983) and Lipatti (1988). 16. There are, of course, some important exceptions. Florian Bieber (2003) has made a set of interesting theoretical observations on regional cooperation in reference to the Stability Pact. 17. Charalambos Tsardanidis (2001), for instance, brings in insights from the literature on new regionalism in International Political Economy. He, however, arrives at the conclusion that Balkan regional cooperation does not represent an instance of ‘new regionalism’, which begs the question of why use it as a yardstick in the first place. 18. Amitav Acharya and Alistair Iain Johnston, ‘Comparing Institutions: an Introduction’, in Acharya and Johnston (eds) Crafting Cooperation. Regional International Institutions in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 18–9. 19. Idem, ‘Imagined (Security) Communities’, Millennium, 26 (2), 1997, pp. 249–78; 20. As early as 1990, Christopher Cviic´ (1990, p. 126) foresaw the formation of two integration blocs in South East Europe, Balkania, defined by Byzantine and Orthodox heritage, and Kleinmitteleuropa where AustroHungarian and Catholic traditions prevailed. 21. Cf. Vucˇetic´ (2001). Vucˇetic´ assesses the Balkan case against the (neo)Deutschian paradigm proposed by Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett (1998). 22. For an excellent recent addition, see Rotta (2008). 23. Mircea Geoana, statement at the ministerial meeting of the South East European Cooperation Process, Belgrade, 19 June 2002. 24. In the context of IR, see Hollis and Smith (1990). While Hollis and Smith, as others, posit explaining and understanding as fundamentally different modes of studying a phenomenon, there is still a strong case for combining the two. Cf. King, Keohane and Verba (1993, pp. 36–43). 25. The concept of appropriateness is taken from James March and Johan Olsen (1989) who distinguish utility-maximizing behaviour (‘logic of consequences’) from norm following (‘logic of appropriateness’). 26. On transnationalism in the region see Kostovicova and Bojicˇic´-Dželilovic´ (2009).

1

All in the Same Boat? Regional Interdependence and Cooperation in South East Europe

1. Cf. Buzan, Waever and de Wilde (1998, pp. 15–9). 2. On Greece and Turkey, see respectively Pagoulatos (2003) and Önis¸ (1999).

Notes

173

3. G. Petrakos and S. Totev, ‘Economic Structure and Change in the Balkan Region. Implications for Integration, Transition and Economic Co-operation’, paper presented at the conference ‘European Space and Territorial Integration Alternatives’, Thessaloniki, 16–18 October 1998, p. 18. 4. Albania’s exports/imports to and from Greece increased from 3 per cent to 7.2 per cent in 1994 to 10.4 per cent/24.3 per cent in 1994. The same figures for Bulgaria were at 1.3 per cent/0.4 per cent (1989) and 7.8 per cent/ 4.8 per cent (1994). 5. Turkey’s trade with Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Greece and FR Yugoslavia increased from $900m in 1992 to $1.75bn in 1995 (3 per cent of its overall volume). The bulk of economic exchange took place with Bulgaria, Romania and Macedonia. ‘Turkey: Balkan Strategy’, Oxford Analytica Daily Brief, 16 April 1998. 6. Data for Greece and Macedonia cover 1994, for Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and Turkey – 1995, for FR Yugoslavia – 1996. 7. Of course, politics had a lasting impact on economics too: FR Yugoslavia’s trade with Croatia was negligible. 8. G. Petrakos (2002), ‘The Balkans in the New European Economic Space, Problems of Adjustment and Policies of Development’, Eastern European Economics, 40(4), July–August, pp. 6–30. 9. Greece was likewise interested in linking its electricity transmission grid with that in the Italian province of Puglia as its access to Serbia was lost. 10. The Muslim population in Greek (Western) Thrace is 150,000 in number. Predominantly ethnic Turkish, it also includes Slav-speaking Pomaks and Roma. While Turkey insists on the term ‘Turkish minority’, Greece points at the 1923 Lausanne Convention’s religious definition and reference to Muslims. Cf. Poulton and S. Taji-Farouki (1997). 11. For an overview of Greco-Turkish relations, before and after the 1999 rapprochement, see Anastasakis, Nicolaidis and Öktem (2009). 12. See the introductory essay in Bechev (2009). 13. Buzan and Waever saw the Balkans as a separate regional complex in the early 1990s that, with the Kosovo conflict of 1998–9, became a subset of the larger European unit (2003, pp. 395–6). 14. On Greek policy towards the Yugoslav conflict in the early 1990s, see Michas (2003). 15. Miloševic´ extended an offer to Greece for a confederation which was rumoured to have contained a secret annex on Macedonia’s partition. Wall Street Journal, 26 June 1992; Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, 20 June 1992. 16. For the different scenarios on the future of Macedonia floated in the early 1990s, see S. Troebst, ‘Macedonia: Powder Keg Defused?’, RFE/ RL Research Reports, vol. 3, no. 4, 28 January 1994, p. 33. 17. For the nature and the origins of the phenomenon, see the essays in Athanassopolou (2005). 18. An in-depth analysis of the Bosnian war’s impact on smuggling and organized crime in Hajdinjak (2000).

174

Notes

19. In Bulgaria, the government of the Union of Democratic Forces was blamed for providing political cover for smugglers operating across the common boundary with Serbia. In 2000, the Romanian President Constantinescu accused former Prime Minister Theodore Stolojan of involvement in a sanctions-breaking scheme. Coalition partners Ljubcˇo Georgievski (VMRODPMNE) and Arben Xhaferi (Democratic Party of the Albanians) were said to have divided the control over smuggling channels through Macedonia’s northern border. For further on this see Hajdinjak (2000).

2

Pushing for Cooperation: External Actors in Balkan Regionalism

1. On the great powers’ impact on the Balkans throughout history, see Glenny (1999). 2. For a study of the international diplomatic efforts to stop the Yugoslav war (1991–5), see Lucarelli (2001). 3. On UNPREDEP, see Siani-Davies (2003, pp. 105–20). 4. That extension of OHR powers was agreed during a summit of the Peace Implementation Council held in Bonn in December 1997: hence, the Bonn powers. 5. For an overview of US policy in the Balkans in mid-1990s, see Larrabee (1997). 6. The initiative was steered by Richard Schifter, special adviser to the US Secretary of State. 7. SECI’s Statement of Purpose defined it as ‘a regional forum at political and expert level for the discussion of regional economic and environmental issues’ (Shtonova, 1998, p. 33). 8. The full texts of the Common Points and SECI’s founding declaration can be found at www.secinet.org, accessed 30 April 2010. 9. Point 7 of the document put it bluntly: ‘SECI will focus on projects which will not compete with those of other international initiatives or institutions, including particularly the EU’s policies and projects in the region (for example, Regional Approach, Pre-accession Strategy). SECI will be informed of the projects developed by the Union, the U.S. and others, but will not have any oversight of them. SECI will ensure that the EU and others providing assistance are informed of SECI’s work.’ To boost cooperation, the coordinators of the EU’s Royaumont initiative and SECI started, in 1998, co-chairing a working party on the ‘Future of South East Europe’ at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS). 10. US Trade and Development Agency, Executive Summary Albanian – Macedonian – Bulgarian Oil Pipeline Corporation (Trans-Balkan Pipeline Project), 1 May 2000. . 11. The EC launched PHARE in December 1989. Originally aimed at Poland and Hungary, the programme was later extended to all Central and

Notes

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

175

Eastern European countries. OBNOVA (meaning ‘renewal’) was an instrument initiated in 1996 to help the reconstruction efforts in former Yugoslavia. On Slovenia’s relations with the EU in the 1990s, see Brinar (1999). On Romania and Bulgaria, see respectively Phinnemore (2001) and Dimitrov (2000). 1903d General Affairs Council Conclusions, 26 February 1996, PRES/96/33, European Commission, Report from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament COM (96) 476 final, 2 October 1996. The conditionality principle was also established vis-à-vis the three main Yugoslav successors: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and FR Yugoslavia by the General Affairs Council during its meeting on 29–30 April 1997, PRES/97/129 of the 2003rd Council Meeting – General Affairs – Luxembourg, 29–30 April 1997. The Economist, 18 March 1995, p. 55. Besides the agreements, the Stability Pact convened multilateral regional tables in Central Europe and the Baltic area, but these were not institutionalized and had a secondary importance. For instance, the Greek–Albanian dispute over Northern Epirus remained outside the scope of the Pact, as it involved a member state and a nonassociate country (cf. Smith, 1999, p. 157). On INTERREG, see Centre for Liberal Strategies (1997, pp. 56–9). Report from the Commission to the Council on Regional Cooperation in Europe, Brussels, 1 December 1997, COM (97) 659 final, points 20 and 21, p. 6 Roumeliotis was later promoted to the position of a ‘Special Representative’ under Javier Solana. ‘Partnership for Peace: Invitation’, Press Communiqué M-1(94)2, issued by the Heads of State and Government, participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council, NATO Headquarters, Brussels, 10–11 January 1994. North Atlantic Council, ‘Study on NATO Enlargement’, Brussels, September 1995. Jeffrey Simon, ‘Partnership For Peace (PfP): After the Washington Summit and Kosovo’, National Defense University Strategic Forum, No 167, August 1999. A cornerstone in the so-called European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI), CJTF’s principal goal was to enable European allies to act alone in humanitarian crises drawing, on a case-by-case basis, on NATO assets. Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Slovenia joined PfP in January–March 1994. Macedonia’s accession was delayed by the dispute with Greece over its name and national symbols. It finally joined PfP on 15 November 1995, after a compromise agreement was signed with Athens. Croatia became part of the initiative on 25 May 2000 after the change in government four and a half months beforehand. Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina joined in December 2006. C. Bildt, ‘Déjà vu in Kosovo’, Financial Times, 9–10 June 1998.

