pub 1170 a bridge over troubled borders

8/18/2019 Pub 1170 a Bridge Over Troubled Borders

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The EU-shepherded agreement to start talks between

Belgrade and Prishtina is a recent sign that the windsin the Balkans might be starting to blow in a differentdirection. The past few months have seen gesturesof commitment towards regional cooperation andsome very first steps to start rethinking the region’srecent history.

Some countries (Montenegro, Albania) are awaiting theCommission’s opinion on their application to becomeproper candidates for accession, and the Council hasgiven the green light for a Commission Opinion onSerbia’s application. The way ahead for Croatia toclose negotiations with the EU is clearer after Slovenian

citizens agreed in a referendum that the solution to thebilateral border dispute between Croatia and Sloveniathat blocked Zagreb’s negotiations for a year should befound through international arbitration.

However, this latter episode illustrated in a nutshellhow the accession process can be full of traps whichcould put a heavy spanner in the whole enlargementstrategy. Kosovo, Serbia and Former Yugoslav Republicof Macedonia (FYROM or Macedonia for short)all have outstanding statehood problems, and mostcountries have unresolved border issues with theirneighbours, which are also inextricably tied tominority rights.

Balkan borders and EU accession

The enduring name dispute over Macedonia, whichprevented its joining NATO and opening negotiationswith the EU despite being accepted as a candidate in2005, Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008,and Croatia's abrupt halt in its accession negotiationsall brought to the fore how unresolved statehood andborder definition can compromise stability in theregion and EU strategies there.

Big or small as these disputes may appear, they

pose three-fold challenges. First of all, it is politicallyunlikely that the EU and its Member States wouldopen their arms to potentially troublesome members.Accepting Cyprus as a Member State before reachinga settlement on the division of the island highlightednot only the EU’s inability to put pressure on acountry once it becomes a member, but also thespillover consequences on other policy areas, wherevetoes can create multiple blockages in the wholeEU policy process.

The fact that some of these unresolved issuesin the Balkans involve current EU Member States

makes the picture far more complex to handle.

The pattern could be repeated once new countriesfrom the region start joining. As things stand today,enlargement to the Western Balkans is likely totake place in stages, with Croatia (and possiblyIceland) leading the way, to be gradually followedby the other countries, as and when they areready. If these countries have not resolved theseborder-related problems before starting accessionnegotiations, any one Member State could blockthe progress of the new candidate countries, as thecases of Slovenia-Croatia and Macedonia showed.

Finally, past experience has demonstrated thatthe EU’s pre-accession process has not been ableto provide solutions to these problems. Indeed, theacquis does not entail any competence over borderdisputes nor over minority rights (also because thereis no consensus in the EU on these matters).

While the Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP)includes conditionality on regional cooperation,the accession process is essentially bilateral. Thismeans that the EU has no formal leverage to exercise

A bridge over troubled borders:Europeanising the Balkans

The King Baudouin Foundation and Compagnia di San Paolo are strategic partners of the European Policy Centre

BACKGROUND

Rosa Balfour and Dijana Basic

POLICY BRIEF

November 2010


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Intractable or minor as they might appear, all theborder disputes have roots in the history of theBalkans, from the battles against the expandingOttoman Empire, through the Balkan wars of1912-13 and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire,to the creation and then violent dissolution of theSocialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Inaddition to historical changes to borders, there areother principles that complicate matters. Internationalpractice, the accommodation of local populations(which have moved, forcibly or not), and the principleof uti possidetis et de facto (‘effective possession’which favours recognising the current situation)all come in the way of finding solutions.

In 1991 the Badinter Commission set the standardsfor the definition of the new republics, and in the1990s and 2000s a number of bilateral committeeswere set up to solve outstanding issues. But on thewhole there has been close to no progress. Onlyover the past few months did some committeesre-start activities after years of hibernation.

The troubled borders

Slovenia’s blockage of Croatia’s accessionnegotiations throughout 2009 stemmed from thetwo sides’ inability, since 1991, to agree on theland and sea border between the two countriesin the Piran Bay, and Slovenia’s access tointernational waters (instead of just the rights of passage guaranteed by international law). Followingthe June referendum, the matter will be put tointernational arbitration, but other similar disputescould crop up.

The border issue between Croatia and Serbia isdue to natural phenomena: land erosion and floods

have shifted the flow of the Danube westwards. Thequestions regard an area of 14,000 hectares andnavigation rights on an economically-strategic river.

The two sides have different approaches on how tosolve the problem. From Serbia’s point of view theborder should follow the main flow of the Danubeand international practice. Croatia on the otherhand wants to use a law-informed approach basedon the land registry originating in Austrian-Hungarianrule and its claims that in 1947 the SFRY recognisedthis territory as part of Croatia (although Serbiadisputes this). The fact that part of the disputed

lands is registered in the cadastral records of both

countries makes the situation even moreproblematic. If this issue were solved followingCroatian arguments, management of river navigationwould become extremely complicated and bothsides would control enclaves on the other sideof the river.

Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina also sharesome contested issues. The 1999 treaty on theborder between the two countries was questionedby both sides soon after it was signed. Both aredissatisfied with the maritime border drawn betweenthe Croatian Peljesac peninsula and the Klekpeninsula on the Bosnian side, which allocates theislands close to Klek to Bosnia-Herzegovina and ispart of its narrow access to the sea.

The contested issue is that the border was definedon the basis of the 1991 status quo , while historicallypart of the Klek peninsula belonged to Dubrovnik,Croatia’s most southern territory. Indeed Zagrebhas toyed with plans to build a bridge to physicallyconnect Dubrovnik County to the rest of Croatia.Problematic are also the border on the Una river

near Kostajnica, the border near Zeljave (Bihac),and one near Martin Brod. The Una River andvillages at Mount Pljesevica are divided and spreadon both territories, and Republika Srpska holdsclaims over an island in the Una River.

Villages divided

Serbia too has a territorial dispute withBosnia-Herzegovina that has remained unresolvedsince the times of Yugoslavia. The River Lim runsthrough three Balkan states ignoring their boundaries.As a tributary of the Drina River, it comes fromMontenegro, runs through the northern part of

Sandzak and enters Bosnia, but only for a fewkilometres. After that it flows back to Serbia andagain to Bosnia, leaving several small villagesphysically out of Serbia’s territory.

One example is the village of Sastavci with its1,400 inhabitants. Reaching Sastavci is an adventureentailing the crossing of four borders. It is a Bosnianisland surrounded by Serbia and under Serbianadministration. That means that all the buildingsand institutions belong to the Serbian municipalityof Priboj, but the cadastral records are in themunicipality Rudo in Republika Srpska. The police

of the Republic of Serbia are the first ones to be

STATE OF PLAY

pressure on solving the outstanding border issuesin the region through accession conditionality.Furthermore, so far EU Member States have beenreluctant to put pressure on their partners to find

pragmatic solutions to bilateral problems with thirdcountries. The lack of standards for conditionalityimplies that a country's progress can be blockedby a single veto.


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on the spot in case of trouble but the Bosnianpolice have the authority.

In the village two brothers live in two houses on thesame land, but with identity cards from two different

countries. Two hydro-electric plants are also dividedby the border, but there is disagreement over the useof these plants and Bosnia-Herzegovina believes ithas the right to use part of the capacity. After fouryears of deadlock, the diplomatic commission forstate borders between the two countries resumednegotiations last May. Serbia has proposed a landexchange but no agreement has been reached.

Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbiain 2008 is one of the better-known issues in theregion and for this reason will not be discussed indetail here: suffice to say that the absence of

adequate international recognition of Kosovo’sstatehood creates many issues that need to beaddressed in the framework of the bilateral talksbetween Belgrade and Prishtina. The talks’ agendahas not been set yet, but is likely to include theAlbanian-majority municipalities of Presevo andBujanovac in Southern Serbia, the Serbian majorityarea of North Kosovo, the Serbian enclaves inSouthern Kosovo, and the status of the OrthodoxChurch and its monasteries in Kosovo.

Among the spillover consequences of the lack of asolution between Belgrade and Prishtina on thestatehood problem is the border between Serbia/Kosovo

and Macedonia. First agreed upon after negotiationsbetween Skopje and Belgrade in 2001, it was thenrenegotiated in 2009 by Prishtina and Skopje for thepart concerning Kosovo/Macedonia. Belgrade, however,considers the agreement illegitimate.

Montenegro too has some unfinished business withSerbia, with Croatia over the Prevlaka peninsula(where the two sides have agreed to refer to theInternational Court of Justice), and with Kosovo, noneof which constitute politically contentious issues.

The troubled name

The impossibility of finding a common narrativeon the history of the region of Macedonia hascontinued to challenge Skopje’s progress towardsEU and NATO membership. Its current borders

were drawn out of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13which divided the region of Macedonia in threeparts: current FYROM, much of Northern Greece,and the Pirin region in Bulgaria.

Disagreements between Skopje and Athens overwho the Macedonians are (heirs of a non-GreekAlexander the Great, as many in Macedonia claim,Hellenes, as many in Greece claim, or BulgarianSlavs?) have so far been translated into a Greekveto to the country's accession to NATO and theEU. This is on the grounds that the name ‘Macedonia’belongs to the Greek region in which Alexander theGreat was born.

Borders are complex matters: defining them risksdividing societies, whereas what is needed aboveall in the Balkans is to bring societies together andreconcile peoples. The EU is a Union of states,which presupposes agreement on its Member States’borders, but it is also a project that aims to reducethe political, economic and social obstacles thatborders can present.

