Les Balkans occidentaux : Trop de Yougoslavie ou pas assez d'UE?

Le premier ministre et député serbe, Aleksandar Mitic, indique dans un entretien accordé à Transitions Online  que les propositions européennes relatives à une zone de libre échange avec les Balkans occidentaux sont trop limitées.

The European Commission on 27 January put forward a series of measures aimed at boosting economic cooperation and development in the western Balkans, but the plan has been met with little enthusiasm in the region itself.

With Croatian apprehension that the plan smacks of the former federation of Yugoslavia and Serbia’s criticism that it does too little to address the key question of investment, the Commission’s proposal is likely to be amended before it is presented to an informal meeting of foreign ministers from the EU and the western Balkans on 10 March in Salzburg.

The proposals

In a strategy paper entitled “The Western Balkans on the road to the EU: consolidating stability and raising prosperity,” the Commission proposed the fostering of trade and economic development, movement of persons, education and research, regional cooperation, and civil society in the western Balkans.

“While the Kosovo status process is moving ahead, we need to encourage the people of the western Balkans to look forward to their European future, not back to the nationalism of the past,” EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said at the presentation of the paper, standing alongside the UN special envoy for the Kosovo status talks, Martti Ahtisaari. “The best way to do that is to focus on practical measures which will integrate their economies and societies into the European mainstream,” Rehn said.

The enlargement Commissioner warned that the western Balkans “should not be allowed to remain a black hole or a ghetto in Europe.”

The proposals include the easing of visa requirements, increasing scholarships, a new regional school for public administration, a civil-society dialogue with the EU, contributions to the recently established European Fund for Southeast Europe (a public/private investment fund financed by international and national donors), and the creation of a diagonal-cumulation-of-origin formula, which would make it easier for a producer in one country to process raw materials from another. 

But the key proposal is the creation of a regional free-trade agreement among the countries of the region: Serbia-Montenegro (including Kosovo), Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Albania, and Macedonia.

The rationale behind the free-trade measure is the relative inefficiency of the current web of bilateral trade agreements in the region – 31 in total – which have failed to produce a sufficient level of intra-regional trade or were not properly implemented.

This idea is not new: it has been on the table since mid-2005, when trade ministers from the region agreed to turn bilateral free-trade agreements into a single regional agreement. Rehn himself had cited the idea on several occasions.

To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.