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26. Some momentum towards a similar initiative had been built during the Austrian Presidency in the latter part of 1998. The Vienna Council (11–12 December 1998) adopted a ‘Common Strategy on the Western Balkans’ in a bid to upgrade the available instruments (Biermann, 1999, pp. 12–3). 27. As Joschka Fischer put it at the time, ‘[t]he previous policy of the international community vis-a-vis former Yugoslavia had two severe deficits: It concentrated on the consequences instead of on the sources of conflict, and it tackled the problems of the region individually and separately from the ones in other parts of Europe.’ Speech by Joschka Fischer, at the Conference of the Foreign Ministers concerning the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, Cologne, 10 June 1999. Quoted in Biermann (1999, p. 6). 28. The formula was reached at the General Affairs Council on 17 May 1999. 29. Here is a shortlist of the Pact’s objectives: (1) preventing and putting an end to tensions and crises as a prerequisite for lasting stability; (2) bringing about mature democratic processes; (3) encouraging regional confidence building measures; (4) preserving the multinational and multiethnic diversity of countries in the region, and protecting minorities; (5) creating vibrant market economies; (5) fostering economic cooperation in the region and between the region and the rest of Europe and the world; (6) promoting unimpeded contacts among citizens; (7) combating organized crime, corruption and terrorism and all criminal and illegal activities; (8) preventing forced population displacement; (9) ensuring the safe return of all refugees; (10) creating the conditions, for countries of southeastern Europe, for full integration into political, economic and security structures of their choice. Point 10, Stability Pact for South East Europe, Cologne, 10 June 1999. 30. Point 20, Stability Pact. 31. Point 10, Stability Pact. 32. Since 1999, Montenegro has participated in the Pact as an observer (‘Guest to the Chair’). Yugoslavia joined the SP in October 2000. Moldova became the ninth beneficiary state by joining the Pact in June 2001. 33. The Black Sea Economic Cooperation was established in 1992 on Turkey’s initiative. Its members included the six riparian countries, Albania, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Greece, and Armenia. BSEC was institutionalized and became an international organization in 1999. 34. Greece pushed initially for the appointment of Panagiotis Roumeliotis. It reversed its position only when Thessaloniki, and not Prishtina as originally proposed, was chosen to be the seat of the European Agency for Reconstruction (Friis and Murphy, 2000, p. 776). 35. The non-EU staff members in the Special Coordinator’s office were seconded from participating states and organizations. The overall budget of the Brussels office was a2m (ESI and EastWest Institute, 2001, p. 9). 36. All priority areas under the SP are given as they appeared at its inception in 1999. There were introduced certain changes in all three Working Tables during the following years. 37. The Thessaloniki Agenda for Stability highlighted the following issueareas where joint action was necessary: the return of refugees and

Notes

38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

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internally displaced persons, strengthening education, and media independence (WT1); reform of the business and investment environment, private sector development, trade cooperation and liberalization, and infrastructure development (WT2); security sector reform, fight against corruption, and organized crime (WT3). Stability Pact for South East Europe, Regional Table, Thessaloniki Agenda for Stability, Thessaloniki, 8 June 2000. The programmatic document underpinning the SP’s economic was prepared by the World Bank (2000). Interview with Nikola Todorcˇevski, National Coordinator of the SP, Macedonia, Skopje, September 2003. The SAAs cover areas like trade, legal harmonization, and political dialogue. Unlike the European Agreements, they put a great emphasis on regional cooperation (see below). For a comparison between the Europe Agreements and the SAA concluded in 2001 with Macedonia and Croatia see Phinnemore, 2003, pp. 77–103. Point 67, Presidency Conclusions of the Santa Maria da Feira European Council, No. 200/1/00, 19 and 20 June 2000. Point 15, Washington Summit Declaration, 24 April 1999. For an account of the EU efforts to build an international coalition in support of the SP, see Friis and Murphy (2000) and Biermann (1999). EAPC succeeded the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. It was inaugurated at the Sintra Summit (1997). The hurdle for Bosnia and Herzegovina was the absence of a federal ministry of defence, while Serbia-Montenegro was delayed mainly due to the issue of high-profile extraditions to The Hague-based ICTY. On NATO enlargement policy in South East Europe, see Perry and Keridis (2004). Point 3, EU-Western Balkan Summit Declaration, Zagreb, 24 November 2000. Council Regulation (EC) No 2666/2000, 15 December 2000. Furthermore, CARDS focused to a great extent, on a regional cooperation element. Its strategy paper singled out several priorities including (1) multilateral trade facilitation measures (integrated border management to tackle existing bottlenecks, mutual recognition of standards); (2) infrastructure development and air-control cooperation; (3) the environment; (4) statistical cooperation. The programme allotted a197m for those priority areas in the period 2002–4. European Commission, External Relations Directorate, CARDS Assistance Programme for the Western Balkans, Regional Strategy Paper 2002–2004, Brussels, 2001, pp. 14–16, 20–24. European Commission, Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA) Multiannual Indicative Financial Framework (2008–2010), Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament, COM689 final, Brussels, 6 November 2007; Commission Decision 2007/2205 establishing a Multi-Beneficiary Multi-annual Indicative Planning Document (MIPD) 2007–9, 29 May 2007. For a detailed catalogue of the EU initiatives covering more than 90 measures, see European Commission, EU Regionally Relevant Activities in

178

49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

3

Notes

the Western Balkans, Commission Staff Working Paper, SEC(2009)128 final, Brussels, 3 February 2009. Stability Pact for South East Europe, Building a More Effective Stability Pact Strategy and Approach of Working Table II, December 2002. For an overall assessment of the Pact’s performance as well as its relationship with SAP, see H. Brey and C. Hopf (2004). The volume contains contributions from some of the SP chief architects and functionaries including Joschka Fischer, Bodo Hombach and Erhard Busek. Council Regulation (EC) No 2007/2000, 18 September 2000; Council Regulation (EC) No 2563/2000, 20 November 2000. The argument about the transition from cooperation to integration within the SAP was made originally by Martin Dangerfield, ‘Integrating South-East Europe: The Role of Subregional Economic Cooperation’, paper presented at the Annual UACES Conference, London, 5 April 2003. Cf. Phinnemore (2003, p. 88). CARDS Strategy Paper, p. 6. The Club of Three and Bertelsmann Stiftung, ‘The Balkans and the New European Responsibilities’, Conference Report, 2000, pp. 19–20.

Balkans, Europe, South East Europe: Identity Politics and Regional Cooperation

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica takes the opposite view: ‘[t]he European portion of Turkey is physiographically, but not politically, part of the Balkans, because it belongs to a non-Balkan state’. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 1, 15th edn, 1994. 2. The reader will note that the concepts of Europe and the West are used here often interchangeably, which might be a problem as they coincide only partly. The argument in favour of coupling the two by default is the fact that in the identity discourses of South East Europe (as elsewhere in Eastern Europe) they are, as a rule, inextricably linked. On the notion of the West, see Garton Ash (2004). 3. An overview is in Bracewell and Drace-Francis (1999, pp. 54–6). 4. The two key texts representing the ‘ancient hatreds’ genre in the accounts of ethnic violence in South East Europe are West (1941) and Kaplan (1993). For a critique with reference to the Bosnian case, see Malcolm (1996, pp. xix–xxii). 5. To quote one example, Stjepan Mještrovic´ seeks the roots of the war in former Yugoslavia in the character of the Dinaric man, a notion introduced by Cvijic´. (Mještrovic´, 1993). 6. This approach is, in many ways, inspired by Frederik Barth’s classical study of ethnic identity formation, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969). 7. See also Todorova’s debate with Holm Sundhausen, a critic of her constructivist take on the Balkans’ specificity (Sundhaussen, 1999, 2002; Todorova, 2002).

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8. See, for example, narrative histories of the region like B. Jelavich (1983), History of the Balkans, vols I & II, Cambridge: Cambridge UP; M. Mazower (2001), The Balkans, London: Phoenix; J. Lampe (2006), Balkans into Southeastern Europe. A Century of War and Transition, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 9. Although John Allcock (1991) should be credited for his pioneering efforts, it took Todorova’s work to launch a debate of major intellectual and political significance. Other important contributions include Skopetea (1992); Goldsworthy (1998); Bjelic´ and Savic´ (2002); Mishkova (2004); Hammond (2004). 10. For further on identification, as opposed to identity, see Brubaker and Cooper (2000). 11. Consider, for example, the case of the Ukrainian nationalist discourse of belonging to the West/Europe and therefore sharing a different identity from ‘Asiatic’ and ‘Oriental’ Russia (Kuzio, 2002). 12. A good illustration of this dynamic is contemporary Bulgarian historian Ivan Ilchev’s description of how competing claims of belonging to the European civilization were raised at the time of the two Balkan wars in 1912–13, ‘During the [1912] Balkan War, the [Bulgarian] Ministry of Foreign and Religious Affairs instructed its representatives abroad to propagate the claim that the Balkan peoples, the Bulgarians in particular, were fighting for the cause of “European culture”. The Serbs emphasized that without their culture the European one would not be the same. The Romanians were especially keen to persuade the Westerners that Romanian culture purportedly stood much closer to the West than to the East. “Romania is neither Turkey nor Bulgaria … She is, more clearly, a sentinel of the Western civilisation.” In a similar vein, Athens tried to equate the Ancient Greek culture, which formed contemporary Europe’s civilization, with modern Hellenic and European culture’. See I. Ilchev, ‘Hlopaneto na vratata na Evropa kato balkanski sindrom’ [Knocking on Europe’s Door as a Balkan Syndrom], Sega Daily, 18 November 2000. 13. See for instance Checkel and Katzenstein (2009), especially. Ch. 5 by Holly Case (East-Central Europe) and Ch. 9 (Conclusion). 14. Here the key point of reference is the work of the nineteenth-century founding father of Greek national historiography Konstantinos (Constantine) Paparrigopoulos, devoted to tracing the continuity between Ancient and Modern Greece: Istoria tou Ellinikou ethnous: apo ton archaiotaton chronon mehri kath’emas [History of the Greek Nation: From Ancient Times to the Present] published between 1860 and 1874. 15. On the identity interactions between Greece and its northern neighbours through history, see Tziovas (2003); Anastasakis, Bechev and Vrousalis (2009). 16. For a general discussion of Greek identity politics, see Hirschon (1999); Koliopoulos and Veremis (2002, pp. 227–63). 17. For a comprehensive exploration of Albanian identity politics, see Schwandner-Sievers and Fischer (2002).

