Biden needs more than good ideas to get anything done in the Balkans

Next week a new special envoy is slated to take over in the Balkans from the prior Trump Administration appointees. Balkanites often imagine that I know new appointees, and sometimes I do. But I left the State Department 23 years ago and have not spent much time there since. The newly appointed Foreign Service officers were relatively junior or not yet even in the service in 1998. If I knew them at all, it would be as junior officers who may well have matured and evolved in the decades since.

So no, I don’t remember Gabriel Escobar, the Belgrade deputy chief of mission rumored to replace Matt Palmer as a special envoy for the region. I’ve read his professional bio. He seems to me eminently well-qualified, with prior positions in the Balkans and some relevant language skills. He is a professional who can be presumed to try to shape American policy in productive directions and to do whatever the Biden Administration decides.

What he is not, so far as I can tell, is a close friend of the President or someone with clout (or money) in domestic American politics. Nor is he being tasked to do something on which the President will spend much time. Biden knows the Balkans well and has made the main lines of his Administration’s policy in the region clear: support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all the states of the Western Balkans as well as their EU aspirations. The Administration will also support NATO membership for those who qualify and want it.

This is a return to American policy as it existed before the Trump Administration, which muddied the waters with talk of border corrections, hostility toward the EU, and doubts about NATO. Those annoying and counter-productive perturbances are gone, even if the abrupt Afghanistan withdrawal and the renewed effort to pivot to the Indo-Pacific raise question marks in European (including Balkan) minds.

There are also questions in my mind about how the new Biden crew will approach current Balkan challenges, which go deeper than the stated main lines of policy. There will be doubts about the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Kosovo and Serbia so long as they do not recognize each other and establish diplomatic relations. There will be doubts about Bosnia and Herzegovina so long as it has a government that cannot function effectively on the whole territory to implement the EU’s acquis communautaire, in part due to purposeful non-cooperation by the leadership of one of its two entities.

The question in my mind is whether the Biden Administration will find new paths forward on those two vital issues: normalizing relations between Belgrade and Pristina as well as reforming the Bosnian constitution to make it function more effectively. Lots of people have tried. No significant progress has been made in the better part of a decade with Kosovo/Serbia and more than that in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Trump Administration thought it could improve relations between Kosovo and Serbia and eventually open up new avenues by pursuing economic agreements between them. That was the strategy behind the agreement signed a year ago in Washington. The Biden Administration has confirmed its support for that agreement, which however is exceedingly thin. Even fully implemented, it would do little more than improve transport links and protection of Serb property in Kosovo, without however removing the many existing barriers to trade and investment, many of which derive from Serbia’s non-recognition of Kosovo’s sovereignty.

Some think that might be done in a new Serbian-supported initiative known as mini-Schengen initially and now rebranded as “Open Balkans.” But that too will run up against the Kosovo sovereignty issue, as does Pristina’s effort to create a Southern Europe Free Trade Area (SEFTA) to replace the Central European one in which Kosovo already participates but under a UN flag. The sad fact is that almost any issue can be reduced to sovereignty if the parties are committed to disagreement about it.

As for Bosnia and Herzegovina, its progress toward EU membership is severely handicapped by the nationalist parties that won power in the Dayton peace accords and are uninterested in the serious political and economic reforms required for EU accession. Ironically, Republika Srpska (RS)–which governs on 49% of the territory–is readier to implement the acquis than the more conflicted Bosniak-Croat Federation, which governs on 51% of the territory (let’s ignore Brcko for current purposes). That’s because implementing the acquis could be seen as enhancing the RS’s own claim to sovereignty while it interferes to the max in Sarajevo’s claim.

Little can be done about this if the current RS leadership remains in place. Milorad Dodik, now serving hypocritically as the Serb member of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s presidency and also in control of the RS government, has committed himself to RS independence. So long as he represents the RS, there will be little progress on political or economic reform, as it would threaten his hold on power, his corrupt asset gains, his indispensable Russian support, and his denial of the genocide at Srbrenica.

In my way of thinking, the Biden Administration has the right ideas about the Balkans but has shown little sign yet of how it intends to implement them. Maybe the economic track can produce something useful. Bless it if it does. But if it doesn’t, someone needs to drum up something better, before the ethno-nationalists try once again to re-draw borders and move people to the “right” sides of them. NATO should not preside over one more catastrophe.