The European Union and the Paradox of Enlargement: The Complex Accession of the Western Balkans

267 Pages·2020·2.355 MB·English

by  Tatjana Sekulić

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN EUROPEAN POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
The European Union and
the Paradox of Enlargement
The Complex Accession of the
Western Balkans
Tatjana Sekulić
Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology
Series Editors
Carlo Ruzza
School of International Studies
University of Trento
Trento, Italy
Hans-Jörg Trenz
Department of Media, Cognition & Communication
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
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Tatjana Sekulić
The European Union
and the Paradox of
Enlargement
The Complex Accession
of the Western Balkans
Tatjana Sekulić
Department of Sociology and Social Research
University of Milan Bicocca
Milan, Italy
Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology
ISBN 978-3-030-42294-3 ISBN 978-3-030-42295-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42295-0
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Preface
In the first days of January 2019, we leave Sarajevo, gliding on the ice and
the snow that had fallen in the previous days. Temperatures are extremely
low, minus ten degrees. Before that, there was the struggle of conducting
the last round of interviews and collecting research documents during the
holiday breaks. The thirty kilometres of highway towards Zenica illumi-
nate the horizon of progress, foreshadowing the idea that Bosnia and
Herzegovina could become a state where mobility is possible in safety and
speed. The highway ends in front of the blast furnaces of the Zenica steel
mill, amid the reddish air that covers the landscape of an otherwise
uniquely beautiful valley. From Zenica, the road narrows into only two
lanes, which makes overtaking a car or truck a life-threatening manoeu-
vre. The road leads to Nemila, a small town along the river Bosna
the name of which literally means ‘undear’, where for some years now
there have been stalls and delays due to damage on the road caused by
floods, landslides or who knows what else. The crossing of the first admin-
istrative but also political border in Bosnia and Herzegovina is marked by
only one sign welcoming passengers to the Republic of Srpska in the
Cyrillic alphabet (the expression is identical in all three national lan-
guages—Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) and in English. For part of our
journey we are accompanied by sights of mined houses in roadside
v
vi Preface
villages, only a small number of which were restored within the twenty-
four years of the Dayton Agreement marking the end of the open war
conflicts. After Doboj now, a new section of the highway much more
comfortably leads to the border with Croatia and, since July 2013, with
the European Union. Yet we continue in the usual direction towards the
border between the two ships—Bosanski Brod and Slavonski Brod (brod
means ship), across Sava River. Its waters originate in Slovenia, flow
through Croatia and Bosnia and finally through Serbia to meet the
Danube in Belgrade. Along the way, we stop for an Illy coffee at the Nada
(hope) gas station, where we are already friends with the staff. Entry into
the European Union this time is not so difficult—twenty minutes wait-
ing in Nemila and another forty at the border with Croatia. It then takes
us four full hours to cross the seven kilometres that separate us from the
Schengen border between Croatia and Slovenia. Hundreds of motorists
are honking simultaneously as they approach the toll booth four hundred
metres ahead of the border, the primary purpose of which is to control
the influx of cars avoiding thus heavy congestion in front of the ‘fortress’
gate. Croatia is once again the bulwark of civilization, while people—
probably mostly from the ‘diaspora’—flock back to their Western
European homes after the holidays. Slovenia also has double border
checks, with restrictive policies of the European institutions related to the
‘migrant crisis’, especially since the opening of the Balkan Route in 2015,
pressuring both countries. At last, Europe: at the border with Italy, they
just check the vignette that Slovenia required us to pay in order to drive
on the highway.
This brief ethnographic reportage illustrates how the contingent redef-
inition of boundaries of different character directly and indirectly deter-
mines the everyday life of citizens, whether they are nationals of EU
member states or residents of the accession countries. Free movement, as
one of the founding principles upon which the community of European
states is founded, is called into question under the pressure of European
and national securitization policies, for which the pretext of a ‘migrant
crisis’ and its direct association with Islamic-inspired terrorism provides a
very convenient framework. In addition to this, the old bilateral disputes
between countries—in this particular case between Slovenia and
Croatia—are being reactivated in informal and non-transparent ways.
Preface vii
The ethnographic experience of crossing the border between Italy and
the countries of former Yugoslavia from 1990 to present day is a research
topic in itself, uniquely relevant precisely to the analysis of the accession
process of these countries into the European Union. As far back as the
1980s, this border divided democratic and communist Europe, the world
of capitalism and the world of socialism; it was the vestibule of the Iron
Curtain, but also a source of inspiration for generations of West European
leftists dreaming about socialism ‘with a human face’, as the self- governing
Yugoslav model was often defined. As the red YU passport lost its rele-
vance in the early 1990s and at times became subject to hiding when
crossing borders, and eventually ceased to apply, so did the collective
identity of the citizens of the Yugoslav federal units under the pressure of
rampant political and military violence. In the 1990s, some of these bor-
ders became insurmountable for ‘wrong’ passports, as military and para-
military violence drew new barriers on the ground within the
internationally recognized frontiers of the newly created states, and those
escaped and expelled, as well as those who could not or did not want to
leave their homes, sought ways to survive. Entire parts of the territory
remained inaccessible due to military operations for many years. The