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18. These themes are central in the Bulgarian national narrative too. There are striking parallels between the Bulgarian and Albanian case as far as the concept of a National Revival period is concerned. 19. Maria Todorova notes this, although she is also able to find examples to the contrary (Todorova, 1997, pp. 45–6). 20. For an interesting analysis of how nineteenth-century Romanian liberal leaders instrumentalized the mythological discourse of European belonging, see Mishkova (2004). 21. On Turkish identity and foreign policy, see Robins (2006). On identity politics in Turkey more generally, see Öktem, Kerslake and Robins (2010). Davutog ˘lu’s policy towards the Western Balkans is discussed further in Chapter 6. 22. As early as 1989–90, Slovenian communists rallied under the slogan ‘Evropa zdaj!’ (Europe now!) (Lindstrom, 2003). On the Croatian case in the 1990s, see Lindstrom and Razsa (2004). 23. Early 1990s graffiti in Ljubljana put the idea of parting with the Balkan past and heading towards Mitteleuropa very bluntly: ‘Burek? Nein danke!’. Burek, a word of Turkish origin (bo˝rek), is a type of pastry common across the Balkans. 24. Despite his portrayal of Croatia as Europe’s bulwark against Eastern barbarism, Tud¯man’s conservative nationalism fuelled his deep distrust of a united Europe as a model of integration and supranational governance. I am grateful to Susan Woodward for alerting me to this point. 25. The desire to establish a symbolic distance from the Balkans is reflected even in the work of Western authors. Titles such as Croatia: Between the Balkans and Europe (Will Bartlett, London: Routledge, 2003) unambiguously illustrate the salience of the issue in Croatian identity politics. 26. Hence the notion of the two Serbias in the 1990s, one traditionalist and nationalistic, associated mainly, but not exclusively, with the Miloševic´ regime; the other – liberal and ‘European’. See Slobodan Naumovic´, ‘National Identity Splits, Deep Rooted Conflicts and (Non)Funcitoning States: Understanding the Intended and Unintended Consequences of the Clash between the “Two Serbias”’, research paper published by the Nexus project, Sofia, Centre for Advanced Studies, 2003. 27. Croat and Serb nationalisms differed little in that respect. In the words of a shrewd commentator, ‘Belgrade and Zagreb propaganda […] instantly claimed that once again Islam was threatening Christianity. Christianity and Europe needed to be defended against the new aggressors. Croatian propagandists declared that for centuries their country had been the Antemurale Christianitatis, “the bulwark of Christianity”. Serb propagandists claimed that their people had defended Europe from a Turkish invasion at the Battle of Kosovo on 28 June 1389, three days after which the bells of Notre Dame in Paris had rung to celebrate the Christian victory. As usual the supine consumers of the propaganda did not question these assertions’. Vidosav Stevanovic´ (2003, p. 84).

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181

28. English translation in H. Krieger (2001), The Kosovo Conflict and International Law: An Analytical Documentation 1974–1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 10–1. 29. Other studies of the usage of the Balkans in the post-Yugoslav context include Sakaja (2001) and Balaloska (2002). 30. On the Bulgarian case, see Daskalov (1994). 31. For an interesting discussion of the legitimizing role of ‘Europe’ in Bulgarian politics, see Dimitrova (2002). 32. Cf. Rumelili (2004, p. 33). 33. On the relationship between the strategic-action and identity aspects of the process, see Schimmelfennig (2000) and Kavalski (2008, Chs 5 and 6). 34. To quote the Presidency Conclusions of the Copenhagen Summit, ‘membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for protection of minorities’. 35. The EU has also projected this norm at the global level. To quote the European Parliament, ‘regional cooperation is one of the consistent elements of European integration itself [and] serves to bring about peaceful cooperation, economic development and democratisation and has therefore repeatedly been advanced and promoted by the EU as a successful example and development model for other regions of the world’ European Parliament, Resolution A4-0127/97, Official Journal of the European Communities, C167, 2 June 1997, p. 0143. Cf. Alecu de Flers and Regelsberger (2005); Smith, (2003, Ch. 4). 36. European Commission, Report from the Commission to the Council on Regional Cooperation in Europe, Brussels, COM (97) 659 final, 1 December 1997. 37. European Commission, SAP – Annual Report 2002, COM(2002)163, Brussels, 4 April 2002, p. 4. 38. For a critical view of the analogy with the Marshall Plan: Gligorov (2001). 39. Clinton quoted by CNN, 2 June 2000; Bildt (2001). 40. Yet ‘South East Europe’ is not a new coinage. It has been in use by German, Romanian and, to some extent, Anglo-American scholars at least since the late 1890s (Švob-Djokic´, 2001, pp. 35–45; W. Bracewell and A. Drace-Francis, 1999, pp. 117–28). 41. When it comes to the second mode, T. A. Börzel and T. Risse (2008) draw a distinction between ‘socialization’ and, following Habermasian social theory, ‘persuasion’, depending on whether the external actor promotes ideas through simply providing an authoritative model or legitimating it through reason-giving.

4 Building Up a Regional Marketplace: Economic and Functional Cooperation 1. Averages for the individual countries are: Albania, 5.3 per cent; Bosnia and Herzegovina, 5.1 per cent; Bulgaria, 5.1 per cent; Croatia, 4.7 per cent;

182

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

Notes

Macedonia, 1.7 per cent; Serbia and Montenegro, 5.1 per cent (Kathuria, 2008, p. 2). Intergovernmental cooperation made progress in that period precisely because it concentrated on low-sensitivity issues like transport, science, communications, and environmental protection. A. Sotiris Walden characterizes that time as ‘the golden era of Balkan cooperation,’ pointing at 30-odd meetings at the ministerial and expert levels in 1990–91 (Walden, 1992, p. 319; Christakoudis, 2002, pp. 65–130; Lopandic´, 2001, pp. 53–5). Bosnia and Herzegovina itself, however, was far from being integrated in terms of trade flows. Up until late 1999, the two entities had separate customs policies. The new customs legislation terminated the separate preferential agreements which Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation had concluded with Yugoslavia and Croatia respectively. Trade between Republika Srpska and Yugoslavia declined after 1998 due to a dispute concerning the exchange rate between the Yugoslav dinar and the Bosnian convertible mark. Inter-entity trade rose sharply in the early 2000s (van Meurs, 2001, pp. 208–10). European Commission, Report from the Commission – The Stabilisation and Association process for South East Europe – First Annual Report, Brussels, April 4, COM (2002) 163 final, p. 3 Uvalic´ uses data from IMF Statistics Quarterly, IMF, September 1998. The data for Bosnia and Herzegovina and FR Yugoslavia were obtained respectively from the Bosnian Central Bank and the Federal Statistical Office. Sarajevo Summit declaration, 30 July 1999, Point 10. European Commission, ‘Enlargement of the European Union – Composite Paper’, October 1999. This was in tune with the World Bank’s strategic paper for the Western Balkans prepared for the SP. It focused on multilateralizing the bilateral trade concessions, concluding association agreements with the EU, and international assistance for the trade-related institutional reforms in each country (World Bank, 2000, pp. 52–71). Financial Times, 23 November 2000. EU Council Regulation 2563, 29 November 2000. Significantly, the ATMs covered agricultural imports from the Western Balkans. Report from the WT2’s Third Meeting, Istanbul, 16–17 October 2000. Final Declaration, point 3. Zagreb, 24 November 2000. Regional Action Plan, SEECP Fifth Summit, Skopje, 22–3 February 2001. Section II: Trade Development. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro were still outside the WTO. RFE/RL Newsline, 19 January 2001. Sega Daily, 5 May 2001. For the first time, senior Bulgarian politicians hinted about withdrawing from the SP in November 2000. They attempted to link continued membership in the Pact with the abolition of Schengen visas for Bulgarian citizens. The memorandum also called for the removal of non-tariff barriers, the establishment of common rules of origin, border crossings procedures,

Notes

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

183

transport documentation and trade statistics – all in line with the relevant EU acquis. In the midterm, the document envisioned cooperation on implementing EU health and safety rules, environmental and other technical norms, harmonization of company and banking law and WTOcompatible reform of intellectual property laws’ trade-related aspects. For an insiders’ account on the trade liberalization task force, see Bogoevski (2002). Dušanka Profeta, ‘No to the Balkans’, Transitions Online, 17 September 2001. Montenegrin leadership adopted an independent economic and trade policy from the federal government in January 1999. In November Montenegro introduced the German mark as official currency. AFP, 8 July 2003. Workgroup on Trade Liberalization and Facilitation, Ministerial Statement, Rome, 13 November 2003. The initiative included also Moldova which joined the Stability Pact in June 2001. Government of the Republic of Croatia, Information Bulletin, no 13–14, November–December 2001. In 2008, all Western Balkan countries, apart from Croatia and Kosovo, became part of a scheme for diagonal cumulation of rules of origins with the EU as well as Turkey (for products covered by the Customs Union with the EU). CEFTA 2006 contains provisions on cumulation among its signatories. European Commission, 2009 Progress Report for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brussels, 14.10.2009 SEC(2009) 1338, p. 23; BalkanInsight.com, 28 April 2009. Reuters, 25 September 2009. Enlargement Strategy and Main Challenges 2009–2010, Communication to the European Parliament and the Council, COM(2009) 533, Brussels 14 October 2009, p. 6. Officials in Prishtina complained in early 2009 that authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina had charged duties on imports from Kosovo, in breach of CEFTA 2006 rules. BalkanInsight.com, 9 January 2009. For a sceptical assessment of intra-regional trade’s potential to stimulate growth, see Grupe and Kušic´ (2005). Kathuria (2008, p. 25). Cf. Bajic´ and Zdravkovic´ (2009) who contend that Croatia and Serbia, as the two largest and most diversified economies in the Western Balkan cluster, are likely to garner the most benefits proceeding form CEFTA 2006. See . See www.investmentcompact.org, accessed 30 April 2010. In April 1999, SECI members adopted a memorandum on road freight transport, originally proposed by Greece. It foresaw the gradual liberalization of the truck-quota regimes in accordance with EU standards, the harmonization of the road taxes, weights and dimensions limits, and visa-issuance procedures for drivers, establishing a Regional Road Transport Committee to monitor implementation (Lopandic´, 2001, pp. 130–1). TTFSE, for its, part reported threefold decrease in clearance times for trucks at customs offices (Kathuria, 2008, p. 73).

