European Union membership necessary for Albania

TIRANA, Aug 10 – Albania is expecting the European Union under the Swedish presidency to discuss its request for candidate status it handed over April 28 under the Czech presidency.
That is very likely to happen by October this year, a time when the EC also brings out is annual report for each country looking to become a future partner in the bloc.
This time Brussels will also have the evaluation of the OSCE/ODIHR on the June 28 parliamentary election which it had said was a very important test of Albania’s maturing democracy.
All Albanian political parties have shown that the European integration is the only future for the country, which is now also a member of NATO since early April.
Prime Minister Sali Berisha created a government coalition with the Socialist Movement for Integration Party of Ilir Meta saying that European integration was the urgent motive for the next four years.
European integration also seems to be the main tool and goal to put aside the region’s history of conflict while also moving its economy ahead in order to reach western European standards.
Six years after the conclusion of the Kosovo war and four years after the Ohrid Framework Agreement ended ethnic violence in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), the Balkans have settled into a real, if tenuous peace and vanished from Western headlines.
The EU presidency would also be a tool to calm down the ethnic conflicts that have covered the Balkans in the last two decades beginning with the former Yugoslavia’s breakup.
In all these years a struggling Albania has tried to cope with the new market economy and has shown itself a moderate country serving as a good basis for the international community to start peaceful initiatives in the region.
The belief that Europe is the answer to problems of economic stagnation, corruption and ethnic tension is the only idea that binds almost everyone in the Balkans, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, party affiliation or profession.
Eventual EU membership is the most powerful incentive to good behavior and reform in history. The wealth offered by the EU is so great that in most countries, political parties are willing to work together to create the open political and economic systems demanded by the EU.
A Balkans enmeshed in the EU would be far more prosperous, and the free flow of capital and people would gradually dissipate rivalries and tensions, just as it did between France and Germany.
The removal of that hope, a prospect raised by the recent defeat of the proposed EU constitution in referenda in France and the Netherlands, could quickly inflame the region. Europe should not gamble that every Balkan country can reach the standards required for accession. It should be more helpful and not differentiate among them.
It is essential that the Europeans, the United Nations and even the United States listen to the message from the region and that the West make the political, financial and intellectual investments required to prepare all Balkan countries for EU membership and the Europeans maintain the will to embrace them.