6/10/2006
Enlargement and the Western Balkans - by Peter Sain ley Berry

The EU has been very much on automatic pilot these last years, at least as far as enlargement is concerned, driven by the emotional imperative of ‘uniting’ or ‘re-uniting’ Europe.

So keen have people been to see this effected that they have not paused to think through the consequences - not for the accession states, those are pretty clear - but for the rest of the EU, how the machinery of government is going to work with so many more states, parliamentarians, commissioners etc. Is a structure set up to co-ordinate the actions of six partners sufficiently flexible to accommodate 30 or more?

No-one has as yet satisfactorily answered this question but already we are seeing the problems. The great enlargement of 2004 has triggered a period of uncertainty in intra-EU relations. Some might call this stasis; certainly it is harder to achieve a consensus for a political vision among so many states.

Of course, the EU Constitutional Treaty was supposed to have answered some of these questions, but the Treaty in effect addressed itself to managing better the affairs of EU15, with scarcely a forward glance to EU25 let alone EU35. That was one reason why it was rejected by voters, certainly in France. There was just no certainty when it came to deciding where Europe’s borders lay and what the EU might look like some years down the road.

I think this is all beginning to sink in now among the EU’s leaders. There is a realisation that the priority must be the Constitutional Treaty, deficient though that may be at the moment. I suspect that the German Presidency will re-table the existing treaty with a series of memoranda that will go some way to mapping out the future.

But I get the feeling that no-one now wants to limit the scope for manoeuvre for drafting such memoranda, which is why Barroso is now taking a more cautious line. There is the also the firm pledge by Sarkhozy in France, which I suspect will be echoed by other Presidential candidates there, to put any further enlargement to a referendum.

What that might mean for the Western Balkans is that the existing EU will have to proceed through a process of constitutional evolution before admitting further members. It should have done this 5 or 10 years ago, of course, but was then pre-occupied by other matters like the single currency. I guess there will be a strong desire for a moratorium at least on further enlargement while this happens.

One problem, as I see it is that either the EU will enlarge, but weaken and loosen as a political entity, or else it will need to become a more federalist structure with stronger central government. How to combine a large number of member states without resorting to a powerful central presidency is a conundrum that has not yet been sufficiently debated, in my view.

Nevertheless I believe that the EU will want to work increasingly closely with the Western Balkans and with Turkey, the Ukraine and the Caucasus. Personally I would like to see the development of a community of which these nations were members, modelled on the EU, in which many of the questions that would need resolution before accession to the EU in any case, could be addressed. This whole eastern community might then adhere to the EU as a bloc.

That is an entirely personal view, not, so far as I know, endorsed by any of those countries; indeed, at present they have an interest in taking a competitive approach to enlargement, rather than a co-operative one. Nonetheless, I believe that that would be the soundest and ultimately the surest strategic direction, both for them and for the existing members of the EU.