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This French non-paper is roiling the Balkans:
while promising eventual accession for all the countries of the
region, it proposes tightening up on conditionality and allowing for
reversibility.
That is good, not bad. Sharply criticized for
blocking the opening of negotiations with Albania and Macedonia,
Paris is taking a major step in the right direction by reaffirming
that the goal is full membership and specifying precisely what
President Macron wants to re-initiate the accession process.
The criticism of this move comes from two
directions.
Some see the non-paper as an effort to postpone
re-initiation of the process with Macedonia and Albania even
further. I suppose that is a likely effect, since it will take time
for the European Union to sort out what it wants to do with the
French proposal, but there is nothing to prevent Skopje and Tirana
from using the time to adopt and implement as many parts of the
acquis communautaire as they can. The “negotiations” are not really
much more than verification of progress in achieving implementation.
All candidate countries know what they need to do to qualify for the
EU. The faster they get on with it, the quicker they will get there.
Others say there are aspects of the French
proposal that fail to take into account what is already being done.
I imagine that might be true. I am not in a position to judge the
details. It will certainly take some time for the other member
states to evaluate and propose revisions to what the French have put
forward. But if the result is a clearer and stricter set of
conditions for EU membership, I see no reason not to applaud.
Backsliding is all too apparent in the Balkans, including in current
member Croatia. Scholarship has revealed interesting reasons for
this, including the way the EU is currently conducting the accession
process. Straightening that out might not accelerate accession, but
it would improve performance in the candidate states.
I am a fan of strict conditionality: there is no
reason for current EU member states to invite as a new member any
state that is unwilling to meet the requirements of membership. But
how it is achieved–path dependency in political science terms–is
important. Natasha Wunsch and Solveig Richter propose this:
If thorough democratic transformation still
remains the EU’s goal in the region, conditionality needs to be
complemented with a more comprehensive and deliberate empowerment of
national parliaments and civil society actors as a counterweight to
dominant executives. Favouring domestic deliberation rather than
incentive-driven compliance should go a long way in ensuring the
sustainability of rule of law and democratic reforms even once the
Western Balkan countries have eventually become EU members.
I’m not sure this empowerment of civil society and
national parliaments will be sufficient, but it seems to me a
reasonable experiment to embark on. I think it also important to
train up an independent civil service that remains in place with
changing governments and to protect the independence of the
judiciary and the media. The trouble with conditionality as
currently pursued, as I read Richter and Wunsch, is that it
strengthens executive power. Balancing that with constraining
institutions is the right way to go.
In any event, those in the Balkans who want to see
real reform should welcome the French proposal and hope the EU will
get on expeditiously with whatever changes it wants to make in the
accession process. And in the meanwhile, those serious about
accession will be working hard implementing the acquis as swiftly as
possible, to be ready when the political window to the EU opens once
again.
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