The European Union has assumed responsibility for the peacekeeiping mission in Bosnia.
A new force called EUFOR that numbers about 7,000 troops will enforce the Dayton peace agreement that ended the bloody Bosnian war in 1995.
The change from NATO to EU on Thursday begins nearly nine years after NATO deployed 60,000 forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in what was the alliance’s first peacekeeping operation.
Good luck. And here’s hoping that Mladic and Karadzic are brought to justice.
The Dutch EU presidency seems to be putting the finishing touches to the summit preparations for 15/16 December. One of the major items on the agenda: decision time on opening negotiations with Ankara about Turkey’s EU membership.
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One country over from the Ukraine, Romania is also about to have elections. Election day is tomorrow, Sunday the 28th.
Romania is a sort of borderland right now. It joined NATO last year, and it’s an EU candidate member, with full membership scheduled (at the moment) in 2007. The economy has been growing briskly, and foreign investment is rising rapidly (albeit from a very low base).
But the country is still desperately poor — per capita income, even adjusted for the lower cost of living, is less than a third of the EU average. Corruption is still pervasive. Political life is still dominated by the old Communist nomenklatura.
So whether Romania is doing well or badly is very much a relative question. Compared to, say, Hungary or Poland, they’re very much the poor Eastern cousins. Compared to Ukraine, never mind Belarus or Moldova, though, Romania is an economic and political success story.
And then there are these elections. Let me start with an obvious question: could the Romanian elections be stolen, in the same way that the Ukrainian elections have been? Will the incumbent government allow its candidates to lose?
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Following up on some of the comments to this post from Doug Muir.
I’m with the other Doug on long-term prospects. As far as I know, no Western European state exists with an indigenous minority population approaching 30 percent.
Thus, the EU is asking the Macedonians (that is, the inhabitants of the former FYROM, regardless of ethnicity) to do something that none of its old members was capable of doing. It’s very much an open quesiton whether any European state is capable of coping with minorities of that size.
Why that should be is probably best left as an exercise for the readers.
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This blog doesn’t usually resound with praise for the far-sighted wisdom and diplomatic cunning of the Bush administration. (Neither does my own blog, for that matter.)
So I thought I’d be a bit contrarian, and point to a recent episode where Bush, or Colin Powell, or undersecretary of state Marc Grossman, or /someone/, seems to have done something wonderfully and exactly right.
Macedonia: small country in the Balkans, former Yugoslav Republic. Gained independence in 1991. For fourteen years, has been officially entitled, not Macedonia, but “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” — aka FYROM. This ugly neologism came into existence purely and entirely because the idea of a country called “Macedonia” drove Greek nationalists gibbering crazy.
(No, don’t ask. It doesn’t make any sense at all, and never did, so never mind. Oh, we could go into stuff like the early-’90s rivalry between Mitsotakis and Papandreou, and how they and their parties got locked into an escalating spiral of whipping up nationalist opinion on this stupid, stupid issue, but never mind. Just take it as given.)
So: on November 3 — the very first day after the election — the Bush administration announced that, after fourteen years, it was going to start recognizing Macedonia by the name it wanted to be recognized: i.e., Macedonia. And that there’d be no more of this FYROM stuff, thanks.
So why was this such a good thing?
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Amidst all the fanfare about negotiations opening on Turkey’s membership, we shouldn’t lose sight of other things that are in the pipeline. EU enlargement commissioner G?nter Verhuegen has just given Bulgaria and Romania the green light for a January 2007 target date.
?For the year 2007 we feel that accession may be appropriate and these two countries will be ready by then,? Verhuegen said.
?Negotiations with Bulgaria are technically speaking closed. We wish to conclude negotiations with Romania by the end of the year, we are aware that this will be difficult.?
Now I wouldn’t want to be misunderstood here. I am perfectly happy with Bulgaria and Romania as EU members, under the right conditions, just as I am happy with Turkish membership. But I do think that Turkey’s point about the same standards being applied is a valid one. I personally – and based among other things on extensive converstaions with migrants from these countries – have plenty of reservations about just how ‘ready’ these societies are if we are using the yardstick currently (correctly) being applied to Turkey. Corruption and lawlessness would be among the issues that immediately spring to mind. So, if there is a time to ‘turn the screw’, it is now.
Mid-term I am still convinced that Turkey will have much more to offer economically. Both Rumania and Bulgaria already suffer from many of the major problems facing existing EU member states – low fertility, rapid ageing, serious problems in paying pensions moving forward – and they have the added problem of the meaningful functioning of their democratic processes. Turkey is already making important steps forward, it would be nice to feel re-assured that the other two were.
Addendum: North Sea Diaries has a spoof text of a speech Erdogan might have made to the Turkish parliament explaining how the EU meets Turkey’s criteria as a suitable place to be. As our diarist wryly puts it “he made it clear the EU would be allowed to join Turkey”. You can find a summary of the speech he actually made in Strasbourg here.