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32. Stability Pact, Agenda for Stability, Thessaloniki, 8 June 2000, Point 21. For a critique of the Pact’s emphasis on physical infrastructure, see Gligorov (2001). 33. On TEN/TINA, see ‘Transport Policy and EU Enlargement’, Briefing N 44, European Parliament, Luxembourg, 28 July 1999, pp. 12–5. 34. European Commission, Agenda 2000: For a Stronger and Wider Union, Communication to the Council, DOC/97/6, 15 July 1997. 35. Report of the Chairman of the ISG, Second Regional Conference of the Stability Pact for South East Europe, Bucharest, 25 October 2001, p. 2. For the complementarity requirements, see the SP strategic paper (World Bank, 2000). 36. In 2000, Italy also launched the Adriatic-Ionian Initiative: see Appendix 1. 37. European Investment Bank, ‘Basic Infrastructure Investment in South East Europe. Regional Project Overview,’ paper presented at the SP’s Regional Funding Conference, Brussels, 29–30 March 2000, p. 15. 38. RFE/RL Newsline, 28 March 2000. Romania obtained, in return, the lowering of previously prohibitive transfer charges for supplying electricity to Greece. Bulgarian policymakers saw the northern neighbour as a competitor at the regional export market for electricity. See M. Chiriac, ‘Power War between Romania and Bulgaria’, Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 2 November 1999. It was not until May 2007 that the actual construction began. 39. European Commission, ‘Transport and Energy Infrastructure in South East Europe’, Brussels, 15 October 2001. The paper was presented to the SP’s Regional Table in May 2001. 40. See the strategic study supporting the Commission’s programme, Agence Française de Development and European Conference of Ministers of Transport. ‘Transport Infrastructure Regional Study in the Balkans, Final Report’, prepared by Louis Berger SA, March 2002. 41. For instance, Muriqan-Sokobine at the Albanian–Montenegrin border or the motorway between the Albanian city of Durrës and Kukës in Kosovo. 42. Commission Press Release, IP/08/382, 5 March 2008. 43. Facts about the SEE FABA. The South East European Functional Block Approach, 15 March 2007. www.stabilitypact.org, accessed 30 April 2010. 44. European Commission, 2009 Progress Report for Kosovo, Brussels, 14.10.2009 SEC(2009) 1340, pp. 20–1. 45. For further details see www.savacommission.org, accessed 30 April 2010. 46. BalkanInsight.com, 16 November 2006. 47. ‘States Vie for Pipeline to Bypass Bosphorus’, Oxford Analytica Daily Brief, 20 July 2000. 48. BalkanInsight.com, 25 March 2010. 49. UCTE was formerly known as UCPTE as it dealt not only with electricity transmission but also with production. 50. Before the 1990s, former Yugoslavia was integrated in the southern branch of UCTE, known as SUDEL. Bulgaria and Romania participated in the United Power Systems (UPS) within COMECOM. Romania left UPS in 1994 (Centre for Liberal Strategies, 1997, pp. 78–9).

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51. To help the intergovernmental consultations, the EU funded, through PHARE, a multi-country study on the issue. European Investment Bank, ‘Basic Infrastructure Investment’, p. 52 52. WT2, Report from the Second Meeting, Istanbul, 16–17 October 2000. 53. European Commission, Strategy Paper on the Regional Electricity Market in South East Europe and Its Integration into the EU Internal Electricity Market, 11 November 2002, p. 8. SEECP Energy Ministers, Energy Coordination and Policies in SEE, paper prepared by the Albanian Presidency of the SEECP, October 2001, points 9–13. 54. Replaced by Directive 2003/54/EC (the Second Electricity Directive). 55. Memorandum of Understanding on the Regional Energy Market in South East Europe and its Integration into the European Community Internal Energy Market (Athens Memorandum 2003), 8 December 2003. . 56. The CEFTA 2006 secretariat is now co-funded by the Commission and the participating states, who contributed 30 per cent of the cost in 2009/10 and 50 per cent in 2010/11. Decision of the Joint Committee of CEFTA No. 2/2008, 8 October 2008. www.cefta2006.com, accessed 30 April 2010. 57. Ibid. The Regulatory Board makes recommendations to the ministerial council regarding disputes but is generally envisioned as a counterweight to the intergovernmental arm of the Energy Community. 58. http://www.energy-community.org, accessed 30 April 2010. 59. Annual Report of the Secretary General of the RCC, 2008–2009, Sarajevo, 14 May 2009, p. 31. 60. Energy Coordination and Policies in SEE, October 2001, point 7. 61. Enlargement Strategy and Main Challenges 2009–2010. 62. Moldova and Ukraine completed technical negotiations for joining the Treaty in 2009. Moldova formally joined on 17 March 2010. 63. Slovenia later joined SECI under US pressure, but Croatia opted for observer status (Lopandic´, 2001, p. 126). 64. Interview with Antoinette Primatarova, former Bulgarian Chief Negotiator and Ambassador to the EU, Sofia, September 2003. 65. Interview with a European Commission official, October 2009.

5 Defusing the Powderkeg: Security Cooperation 1. For a theory-informed analysis of the multiple meanings of Balkan security, see Economides (2002). 2. During subsequent talks on CFE, Bulgaria and Romania showed readiness to set even lower ceilings, with a view to their NATO membership bids. Turkey was prepared to follow suit, in case all other Balkan states limited their arsenals, while Greece declined to revise its CFE ceiling. 3. At the time, Albania was still not a member of OSCE and was not a signatory to CFE and the Vienna documents. 4. Full text available at . Cf. McCausland (1997).

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5. Centre for Liberal Strategies, Current State and Prospects, pp. 33–6. On OSCE role in South East Europe in that period, see Ghebali and Warner (2001). 6. As of 2010: Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Canada, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine and the US are observers. 7. For an overview of RACIVAC’s activities see www.racviac.org, accessed 30 April 2010. Another significant SP project in the field of security is the South Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SEESAC), launched on 8 May 2002 in Belgrade and funded by the UNDP. SEESAC is guided by the OSCE’s Document on Small Arms and Light Weapons, notably provisions on regional co-operation. www.seesac.org, accessed 30 April 2010. 8. During his visit to Tirana, Perry also announced that the US was going to grant Albania a military aid package worth $100m, ten times more than the sums the country had received in the preceding four years. AFP, 2 April 1996. 9. RFE/RL Newsline, 26 March 1996. 10. BTA, 31 March 1996. 11. For Secretary of Defence William Cohen’s comments, see AFP, 3 October 1997. 12. Angelov (1999, p. 55) drawing extensively on sources within the Bulgarian Ministry of Defence. 13. Nadja Podobnik, ‘Turnšek – Slovenia is in Central Europe and will remain there’, STA, 3 October 1997. 14. AFP, 3 October 1997. 15. Ibid. 16. Interestingly, Macedonia’s stance was backed by Bulgaria. The inevitable issue about the name to be used by Skopje surfaced too. As a result, the signatures of the ministers of defence of the SEDM countries on the MPFSEE agreement were not followed by clarification of which state they represented. 17. Greece even established a training center in Kilkis for the purposes of the Balkan force. 18. Foreign Minister Pangalos supported the Bulgarian bid after a meeting with the head of the Bulgarian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee Assen Agov on 14 April 1998. RFE/RL Newsline, 14 April 1998. 19. Anatolian Agency, 25 April 1998. 20. In 2001, General Zorlu was succeeded by the Greek General Andreas Kouzelis. Next in line were Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and Macedonia. 21. RFE/FL Newsline, 28 September 1998. 22. The text of the Skopje agreement is available on the website of the Romanian Chairmanship of the SEDM . 23. In addition to peace-support operations, it listed joint training activities: reconnaissance, command post/field training, and crisis management exercises conducted according to commonly agreed-upon plans and programmes.

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24. The agreement stipulated that the unit should operate according to NATO standards, rules and regulations. 25. The Thessaloniki conference (October 2000) added a permanent coordination committee (SEDM-CC) to the institutional structure. The body was to be chaired by the country presiding over the MPFSEE Steering Committee. 26. The ETF was established with the Second Additional Protocol to the the MPFSEE Agreement signed on 30 November 1999 during the Bucharest Ministerial. It was originally conceived as a separate unit, but later incorporated in the SEEBRIG. 27. The legal status of the HQ was settled by the Third Additional Protocol to the MPFSEE Agreement adopted by the SEDM deputy defence ministers in Athens on 21 June 2000. 28. The bulk of the personnel came from Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria. Details in George Christian Maior and Mihaela Matei, ‘Defence Policy Developments: Old and New Missions for the Armed Forces’, Occasional Paper 1/2002, Institute for Political Studies of Defence and Military History, Bucharest, 2002. . 29. At the regular SEDM meeting held in Thessaloniki on 9 October 2000, William Cohen pointed out that the brigade had to be deployed at the earliest opportunity, Reuters, 9 October 2000. 30. Balkan Times, 21 December 2001. 31. Institute for Security and International Studies (Sofia), ‘Balkan Regional Profile’, May 2001. 32. RFE/RL Newsline, 4 April 200, Reuters, 4 April 2001. 33. This same view was expressed again several weeks later by Albania’s Head of General Staff during a visit to Bulgaria. ISIS, ‘Balkan Regional Profile’, May 2001. 34. Romania presided over the SEDM and the MPFSEE coordination committees in 2001–3. In September 2003, the force’s HQ moved to the Romanian port of Constant‚a. 35. At the 2001 Thessaloniki ministerial, the defence ministers approved a budget of $500,000 for the year 2002. 36. Croatia joined the SEDM during its fifth ministerial taking place in Thessaloniki on 9 October 2000. 37. Factiva Newswire, 26 September 1998. 38. SEECAP’s full text is available at . 39. Other RCC-affiliated projects, largely inherited by the SP WT3, include the Disaster Preparedness and Prevention Initiative (DPPI), Southeastern and Central Europe Catastrophe Insurance Facility, and Firefighting Regional Centre. See 2008–2009 Annual Report of the Secretary General of the Regional Cooperation Council in South East Europe, RCC, Sarajevo, 14 May 2009, pp. 30–3. <www.rcc.int, accessed 30 April 2010>. 40. Stability Pact for South East Europe, Agenda for Stability, Thessaloniki, 8 June 2000, point 21.

