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Abstract
The article intends to look at the role of the EU during the post-Cold War period, as an external factor encouraging regional cooperation in South-Eastern Europe and the protection of individuals both as victims and as sources of insecurity. The paper analyses the implementation of the Stability Pact and the Stabilization and Association Process as clear manifestations of asymmetrical inter-regionalism. It also examines the whole process of the Regional Cooperation Council and argues that it should be considered as a case of ‘sub-regionalism through inter-regionalism’ which could be named dependencia sub-regionalism.
Notes
An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 2008 GARNET conference: The EU in international affairs. Egmont Palace, Brussels, 24–26 April 2008.
1. The USA played a leading role in establishing the SECI. The main goal behind the US-inspired SECI was to create a regional association which would encourage cooperation among participating countries and would facilitate their incorporation into European structures. SECI was launched on 6 December 1996 and its initial members were Greece, Romania, FYROM, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which later withdrew.
2. Italy was the initiator of another regional cooperation scheme: The Central European Initiative (CEI). The objective of the initiative established in November 1989 was essentially formed after the meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the five initial participating countries – Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria and Yugoslavia (hence first named the Pentagonal Initiative) – in Venice in July, 1990, in an effort to bring participating countries closer to the EU. In line with the initiative, several working groups functioned across a variety of fields.
3. On 20 and 21 March 1995 in Paris, the Final Conference on the Stability Pact in Europe, convened on the initiative of the European Union on the basis of a proposal from France, was attended by the representatives of the OSCE Member States.
4. The main goal of the Process was to achieve stability and good neighbourliness in South Eastern Europe through realizing a sequence of programmes and initiatives which would emphasize the promotion of inter-frontier dialogue and develop communication nets among representatives of regional civil society.
5. Hybrid inter-regionalism could take other two forms. First, it may refer to relations between regional groupings and single states e.g. EU-Russia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations–Australia and secondly it may refer to the creation of institutional arrangements between major representatives of two or more regions which claim regional leadership. A clear example is IBSA, the trilateral, developmental initiative between India, Brazil and South Africa to promote South-South cooperation. The launching of the IBSA Dialogue Forum was formalized through the adoption of the ‘Brasilia Declaration’ in June 2006 (Tsardanidis, Citation2010, 220–1).
6. However, other approaches interpret the ‘construction’ of the Western Balkans as a result of the necessity to separate Romania and Bulgaria. These two countries were expected to accede to the EU, unlike other Balkan countries that still had many problems to face (Tzifakis Citation2007).
7. This could explain how the EU negotiates with the relatively strong East Asian region and how to the weak western Balkans.
8. However, in other neighbourhood states, like Ukraine, Moldova and the Caucasus states as well as the Third Mediterranean states, the EU has formulated in parallel another policy. The ENP. The main emphasis is not only on encouraging the countries to cooperate with each other, but on encouraging each to undertake economic and political reforms, in an attempt to influence their internal and external policies. Bilateralism in ENP is clearly predominant over regionalism (Smith Citation2005, 360). The neighbours are being asked to adopt much of the acquis communautaire, to embrace the values and norms of the EU, and to commit to political reform towards the goal of creating a system that is a mirror image of the EU in its normative design and value systems (Farrell Citation2004, 25–6).
9. Bulgaria and Romania, after their accession to the EU in January of 2007, ceased to be members of CEFTA.
10. However, some analysts believe that that the region is increasingly becoming more capable to support its own development, its own developmental needs and wants and to create its own integrated and coherent regional market (Monastiriotis Citation2008, 32).
11. A human security approach was developed by the EU during the Bosnian war, largely in response to its failure to further the security of individuals and communities. However, the EU has never succeeded in articulating a distinctive human security narrative (Kaldor Citation2007, 6–11).
12. The inter-parliamentary forum Cetinje was established in 2004 and are participating representatives from the National Parliaments of Albania, Croatia, FYROM, Greece, Montenegro Bosnia – Herzegovina , Serbia and the Parliamentary Assembly of OSCE.
13. Environmental Compliance and Enforcement Network for Accession is the successor of Balkan Environmental Regulatory Compliance and Enforcement Network.
14. The term ‘subregionalism’ has been adopted in order to distinguish the higher levels of regionalism like the EU from the lower levels of micro-regionalism (‘sub-subregionalism’ or, in certain cases, ‘sub-states regionalism’) promoted by national and subnational actors (Hook and Kearns Citation1999, 6). Sub-regionalism could intensify also the interactions among nodes (states or parts of states) that transcend national borders within and beyond a macroregion (Mittelman Citation2001, 214).
15. Since 2003, the European Commission has pointed out that the western Balkan countries will have to be gradually encouraged to take upon themselves the regional cooperation through initiatives, such as SEECP.
16. The members of the RCC are participating states of SEECP, the UNMIK on behalf of Kosovo in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244, the EU, represented by the Troika, consisting of the EU Presidency, the European Commission and the Council Secretariat, as well as those donor countries, international organizations and international financial institutions substantially and actively engaged in support of regional co-operation in South Eastern Europe.
17. The same policy EU seems to follow regarding to the Union for Mediterranean and the Eastern Partnership initiative.
18. Joint Statement of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the South East European Cooperation Process, Europe’s New South East, Zagreb, 11 May 2007.
19. From a conflict prevention and confidence building initiative in South Eastern Europe to a regionally owned Regional Co-operation Council. See http://www.stabilitypact.org/about/SPownershipprocessPortal.asp.
20. Report of the Special Co-ordinator on Regional Ownership and Streamlining of Stability Pact Task Forces and Initiatives, 16 November 2006. http://www.stabilitypact.org/rt/Annex%202%20-%20Report%20of%20the%20Special%20Coordinator%20on%20Regional%20Ownership%20and%20Streamlining.pdf.
21. Although it might be considered as an attempt of a face saving successor project of the Stability Pact (Anastasakis Citation2008, 41).
22. This, however, does not concern all South Eastern countries, for example Romania and Croatia. Todorova (Citation2004, 183) believes that ‘the attempts to hypostatize a Balkan identity have historically been noble but utopian political exercises, like a movement toward a Balkan federation, doomed from the outset by internal opposition but, more significantly, by outside forces’. Furthermore, others support the view that in the Balkans the local actors and societies ‘have a different sense of regional belonging and regional identity, and a different geographical definition of the region to which they belong’ (Anastasakis Citation2008, 43).
23. These common elements according to Alina Mungiu and Andrei Pippidi are a common Ottoman and Byzantine legacy, a common culture and religion being mostly Christian Orhodox and a shared experience of ethnic difference. In every country of the region the dominant ethnic group have to share both the pre- modern and the modern state with other groups (Mungiu-Pippidi and Pippidi Citation2008, 169).
24. The shifting discourses and conflict among the various ethnopolitical groups have created cycles of crises that have, in neo-Gramscian terms, undermined the formation of a historic bloc, and thus the EU’s hegemonic project remains open-ended (Türkes and Gökgöz Citation2006, 688). Another danger for RCC is to become a technical-bureaucratic body, leaving no space for non-state actors and for policy entrepreneurship.
25. RCC. Strategy and Work Programme 2011–2013. Sarajevo, 17 June 2010. http://www.taskforcehumancapital.info/…/RCCStrategyandWorkProgramme2011-13-finalwith_annexes.pdf.