The European Commission has recommended that accession talks for Turkey should begin, but hasn’t laid out any dates for the process:
Commission officials are reporting on the progress Turkey has already made, along with Bulgaria and Romania.
The final decision on Turkey rests with the leaders of all 25 EU member states in December – with accession years off.
The Commission’s recommendation is a milestone in an increasingly impassioned debate.
The decision was reached by a “large consensus” among commissioners, one EU official said, but no vote was taken.
There was also no recommended date to start negotiations with Turkey.
More from The Scotsman/PA, EU Business, Reuters and EU Observer.
Update: The full text of Romano Prodi’s speech can be found here and I’ve copied it below, so you can click on the ‘continue reading’ link to see it as the English HTML link on the site doesn’t seem to be working (pdf and doc links are).
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Despite the recent revival of optimism about the forthcoming Turkey negotiations following the apparent resolution of the ‘adultery ban’ issue, it is clear to everyone that significant hurdles still remain to be overcome. Among these may now need to be added a referendum on Turkish membership in France.
Turkey will not join the European Union for at least 15 years and could only do so once France had held a referendum on the issue, French Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said on Sunday.
?The membership of Turkey, in the best of cases, will not happen for 15 years,? he told LCI television. ?A decision as important as the membership of Turkey in Europe could only be taken after there had been a referendum in France.?…….
He was sceptical about the idea ?not because it is a Muslim country but because Turkey alone represents the membership of the 10 countries (mainly) from eastern Europe?, he said, referring to the countries that joined the bloc this year.
Sarkozy made his comments after French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin voiced misgivings on Thursday about Turkey joining the bloc, asking if Europe really wanted ?the river of Islam to enter the riverbed of secularism?.
Raffarin said Turkey had made progress in adjusting its laws and institutions to EU standards under Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, but queried the overwhelmingly Muslim but secular state?s ability to stay the course.
Source: Financial Times
Clearly everyone involved in the debate is aware of the problem of Turkey staying ‘on course’. Clearly also it is difficult for any democrat to object to the principle of ‘citizen consultation’ about important issues, still it is important to note the growing recourse to the referendum as the means of making such consultation (this process will probably reach a climax with next year’s votes on the proposed EU constitution). This would seem to be an additional hurdle for Turkey, given that such a procedure was not followed in the case of the recent round of accession.
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Further to that business about the Turkish government advancing, and then as quickly aborting, plans to criminalise adultery, the very valuable ?????????? (Histologion) notes that:
It’s a good thing that the state of Virginia won’t be applying for EU membership anytime soon, since it is one of the 23 US states, where adultery is considered a crime (while having sex out of wedlock is considered a crime in ten)! In the American Bible Belt Erdogan’s Islamic party would be considered way too permissive I fear…
Which only goes to show what I have always said: comincia il paese di Deliverance venti kilometri al’ovest dell’ Hudson.
If I may lapse into pedantry for a moment, though, I believe it’s safe to say the state of Virginia will never be in a position to apply for EU membership, for Virginia is not a state but a commonwealth.
The European Commission won’t release its report on the possibility of opening accesion talks with Turkey until 6 October. But after expansion commissioner G?nter Verheugen’s comments yesterday, the report will not be much of a surprise. ‘There are’, said Verheugen, ‘no further barriers‘ to beginning talks.
(All the links to outside sources in this post, incidentally, are to German-language sites. At the moment there’s nothing about this on the FAZ English-language site, but you might check there later in the day if you can’t read German.)
In the comments to my recent post on the NPD’s electoral gains in Brandenburg, Otto suggests that the German CDU step up its resistance to a possible Turkish entry. Apparently the Union is paying attention to Otto, for party chief Angela Merkel was prompt to announce that she will seek allies elsewhere in Europe to keep the Turks draussen vor der T?r. And taking up most of the front page of the print edition of today’s Die Welt — the reliably right-wing sister paper to the Bild-Zeitung, but unlike Bild intended for those who can read words of more than one syllable — are ‘Ten Reasons Why Turkey Should Not Be Allowed to Join’.
Strangely enough my first reaction to this all-out onslaught by the Union was one of compassion and concern. ‘Bloss keine Panik, Leute!’, I wanted to say, giving their well-coiffed heads a reassuring pat. For you see, Turkey is not about to join the EU after all. All that the Commission has done (and indeed, officially it hasn’t even done that yet) is to say it’s all right to start talking with the Turks about the possibility of an eventual accession. In those talks Europe will, among other things, negotiate with the Turks the conditions and timeline for a possible entry. There is no guarantee that Turkey will accept (or fulfil) the EU’s conditions. And accession, if it comes at all, will not be for many years.
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