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41. The SP even set up a taskforce on human trafficking together with the OSCE (September 2000). SP participants signed a special declaration in support. Among the actors involved in the taskforce were the OSCE Commissioner for Human Rights, the International Organization on Migration, UNICEF, the Council of Europe, the International Catholic Migration Committee and others. The taskforce’s activities partly overlapped with those of the Regional Centre for the Fight against Illegal Trafficking, set up by Albania, Italy, Greece and Italy in the town of Vlorë. 42. Issues include trafficking in human beings, stolen vehicles, small arms, radioactive and dangerous substances, and drugs, as well as commercial frauds, financial and cyber crimes, terrorism, and valuation frauds. SEEPAG was launched in November–December 2003 by the SEECP members and Slovenia. Further details can be found at <www.seepag.info, accessed 30 April 2010>. 43. In 2001 alone, the centre reported 3112 exchanges of information (Hajdinjak, 2000, p. 65). 44. Mihai-Rãzvan Ungureanu quoted in Xenakis (2004, p. 211). 45. For the distinction, see European Stability Initiative and East-West Institute (2001, p. 28). 46. www.respaweb.eu, accessed 30 April 2010. 47. Even SPAI’s multilateral activities overlapped with those of the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) within the Council of Europe. ESI and East-West Institute, ‘Democracy, Security’, p. 15. 48. See . 49. RFE/RL, Crime, Corruption and Terrorism Watch Bulletin, vol 1, no. 7, 13 December 2001. 50. Tanjug, 3 March 2003. 51. The other leading project of the Centre is the Common Threat Assessment on Organized Crime for the South East European Region (OCTA-SEE), originally proposed by the Slovenian Presidency of the EU Council in October 2007. Starting from 2001, Slovenia has been hosting meetings on organized crime and terrorism attended by government representatives of the Western Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Austria, and Hungary (the so-called Brdo Process). 52. European Commission, Western Balkans: Enhancing the European Perspective, Communication to the European Parliament and the Council, COM(2008) 127, 5 March 2008, p. 13. 53. Balkan Times, 5 February 2002. 54. A Police Cooperation Convention for South Eastern Europe was signed in Vienna in May 2006. 55. Gabriela Konevska, Director of the SECI Centre and Head of the SPOC Secretariat, Europe by Satellite TV, 21 November 2003. Transcript available at . 56. BBC News, 3 February 2010. 57. EUObserver, 4 February 2010. 58. Javno.hr, 10 February 2010.

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59. Nationals of all South East European countries can now enter Turkey visa-free or by buying a permit. Albania and Turkey abolished visas in November 2009. 60. Macedonia and Albania concluded a visa-free travel agreement in 2008. 61. This has been accompanied by intensifying of cooperation in the area of migration policy. In November 2008 Western Balkan countries signed a memorandum of understanding towards setting up a system for sharing statistical data on illegal migration, and participating in the regional system of advance notification. It complements the activities of the Migration, Asylum and Refugees Regional Initiative (MARRI), originally launched by the SP in 2003 and steered by a centre in Skopje <www. marri-rc.org, accessed 30 April 2010>. 62. ‘SEDM – Adapting to the New Security Environment’, Presentation by Gabriel Rilla, Captain SEDM-CC Secretariat at the EAPC / SEEGROUP Workshop ‘Civil-Military Interaction in Security Management: The Case of South East Europe’, Sofia, Bulgaria, 27–8 June 2002. 63. Quoted in Elizabeth Brook, ‘Multi-National Brigade Set to Deploy in Balkans Southeastern European Nations Train together for Peace Operations in the Region’, National Defence Magazine, December 2002 .

6 Between Lofty Rhetoric and Lingering Conflicts: Political Cooperation 1. Protocol between the Governments of Romania, Bulgaria and Greece on Enlarged Trilateral Co-operation in Fighting Crime, in Particular Cross-border Crime, Sofia, 8 September 1998. During the Sinaia Summit, the three presidents signed an agreement on cooperation in the field of tourism, as well as a declaration on the creation of a free-trade zone. 2. Reuters, quoting Western diplomats in Sofia, 22 May 1996. Importantly, Bulgarian authorities were accused of turning a blind eye on the pro-PKK activities of Kurdish émigré organizations based in the country. 3. BTA, 19 July 1996. 4. The declaration’s text and Videnov’s address are available at . 5. BBC Monitoring Service: Central Europe & Balkans, 8 July 1996. 6. Reuters, 6 July 1996. 7. Interview with Dr Dinko Dinkov, advisor on foreign policy issues at the Bulgarian Council of Ministers, September 2003. 8. Importantly, Croatia was absent, while Bosnia’s Foreign Minister Jadranko Prlic´, who was to be indicted by ICTY in March 2004 for his actions during the war, chose to take part as an observer. Allegedly, this decision was pushed by Bosnian Croats adopting Tud¯man’s line. The Turkish Foreign Minister again did not attend, which fed Greek hopes of becoming the

190

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

Notes

leader in the newly formed group. The ministerial took stock of the regional developments for the past year: the government changes in Bulgaria and Romania and the collapse of the Albanian state triggered by the breakdown of the financial pyramid schemes. The appeal for restoring order in Albania was the highlight of the declaration adopted by the foreign ministers. Reuters, 10 June 1997. The summit was attended by: Presidents Kiro Gligorov (Macedonia), Slobodan Miloševic´ (FR Yugoslavia); Prime Ministers Victor Ciorbea (Romania), Ivan Kostov (Bulgaria), Fatos Nano (Albania), Kostas Simitis (Greece) and Mesut Yılmaz (Turkey); Foreign Ministers – Ismail Cem (Turkey), Blagoja Handžiski (Macedonia), Nadezhda Mihaylova (Bulgaria), Paskal Milo (Albania), Milan Milutinovic´ (Yugoslavia), Theodoros Pangalos (Greece), Adrian Severin (Romania), and Mihovil Malbašic´ (Assistant Foreign Minister of BiH, participating as an observer). Croatia was not present at the summit in any capacity, claiming that it had received no official invitation. The point was well understood at the time. As a senior Western diplomat discussing the impact of the Salonika meeting put it, ‘ [the event] is a remarkable step forward … not only is it the first time such a meeting has taken place, it is the first time most of these people have actually met, and there is now an opportunity for personal diplomacy, which we tend to take for granted elsewhere.’ Norman Abjornsen, ‘Bosnian Security Gets Big Rethink’, Canberra Times, 15 June 1997. Bill Clinton came to Bucharest on 11 July, two days after the Madrid Summit, a first high-level visit since President Richard Nixon’s unprecedented summit with Nicolae Ceaus¸escu in August 1969. Tsardanidis (2001, p. 5). Commenting on the Crete declaration, the official press agency Tanjug pointed out that ‘the document was welcomed by participants in the conference as a proof that the regional countries are capable of cooperating and ready to cooperate without foreign powers’ interference’. BBC Monitoring Service: Central Europe & Balkans, 3 November 1997. The Bulgarian National Radio reported that Prime Minister Ivan Kostov spoke against this initiative, stressing that it would be better to use the money and efforts needed for the establishment of such structures for the financing of infrastructure projects and the transport corridors and for eliminating customs duties. BBC Monitoring Service: Central Europe & Balkans, 5 November 1997. AFP, 4 November 1997; RFE/RL Newsline, 4 November 1997. This was the first visit to Greece by a Turkish prime minister since Turgut Özal’s summit with Andreas Papandreou nine years before, and it followed soon after the Imia/Kardak crisis in late 1996, which saw the two countries moving to the brink of military escalation. BTA, 12 March 1998. Bulgarian Press Digest, 11 March 1998. Athens News Agency, 10 June 1998.

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19. Athens News Agency, 9 June 1998. 20. After some initial hesitation, Yugoslav Prime Minister Momir Bulatovic´ signed the joint statement, describing it as ‘balanced’. Reuters, 13 October 1998. 21. Financial Times, 14 October 1998. 22. The Yugoslav leadership was even banned from entering Romania, which was a direct signal that multilateral dialogue was closed for Belgrade. Comments on a news conference at the Romanian Foreign Ministry quoted by Rompress, 15 September 1999. 23. The inaugural meeting in Sarajevo (July 1999) had been attended by nearly all of the region’s dignitaries: Presidents Franjo Tud¯man, Süleyman Demirel, Petar Stoyanov, Rexhep Meidani, Milo Ðukanovic´, Alija Izetbegovic´ (together with his Croat and Serb colleagues in Bosnia’s collective presidency), and Prime Ministers Costas Simitis and Zlatko Mateša, accompanied by their respective countries’ foreign ministers. 24. The summit was attended by President Emil Constantinescu (Romania), Prime Ministers Bülent Ecevit (Turkey), Ljubcˇo Georgievski (Macedonia), Mugur Isa ˘rescu (Romania), Ivan Kostov (Bulgaria), Ilir Meta (Albania) and Costas Simitis (Greece), Ministers of Foreign Affairs Ismail Cem (Turkey), Aleksandar Dimitrov (Macedonia), Nadezhda Mihaylova (Bulgaria), Paskal Milo (Albania), George Papandreou (Greece) and Petre Roman (Romania), as well as Deputy Foreign Ministers Jadranko Prlic´ (BiH) and Vladimir Drobnjak (Croatia) as observers and Bodo Hombach, Special Coordinator of the SP, as a special guest of the Chairman-in-Office. 25. As already noted, this was the standard line promoted by the European Commission. Report from the Commission to the Council on Regional Cooperation in Europe, Brussels, 1 December 1997, COM (97) 659 final. 26. During the Bucharest summit, the Croatian representative Vladimir Drobnjak reaffirmed the unwillingness of his country to join SEECP as a full member, arguing that the initiative was Balkan in character and that Croatia did not consider itself a Balkan state. Hina, 11 February 2000. 27. Picula, talking to news reporters, Hina, 18 July 2000. 28. Reuters, 22 February 2001. 29. Patrick Moore, ‘Security Issue Overshadows Balkan Summit’, RFE/RL Balkan Report, vol. 7, no. 16, 27 February 2001. 30. Reuters, 23 February 2001. 31. Goran Granic´’s speech at the first Skopje Summit. Hina, 25 October 2000. 32. Comment made at the SEECP’s Second Parliamentary conference. Alban Bala, ‘Mixed Messages at Balkan Parliamentary Gathering’, RFE/RL Balkan Report, vol. 6, no. 13, 15 March 2002. 33. The crisis coincided with an agreement signed at the summit by Koštunica and Trajkovski that dealt with the demarcation of the two states’ common border, both in Kosovo and east of it. The Kosovars objected to the deal and accused Yugoslavia of usurping their right to negotiate themselves the boundaries of the province.

