Slower But Surer Progress Towards Enlargement

The Western Balkans will have to wait until the EU has agreed its constitutional reforms, which won’t happen before 2009.
By Peter Sain ley Berry
This week, on June 20, European Union leaders sit down for their summer summit in Brussels. The summit is supposed to last for two days but the discussions at the European Council may well drag on into a third or fourth day of tense negotiations, as the 27 states grapple with important institutional reforms that will shape the Union for years to come.
What will be the effect of these reforms on Western Balkan entry prospects? And will a successful outcome to these negotiations remove what has been a block on substantive progress during the past two years?
We should take nothing for granted. It is still possible that Poland may veto the talks, as it has threatened to do, unless it is allowed to maintain its present voting strength in Council of Ministers meetings. Should this happen, the whole process of constitutional reform will be thrown back and enlargement blocked for an indefinite period.
But a Polish veto is only one of several potential stumbling blocks; there are big differences between what most nations want to keep from the old constitutional treaty and what countries like Britain and the Czech Republic are prepared to entertain. Major compromises will be required from both sides.
Even if the talks are successful and the leaders agree a framework for a new “Reform Treaty” there is still no guarantee that among the 27 nations there won’t be one that fails to ratify the document. This is despite the fact that the treaty has been designed to avoid the necessity for ratification by referendum. This is crucial in France and The Netherlands on the rock of whose electorates the original constitutional treaty crashed in 2005.
But assuming all goes well, the ratification process should be complete by 2009. It will only be after that, I suspect, that a new enlargement window will open up.
That doesn’t mean accession talks will not proceed in the meantime. While the new French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has indicated that he does not see Turkey as a future member, he agrees that the Western Balkan states should join at some point. It is just a question of when.
Nevertheless, as one reason for the negative results in France and the Netherlands was the speed with which the EU was enlarging, the new treaty is likely to contain references to the EU’s capacity to accommodate new arrivals. We may, therefore, be looking at accession processes that are more gradual.
It is also doubtful whether the summit will really get to grips with the thorny question of exactly how a Union of 33 or more states should be run; how decisions should be made and how states should be represented – in order to ensure the efficient conduct of business.
In essence, European leaders are discussing constitutional provisions originally designed for six states and developed to accommodate 15 and now 27 states. But the whole character of an organisation changes as its membership increases. Achieving a consensus among a partnership of 30 is many more times more difficult than achieving one among 15.
Such questions will need to be addressed once the framework of the new treaty becomes clear. The sooner such discussions start the better, so that some conclusions may be available before 2009.
As for Turkey, the French President has suggested that instead of joining the Union, it might position itself at the centre of a Mediterranean community, linked to, but not part of, the EU. Which other countries this community might embrace is not clear, however. Moreover, Turkey has made it clear it opposes being asked to take any path that does not end with EU membership.
We shall need to see how much support Mr Sarkozy receives for his suggestion. Yet the idea of countries working together is surely a good one. I suggested something similar myself in an earlier article in this newsletter. (See http://www.birn.eu.com/en/58/10/1583/?ILStart=20 )
In the Western Balkans, a form of competitive entry in which states race to squeeze in under a closing door could be replaced by collective or community entry.
A group of states that worked together to form common institutions and to meet EU entry requirements might join together, preserving some regional autonomy within the overall Union structure.
Such “community” thinking may have a further advantage. It is hard to see any lasting stability for Kosovo outside a wider collective framework that embraces all relevant interests.
Self-determination will no doubt ultimately prove the guiding principle in a final status settlement; it is hard to see where else the future of Kosovo could lie.
But the more such a solution is wrapped in a community framework the less the trauma for all concerned. Thus, slow but surer progress could well be the message from this summit.
Peter Sain ley Berry has worked as a consultant with various European companies and undertaken information work for the European Commission. He contributes a weekly political column to the Brussels based EUobserver and is the editor of Europaworld.