UCL expert says decision will be driven by political opportunism not reform efforts
LONDON (TrustLaw) - Strengthening anti-graft efforts may be a requirement for EU membership, but the decision on giving Serbia and Albania EU candidate status will be purely political, a regional specialist said in an interview.
Eric Gordy, a senior lecturer in South East European politics at the University College London School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, spoke to TrustLaw about the two nations’ chances of gaining EU candidate status next month, and why corrupt businessmen in those countries don’t want EU membership.
Do you think Albania and Serbia will get candidate country status for EU membership in October?
It’s not impossible. It’s hard to predict the behaviour of the EU because they don’t hold to any pattern for very long. I think everybody was confused by the accession of Bulgaria and Romania (in 2007). I think the idea was that they wanted to send a message to the other states in the region and I think they did... but it wasn’t the message they intended to send.
What message did they send?
The message was that, when it suits us politically, we’re willing to ignore all the standards we proclaimed. They’ve since spent the next several years complaining about it. Whether they (Albania and Serbia) become candidates or not isn’t going to depend objectively on what they do in terms of their requirements, it’ll depend on the calculation as to whether it’s an opportune moment.
Does this mean that reducing corruption in Albania and Serbia, as the European Commission requested last year, is relatively unimportant?
I think (reducing) corruption is tremendously important to get functioning states that are going to have the capacity to join (the EU). It could be that one of the reasons there’s resistance to joining the EU in these states is that locally powerful business people are monopolists to a privileged position that is guaranteed by politics in the region. They know they couldn’t maintain it if they had to compete with businesses in the EU. So in that sense, just getting the public interest represented also means dealing with corruption.
There’s another matter too - especially when you’re talking about Serbia, Kosovo and Albania - and that is that the corrupt people have no difficulty cooperating across borders. They did it when the states were fighting, and they continued afterwards. It’s profitable for them and it’s profitable for there to be a conflict along the borders.
The people who have difficult cooperating across the borders are government and law enforcement because there aren’t agreements between the states. So I think the first condition for doing anything about corruption is to get a level of cooperation among the states so that they share information with each other and act together.
Do you think Albania, Kosovo and Serbia suffer from similar types of corruption?
It’s basically similar - it has to do with uncontrolled, corrupt privatisation and with the consolidation of wealth that was gained during a period of lawlessness. For Serbia and Kosovo, the period of lawlessness was the war, but Albania had (such a time) too. They had this long period of lack of government during the 1990s and for a bit after, especially in the northern part.
I don’t think any of the states in the region have any unique problems. I think all of their problems are shared, and especially problems related to corruption, which probably also means that for them to do anything very serious to approach them, they’re going to have to do it together and the likelihood that they will, given the level of political conflict...looks pretty low. On the other hand, I really think that Serbia and Croatia are doing pretty well in cooperating, especially on law enforcement, and nobody would have predicted that was possible just a few years ago when they were at war with each other.
Is it possible to predict when Albania and Serbia will receive full EU membership?
I think it’ll depend on the behaviour of other states, and it will depend on how the conflict over Kosovo develops. The one state that is on track for membership is Croatia, and it’s not like Croatia doesn’t have similar problems with corruption. They’ve got their former prime minister’s (corruption) trial about to begin. Clearly, that candidacy too is a political gesture - it’s meant to be a reward for cooperation in other fields and maybe also a way of closing the chapter related to war crimes. So I think a lot is going to depend on the first period of Croatia’s membership; how satisfied European countries are with Croatia as a member.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
