EU Reiterates Support for Balkan Integration

By GORDON FAIRCLOUGH

The European Union pledged Wednesday to keep its doors open to membership for the poorer states of the western Balkans, despite mounting worries about expanding the group in the wake of the Greek financial crisis.

At a summit meeting in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, senior EU officials sought to reassure government ministers from the Balkan states that once their nations meet the bloc's criteria for joining, they will be admitted.

"We came here to firmly say that despite the fact that you might hear different noises" from some in Western Europe, Balkan countries still would be welcomed into the union, said Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister.

Still, serious hurdles remain a decade after the EU first held out the promise of membership. Of the countries that emerged from the violent collapse of Yugoslavia beginning in the 1990s, only Slovenia so far has succeeded in joining the group.

Croatia, Macedonia and Montenegro are at different stages of seeking inclusion, as is neighboring Albania. Bosnia, whose politics remain fractured along ethnic lines, and Kosovo, whose independence isn't recognized by some EU states, have yet to apply.

"Integrating the western Balkans into the European family of nations remains one of the last challenges to building a democratic and unified Europe," said Catherine Ashton, the EU's foreign affairs chief in a statement issued ahead of the one-day meeting.

But some diplomats and analysts fear that the prospect of EU membership—which offers few concrete payoffs as countries pass through the intermediate stages of the lengthy joining process—is losing its allure as an incentive for reconciliation and improved national governance.

"There needs to be something tangible" to encourage continued progress on fighting corruption, strengthening institutions and overcoming mutual suspicions in the Balkans, said Heather Gabbe, director of the nonprofit Open Society Institute's Brussels operations. Stepped-up engagement between the EU and Balkan governments "could avoid a lot of trouble down the road," she said.

Ms. Gabbe and two co-authors wrote a paper last month calling on Brussels to pursue an "intensified" application process to take Balkan candidates through the initial steps toward membership, and early on laying out a detailed map of what each needs to do in order to join.

Balkan states have come a long way since armed conflict tore the region apart in the 1990s. Politicians have worked at healing wounds. Over the weekend, Croatia's president laid flowers at a Serb Orthodox church in a town in Bosnia where ethnic Serbs were killed by ethnic Croats in 1992.

But tensions remain. On Sunday, riot police in Kosovo used tear gas in an effort to prevent clashes between thousands of ethnic Albanian protesters singing nationalist songs and rock-throwing ethnic Serb demonstrators in the divided town of Mitrovica.

Peacekeeping troops from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and civilian police units from the European Union were deployed on a bridge that connects the Albanian-dominated south of the town and the Serb-dominated north, as the authorities struggled to keep order.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but Serbia doesn't recognize it as a separate state. Neither the Kosovo government nor international forces have managed to establish their authority in areas of north Kosovo inhabited mainly by Serbs.