Withering into disillusion, the dream of EU membership that helped win peace in Balkans
Spirit of populism emerges two decades after end of wars as Russia, China and Turkey vie for influence
‘Failure is not an option. This is our doorstep. If we don’t succeed here, I don’t see where we can succeed’
‘They are still fighting the war. They are using cultural, economic, political and linguistic weapons’
EVERY other building still bears bullet and shrapnel marks, but 23 years since the guns fell silent on the wooded hills surrounding Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital city is largely unrecognisable.
On “sniper alley,” the once deadly main road into town, the 21-floor skyscraper that for years loomed empty and fire-blackened over the city centre has a new facade and a new role – as the seat of the carefully balanced powersharing government introduced by the 1995 Dayton peace agreement.
Nearby, glass and steel Saudi Arabian-owned shopping centres have sprung up to serve middle-class shoppers, tourists trawl the historic bazaar, and hipster eateries and watering holes do a brisk business a stone’s throw from the spot where Franz Ferdinand was shot in 1914. But spend a few minutes speaking to locals, and it quickly becomes clear that all is not well.
The gleaming new shopping centres, many locals grumble, cater less to a mythical Bosnian middle-class than to rich Saudi and Emirati tourists who have taken to buying holiday homes in the suburbs.
So many people are leaving the country – one study suggested that by 2015, 43.3 per cent of the Bosnian-born population lived abroad – that locals joke that by the time they join the EU, the place will be a national park.
There are many reasons for the near tangible sense of frustration. Among them are a 55.4 per cent youth unemployment rate, the third-highest in the world, and GDP growing at a sluggish three per cent per year, according to the World Bank.
Others blame a failure of European leadership that they say has led to backsliding on democracy and rule of law; creating a vacuum that Russia, Turkey, and China are moving to fill; and, most seriously of all, eroding the basic compact underwriting the peace-building project across the entire western Balkans.
The promise
After the Nato intervention in Kosovo ended the series of bloody conflicts known as the Yugoslav wars at the turn of the millennium, a peacebuilding strategy was built around the carrot of EU integration.
Twenty years on, Albania, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Kosovo, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia – the “Western Balkan Six” – are surrounded by the EU geographically, enmeshed in it economically and committed to chasing the dream of membership.
But only two Balkan countries – Slovenia and Croatia – have joined the bloc since the promise of membership was made explicit at a conference in Thessaloniki in 2003, and conversations with members of the public and local elites reveal deep disillusion with the entire project.
“We are very thankful for the financial assistance. And our problems would have been even bigger if it had not been for this help. But all of us, including Europe and us, have lost enthusiasm for this project,” says Milorad Dodik, the president of the Republic of Srpska, the Bosnian Serb mini-state that emerged from the Dayton peace agreement.
Mr Dodik offers a shopping list of reasons for that loss of faith – Brexit, troubles in the Eurozone, the rise of Eurosceptic populist governments in Hungary, Poland and Italy, and divisions over immigration, Russia and Donald Trump’s America.
In a nutshell, he says, the Europe of 10 years ago – borderless, prosperous, and peaceful – is simply not functioning as advertised.
“We were naive to think we would just join Europe and all our problems would go away,” he said in an interview in his office in Banja Luka, the capital of the republic.
Macron vs Juncker
Once a protégé of the West praised for his modernising reform agenda, Mr Dodik has in recent years reinvented himself as a hard-line nationalist and is feared by some as a would-be warlord.
While he still insists he wants to join the EU, he is also an admirer of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and says he sees Brexit as a template for Republika Srpska’s secession from Bosnia and Hercegovina.
But his description of mutual disillusion is difficult to fault. At a summit in Sofia in May, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, bluntly informed Balkan leaders that the door to Europe is closed – at least for now. “What we’ve seen over the past 15 years is a path that has weakened Europe every time we think of enlarging it,” Mr Macron told assembled European and Balkan presidents. Any further enlargement, he cautioned, must be studied with “a lot of prudence and rigour”.
And in June, 26 EU governments, at the insistence of France and the Netherlands, postponed the start of formal accession talks with Macedonia and Albania for another year.
The shock decision rode roughshod over both the recommendations of the European Commission and the warnings of Jean-claude Juncker, its president, that the western Balkans could see a renewed bout of violence if the EU failed to deliver on its promises.
And it came just two weeks after Zoran Zaev, Macedonia’s pro-european prime minister, delivered on a key EU demand by announcing a historic and domestically risky deal to end a 25-year name dispute with Greece. The former Yugoslav republic is to be renamed “the Republic of North Macedonia”.
Mr Macron’s public scepticism may merely be a temporary tactic to avoid handing ammunition to far-right, anti-immigration parties ahead of European elections in May 2019.
For advocates of the European project in the Balkans, the decision was infuriating. “Brussels has spoken out of both sides of their mouth for a long time, but this was a reality check,” said Jasmin Mujanović, a Bosnian-canadian academic. “Those most informed about the situation and in Brussels knew the odds of membership were shrinking, but the logic was, ‘We don’t have to say this openly or explicitly – we can keep everyone on side by pretending it is going on’,” he added.
