Post by Bozur on Dec 30, 2009 11:42:36 GMT -5
The Balkans and the European Union
Lightening gloom?
Dec 30th 2009 | BELGRADE
From The Economist print edition
A somewhat more optimistic start to the new year in the western Balkans
ONLY a few months ago a deep gloom hung over the western Balkans. Both Croatia and Serbia had been stopped in their separate tracks towards the European Union. Foreign investment had dried up during the recession. There was even doom-laden talk of a renewed conflict in Bosnia. But now the atmosphere has generally improved; maybe not everywhere, but particularly so in Serbia.
Serbia had been blocked by the Dutch, who wanted it to arrest Ratko Mladic, the fugitive Bosnian Serb general indicted by The Hague war-crimes tribunal on charges of genocide. But, satisfied that the authorities are genuinely looking for General Mladic (a Serbian minister has just resigned for failing to catch him), the Dutch have for now lifted their veto. Just before Christmas, Serbia’s government applied for EU membership.
The idea was that Serbia should end the year with a bang. Three days previously Serbs, along with Macedonians and Montenegrins, had regained the right to travel without visas to most EU countries that they lost during the wars of the 1990s. Soon afterwards Fiat, an Italian carmaker, at last acquired a full 67% stake in Serbia’s main carmaker, Zastava, which was already turning out Fiat Puntos. That deal was planned in 2008 but frozen by the economic crisis. Mladjan Dinkic, Serbia’s deputy prime minister, claimed the takeover signalled the end of Serbia’s recession.
Mr Dinkic may be too optimistic. Serbia’s economy has been hit hard and GDP is expected to have contracted by 3.5% in 2009 and to grow by only 1% in 2010. Yet the Fiat deal matters as a sign of renewed confidence in the country. What is not clear is whether ordinary Serbs will be much cheered by it. In February the government will begin firing 8,500 workers as it tries desperately to cut public spending. On December 6th in a local election in Vozdovac, a Belgrade municipality that President Boris Tadic’s ruling Democratic Party sees as its natural territory, the opposition parties were the winners.
The leading opposition party, the Serbian Progressives, was founded only in October 2008. It emerged from the extreme nationalist Radicals, now just a rump party. The Radicals’ irredentism had turned into irrelevance, so Tomislav Nikolic, the acting party leader, chose to follow the example of Croatia’s nationalists and fashion a modern centre-right party, shorn of warlike rhetoric and no longer anti-EU. The latest opinion polls give the new party a similar share of the vote to Mr Tadic’s Democrats.
In the meantime, Croatia’s own former nationalist party, led by Jadranka Kosor, the prime minister, is crestfallen. For much of 2009 Croatia’s EU accession talks were blocked by a trivial border dispute with Slovenia. Despite recently raising some fresh concerns, the Slovenes have now lifted their veto. Croatia could join the EU as soon as 2012. Yet in the first round of a presidential election on December 27th, Mrs Kosor’s candidate was beaten into third place. The second round on January 10th will pitch Ivo Josipovic, a lacklustre Social Democrat, against Milan Bandic, the controversial mayor of Zagreb.
Ines Sabalic, a magazine columnist, notes another big shift. In the past, proving one’s patriotism was the way to win votes, but no longer. Today, she says, anti-corruption is the new nationalism and everyone outdoes everyone else with promises to clean up the country. Organised crime, corruption and a judiciary buried under a backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases are only the most urgent tasks.
The campaign was boring, the candidates dull and people are fed up, says Ivo Banac, a historian and commentator. Croats are the richest people in the western Balkans and the closest to following Slovenes into the EU, but polling by Gallup and the European Fund for the Balkans finds 84% of respondents in Croatia, more than anywhere else, think their country is heading in the wrong direction.
Much as others in the western Balkans may resent it, Serbia and Croatia are the two countries that matter most in the region. Many obstacles stand athwart the EU ambitions of Montenegro and Macedonia, as well as Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania (these three have not even won visa-free travel yet). But if the big two make progress, the effect will be positive for all. Enlargement is hardly a priority in Brussels these days, and Spain, which does not even recognise Kosovo’s independence, has just taken over the rotating EU presidency. With the exception of Croatia, the others have many years of work before they can even come close to joining the EU, so today’s hostile mood may be less worrisome and discouraging than it appears.
Only a decade ago Slobodan Milosevic, president first of a disintegrating Yugoslavia and then of a belligerent Serbia (and Montenegro), was still comfortably in power in Belgrade. In the Balkans progress tends to be painfully slow. But it is progress, all the same.
www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15180906