policies implemented by ethno-national elites were intended to disrupt
communication channels between states, groups and citizens/individuals,
through the destruction of infrastructures—telephone lines, roads, rail-
ways, air transport, shared industrial facilities, schools and universities, as
well as through redefining both the status of individuals as determined by
the new citizenship, and new relationships of closeness and (mis)trust
among people and peoples. The key word of today’s policies of associa-
tion with the European Union is precisely connectivity, which has inspired
the efforts of a group of European countries to support the development
of the so-called Western Balkan (WB) region within the Berlin Process
since 2014.
The new statuses and documents of the citizens of these states from
2000 onwards began to take on new meanings, increasingly in relation to
the position of individual countries in the European integration process,
after the ‘European perspective’ of the eastern and south-eastern parts of
the continent became defined with relative clarity. ‘Novelty’ here is a basic
concept that is to be taken into account in almost every respect when it
viii Preface
comes to the complementary processes of deepening and widening the
EU. Novelty is about the profound transformation of the countries and
societies of East and Southeast Europe, but above all of the European
Union itself, which only in the 1990s actually emerged as something that
should grow into a supra- and transnational unit—a structure/institution
whose character is to this day still insufficiently defined. Here we are talk-
ing about a tension between two processes: on the one side, the enlarge-
ment of the European Union; on the other, the deepening of integration
structures and their institutionalization. Both processes include what
could be called mindset, or mentality, which cannot be nationally stan-
dardized given the implicit differentiation of worldviews related primarily
to class, gender, age, religion, ethnicity and other elements of belonging
and identity. We are also talking here about the temporal component, that
is, the changes that occur in and over time, which require as much time as
necessary, and whose dynamics cannot be linear but are instead exposed
to an almost unfathomable and immeasurable series of events and acts/
actions within the growing complexity of a globalized society. The prin-
ciple of conditionality, as the basis of the enlargement policy whose imple-
mentation is entrusted primarily to the European Commission, was
conceived precisely as the fundamental leading and controlling institu-
tion which should ‘order’ the process of transformation of new states and
societies aspiring for an EU membership. Conditionality is based on rela-
tively explicit criteria for standardization and harmonization defined by
Acquis Communautaire, which in principle apply to all member states’
societies, with the aim of reducing as much as possible the influence of
exogenous factors (geopolitical and others) by establishing equivalent and
complementary structures and institutions in various societies. This would
deepen the integration linkages of the ‘community of fate’ of the united
European continent, which seems to be yet so hard to imagine.
For the countries of former Yugoslavia and Albania, the process of
accession can be considered to have actually begun with the Zagreb
Summit in November 2000. The Thessaloniki Declaration of June 2003
gave the process an institutional framework and set out in principle the
instruments and rules under which the process would play out over the
coming years: the European Commission presented so-called Road Map
of the accession process for the Western Balkans. The subsequent enlarge-
ment of the European Union was seriously jeopardized after the 2004
Preface ix
and 2007 accession, which almost doubled the number of members tak-
ing it from fifteen to twenty-seven. It certainly shook the previous equi-
libria of individual national interests of the core member states and
required, above all, a huge institutional and structural effort to reorganize
the existing field of action of the Union itself. The effort of this fifth wave
of enlargement, colloquially referred to as the Big Bang, required that
each subsequent step towards the accession of new members pass a far
greater check on each institutional barrier, which the already existing
conditionality principle coherently made possible. If we can accept that
this was necessary to stabilize and re-assert the new identity of the
European Union after such a major and historically important event at
the global level, at the same time, the survival of the idea of unification is
of invaluable significance for the Union itself. It means inevitably taking
responsibility for the already launched accession initiatives both in candi-
date countries and in those whose candidacy is still in question.
The character of the enlargement/accession process is such that it can-
not be stopped, or reversed, without very serious repercussions both for
aspirant countries or countries seeking to withdraw their membership,
and for the European Union itself. Brexit is the first experience for which
there is still no adequate term contrary to the term enlargement. In any
case, this concerns the guaranteed freedom of each member state to leave
the Union, while there is no instrument for the other member states to
make such decisions conditional. The procedural rules, but also the sanc-
tioning of such a decision, are just being written in the case of the United
Kingdom. The unanimity principle is sought when it comes to the acces-
sion of new member states and only after the European Commission has
assessed that all the conditions for accession have been fulfilled. Countries
starting from a very low level of development, especially related to the
economic dimension, but also to the political and social ones, as is the
case with the Western Balkans 6 countries must make a far greater effort
to reach the minimum standard levels while at the same time disposing of
far lower resources. The same could be said for Bulgaria, Romania and
Croatia, and to some extent Slovenia and Hungary. The political, eco-
nomic and social resources that these countries can count on in the acces-
sion process are almost entirely directed toward fulfilling the conditions
imposed by the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA), though
the real priorities of these societies may be others. The constant