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34. The closing declaration condemned ‘the violent and illegal terrorist actions, by the ethnically motivated extremist armed groups in South Serbia which could have the effect of destabilising the situation in the region’, ‘Summit Declaration of the Heads of State and Government of South East European Countries’, Skopje, 23 February 2001. 35. According to Tanjug, the original wording of the declaration contained a condemnation of the ‘Albanian terrorists’ in southern Serbia, which prompted Meidani’s last-minute decision not to go to Skopje. RFE/RL Newsline, 23 February 2001. 36. AFP, 16 May 2001. 37. RFE/RL Newsline, 17 May 2001. There were also reports about further controversies between Macedonia and Albania, regarding the wording of the joint declaration. While Skopje insisted on the use, in a certain part of text, of the pronoun ‘such’, which amounted to a condemnation of the NLA, Paskal Milo firmly opposed the term. Finally ‘such’ was replaced by ‘this’ which was taken to be more neutral. Arian Leka, ‘Diplomatic meeting in Tirana jeopardized by one pronoun’, Alternative Information Network (AIM), 19 May 2001. 38. Despite the Macedonian crisis, the conference was marked by certain signs of hope. One hope was clearly for the restoration of the diplomatic links between Albania and Yugoslavia, severed during the Kosovo crisis. In fact, Goran Svilanovic´ was the first Yugoslav minister of foreign affairs to visit Tirana since Budimir Loncˇar attended the Balkan summit of 1990. The conference also called for a meeting of ministers of education to discuss a concerted policy on the ‘bad neighbour’ images in the books of history. 39. Arian Leka, ‘Peace in Skopje accompanied by a chill in the relations with Tirana’, AIM, 31 August 2001. 40. Reuters, 28 March 2002. During the meeting, Albania presented a plan envisioning the set-up of multiple working groups in various issue-areas from trade to organized crime and democratization. 41. ANA News Daily Bulletin, 29 March 2002. 42. Hina, 19 June 2002. 43. UNMIK’s head Michael Steiner proposed the establishment of a regional police network (with the participation of Kosovo) to carry out joint investigations and the exchange of information. Hina, 19 June 2002. 44. A meeting of the SEECP trade ministers was held in October 2002, and ministers of interior met in March 2003. The Belgrade ministerial scored some success on the political side. Just before it, the foreign ministers of Yugoslavia and Albania agreed to establish diplomatic ties and exchange ambassadors. The closing declaration mentioned cooperation in the educational sphere, and a future meeting of the ministers of culture to discuss strategies to deal with interethnic prejudices and ‘bad neighbours’ stereotypes called for bilateral consultations on the issue. Like the Tirana Summit, the ministerial also condemned ‘in strongest terms’ the destruction of cultural monuments in Kosovo, which was put on the agenda by the host country.

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45. Joint Statement of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the SEECP, Belgrade, 19 June 2002. Text available at http://www.mfa.gr/english/foreign_ policy/europe_southeastern/balkans/perifereiaka/belgrade.html, accessed 30 April 2010. 46. The ministerials were followed by meetings of the chiefs of staff on 24 October and defence ministers on 16 September and 13 November 2002, just a few days before the Prague Summit. A similar informal quadrilateral meeting was held by Paskal Milo, Solomon Passy, Ilinka Mitreva (Macedonia’s foreign minister) and George Papandreou on 25 August 2001 in the Greek town of Florina. 47. Joint press conference by Powell, Picula, Mitreva, and Meta, Tirana, 2 May 2003. . 48. Interview with an official from the Office of the President of the Republic of Macedonia, Skopje, September 2003. 49. 46 tons of Yugoslav gold worth $440m was split as follows: FRY 36.52 percent, Croatia 28.49 per cent, Slovenia 16.39 per cent, Bosnia and Herzegovina 13.12 per cent, and Macedonia 5.4 per cent. Subsequently, a deal was reached on the distribution of the former federation’s embassies around the world. One issue still to be resolved concerns the deposits of citizens of various ex-Yugoslav republics in Slovenia’s Ljubljanska Banka. 50. SEC(2009) 1336 (Montenegro), p. 19; SEC(2009) 1338 (Bosnia), p. 22; SEC(2009) 1339 (Serbia), p. 21, all published on 14 October 2009; 51. B92, 13 November 2003. 52. BalkanInsight.com, 14 April 2010. Following the visit to Ahmicí, Josipovic´, accompanied by the heads of the Bosnian Catholic Church and the Islamic Community, went to Krizancˇevo Selo, where Bosniak troops had killed Bosnian Croat civilians on 28 December 1993. 53. The ICJ delivered its judgment on Bosnia’s application on 26 February 2007. While it found that genocide had taken place, it judged that Serbia, considered FR Yugoslavia’s lawful successor, had only failed to prevent it and had not actively committed it. ICJ [2007] Judgment, ICJ General List No. 91. Croatia filed its own case against rump Yugoslavia in 1999. The judgment is still pending. Serbia lodged a counter-case on 4 January 2010. 54. The Secretary General has a three-year mandate, with a possible extension for another two years. 55. Hido Bišcˇevic´, ‘Regional Ownership and Beyond – Setting up the Regional Cooperation Council’, Concept paper prepared by the Secretary General of the Regional Cooperation Council SEECP Summit, Pomorie, 20 May 2008. Another body, established earlier in 2007, was a permanent secretariat in Sofia, overseeing the regular meetings of speakers of parliament and other exchanges of national legislatures, a priority area for RCC. See <www.rspcsee.org, accessed 30 April 2010>. 56. Regional Cooperation Council, Strategic Outlook at the Priority Areas of Cooperation in South East Europe, Supporting Document to the Strategic Work Programme of the Regional Cooperation Council, Pomorie, 20 May 2008.

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57. 2008–9 Annual Report of the Secretary General of the RCC, p. 10. 58. In October 2008, Macedonia and Montenegro recognized Kosovo’s independence. As a result, the Serbian government proclaimed the Macedonian and Montenegrin ambassadors personae non gratae, and withdrew its own representative, in January 2009, after Podgorica established diplomatic links with Prishtina. However, Serbia’s ambassadors returned to Croatia and Bulgaria in November 2008, after being recalled in February. Serbia accepted ambassadors from Macedonia and Montenegro in April and July 2009 respectively. 59. Sofia Echo, 22 May 2008. The summit produced more optimistic news items too: Bulgaria and Montenegro had agreed that Montenegrin citizens could seek consular assistance at Bulgaria’s offices in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. 60. In contrast, Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite not having recognized Kosovo, has been issuing visas, on a case-by-case basis, to Kosovar officials involved in the work of the RCC. 61. 2008–2009 Annual Report, p.6. UNMIK has signed, on behalf of Kosovo, all-important regional agreements and initiatives: CEFTA 2006, the Energy Community Treaty, the ECAA agreement, SEETO, etc. See Ch. 4. 62. European Commission, Enlargement Strategy and Main Challenges 2009–2010, p. 6. 63. Zaman, 3 March 2010. 64. For two academic observers’ treatments, see Hyde (2004) and Tsardanidis (2001).

Conclusion 1. For the shifting ideas of territoriality and sovereignty in (Western) European history see Maier (2002). 2. This ideological paradigm has been aptly described by Jan Zielonka (2001, pp. 514–5) as a ‘neo-medieval religion’ established upon the Holy Trinity of ‘democracy, free markets, and peace’. See also Russett and Oneal (2001). 3. The mood was very well captured in a speech made by none other than US President Bill Clinton. Speaking at the US Naval Academy on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, he observed that ‘the Cold War’s end lifted the lid from a cauldron of long-simmering hatreds. Now, the entire global terrain is bloody with such conflicts’. Quoted in Washington Post, 26 May 1994. The argument was further elaborated by Robert Kaplan, whose earlier book Balkan Ghosts reportedly influenced Clinton’s early policy towards the Bosnian conflict. See Robert Caplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, The Atlantic Monthly, 273 (2), February 1994, pp. 44–76. 4. For example, Goldsworthy (2002). 5. On the anti-liberal appropriation of Europe in Romania, see Katherine Verdery, ‘Civil Society or Nation? “Europe” in the Symbolism of Postsocialist Politics’, Chapter 5 in Verdery (1996).

