Serbia has been in the EU accession pipeline blocked for years. For a country with growing nationalist sentiments, postponing the EU membership perspective might prove fatal. Repetitive candidacy status delay will very likely cause that a public enthusiasm for European integration in Serbia withers additionally.
Taylor-made conditionality
The EU conditionality for the Western Balkans countries has been made as a response to the bloody inter-ethnic conflicts of 1990s that resulted in abundant war crimes, significant displacement of population and deterioration of inter-ethnic relations across the region. Therefore, the part of human rights criteria for the (potential) candidates of the Western Balkans encompass the ‘classical’ “respect for and protection of minorities” requirement, but also requires pursuit of transitional justice (by insisting in prosecution of the war crimes before the domestic courts and by extraditing war crime suspects to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY) and good neighbourly relations. Such tailor-made minority conditionality shall allow for return of refugees and contribute to a proper accommodation of a number of ethnic minorities and their reconciliation in the Western Balkans countries.
Serbia is exposed to the same set of criteria. Belgrade has extradited to the ICTY former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, the wartime president of the Bosnian Serbs. However, in order to start up EU accession process, it was required to extradite two remaining war crime suspects, General Ratko Mladic, who is charged for the slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995 and Goran Hadzic, the former leader of Serbs in Croatia, indicted for crimes against humanity during the 1991-95 Croatian war. After a decade-long manhunt, both war crime fugitives were captured in 2011, in May and July respectively. Serbia's pro-Western President Boris Tadic and the coalitional government headed by Democratic Party believed this would speed up integration of Serbia into the European Union. The platform that brought them to power was promise to achieve candidacy and begin membership talks. Nevertheless, the candidacy status has not been achieved, not even as a reward for fulfilling a tailored made criterion that requires cooperation of the Western Balkans candidate countries with the ICTY in The Hague.
Another EU accession obstacle Serbia has been facing considers Kosovo, its former province that came under international control after a 1999 war and which declared independence four years ago. Serbia has not recognised its independence; neither did all EU member states. Whereas for the Serbs a territory of Kosovo plays an import symbolic role, being the cradle of the nation, several EU Member States (Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain) refuses to recognize its independence fearing it might cause upheavals of ethnic minorities residing on their territories.
Since good neighbourly relations and regional cooperation, that acknowledge the borders among the neighbouring states, are all part of EU conditionality, unresolved border issue has been keeping both Serbia and Kosovo in a stalemate. This issue exactly was consequently taken as an excuse to postpone progress in Serbian EU accession. Serbia namely hoped to become a formal EU candidate in December 2011, but Germany blocked this, insisting that more solid neighbourly cooperation with Kosovo has to be reached.
An agreement reached on Kosovo's regional representation several days ago, will allow Kosovo to represent itself in international conferences and arranges management of joint borders. And when it seemed that the final obstacle for Serbia to get a candidate status was removed, Romania posed additional condition about the treatment of a Vlach minority, which they consider a group of ethnic Romanians. The reasoning behind the conditioning is allegedly inadequate protection of this minority in Serbia. This however comes as a surprise because the Vlah minority in Serbia claims it does neither feel threatened in Serbia nor recognizes Romania as its keen-state.
In spite of this surprising and unannounced conditioning, EU ministers on 28 February 2012 gave preliminary approval to Serbia's Union candidacy. On 2 March 2012 the EU head of states and governments will eventually decide over the Serbian candidate status.
Stricter conditionality supplemented by the enlargement fatigue
A growing resistance among EU citizens toward adding new members, as well as an ongoing and enduring eurozone crisis affects EU enlargement of the Western Balkans. In spite of the fact that enlargement to the Western Balkans is necessary both for Europe and the countries of this region, Serbian story told above confirms that accession criteria are becoming stricter as the time passes by, but also that the EU is losing its lure since the enthusiasm for the EU is waning among the population of (potential) candidate countries. Usually, nationalist political options are the only gainers of such an outcome. Indeed, in Serbia this soon might be proven, as the parliamentary elections are scheduled for the first half of 2012 and the presidential one are soon to follow.