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The US, EU and Kosovo: can they sync up?

Here are the speaking notes for the talk I gave this morning under the auspices of KIPRED in Pristina, Ambassador Lulzim Peci presiding:

1. It’s great to be back in Pristina, and an enormous privilege to talk with you here at the Swiss Diamond, though I hope next time to have a Marriott at our disposal as well. Don’t tell your foreign minister I said that!

2. I’d like to discuss with you the triangle that has so often driven progress in the Balkans in general and in Kosovo in particular: the US, the EU and of course you.

3. When those three are in sync, nothing stops us. When they are out of sync, little progress is made on big issues, including those that can threaten peace and stability.

4. Let me start with the US. Its circumstances have changed dramatically since the 1990s and early 2000s, when relatively small American interventions—military and diplomatic—ended and prevented wars in the Balkans, including the 2001 conflict in Macedonia.

5. That was the unipolar moment, when Yeltsin’s Russia was on the ropes and China had not yet started to show its financial muscle.

6. In the 1990s, the US was not yet tired of playing the role of global policeman and it was confident of its own strong democratic tradition.

7. The 17 years since 9/11 have changed that. The attack on the World Trade Center prompted a justified US invasion of Afghanistan and an unjustified US invasion of Iraq, both of which seemed to go well at first but bogged down into quagmires that sapped American finances, strength and confidence.

8. Now we live in a multi-polar world, one in which President Putin is trying to reassert Moscow’s claim to great power status and President Xi doesn’t even have to try.

9. The financial crisis of 2008 sent the world’s economy into a tailspin. Though the American recovery was relatively steady and even fast compared to Europe’s, a large portion of the relatively uneducated, white, male working population still hasn’t recovered.

10. It was their discontent, especially in the Midwest, that led to President Trump’s election in 2016. He lacked a majority of the popular vote but gained a modest margin in the electoral college, which gives less populous states greater weight in determining who wins the presidency.

11. The Trump Administration is not a conservative one: it has abandoned a central conservative tenet—concern about the budget deficit—in favor of a massive tax cut for the wealthy and an unprecedented boost in military spending as well as sharply increased military activities focused on Islamic extremism, especially in the Middle East and Africa.

12. It has also been sometimes belligerent towards North Korea and always towards, while abandoning both the Trans-Pacific and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnerships and throwing down the gauntlet on trade and investment as a challenge, especially to China.

13. The Administration’s initial hostility towards NATO has been corrected, but the President has little use for the EU, whose sharing of responsibilities is anathema to an America First attitude.

14. I need only mention briefly that the Administration is also preoccupied with a series of dramatic scandals that involve Russian tampering in the US election, the President’s many sexual affairs, and his financial and other legal improprieties. This is a confused White House under siege.

15. As a consequence, Trump focuses on keeping his big money donors and his white working-class base happy. He explicitly states that he has no interest in how others govern themselves and has warmed to autocrats like Presidents Duterte, Putin, Xi, and Sisi.

16. The kind of liberal democracy “of the people, by the people and for the people” that many in Kosovo aspire to is under threat in America and out of fashion in much of the rest of the world, as ethnic nationalists and kleptocratic elites feel unconstrained by Trump.

17. So you shouldn’t be surprised when I say that the Balkans and their governance failures are one of the last things on minds in Washington. Even if he is married to a Slovene, President Trump hasn’t spent more than a few minutes on the Balkans since taking office.

18. Instead, career officials in the State and Defense Departments have thankfully kept US Balkans policy on their previous course, and Vice President Pence as well as former National Security Adviser McMaster have intervened constructively.

19. But it is going to be difficult to match even the low Obama-level interest in Balkans democracy with President Trump in the White House.

20. The situation in Europe is better. The Europeans were for years preoccupied with their own financial crisis, the Greek debt debacle, and their consequences for the euro and for growth.

21. Europe was also deeply scarred by the refugee influx from the Middle East and Africa and its implications for terrorism. More than 100,000 illegal border crossings occurred here in the Balkan, putting economic, logistical and political strain on the region.

22. Some Europeans even within the EU have turned to demagogic leaders who promise to protect nativist groups from foreigners, while the British made the enormous mistake of voting narrowly to withdraw from the EU, in large part due to xenophobia.

23. But Europe’s economy is now slowly recovering, and the Europeans have become much more alert to Putin’s trouble-making since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016, and this year’s attempted murder of defectors in Britain.

24. To my delight, the European Commission, alarmed by Putin, seized an opportunity in February to reopen the political window for EU accession in 2025, saying that those who qualify by 2023 will be welcomed in two years later. They did not say when the window would close.

25. For good reasons, many doubt the sincerity, and even the feasibility, of this promise to enlarge once again. It is explicitly conditional on internal reforms to strengthen the Union, and it will require ratifications by current members that may prove difficult to elicit, including referenda in France and maybe the Netherlands.

26. This is nevertheless an extraordinary opportunity. It is my hope that as many Balkan countries as possible will take advantage of it. Most of the benefits of EU membership come in preparing for accession.

27. Montenegro and Serbia lead the regatta, as they have achieved candidacy status and are making their way as quickly as they can through the chapters of the acquis.

28. But others are not so far behind: the Commission has recommended candidacy status for Albania as well as Macedonia, and Kosovo has approved border demarcation with Montenegro and will now I hope get the visa waiver. That will be an important milestone in synching up with the US and the EU.

29. Bosnia and Herzegovina, although it has applied for candidacy, is in many respects the laggard, as its governing system is based on the awkward constitution Americans wrote at Dayton.

30. Nevertheless, a process that has been frozen pretty much since Croatia acceded to the EU in 2013 has restarted. Opportunities like this one don’t come often.

31. That brings me to the Commission’s Progress Report on Kosovo and its implications for your government, parliament, and civil society.

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