“Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger famously asked.
In 2009, Kissinger belatedly got his answer when the Treaty of Lisbon created the post of High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
But the decade since has done little to consolidate the EU’s 28 states around a coherent, united policy on Kosovo.
Now, in its haste to seal a deal that might get all parties – at least, their political leaders – on side, the EU risks undercutting the very democracy it vowed to nurture in Kosovo.
The presidents of Serbia and Kosovo, Aleksandar Vucic and Hashim Thaci, have long been feted in Brussels as ‘dealmakers’, yet they have failed to implement more than a dozen deals they each signed up to.
Now they are trying to fool us into believing that an exchange of territories, or a “correction of borders” as it is being spun in Kosovo, is the silver bullet.
The EU, split between 23 members who recognise Kosovo as independent and five that do not, has been deafening in its silence on the prospect of an ethnic partition that the West so strongly ruled out when Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008.
Civil society organisations in Serbia and Kosovo have written to the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Federica Mogherini, asking for an unequivocal rejection of partition, but Mogherini has said nothing.
In Prishtina, democracy will be in peril if Thaci sidesteps parliament and goes beyond the constitutional boundaries of his presidency to seal such a deal with Serbia.
EU values in doubt
When Kosovo declared independence based on a plan drafted by veteran Finnish peacebroker Martti Ahtisaari, Thaci and others said concessions to the Serb minority in terms of an effective veto power in parliament were a necessary compromise in order to secure statehood.
Yet while such concessions have thrown up significant obstacles to the working of the Kosovo parliament, the major European backers of statehood have as yet failed to persuade their five EU peers to change their stance, leaving Kosovo’s EU future in permanent doubt.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
