Dutch decision boosts Serbian bid

Serbia’s bid for membership in the European Union has long been held back by member states’ insistence that Belgrade demonstrate full co-operation with a United Nations war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. 

But by this autumn, the Netherlands was the only country still arguing that Serbia should not be allowed to take further steps towards membership unless it demonstrated full, ongoing co-operation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

The other 26 member states – including Belgium and the United Kingdom, which had previously backed the Dutch stance – believed that it was more important to reward Serbia for a slight softening in its attitude towards its former province of Kosovo.

On 25 October, the EU’s foreign ministers referred the country’s membership application, made in December 2009, to the European Commission for an opinion, a process that is expected to take around one year and result in a recommendation to open accession talks. Next week’s progress report will underline Belgrade’s “constructive” attitude to the Kosovo issue.

Successful reforms

On a more technical level, Commission officials are generally happy with the government’s political, economic and administrative reform measures, although there are grumblings about incomplete and uneven implementation – hardly a surprise for any of the western Balkans countries.

Judicial reform and the fight against corruption and organised crime are – again in line with the regional standard – seen as somewhat less successful.

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Serbia began implementing the provisions of its Stabilisation and Association Agreement, the main pre-accession treaty between the EU and the individual countries of the western Balkans, at a time when its ratification was still blocked by the Netherlands over the war-crimes issue. This has given it a head-start on the reforms demanded by the EU.

Regional importance

Last month’s unblocking of Serbia’s membership bid, strongly and openly supported by the United States, suggests that Serbia has found a comfortable place in the EU’s enlargement process primarily for reasons of geopolitics.

It is seen as a pivotal state in the region, its deep ambivalence toward the territorial integrity of neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina notwithstanding. (Boris Tadic, Serbia’s generally pro-EU president, campaigned for Milorad Dodik, the secessionist leader of the Bosnian Serbs, ahead of last month’s general election in Bosnia.) That is a major achievement for a country that was bombed by NATO a little over a decade ago.