E XPLORAR EL POTENCIAL DE LA COLABORACIÓN PÚBLICO - PRIVADA

As a region, the Western Balkans has been subject to EU conditionality since the mid-1990s through various instruments and policy frameworks, ranging from the Union’s foreign policy to the enlargement portfolio. Generally, “there has not been a single policy by the EU towards the region, but rather a number of different policies carried out by a host of different institutions and ad hoc bodies of the EU” (Bieber, 2011b p.1776). In the late 1990s, the EU introduced the regional approach targeting the countries of the region with the purpose of inciting reforms in the political area, such as return of refugees and inter-ethnic reconciliation. In the official terminology of the Council of the EU, the Regional Approach combined the objective of implementing the local peace agreements, as well as advocated political and economic cooperation between the countries in this region (Council, 1997). Although directed towards the regional reconciliation, of which minority rights present an essential element, in the regional approach “no direct references were made to minority rights per se within the country- specific conditions though the need to address majority-minority relations was clearly implied” (Gordon et al., 2008 p.12).

As already explained, the same structure is used in the next chapter as well. For more on this, see methodology chapter.

The launching of the Regional Approach occurred prior to the entry into force of the Amsterdam treaty, i.e. in a period when the EU engagement in external relations was still nascent (On the early development of the CFSP see Smith, 2003). In 1997, the EU was largely still in the shadow of its failure to deal effectively with the Yugoslav crisis, focusing on the Eastern enlargement and without a political agreement on the Balkans. In this direction, one of my interviewees referred to the Regional Approach as “almost a pre-historic era in terms of EU conditionality”.70 In the context of enlargement, the launch of the Regional Approach corresponds with the beginning of the EU’s systematic monitoring of the countries of the Eastern enlargement as the first progress reports on these candidates were introduced precisely in 1997. While the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) were about to launch negotiations, in the Balkans, however, the political situation and security situation was still highly volatile. For illustration, the late 1990s, Serbia was still under sanctions and the Kosovo conflict was at its peak. Hence, the EU shaped its position in the region through an immediate security threats approach, not looking into deeper use of conditionality.71 Moreover, “in reality, bilateral relations barely progressed in the post-1997 period and negative conditionality prevailed in the form of limited contractual relations, exclusions from Association Agreements and, in cases like Serbia outright sanctions” (Anastasakis and Bechev, 2003 p.7).

In academic literature, the Regional Approach, has been assessed as inadequate to bring about stability and prosperity among other reasons for not having a “core perspective nor an elaborate strategy” (Fakiolas and Tzifakis, 2008 p.381). This assessment is supported by two main explanations: the “collective” approach and the lack of membership incentive. In relation to the former, the Regional approach was the first form of conditionality for the Western Balkan countries as a group (Gordon et al., 2008). Prior to this strategy, every country had established bilateral relations with the Union following its respective recognition by the EU member states. Moreover, these states were to form a new political category under the heading of the “Western Balkans” (Bartlett and Samardžija, 2000). In fact, “in a situation where there is no shared notion of the region but only various, often contradictory, notions held by the respective regional countries themselves, what constitutes the ‘region’ is frequently defined from the outside” (Delevic, 2007 p.14).

Author’s interview with think tank analyst, Brussels, 5 October 2010. 71

This new reinvention of the region (excluding the candidate countries Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia) carried negative connotations for all of the countries concerned. Albania and Macedonia were already bound by agreements with the EU and hence “perceived the regional approach as a rather step backwards in their relations with Brussels, [while] Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia saw in this EU undertaking an attempt at reconstituting somehow a version of former Yugoslavia” (Fakiolas and Tzifakis, 2008 p.381). These two countries as countries which were not involved in warfare had signed agreements with the EU which contained exceptional conditions in relation to the regional stability, hence the respective governments expected to advance at a quicker pace than the rest of the region (For a detailed analysis of their agreements see Fierro, 2003). As a specific case, Croatia has traditionally since independence resisted accepting any association with the Balkan region or the other Yugoslav successors. According to Vlahutin (2004), “Croatia’s urge to distance itself from the underdeveloped and war-torn region [...] resulted from an assessment that inclusion in the Balkan grouping would necessarily drag Croatia down” (p.22).

In addition to its “collective dimension” the regional approach was also at the time of its launching considered as an inadequate mechanism of conditionality since it did not provide the basic incentive of the prospect of membership. “While refraining from extending the offer of membership, Brussels developed relations with the regional states both on an individual and collective basis” (Anastasakis and Bechev, 2003). Local experts have considered that the EU Regional Approach was vague with limited financial backing and most importantly offered no incentives to these countries to carry forward its main objectives (Uvalic, 2001). This has been a common critique in literature as to more recent periods of EU accession as well, in terms of “a fundamental commitment deficit: without a clear time frame regarding a future EU membership for the countries in the Western Balkans, the prospect of membership remains only an abstract possibility without palpable political implications” (Renner and Trauner, 2009 p.450).

This section has presented the contextual developments and literature’s take on the regional approach as the first monitoring and application of conditionality towards the region. It has presented the main elements of the regional approach, the context of its launching as well as the literature’s findings. Against this background, the following section will present the empirical analysis of the content of the reports on the case study countries in order to establish

whether there is any evident form of a minority policy conditionality developed in the period studied.