Those opposed to a pause in enlargement warn that it could slow down reforms or even lead to serious political and social instability in the Western Balkans. “Instability is still hanging in the air there. The EU tends to forget it because the Serbs, the Croats and others haven’t been shooting at each other for a couple of years now,” Vessela Tcherneva, head of the Sofia office and policy fellow of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) argued in an interview with Europolitics. She warned that “putting enlargement off the EU agenda would be a bad choice” as most of the Western Balkan countries “have no future without the EU or outside the club”. “They are weak states with fragile political structures and not functional economies. They are not ethnically homogenous. The main factor which prevents them from falling apart and keeps them alive is the European perspective,” Tcherneva argued.The majority of the member states, however, turn a deaf ear to these arguments, giving priority instead to their own problems caused by the global financial crisis. Faced with an unprecedented economic slowdown, with falling industrial output and rising unemployment, they are a lot less generous and ready for new sacrifices than they were some five years ago, when the economic situation was relatively good. Exacerbated by the financial crisis, old fears of a massive influx of migrants from the new member states as well as delocalisation and transfer of jobs to countries with cheaper labour cost play an important role here. Already following the 2004 enlargement wave, many people in the older EU member states believed that the ‘big bang’ expansion will trigger an exodus of jobs from the West to the lower-paid East. According to a 2006 Eurobarometer poll, three-quarters of EU citizens thought that enlargement speeded up the transfer of jobs to countries with cheaper labour. Yet, according to the European Restructuring Monitor, an official survey, only 8% of EU jobs lost to restructuring between 2003 and 2006 involved offshoring.

OLD FEARS

Now, the same anxiety is felt among member states with regard to the potential expansion of the EU towards the Western Balkans. The low level of living standards with extremely low GDP and sky-high unemployment rates in most of the countries in the region is additionally aggravating the fears. With the exception of Croatia (55), all the Western Balkan countries aspiring for EU membership are below 50% of the EU27’s GDP per capita level, at PPP in 2007: Albania (22), Bosnia and Herzegovina (26), Macedonia (26), Montenegro (25) and Serbia (including Kosovo - 35). In addition, the countries in question are all now facing the biggest economic crisis since the fall of Yugoslavia in 1991 due to the recession in their export markets, including the EU (the EU is the region’s largest export market) and falling sources of finance. The Zagreb Economic Institute forecasts a 1.4% GDP decline for 2009 in Croatia, with recovery and growth of 2.3% likely in 2010. According to the Skopje Council on Foreign Economic Relations’ report issued in March 2009, unemployment in Macedonia stands at 33% and in Bosnia and Kosovo at 40%. The same document argues that unemployment region-wide will further increase due to the continuing fall in trade and declining foreign investment.

KEEP DOORS OPEN

Experts warn that such a bad economic situation in the Western Balkan countries, accompanied by a slowdown in European integration, could bring serious social and political instability to the region. “The region can become a very difficult place” if EU enlargement is put on hold, Tcherneva argued. “Isolation, economic difficulties, including decline of remittances and investment - all these circumstances, accompanied by the lack of EU perspective, could lead to a return of strong populist, nationalist regimes and bring as a result long-term instability to the region, which was in fact very close to normalisation,” she said. “We are starting to feel this new atmosphere in the Balkans with the Greek-Macedonian name dispute, with Slovenian-Croatian border row and with the fact that Serbia still talks about Kosovo as if it was part of its territory,” Tcherneva added, concluding that for its own good, as much as for the Balkans, the EU must therefore keep its doors open.

According to the annual Failed States Index (2008) of the Foreign Policy (FP) and The Fund for Peace, only two out of six countries (Kosovo is not included in the index) aspiring for EU membership, namely Croatia and Montenegro, are with a score below 60 points in a group of a fairly stable countries. The other four countries were assessed as being much less stable, with Bosnia seen as a country “in danger”.’

The ranking of the states is based on the total scores of 12 indicators, such as extensive corruption and criminal behaviour, inability to collect taxes or otherwise draw on citizen support, large-scale involuntary dislocation of the population, or sharp economic decline. For each indicator, the ratings are placed on a scale of zero to ten, with zero being the lowest intensity (most stable) and ten being the highest intensity (least stable). The total score is the sum of the 12 indicators and is on a scale of 0–120. Countries that have scores lower than 30 are categorised as ‘most stable’, while countries that score over 90 are considered as ‘critical’. The scores between these two extremes indicate that a state is ‘in danger’, ‘borderline’ or ‘stable’.