In weakness strength
On reflection a day after the fact, I’d like to reiterate what Kurt Bassuener has already eloquently asserted: the arrest of Ratko Mladic was certainly a triumph for the Dutch. Both stubborn and racked by guilt, as Jerry Gallucci suggests, they deserve credit for sticking with their insistence on Mladic’s arrest.
But here is the deeper point: the EU’s famous weakness–its need for unanimity–becomes a strength when it comes to imposing conditionality. For Serbia to achieve candidacy status for membership, all 27 member states have to agree. The Netherlands’ hard line on arrest of Mladic as a precondition for its agreement to candidacy is what made the arrest happen.
I have little doubt that several years down the pike, when Belgrade has fulfilled all the technical requirements for EU membership, that the Dutch and others will insist that it also needs to resolve the issue of Kosovo (good neighborly relations being in any event an EU requirement). Many in Belgrade already know this; the sooner the EU makes it explicit, the quicker Belgrade will make the necessary moves.
Of course this capacity of member states to block EU decisions can also work against what I might consider a good idea. Witness EU relations with Kosovo, which are stymied by the five EU members that don’t recognize the government in Pristina as sovereign and independent, even though most of them seem to acknowledge its legitimacy and authority. But look what happened when those five joined the other 22 in insisting that Belgrade and Pristina begin a dialogue: it happened quickly and seems to be proceeding well.
The EU’s leverage is a powerful force, one that will need to be brought to bear both in Kosovo and in Bosnia and Herzegovina if the remaining Balkans problems are to be resolved peacefully. The disturbing thing is that the EU seems so infrequently capable of wielding power effectively.
Lady Catherine Ashton’s sudden visit to Banja Luka earlier this month to prevent a referendum in Bosnia on the authority of the state justice system got President Milorad Dodik to postpone his plans, but it also strengthened his position as an EU “interlocutor” and gave him the opportunity to sideline the Sarajevo government and institutions. I am not convinced the EU came out ahead with this maneuver, which undermined the international community’s High Representative and annoyed Washington. It is still not yet clear to me whether Dodik will cancel the referendum altogether, or hold it over the heads of his antagonists. But I can guess what he would prefer to do.
I can only hope that the EU will use its leverage well. Projecting power is not its strong suit, but its need for unanimity on important issues provides a strange kind of strength when it comes to imposing its will on those who aspire to membership.
With respect to Serbia, Kurt draws the right conculsions:
Serbia has proven it responds to rational incentives – and there is no reason to believe that this is not a reality across the party spectrum. So instead of bending over backwards to ensure Tadic and the Democratic Party’s re-election, the EU and wider West should instead insist that standards be met whoever is in power, and cut Serbia no more slack.
The same should go for other Balkans leaders.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
3 thoughts on “In weakness strength”
Comments are closed.
RSS - Posts
Serbia under Tadic has become a country capable of acting rationally. But looked at coldly, it could certainly have “found” Mladic earlier. The day Ashton arrives? Really?
Turning over – one by one – a few war criminals, while not popular with the nationalists, is really a cheap way to get credit with the EU. Abandoning the claim to Kosovo seems in another category completely. EU leverage exists only in relation to asking the achievable and the EU cannot keep moving the goal posts. Given its own problems, the EU might find that when it is ready – you suggest in several years – to accept its suitor, the bloom will have gone off the very idea of marriage.
The current negotiations between Pristina and Belgrade offer an opportunity to make practical compromises that improve conditions for everyone while the final status question is still not settled between them. The EU needs to focus its leverage on getting the two sides to accept arrangements that do not require either side to take a position on independence. This is achievable and should itself open the door for Serbia to advance further into the EU. EU membership is not some prize for good behavior but a process to extend the democratic and liberal values and culture of Europe into the heart of the Balkans. Kosovo should also be given the same opportunity, though it may need to move within a different framework into the EU.
The villagers in Lazarevo share your suspicions – they told a Figaro reporter that it was impossible for anyone to have spent more than two days in a place that small without being noticed. And Dnevni Avaz claims police sources say he had been living in a Belgrade suburb where many police officers live.
Remind you of anything? I’m eagerly awaiting the current US Ambassador’s memoirs, especially the part where she describes the conversation where she offered the Serbian government the services of a currently underemployed SEAL team. Given a choice, you can see which option Mladic himself would have preferred. And why he is being so cooperative about calling on his supporters to protest only non-violently. Or maybe he’s just old and tired and needs top-flight European medical treatment – letting enough time pass solves some problems automatically.
For Tadic’s sake, you have to hope a lot has changed in the country since Djindjic’s day, not just in the president’s office. The tone in Serbian newspaper articles and the talkbacks to them suggests it has (although e-noviny managed a lengthy compilation of online bluster). Even if the perceived shift is due to editorial selection, I’d think it significant.
“For Serbia to achieve candidacy status for membership, all 27 member states have to agree. ”
And so they start off by insulting the country that will presiding over that hoped-for offer of candidacy status next December? Their latest diplomatic triumph was to persuade Romania to boycott the Warsaw summit and to force Slovakia to demand that Kosovo be represented without its flag or other state symbols. But today the Kosovo newspapers are showing the flag of Kosovo there among all the others – including that of the US. So – no flags (anybody’s) for the meetings without Obama, but flags for everybody for the ones he attended? And thus the wolf was filled, and the sheep remained whole.