“It raises questions for elites about how they keep power. The EU was plan A. What is plan B?”
Plan B
It is a question that increasingly worries some Western diplomats. At least three world powers are already making bids for influence on Europe’s doorstep, with varying degrees of subtlety.
Russia, which enjoys long-standing diplomatic leverage in Serbia, has been courting Mr Dodik in Bosnia and invested in several soft-power projects designed to shore-up pro-moscow sentiment across the region. Western officials allege that Moscow is also running increasingly bold espionage operations to stir up nationalist sentiment and scupper the efforts of regional governments to join Nato and the EU, including an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey has been pouring investment and political patronage into the region it once ruled in what has been described as a “neo-ottoman” foreign policy.
More mystifying is China’s game. Beijing has offered €10billion in infrastructure investments in 16 southern and eastern European countries including five of the Balkan six. (It does not recognise Kosovo.) Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are making major real-estate investments in the region.
Is that any reason for Europe to worry? No, says Ana Brnabić, the prime minister of Serbia, officially on course to join the EU by 2025.
Turkey is a “good partner” and an important market. And yes, she says, China has provided a degree of infrastructure investment. But 65 per cent of Serbia’s trade and 70 per cent of its foreign investment is from Europe.
As for Russia, it is no secret it is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council that Serbia can rely on to fight its corner over Kosovo, over which Belgrade claims sovereignty. “They are a great ally. That gives them leverage,” she said. “But no one has ever told me, ‘Look, you have to choose between Russia and Europe’.”
EU
In the EU’S rather sumptuous Sarajevo office, Lars-gunnar Wigemark, the veteran Swedish diplomat who is the current EU ambassador to Bosnia, rejects accusations of neglect. A decision by the international community to step back to allow “local ownership” a decade ago may have slowed progress, but running Bosnia “as a colony” was never viable in the long term. An Anglo-german initiative to kick-start reforms after protests at two decades of economic and political deadlock ripped through Sarajevo in 2014 has borne some fruit.
And in February, the tripartite, fractious government – meaning Serbs, Croats and Muslims – completed and endorsed answers to the 3,242-question survey that the EU demands from applicants, an almost unthinkable act of pragmatic cooperation that shows, he says, the prospect of EU membership remains alive and can still induce genuine cooperation here.
Failure, says Mr Wigemark, is not an option for either side. “This is our doorstep,” he said. “If we don’t succeed here, I don’t see where we can succeed.” Not all European leaders share his enthusiasm. One of the strongest advocates for Balkan integration inside the EU is about to be muffled – if not silenced.
Brexit
Theresa May said in July that Britain would push for EU membership for the Balkan six after Brexit, and that she would double funding for security and wealth projects to £80million by 2021.
But the UK’S departure will leave Angela Merkel’s Germany as the lone champion of Europe’s Balkan project inside the bloc. And with many other EU governments ambivalent, Mr Macron’s mantra of consolidation before expansion is ascendant.
The ambivalence is understandable, said Milena Lazarevic of the European Policy Centre, a Belgrade think tank. The rise of populist nationalists such as Mr Orbán has disabused Brussels – perhaps too late – of the complacent notion that centuries of authoritarian rule would simply evaporate on exposure to capitalist democracy. But abandoning the project carries its own, perhaps greater risk: what Ms Lazarevic calls the “Turkish scenario”.
“If Europe doesn’t put its foot down and show leadership here, you could see countries give up EU accession and turn to an increasingly autocratic form of government,” she warns.
Populism
In relatively stable Serbia, opposition activists and journalists accuse Aleksandar Vučić, the pro-european president, of dismantling the free press, marginalising the opposition and generally laying the groundwork for a Putin-style grab for lifelong power.
At the other end of the spectrum are figures such as Mr Dodik, who opponents fear may use violence to shore up his grip on power and achieve an independent Republic of Srpska.
Figures in the Croat and Muslim political elites in Bosnia are also given to increasingly populist rhetoric. “In a way, they are still fighting the war,” said Valentin Inzko, the UN’S high representative in Bosnia and Hercegovina. “They are using cultural, economic, political, and linguistic weapons instead of guns, but it is the same goal: an independent Republic Srpska, a Croatian Hercegovina, a Bosniak state.”
Most alarming of all, say British and German officials, are proposals to solve the Kosovo-serbia dispute by swapping disputed territory.
The plan, which has been aired by both Mr Vučić and Hashim Thaçi, Kosovo’s president, would theoretically remove an obstacle to Serbia’s European accession. It has won provisional backing from John Bolton, Donald Trump’s national security adviser.
But critics fear breaking the taboo on redrawing borders would reawaken the nationalist dreams that soaked the region in blood in the Nineties.
Mr Dodik denies building an army or partnering with Russian-trained nationalist paramilitaries, as was reported earlier this year.
“My goal is peace,” he told The Daily Telegraph. But for the avoidance of doubt, he adds: “If there was a way for Republika Srpska to get out of Bosnia in a peaceful way, through an agreement, we would certainly take it.”