© REUTERS/Vassil Donev/Pool

In politics, there are no coincidences. That could be the lesson from the fact that the EU hosted its annual Western Balkans summit just days ahead of President Erdogan’s visit to Sarajevo, as part of his AKP party’s “regional” election campaign.

The EU summit, of course, has been in the works far longer than Erdogan’s visit, but that makes the Turkish president’s arrival in Bosnia and Herzegovina all the more striking. After all, the summit in Bulgaria was a true non-event: No major policy initiatives were announced, no significant projects unveiled, nor were there any major breakthroughs concerning any of the region’s myriad unresolved disputes or worrying decline in democratic standards. There had been hopes that Macedonia and Greece might use the Sofia meeting to finally settle their long-standing dispute over the former’s name. But even that scenario fizzled out—although rumors persist that a solution is imminent.

That lack of progress is striking because the region does not lack for urgent crises. Consider only the deteriorating state of human rights, the free press, and democratic accountability in Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbia. Instead of drawing attention to these developments, or similar concerns in, say, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the EU continues to insulate the Balkan elite from any meaningful criticism.

Local civil society activists and NGOs continue to pressure Brussels to frontload substantive concerns with the quality of democratic governance in the region, but so far their pleas have largely fallen on deaf ears, notwithstanding brief references to these subjects in the respective EU missives about regional events.

Meanwhile, Erdogan announced his rally in Sarajevo before anyone in the Bosnian public administration even confirmed that such a visit had been cleared with the relevant local authorities. And indeed it took weeks for such a confirmation to arrive at all, giving the distinct appearance that the Turkish President was telling the Bosnians that he was coming, not asking.

The differences between these two events, from preparation to execution, tell the story of the contemporary Western Balkans. And it is not a tale that should put anyone committed to genuine democratic governance or the rule of law in the region or in Europe at ease.

Contested Terrain

Western Balkan politics are shaping up as a contest between a slow-moving and unresponsive EU and a constellation of opportunistic and cynical foreign authoritarians—chief among these Russia and Turkey, but also China and the Gulf monarchies. Each of these is competing for the favor and compliance of illiberal local elites, who more often than not look to authoritarian powers abroad to bolster their own undemocratic aspirations.

It is no simple matter to explain how the EU as the world’s largest economic bloc could find itself outmuscled by tin-pot autocrats of both the local and international variety. But the crux of the problem is straightforward: the technocratic establishment in Brussels, by their own admission, has no Plan B to EU enlargement.

There is no strategy for this region in Brussels beyond the belief that EU accession is essentially the ultimate objective. Once the “Western Balkan Six” are in the EU, so the thinking goes, their leaders will cease to be corrupt proto-authoritarians and their economies will cease to be patrimonial basket cases.   And if this will not quite be accomplished through the process of accession itself, then by the time these polities actually join the EU, their societies will be transformed by the decorum they will find on the other side. But the consequences of such policymaking are already on display in the illiberal and authoritarian backsliding seen in EU member states like Poland, Hungary, and Croatia.

By shirking from demands for concrete reforms from local governments, the EU’s transformative potential has actually played into the hands of local elites whose priority has long been the survival of their respective oligarchies, through a combination of confrontation and accommodation with the international community. That is why the roster of ruling elites in the region has remained virtually unchanged, except for the most minor rotations, for the better part of the last three decades.

In principle, the EU’s liberal-democratic foundation should be an existential challenge to these patrimonial regimes, but that is not what has happened in practice. Take the “Prishtina-Belgrade Dialogue,” the moribund framework for the resolution of Kosovo’s status and the opening of Serbia and Kosovo’s path towards EU accession. Governments in both countries admit the process is, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Ceding the Initiative

Instead of forcing the two sides to negotiate, the EU has ceded the initiative to illiberal forces on the ground. Even as Vučić and his cabinet openly declare their desire to partition their erstwhile province, and the still unsolved assassination of the Kosovo Serb opposition leader Oliver Ivanović quietly fades into obscurity, EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn appears to be waving Vučić’s government through the accession process. Kosovo, meanwhile, remains internationally marginalized.

To local elites, and authoritarian regimes in Ankara and Moscow, this reads as a combination of incompetence and fear on the part of the EU. Brussels has been unwilling to enforce its own values on candidate states but also afraid of having these polities fall under the influence of states like Russia and Turkey; its inaction favors strongman regimes like those in Serbia and Montenegro, where powerful ruling autocrats can dress up their pro-EU oration as decisive leadership while making fragmented polities like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia appear like the worst of a rotten bunch. But the underlying dynamics are identical: Brussels is squandering its political capital.

Such inconsistency by the Europeans leaves a vacuum for Erdogan and the Kremlin in the region; local governments, meanwhile, are eager for the influx of money that comes with marquee projects like the Turkish-sponsored Belgrade-Sarajevo highway.

These initiatives will further enable both local and foreign governments to distribute cash handouts to clients while creating the illusion of economic progress and political relevance at home. Along the way, democratic accountability will further deteriorate, as will any semblance of the rule of law or even regional security. But that is exactly what Turkey and Russia are knowingly offering local elites: a non-democratic means to cling to power and thus expand their own regional and continental ambitions.

