1 Security cooperation in the Western Balkans
Cracks and erosion of Euro–Atlantic integration?
Tobias Flessenkemper1 and Marko Kmezić
Since the end of the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s, the threats posed to European security by the Western Balkans have greatly diminished. The initial phase of internationally managed conflict settlement and reconstruction in the region has been followed by the phase of Euro–Atlantic integration – the increasing association with and eventual membership of the Western Balkans in the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This chapter concerns the latter phase in security cooperation, tracing “leverage and links” (Levitsky and Way, 2005, 2006) between international actors and the countries of the region. This gradual enhancement of relations suggests that the success of the EU and the NATO influence on security, democracy and the rule of law in the Western Balkan countries is conditioned by high leverage, as manifested in an asymmetrical power relationship between these organizations and the target state and dense linkages due to the density of ties between them. The more an accession country becomes entangled in linkages with the NATO and the EU, the more “vested interests” (Tolstrup, 2010) will consolidate on both sides, which ultimately leads to the domestic elites’ aspiration to preserve such ties. Following this logic, over the past twenty years the Euro–Atlantic integration of the Western Balkans has become a joint project of the regional political and economic stakeholders, the EU, the United States (U.S.), and their partners.
However, the last two decades have brought more frustration than progress to the Western Balkans’ Euro–Atlantic integration (Džankić et al., 2018). Following Albania and Croatia, which entered in the sixth enlargement in 2009, eleven years after declaring its independence, the Republic of Montenegro became the third Western Balkan country to join NATO in 2017. Montenegro’s entry into the alliance demonstrated the lack of the organization’s compromise-based decision-making and the erosion of coherence between the main actors driving the Euro–Atlantic integration project. Controversial messages from leading NATO partners concerning the perspective of the Alliance’s future enlargements, as well as the deprivileged position of the newcomers, risk eroding the normative foundations of the Western Balkan countries’ integration into Western structures and opens the possibility for external and internal security cooperation with other actors. The area of internal security cooperation broadly encompasses issues relating to policing, the rule of law and civil protection which primarily concern EU integration, while external security in this article concerns questions of NATO membership and foreign policy cooperation in the framework of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).
This chapter analyzes how the erosion of the coherence of the Euro–Atlantic project created cracks through which Russia and Turkey were able to influence external and internal security cooperation in the Western Balkans. Russia’s growing assertiveness can be observed in attempts to impact external security cooperation across the region. President Vladimir Putin’s seemingly permissive attitude to Euro–Atlantic integration in the early 2000s has turned, rather sharply, to vocal criticism and active opposition to NATO enlargement to the Western Balkans and the political and economic dimensions of EU integration, thus affecting security cooperation, including the internalization of rule of law norms (Bechev, 2017; Samorukov, 2017). Russia is not the only actor with objectives antagonistic to those initially set forth by the Euro–Atlantic integration perspective more than 20 years ago. Despite its membership in NATO, Turkey’s role in the region since the attempted coup d’état in July 2016 has changed from promoting and supporting Euro–Atlantic expansion to the Western Balkans to becoming a more inward looking self-oriented actor less interested in regional affairs. Turkey’s external and internal security objectives for the region have become dominated by the self-preserving policy priorities of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. These include supporting political actors with similar authoritarian leanings and pushing back political adversaries’ presumed influence in the Western Balkans, in particular those associated with the “ ‘Gülen movement”. Other actors such as China and the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), in turn, have little engagement in the field of security and do not seem to be aiming to intervene in the Euro–Atlantic integration project in a disrupting manner. However, attitudinal and normative effects of their engagement in the fields of economy, education and culture may in the long run facilitate consolidation of informal practices and corruption thus indirectly distancing the region from the goal of EU membership.
This chapter outlines the current international context of the Western Balkans’ Euro–Atlantic integration, reflecting on the most recent developments that shape geopolitical developments on a broader level, but also their implications for the apparent halt in the political transformation of the Western Balkans. It explores the convergence between linkages and influence between regional and great powers on the integration of the Western Balkan countries, seeking to define how they translate to the development of eroding Euro–Atlantic enlargement strategy. We conclude this chapter by proposing how best to remove the observed deficiencies on the Euro–Atlantic integration path of the remaining non-EU and NATO countries from the region.
The international context of the Western Balkans Euro–Atlantic integration
In spring 2015 the Council of the European Union concluded that “[t]he global and European security environment has changed dramatically in recent years” (Council of the EU, 2015). These changes had consequences in the Western Balkans as well. Montenegro’s entry into NATO was preceded by an alleged coup d’état attempt in October 2016, which the country’s public prosecutor attributes in an ongoing court trial to Russian interference. While NATO accession was never without internal controversies in Montenegro, a number of media outlets with pro-Russian agendas as identified in research conducted by the Center for Investigative Journalism of Montenegro (Centre for Investigative Journalism of Montenegro, 2018), as well as Russia-based international news outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik, continuously campaigned against the country’s NATO membership. In parallel, Serbia and Russia stepped up their technical military cooperation in late 2016.
The regional controversy over potential NATO membership considerably increased after Russian military intervention in Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the introduction of punitive measures against Russia agreed upon by the EU and NATO member states. Russia’s policy and public diplomacy explicitly aimed to stop NATO enlargement; not least as Montenegro’s membership completed the alliance’s effective coverage of the entire Adriatic shore, apart from a tiny strip of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s coast. Furthermore, Montenegro’s participation in the EU’s restrictive measures under the CFSP contributed to further antagonizing Russia. The situation has worsened after the agreement between Athens and Skopje in 2018, as North Macedonia’s planned NATO membership has become the next issue of contestation.