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Index Adler, Emanuel 7, 63, 86, 172 Adriatic Ionian Initiative 157, 164, 168, 184 Albania 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 171 Domestic politics 20, 22, 26, 27, 28, 30, 37, 38, 70, 190 Economy 20–26, 30, 88, 94, 98, 173, 181 Foreign policy 5, 7, 10, 20–25, 31–34, 37, 42, 45, 49, 57, 59, 70, 91, 96, 110–112, 116, 117, 121–122, 125, 132–133, 136–137, 140–143, 146, 157, 160, 162, 166–169, 175–176, 185–186, 189, 192 Identity 31–34, 70, 179 Altmann, Franz-Lothar 56, 145, 171 Anastasakis, Othon 7, 34, 41, 68, 173 Arkan, Željko Ražnatovic´ 36 Arsenis, Gerasimos 112 Austria 26, 27, 44, 94, 101, 120, 121, 147, 158, 160, 169, 186 Austria-Hungary 42, see also Habsburg Empire Balkans, notion of Balkan mentality 74, 201 Balkanism 66, 67, 74, 201 homo balkanicus 64 Orientalism 204 Western Balkans 2, 5, 6, 15, 26, 47, 50, 52, 55–59, 61, 62, 76–80, 85, 88, 89–94, 98–107, 111, 118, 121–127, 130, 139, 142–143, 148, 152–155, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 165, 166,

167, 176, 177, 178, 180, 182, 188, 195, 198–200, 202–203 Balkan Pacts 1934 31, 42 1952 32, 42 Berisha, Sali 35, 135 Bildt, Carl 78, 133, 175, 181 Bišcˇevic´, Hidajet (Hido) 146, 193 borders cultural 1, 93 state 1, 21, 24, 27, 30–31, 36, 38, 47, 76, 150, 196–197 Bosnia and Herzegovina 34, 171 conflict, 1992–5 24, 27, 43, 110, 162, 167 domestic politics 110, 144, 147, 167, 177, 183 economy 88, 93, 173, 181–183, 193 foreign policy 52, 56, 59, 91–93, 100, 118–121, 123–126, 132, 139, 143–144, 147–148, 163, 165–169, 175, 177, 182–183, 194 identity 68 Bulatovic´, Momir 136, 191 Bulgaria 73 Domestic politics 20, 24, 31–32, 37–38, 125 Economy 20–30, 85, 87–88, 91–93, 173, 99–104, 107 Foreign policy 20–26, 32–35, 37–38, 42, 44–45, 47, 49, 52, 55–57, 61, 68, 76–77, 79, 87–89, 91–93, 96, 99–104, 107, 110–114, 117, 121–122, 125, 135, 139, 142–144, 146, 157–161, 162–168, 171, 173–175, 179, 181, 184–191, 194 207

208

Index

Busek, Erhard 44, 58, 146, 165, 178 Bush, George W. 116 Buzan, Barry 20, 33, 172 Cem, Ismail 190 Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) 5, 46, 77, 87, 89, 91–93, 103, 105, 107, 148, 157, 163, 166–168, 171, 183, 185, 194, 196, 198 Ciorbea, Victor 190 Clinton, Bill 44–5, 51, 78, 111, 181, 190, 194 Cohen, William 113, 115, 119, 186–187 Cold War 5, 14–15, 20–21, 30–33, 42, 69, 73, 75, 80, 109, 130, 137, 152, 154, 194, 197, 199, 206 COMECON 20–22 Confidence building measures 49, 133, 176, 199 Constantinescu, Emil 135, 174, 191 Constructivism 8, 9, 79 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE), Treaty on 109–11 Cooperation Council of the Baltic States 46 Croatia 171 Domestic politics 34, 36, 72, 90, 138, 150, 155, 180, 183, 201 Economy 23, 25–26, 28, 88, 94, 173, 181, 183 Foreign policy 2, 10, 24, 26, 36, 43–44, 47, 49, 52, 55–59, 87, 90–94, 98–103, 106–107, 110–112, 118, 122–126, 132, 137, 139, 142–147, 150, 153, 151–161, 162–167, 169, 173, 175, 177, 183, 185, 187, 189–190, 193, 205 Identity 7, 68, 72, 180 Cvijic´, Jovan 64, 178 Dangerfield, Martin 92, 107, 171, 178

Dayton/Paris Peace Accords 2, 43, 131, 162 Delevic´, Milica 91, 93, 98, 100, 124, 144, 171 Ðind¯ic´, Zoran 143 Ðukanovic´, Milo 38, 136–7, 191 Energy 29–30 electricity 29–30, 101–104, 105, 106, 140, 141, 158, 166, 173, 184–185 infrastructure 29, 30, 133, 184 gas 29–30, 101, 103, 105, 158, 168 oil 21–22, 29, 36–39, 45, 101, 103, 105, 158, 168, 169, 174 European Common Aviation Area (ECAA) 99, 100, 107, 158, 167, 194 Energy Community 2, 13, 98, 103, 104, 105, 107, 158, 166, 167, 168, 169, 185, 194, 204 Europe Europeanization 12, 74, 78, 80 history 42–43, 67, 75, 78, 174, 179, 197, 200, 203 identity 6–14, 75–76, 80, 134–135, 149, 178, 197, 202 South East Europe 30, 62–63, 68–70, 74–79 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) 52, 54, 147 European Union Amsterdam Treaty, 1997 50–51, 124 and regional cooperation 5–6, 10–11, 12–13, 15, 45–48, 51, 55, 57–61, 77–78, 104, 107, 142–145, 154, 181, 196, 203–205 Association Agreements 21, 50, 51, 55–56, 135, 139, 182, 203 conditionality 5, 47, 58, 61, 77, 81–82, 105, 148–149, 156, 163, 175

Index

Common Foreign and Security Policy 43, 48, 91, 163, 205 Council of Ministers 48, 163, 189 Customs Union 24, 89–90, 183 Enlargement 47, 51, 59, 76–77, 86, 107, 125, 130, 134, 142–143, 148, 153, 182–185, 194, 198, 203, 205 Euro-Mediterranean Partnership 8, 88 European Commission 47–48, 52–55, 58, 77, 87–89, 93, 95–96, 98, 101, 102–103, 107, 141, 144, 146, 163, 175, 177, 181–185, 188, 191, 194 European Investment Bank 52, 98, 147, 184–185 financial assistance CARDS 57–58, 98, 121–122, 139, 165, 177–178 IPA 58, 98, 146, 168, 177 OBNOVA 45, 57, 175 PHARE 45, 47, 58, 174, 185 identity 75, 81, 109, 202 membership negotiations 76, 91, 103, 144, 163–164, 167, 169 norms 11, 14, 75–76, 78, 82, 86, 106, 130, 153, 155, 183, 196 Regional Approach 44–45, 77, 161–163, 174 Royaumont Process 147–48, 53, 131, 133, 162–163, 174 Stabilization and Association Process (SAP) 15, 55–56, 58–61, 76–77, 98, 105, 130, 142, 149, 152, 158, 161, 178, 181 Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAA) 55–56, 59, 88, 90, 92–93, 165, 167–168, 177 Thessaloniki Summit, 2003 59, 76, 130, 143, 149, 166 Trade and Cooperation Agreements 45, 47

209

Zagreb Summit, 2000 57, 121, 139 Fischer, Joschka 90, 176, 178 Frcˇkovski, Ljubomir 132 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) 4, 22, 85, 89, 95 France 51, 70, 78, 147, 158, 186 Garton Ash, Timothy 76, 178 Georgia 61, 104, 118, 126, 194 Georgievski, Ljubcˇo 117, 174, 191 Germany 26, 27, 42, 44, 50, 70, 72, 111, 147, 158, 186 Glenny, Misha 34, 75, 174 Gligorov, Kiro 135, 190 Gligorov, Vladimir 4, 26, 87, 89, 181, 184 Granic´, Goran 190 Greece 171, 195, 201 Domestic politics 69–70, 186 Economy 20, 24–30, 87, 94–96, 101–102, 173, 183–184 Foreign policy 21, 24–30, 31–35, 39, 44, 49, 60, 92, 94–96, 101–102, 110–117, 119, 121–122, 125–127, 131, 133–136, 142–143, 145–147, 149–151, 157–161, 162–163, 165, 167–169, 172–173, 175, 183–184, 185, 188, 189, 202, 205 Identity 69–70, 179, 200 Habsburg Empire 31 Hegemony 41, 70, 156, 198 HELBROC 119, 168 Hombach, Bodo 52, 78, 89, 96, 139, 164, 178, 191 Hoxha, Enver 32–3, 70, 135 Huntington, Samuel 63, 72 Interdependence 6, 9, 10– 14, 19–20, 30, 35, 39, 40–41, 61–62, 81–82, 86, 106, 108, 127, 130, 143, 149, 150, 172, 200, 204

210

Index

International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 46, 57, 60, 79, 124, 144, 165, 177, 189 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 21, 50, 143, 182 Investment Compact 54, 94, 159, 167 Iorga, Nicolae 62, 65, 70 Isa ˇrescu, Mugur 96, 191 Izetbegovic´, Alija 43, 131, 162, 163, 191 Italy 24–27, 31, 38, 44, 96, 100, 102, 112, 115, 119, 147, 157–158, 160–161, 184, 186, 188 Jocic´, Sreten 124 Jovanovic´, Živadin 136 Judah, Tim 2, 4, 172 justice and home affairs 15, 54, 56, 61, 108, 138, 159–161 Khruschev, Nikita 31–2 King, Charles 64–5 Kitromilides, Paschalis 64–5, 69 Kofos, Evangelos 32, 42, 171 Kosovo 171 conflict, 1998–9 3–5, 24, 35, 44, 49, 56, 130, 136–137, 150 domestic politics 60, 100, 126, 130, 163, 168 economy 103 foreign policy 59, 60, 99, 103, 125, 133, 147–148, 159–160 identity 12, 33, 36 Rambouillet talks, 1999 137 status 12, 91, 99, 130, 133, 135 Kostov, Ivan 89, 96, 112, 115, 117, 135, 190, 191 Koštunica, Vojislav 89, 138, 140, 143, 145, 165, 191 Kouzelis, General Andreas 186 Lopandic´, Duško 6, 25, 42, 47–8, 135, 137, 172, 182, 185

