South East Europe

The Road from Thessaloniki
Gerald Knaus
European Stability Initiative
www.esiweb.org

It was the sceptics among EU diplomats and politicians - not the visionaries gathered around Greek Foreign Minister Dr George Papandreou - who won the debates that preceded the preparation of the recent Thessaloniki EU summit. Thessaloniki concluded that the EU policies used to help countries prepare for accession - and that are now applied in Romania and Bulgaria - are not available to the region. Most importantly, the EU is not yet willing to bring to bear its considerable experience in supporting structural economic reform, the cohesion policies that have been such a success in recent years in Ireland and Greece and that will now be applied in Poland and Lithuania. A small success - some additional money so that EU assistance to the region does not decline further in coming years - is tempered by the fact that much of this will not be used to help countries catch up economically but for the same programs already now financed under the EU CARDS programme.

Thessaloniki is a reality check for Western Balkan leaders. They know now that they must demonstrably want the integration of their countries into the EU more than the EU will ever want to integrate them. In the 1960s De Gaulle's twice vetoed the UK joining the European Community. In the late 1970s the European Commission gave a negative opinion on Greek accession. The history of enlargement is the history of determined lobbying and pressure to overcome deep scepticism. This will not change in the case of the Western Balkans. Simply put, the EU will never ask countries to apply for membership and the time will never be ripe unless countries self-confidently believe in it themselves.

And yet, there are winners from the debates leading up to the summit.

One is Greece, which has invested more political capital in helping the region than anybody had the right to expect, and is now widely seen as an honest broker.

Another are regional leaders, who have for the first time lobbied jointly and assertively, making clear that the region wants to be taken seriously as interlocutors, and not simply be made to accept whatever is being offered.

And a third is the idea that European integration requires the region to catch up economically, and that the EU has both the instruments and the self-interest to support this. Thessaloniki did not bring the breakthrough in incorporating "cohesion" into EU policy towards the Balkans, as regional politicians have demanded in joint declaration. But the ground has been prepared, the idea has caught on widely, in the region and in Europe. If governments in Skopje, Belgrade and Zagreb continue to lobby as determinedly as they have done in recent months, the number of sceptics in the EU will diminish.

Ask the Bulgarians how many people in Brussels, Paris or London believed in 1988 that Bulgaria would soon be members of both the EU and Nato? There is a road from Thessaloniki and the Greek Presidency to Rome and to Dublin and the Italian and Irish EU Presidencies.