In the Balkans they are a historical legacy of empire

and war, making it impossible to define ‘right’ and‘wrong’ solutions, just as it is impossible to identifywhere Europe might end on cultural, geographicor ethnic grounds. But the potential impact of thelack of border definition on the politics of the regionand on the enlargement prospect is huge. Settlingthis unfinished business is a practical preconditionto move towards a context of integration in whichborders have less political resonance.

The EU would do well to seize the tide of increasedcooperation in the region to promote a process thatcould create a positive context for the resolution of border disputes. The moment is ripe. Zagreb and

Belgrade have started talking about issues relatedto refugees and missing persons, and both sides areconsidering dropping their lawsuits against eachother for genocide. The presidents of both countriesare taking the lead in what could become a processof rapprochement , and are beginning to work witheach other on practical issues, such as the fightagainst organised crime. Regional cooperation ismoving ahead. Talks between Belgrade and Prishtinaare envisaged to start in the near future.

Lessons from the past

There is one past initiative from which some lessonscould be drawn. In the first half of the 1990s, oneof the EU’s first ‘joint actions’ of the newly createdCommon Foreign and Security Policy, was theStability Pact for Central and Eastern Europe.Originally a controversial idea driven by thepreoccupation that minority issues could causeconflict in Central Europe, the process led to thesigning of a multitude of bilateral and trilateraltreaties, conventions and agreements between thecountries of Central and Eastern Europe settling

PROSPECTS


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European Policy Centre Résidence Palace, 155 rue de la Loi, 1040 Brussels, BelgiumTel: +32 (0)2 231 03 40 Fax: +32 (0)2 231 07 04 Email: [email protected] Website: www.epc.eu

With the support of the European Union:Support for organisations active at European level

in the field of active European citizenship.

open border questions, framing rights-basedsolutions for minority protection, and setting theconditions for good neighbourly relations.

By 1997 many of the potentially destabilising and

undemocratic problems relating to minorities,borders and relations between the countrieswanting to join the EU were, in principle, settledon the basis of Council of Europe and Europeanstandards. This took place before the front runnersto accession opened negotiations with the EU.Although minority issues did emerge during theaccession process (most notably the Russian-speakingminorities in the Baltic states), these did not involvedisputes between neighbouring countries in theenlargement queue.

Build better borders to make them less meaningful

The EU could promote a region-wide processmodelled on the Stability Pact for Central andEastern Europe. Such an initiative would need to becoordinated with other international actors suchas the United Nations, the USA and Russia, whichare still involved in many of these issues. But itis to the EU that the international community ingeneral looks to promote future stability andprosperity for the region: being surrounded byEU Member States, the Balkans are effectivelyin the EU’s own locality.

It would be unrealistic to expect such initiatives

to provide a blueprint for solutions to the mostcontroversial bilateral cases, but it would createa context most favourable to dialogue. A numberof principles should inform this.

First of all, it should be an EU foreign policyinitiative, decoupled from the accession andpre-accession process, given that the enlargementstrategy does not have the legal and political toolsto deal effectively with these issues. The HighRepresentative’s role in persuading Belgradeand Prishtina to agree to bilateral talks can beincluded among her successes: Catherine Ashtoncould build upon this leverage to make suchregional initiative the first big challenge of thenascent European External Action Service.

It should also involve the relevant organisationspresent in the Balkans, such as the Organisation

for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE),the Council of Europe and the Regional CooperationCouncil (RCC), all of which have the expertiseand the legal authority to address the complexitiestied to unresolved border problems. Most

importantly, the Council of Europe upholdsthe most appropriate principles and standardsregarding democracy and minority protectionthat the EU cannot provide.

The EU can give the political drive and leverage, evenif this is technically untied from accession conditionality.But ownership should fall in the Balkans, buildingupon the positive steps made during 2010: regionalcooperation requires commitment on part of thegovernments supposed to carry it out.

If they are to be stable, maps cannot be drawn

at the table. Minority rights need to be includedand addressed through creative and democraticinstitutional and administrative solutions especiallyin frontier and multi-ethnic areas.

One way of approaching this potentially explosiveissue is to involve civil society and local institutions.Grassroots and local initiatives need far moresupport and visibility in the EU and in the Balkans.Cross-border cooperation, initiatives aiming atreconciling citizens across different countries,property restitution projects, developing socialnetworks, are all much needed bottom-upapproaches to support people in climbing out

of the dark hole of ethno-nationalism.

The Balkans have always been a crossroads of languages, religions and ethnicities. War has forcedthe fixing of borders at the expense of more openfrontiers and exchanges. EU integration offers theopportunity to de-emphasise the importance of borders, but historically it has been able to do soonly where borders were clearly delineated anduncontested. If settling borders is a way to makeEurope less divided, it is worth investing in.

Rosa Balfour is Senior Policy Analyst at the EuropeanPolicy Centre; Dijana Basic was Programme Assistant at the European Policy Centre during the spring and summer of 2010.

The issues raised in this paper are discussed inthe EPC's Balkans Forum.

pub 1170 a bridge over troubled borders

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