Macedonia conflict in 2001 139–140, 150 domestic politics 34–35, 37–38 economy 22–29, 87, 91–94, 100–104, 110, 173 name dispute 115, 134 foreign policy 32–35, 45, 47, 49, 52, 55–56, 57–59, 87, 91–94, 96, 100–104, 110, 112, 114,116, 117, 121–122, 125, 130–131, 134, 136, 138, 142–143, 157, 160–161, 162–163, 165–169, 171, 173–175, 177, 182, 186, 189–194, 196, 203–205 identity 31–34, 196 Mazower, Mark 67, 75, 179 Moldova 28, 38, 61, 62, 68, 79, 99, 104, 111, 118, 121, 146, 148, 151, 171, 176, 183, 185 Meta, Ilir 140, 143, 191, 193 Mihaylova, Nadezhda 136, 190, 191 Milo, Paskal 140, 190, 192 Miloševic´, Slobodan 14, 29, 34–37, 43, 44, 47, 52, 55, 58, 73, 89, 104, 112, 121, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141, 162–164, 173, 180, 190, 202, 205 Milutinovic´, Milan 190 Mimica, Neven 90 Minorities 3, 21, 30, 33, 112, 176, 181 Mitreva, Ilinka 143, 193 Montenegro 171 Domestic politics 38, 124, 130, 183 Economy 91–93, 182 Foreign policy 52, 57, 59, 62, 91–93, 118, 120, 124–125, 137, 143–147, 157, 160–161, 166–169, 175–176, 194 Identity 33 Multinational Peace Force in South East Europe 15, 113, 114, 161, 163, 197

Index

Nano, Fatos 135, 190 National Liberation Army (Macedonia) 117, 140 Nationalism 31, 35, 65, 71, 72, 73, 77, 130, 150, 172, 180, 195, 199, 201, 202 NATO Adriatic Charter 143, 149, 151, 157, 166, 169 CJTF concept 48 Conditionality 48, 82, 127 Enlargement 48, 117, 130, 134, 153, 175, 177 Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council 56, 119 Partnership for Peace 15, 35, 48–50, 56–57, 111–120, 126, 128, 143, 162, 164, 167, 175 Peacekeeping operations 49, 116, 161, 165 South East Europe Initiative (SEEI) 56–57, 120, 128 SEECAP 120, 128 SEEGROUP 56–57, 119–120, 127, 160, 164, 189 Neoliberal Institutionalism 41 Neumann, Iver 9, 41, 64–5 New Regionalism 7, 85, 172, 202, 205 Northern Epirus 32, 175 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 52, 54, 94, 95, 122, 147, 159 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 44, 48, 50, 52–53, 78, 82, 109–111, 113, 115, 117, 127, 129, 133, 136, 147, 150, 160, 185–186, 188, 199 CSCE 53, 77, 78, 109, 110, 133, 150 Cyprus 31–2, 79, 119, 147, 158, 166, 168 Josipovic´, Ivo 144, 169, 192

211

Karamanlis, Constantine 32, 168 Karamanlis, Kostas 101 Marovic´, Svetozar 144 Meles¸ canu, Teodor 131 Mesic´, Stjepan (Stipe) 141, 143–4, 168 Papoulias, Karolos 131 Pirinski, Georgi 131–2 Samaras, Andonis 34 Šešelj, Vojislav 35 Stanishev, Sergey 101, 168 Putin, Vladimir 101, 168 Videnov, Jean 131–2 Paris Charter 77, 78 Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) 109, 110, 111, 185 Ottoman Empire 69, 72, 204 Özal, Turgut 20, 190 Pangalos, Theodoros 133, 136, 186, 190 Papandreou, Andreas 32, 42, 70, 171, 190 Papandreou, Geogrios (George) 191, 193 Passy, Solomon 193 Perry, William 111, 177, 186 Picula, Tonino 90, 138, 143, 191, 193 Powell, Colin 193 power 31, 155, 196 military 33 relational 13, 39, 41, 81, 82, 156 soft 41, 155 structural 81, 82 Pukanic´, Ivo 123, 124 Racˇan, Ivica 90, 107, 164 Realism 41, 200 refugees and IDPs 36, 38, 46, 49, 143–144, 176–177, 189 Regional Arms Control Verification and Implementation Assistance Centre (RACIVAC) 111, 186

212

Index

Regional Cooperation Council 2, 58, 95, 120, 129, 147–148, 159, 168, 187, 193, 195 Regionalism 3–14, 19, 41, 50, 55, 59, 60, 63, 67, 76, 79, 85, 107, 119, 129, 146, 154–155, 172, 196–197, 200, 202, 205 Forms 5, 7 theories of 4, 7, 9, 19, 59, 63, 79, 85, 127 Romania 7, 171, 196, 201 Domestic politics 20–24, 111, 125, 190–191 Economy 20–30, 85, 87–89, 91–94, 99–104, 173 Foreign policy 1, 20–33, 35, 37–38, 44–47, 49, 52, 55–58, 60–62, 79, 87–89, 91–94, 96, 99–104, 107, 110–112, 117, 121–122, 125, 134–137, 139, 141–143, 147, 151, 153, 157–160, 162–169, 173, 175, 184–189, 191 Identity 7, 68, 70–71, 179–180, 194, 199 Roumeliotis, Panagiotis 48, 175 Russia 29, 37, 42, 50, 52, 101, 104, 105, 112, 179, 186 Sava Commission 105, 159 Security 5, 15, 30–38, 39–40, 108–113, 119–120 Conflicts 30–33, 56, 60–61, 77, 180 Military 50, 108 Soft security 14, 36, 40, 109, 120–124 Serbia 171 Domestic politics 22, 36, 49, 91, 174, 192 Economy 22–29, 49, 91–94, 100–102, 183 Foreign policy 26, 35, 42, 49, 55–62, 91–94, 100–102, 118–126, 132, 137–150, 157,

159–161, 165–169, 175, 194, 202 Identity 68, 72–73, 180 Simitis, Kostas 131, 145, 190, 191 Slovenia 171 Domestic politics Economy 21, 94, 98–100 Foreign policy 21, 34, 44–47, 52, 61, 68, 87, 92–94, 98–100, 106–119, 132–135, 144–150, 157–161, 162, 165–169, 175, 180, 185–186, 188, 193, 197 Identity 68, 72, 113, 201 Solana, Javier 91, 139, 175 Soviet Union 21, 118 South East Europe Transport Observatory (SEETO) 98–99(T), 161, 166–168, 194 South East European Cooperation Process (SEECP) 1, 10, 12, 15, 52, 58, 79, 89, 95, 102–103, 111, 113, 122, 127, 129–131, 134–142, 145–151, 153, 159–160, 163–169, 172, 182, 185, 188, 191–193, 205 Summits 134–135, 140, 145, 146, 149 Institutionalization 131, 134–135, 141, 145 regional ownership 145 South East European Cooperative Initiative (SECI) 44–45, 47, 52, 53, 58, 61, 87, 95, 102, 106, 119, 121, 123, 127, 131–133, 141, 147, 160, 163–164, 169, 174, 183, 185, 188, 205 South East European Defence Ministerial 109, 111, 134, 161 Stability Pact for South East Europe 4, 49–55, 111, 137–138, 164, 176, 177, 178, 184, 188, 203 donor conferences 53

Index

WT1 53, 145, 177 WT2 53, 88, 94, 177, 182, 185 WT3 53, 57, 119, 121–122, 145, 177, 187 Stoyanov, Petar 117, 191 Agriculture 20, 93, 157 free trade agreement 36, 87, 148 industrial goods 55–56, 87, 92, 157 liberalization 3, 4, 13, 20, 57, 87–89, 93, 104–106, 139 non-tariff barriers 157, 182 services 26, 59, 90, 92, 99, 107, 157 Šušak, Gojko 37 Soviet Union 20–1, 32–3, 42, 72, 75, 113, 118 Svilanovic´, Goran 141, 145, 192 Thrace 110 Eastern (Turkish) 62 Western 31, 173 Tito, Josip Broz 31, 135 Todorova, Maria 8, 65–7, 73, 76, 178 Trade 2, 15, 24–27, 58, 86–94 Trajkovski, Boris 143, 191 transport 27–29, 95–100, 168, 184 air 99, 158 rail 161, 197 road 105, 183, 197 transborder waterways 100, 105 Transport Community 98, 100, 105, 107, 161, 168 Tud¯man, Franjo 14, 36, 43, 55, 72, 106, 112, 131, 191 Turkey 171 Domestic politics 20–22, 87 Economy 20–22, 24–30, 87–89, 94, 100–107, 173, 203 Foreign policy 21, 24–30, 30–44, 49, 55, 61–62, 79, 87–89, 94, 100–107, 110– 118, 121–127, 131–132, 136, 142, 146–151,

213

158, 160–161, 163–165, 169, 172–173, 176, 188–189 Identity 71, 180 Tzhohadzopoulos, Akis 112, 135 Ukraine 37–8, 49, 61, 101, 104, 118–9, 126, 171, 185 United Nations Peacekeeping operations UNPREDEP 43, 174 UNPROFOR 43 Security Council resolutions 50, 136 UNECE 44, 147 United States 13–15, 21, 35, 39, 42– 47, 50, 52, 60–61, 70, 72, 78, 82, 87, 96, 101, 102, 104, 109–119, 126–127, 130–131, 136, 139, 140–143, 147, 149, 152, 155, 157, 160–161, 163–165, 174, 185–186, 194, 201 Balkan initiatives 13–15, 42, 44, 47, 111–113, 115, 149 Uvalic´, Milica 4, 21, 24, 26, 55, 88, 182 Veremis, Thanos 6, 42, 171, 173 Visegrád cooperation 46, 92, 106 World Bank 25, 50, 52, 53, 54, 90, 93, 95, 96, 147, 177, 182, 184, 200, 206 World Trade Organization (WTO) 26, 88–90, 92, 182 Yılmaz, Mesut 115, 135, 190 Yugoslavia disintegration of 10, 42, 66, 73, 109 Federative Republic of, 1992–2003 3, 22–28, 36, 43–44, 47, 49, 52, 87–88, 110, 112–113, 116, 122–123, 126,

214

Index

Yugoslavia – continued 131–133, 136, 143–144, 151, 163, 165, 173, 175, 182, 190 Serbia and Montenegro, 2003–06 5, 23, 68, 93, 100, 102, 118–119, 125–126, 141, 144, 166, 182

Socialist (People’s) Federative Republic of, 1945–92 3, 20–22 Yugosphere 2, 8, 94, 200 Zielonka, Jan 76, 194 Živkovic´, Zoran 143 Zorlu, General Hilmi 115, 117, 186

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