So even if, well after the horse has left the barn, the Europeans decide to freeze accession talks with undemocratic regimes like the one in Belgrade, it won’t matter—local elites will have already secured new foreign benefactors.

In short, unless the EU earnestly recommits itself to genuine democratization in the Balkans—credible policy proposals already exist, but this would also mean incorporating the region’s most vulnerable states (like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia) into NATO—then its already tenuous grip on the region may dissolve much sooner than anyone in Brussels would care to imagine.

The post A Tale of Two Models appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Thomas Peter

Nearly two decades since the end of the Yugoslav Wars, the Western Balkan’s states and peoples remain trapped in “Europe’s waiting room,” meandering endlessly through the morass of EU accession requirements on the path toward Brussels. Acceptance into the most prosperous economic union in history is at the end of this rainbow but in the meantime, by all available measures, the quality of governance and democratic administration in the region is in free fall—and that includes the region’s EU member states Slovenia and Croatia, those who have supposedly already found their pot of gold.

Worse still, the specter of violence is returning to the Balkans. Since the beginning of this year, the region has been shaken by the assassination of a leading Serb opposition figure in Kosovo, evidence of Russian-funded paramilitaries in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the re-arming of a recalcitrant nationalist regime in the country’s ethnically Serb dominated east, and an apparent anti-NATO suicide bombing in Montenegro, the alliance’s newest member.

Countries like Russia and Turkey, which trace long (and long imagined) ties to the region, are clearly at the tip of the spear. At a time when the liberal international order has heavily come under pressure, these regimes are aiming to reshape the Balkans, and they are finding receptive audiences among local governments. But the relationships they nurture in the region are of a decidedly sectarian nature, with Moscow as the chief international patron of the Balkans’ Serb nationalist establishment, and Ankara as the supposed protector of the region’s predominantly Muslim communities, namely, the Bosniaks and the Albanians.

Thus, the grand, transformative aspirations of the liberal-democratic international community have been supplanted by the provincial posturing of the world’s new “authoritarian international.” And one authoritarian regime, with growing interest in the region, has shown a capacity to truly bring all actors to the table in the Balkans: China.

Educating the Locals

Beijing’s activities have the appearance of pure economic self-interest. Beijing’s flagship venture in the region is the so-called “16+1” framework, the political forum of the country’s attempt to expand its “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure network into Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Pragmatism certainly seems like the defining characteristic of the country’s approach to the region: If you’re willing to do business with Beijing, Beijing is willing to work with you, regardless of your political conditions or persuasions.

To educate local communities about China and its interests, Beijing has begun opening chapters of its famed Confucius Institutes throughout the region. Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a population of less than four million, already hosts two of these centers. Belgrade, meanwhile, is to host a sprawling, 32,000 square meter Chinese cultural center commemorating Sino-Serbian ties. And in tiny Montenegro, China is constructing a nearly 200 kilometer-long highway from the Serbian border to the country’s main port at Bar.

Clearly, the €6 billion or so China has invested in the Western Balkans in the past decade is a much needed cash injection into a region that is still struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. Best of all, China’s money appears to come with few strings attached, at least as compared to the complex loan protocols of the IMF, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and other similar Western financial institutions which have traditionally bankrolled the former Yugoslavia’s post-war recovery.

And given the titanic scale of the project Beijing is undertaking—attempting to link transportation networks from China, through Central Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and out to North Sea—the Chinese approach would appear to be very much results-oriented. To hear advocates sell the idea, China is not in the business of “conditionality,” it is simply interested in business itself.

Reality Check

But China’s approach to its growing economic and foreign policy clout is hardly so benign, especially for a region like the Western Balkans whose domestic democratic institutions are already wobbly. China’s apparent pragmatism is, in practice, a means for both locking client countries into punishing dependency structures while simultaneously buttressing illiberal and authoritarian elites and their already vast patronage networks, now newly awash with Chinese money.

Take only the example of Montenegro’s Bar-Boljare highway currently being constructed by Chinese contractors. Its cost is set to push the [Podgorica] government’s debt burden to close to 80 percent of GDP by 2018, according to IMF figures. In the event of catastrophic cost overruns—a distinct possibility in what is essentially a one-man mafia state—the Montenegrin economy would be at the whims of the Chinese regime, a sordid fate as Sri Lanka has recently discovered.

Nor is it the case that Beijing asks for nothing in return at the political level either. In the wake of the 2016 South China Sea arbitration, Montenegro explicitly rejected the ruling, and Serbia feigned neutrality on the issue. One might say that such small states cannot be expected to insist on Chinese compliance on any matter, but that is precisely the issue. Through its growing economic influence in Eastern Europe as a whole, China is seeking to indirectly institutionalize a pro-China lobby, thus securing much-needed international legitimation and support for its increasingly aggressive posture in East Asia in particular.

Challenging Brussels

It is difficult to untangle Beijing’s activities in the Balkans from its ascendancy in the political dynamics of Europe as a whole. And it is that fact that will make it difficult for Brussels, or any of the EU capitals, to form any coherent policy to check China’s growing pull in the continent’s Southeast. After all, this is the same EU that has watched the region’s political situation deteriorate to authoritarian retrenchment—and that was before the Russians, Turks, and Chinese began earnestly challenging Brussels’ commitments to being the “only game in town” in the Western Balkans.

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