Europe's NonChalant Attitude Towards Kosovo

On Kosovo, The EU Is United - By A Sickening Lack Of Will

Despite The Modest Successes Of The Reform Treaty, The First Post-Ssummit Crisis Lays Bare Europe's Failures

Courtesy Of The Guardian
By Jonathan Steele in Berlin
Friday July 6, 2007

...Far from seeing the reform treaty as a victory for the integrationists, as the Tories do, it looks more like a victory for the long standing and bipartisan British strategy of widening Europe so as to prevent its deepening. The summit did agree to combine the EU's two foreign affairs civil servants into a single "high representative".

It also agreed to have a 30-month presidency instead of rotation every six months. But this is bureaucratic streamlining. It does not give either post more power.

More significant is the fact that there is no major transfer of competencies from national governments to the union. National parliaments will have a greater role in examining EU issues than before.

...If proof were required that Europe, with or without the prospective new high representative, still finds it almost impossible to have a united foreign policy, take the first crisis to return to the agenda since the Brussels summit - Kosovo.

Here is a major European issue on which the union's members are split several ways, though they share a sickening failure of will.

Until last year, Europe's Kosovo policy was a lowest common denominator of playing for time.

The issue was handed to former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari to craft a solution after talking to all sides.

When he came up early this year with a call for the territory to have qualified independence, European leaders responded with a demand for one more round of talks.

Then, at last month's G8 summit, the brash new French president stunned everyone with a weak-nerved call for between four and six more months of delay and yet more talks...

Instead of leadership, the EU then left things to Washington, in the hope that at his meeting in Maine on Monday, George Bush could persuade Russia's president Vladimir Putin not to veto a UN resolution giving Kosovo independence. Bush seems to have got nowhere.

But, unlike Europe, the Americans have been crafting a plan B.

They are considering the idea of encouraging the Kosovo Albanians to declare independence unilaterally with the promise that Washington will recognise the new state.

The paradox of Iraq is back again, in a reverse form from 2003 but one that is just as depressing.

When Washington did the wrong thing by invading Iraq, too many European states said yes.

Now, when Washington is thinking of doing the right thing over Kosovo, too much of Europe is saying no.

Eight years after Belgrade was forcibly stopped from driving the Albanians out of Kosovo, it is time to recognise that Serbian politicians will never agree to abandon the territory formally.

They know Kosovo is lost but cannot say so.

A unilateral declaration of independence by the Albanian majority is not ideal, but it is a solution.

Further talks with no deadline will lead to greater impatience in Kosovo, a sense of betrayal, and the risk of violence - an outcome which only Belgrade wants.

Collectively or individually, European governments must tell Washington and Kosovo's leaders that they too accept the territory's hour has come.

j.steele@guardian.co.uk