Russia’s external challenge to Euro–Atlantic integration interacts with the mixed signals for the Western Balkans’ European integration that have been coming from Brussels over the last few years. Enlargement fatigue was explicitly expressed by the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at the beginning of his mandate in 2015, when he stated the obvious – that there will be no enlargement during his term – and downgraded the enlargement portfolio in the current Commission. In addition, the “creeping nationalization” (Hillion, 2010) of the enlargement process, whereby member states have effectively increased the frequency of instances in which they block or delay decisions on enlargement in the Council, has negatively impacted the EU’s transformative power and its ability to successfully export democracy through its enlargement policy. In the Western Balkans this has led to the flourishing of regimes that can be described by concepts such as “illiberal democracy” (Zakaria, 1997) or “competitive authoritarianism” (Levitsky and Way, 2002). They present themselves as a new kind of “normalcy”, able to incorporate the democratic formal procedures while, using the rhetoric of democracy, conserving an “un-democratic” regime core. As autocrats are more likely to emulate, cooperate and seek support from other autocrats or to opportunistically play off different external actors, the dynamics and mechanisms of democratic decline in the Western Balkans are crucial to understanding how the region could become a source of renewed instability should more authoritarian regimes promise short-term “stabilitocracy” (Kmezić and Bieber, 2017) at the expense of long-term, sustainable stability.
Furthermore, the overall Euro–Atlantic dynamic resonates in the region and influences perceptions of security. The symptoms of the crisis of the norms and values of Euro–Atlantic integration – the normative foundation of the European security architecture of liberal democracies – are thereby not limited to the Western Balkans region. After the “migration crisis” that peaked in 2015, the “Brexit” referendum in June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President in November 2016, a profound sense of fragility beset the EU and NATO. The EU member states, in addition to the continuing economic and Euro governance crises, found it difficult to maintain coherence on border security and migration policy, both key questions which necessarily affect and are intertwined with Western Balkan security. Hence, the two organizations which were seen as the basis of stability and security for the region found or were found to be caught in internal crisis. That President Trump within the span of a few months first called NATO “obsolete” and then “no longer obsolete” (Baker, 2017) contributed to a perceived sensation of a broadening crack in the Euro–Atlantic alliance. This opened the doors of Western Balkan security for further incursions, questioning and supporting erosive tendencies in the Euro–Atlantic security architecture created since the 1990s.
During this period of real and perceived security fragility, Montenegro joined NATO. Yet, at the NATO summit in Brussels on 25 May 2017, when Montenegro was officially welcomed for the first time into the alliance, the public witnessed the bizarre scene of U.S. President Donald Trump seemingly pushing aside the Montenegrin Prime Minister, Duško Marković, at the photo opportunity, to the obvious bafflement of EU member state leaders (Chokshi, 2017). The combination of forceful Russian interference, insensitive American neglect, and puzzled European heads of state and government in Brussels genuinely symbolizes the Western Balkan Euro–Atlantic security predicament in the 2010s.
Together or apart: cracks in the Euro–Atlantic external security structure
In 2019, the Balkan peninsula is surrounded by and part of a single military alliance stretching from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Montenegro, Romania and neighboring Turkey, as well as, in the north, Italy, Slovenia, Hungary and Slovakia, are all members of NATO. Even the small dot of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian maritime outpost of Neum is de facto under NATO’s supervision thanks to the presence of UN-mandated EU and NATO deployments in the country. The overwhelming majority of the Balkan states are therefore members of the most significant collective defense organization in Europe. The alliance’s coverage appears solid on the map. The process of Euro–Atlantic integration seems to have been moving along successfully, with the gradual completion of NATO’s expansion in the region.
Yet a second glance at the map leads the observer to the conspicuous “white hole” in the center of the region. An analysis of the policies of the current members of the EU and NATO points to the crucial cracks and the lack of common political positions within the Euro–Atlantic community. In essence, the military and political integration of the region will remain open, conditioned and contested so long as there is no sustainable “closure” of issues related to the dissolution of Yugoslavia and, the single most important question, the position of Serbia. The unresolved territorial finalité politique of Serbia, which also impacts on the predicament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has created “cracks” inside the region affecting the Euro–Atlantic integration set-up.
Map 1.1 The EU and NATO in South Eastern Europe in 2019.
At least since 2003, Russia in particular has started to pursue its own policies in this regard by ending its contribution in EU-NATO–led security activities in the region. Russia moved into the cracks with diplomatic, political and media activities on the Kosovo question, and with ever-increasing assertiveness as of 2006 with the beginning of the talks on Kosovo’s status (Maass, 2017; Bechev, 2017). Shortly beforehand, the negotiated independence of Montenegro in 2006 could be considered a peak of Euro–Atlantic support for state-building in the region, keeping adversaries of Montenegro’s independence at bay. Yet the Kosovo status negotiations resulted in a marriage of convenience and cooperation between Russia and Serbia, due to the former’s leverage as a permanent member of the UN Security Council with the power to veto any binding decision on Kosovo in the interest of Serbia (Radeljić, 2017).
It was often difficult for key EU member states to reach a common position on important security-related foreign policy issues, as observed in the 1990s wars in Yugoslavia or their varied response to the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq in 2003 (Ginsberg and Penksa, 2012). Since 2008, the Kosovo status issue opened yet another EU and NATO internal fracture, which is particularly difficult for the EU. The slowing integration dynamics within the EU became ever more apparent after the 2004 enlargement and came to a dramatic halt with t...
