Brussels beckons, Serbia and the EU

Serbia comes a step closer to EU membership
Oct 28th 2010
ON OCTOBER 25th European Union foreign ministers agreed to pass Serbia’s request for membership to the European Commission. To the uninitiated it sounded like a dry act of bureaucracy. In fact, it carried huge significance.
The Serbian government has been waiting for this day since it lodged its bid for membership last December. Until this week it lingered in the “matters pending” file, as the Dutch government argued that Serbia had not fulfilled its obligation to arrest the last two men still on the run from the UN’s Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, especially Ratko Mladic, commander of Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian war, who has been indicted for genocide.
The Serbs have spent much of this year irritating many of their fellow Europeans. In July the government called for a resolution at the UN effectively demanding talks on the status of Kosovo. The British and German foreign ministers visited President Boris Tadic to remind him that Serbia had asked to join the EU rather than the other way around. Mr Tadic not only backed off but agreed to open direct talks with Kosovo, something the Europeans and Americans had been urging on him. This week’s move was his reward.
Serbia certainly needs help. People feel financially squeezed; resentment, particularly towards the elite that has consolidated power in the ten years since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, is widespread. Some 700,000 Serbs, of a population of 7.3m, live below the poverty line. Remittances from the diaspora have plummeted and GDP is expected to grow by only 1.5% this year. This is why the foreign ministers’ move matters. “It will energise the whole system,” says Milica Delevic, the director of Serbia’s EU integration office.
Within a month the commission will send Serbia a list of up to 4,000 questions designed to assess its readiness to join. Answering these will take several months, after which the commission will send teams of experts to Serbia to follow up. Next year it will give its opinion on whether the country is fit to become an official candidate. If the answer is yes, it will be a great boost to Mr Tadic’s party ahead of an election that must be held by 2012.
The questionnaire will largely cover technical matters. But in the Balkans, politics is never far away. When Serbia is asked about its population and the location of its borders, for example, the answer will depend on the treatment of Kosovo. The EU demands good neighbourly relations from aspiring members. As Serbia in effect controls the northern, Serb-majority part of Kosovo, the problem is obvious.
The solution, say diplomats, is to begin direct talks on practical matters that should generate the good-neighbourliness that will be needed if tricky political questions of status are to be fudged, as they will surely be. Mobile-phone coverage is one obvious topic for discussion. In September the Kosovar authorities destroyed equipment that had enabled Serbian mobile operators to provide coverage to Serb enclaves in central and southern Kosovo.
Getting substantial talks under way may be difficult, though. Just as Serbia’s government has agreed to them, Kosovo’s has collapsed, and elections are now in the offing. Any Kosovo Albanian leader perceived as giving a jot to Serbia will be labelled a traitor. Yet in the end talks will have to take place. Without them Serbs and Albanians will remain like two men handcuffed to one another, unable to take the road to Brussels and unable to break free from the past.
Europe

the economist

http://www.economist.com/node/17363537