(story to be published in tomorrow's issue, March 30)
This week in Brussels the World Bank and the EU Executive Commission organise the Conference for Regional Financing in Southeast Europe, in collaboration with the coordinator of the Stability Pact for Southeast Europe. The World Bank's report for this conference, titled "The road to stability and prosperity in Southeast Europe," is designed as a draft strategy for regional development with the stated purpose of "overcoming the economic recession and poverty in the area," which is considered to include Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia and Romania. What the report calls "a comprehensive strategy of national development and integration in Southeast Europe" contains proposals that express projects being mulled by influential financial and political circles on both sides of the Atlantic, on stabilising in the Balkans, via intra-regional cooperation, an economic structure that will be an alternative to the individual pressures of countries striving for integration or assimilation into European and Atlantic structures. The report speaks of the need for a "rapid evolution toward commercial integration with the European Union and between countries in Southeast Europe." "Overcoming the heritage of conflicts in the area and poor economic performances, as well as reducing poverty, requires of these countries a commitment for reforms and intra-regional cooperation that is more profound and lengthy than in the last decade." The reality is that the West, after taking for itself what was best - or what it liked most in the old communist bloc - is finding itself under assault by those remaining on the outside, who are more numerous and more underdeveloped. And it is beginning to think seriously about a structure that, by tightening mutual relations, will weaken the economic pressures of the hands stretched begging at the West. The problem is that such an approach cannot go beyond projects and hypotheses because there was and is no economic complementarity in the region. It is impossible that the authors of such projects do not realise this, hence the suspicion that such projects have political rather than economic ends, and those are rather of indirect isolation than direct integration of the Balkans into Europe. At the bottom line, the goal is to guard the wealthy and stable Europe from the proven vulnerabilities of the Balkan area and the instability it constantly generates and can always spread. Romania, for instance, has trade exchanges with countries in the area that do not exceed 2% of the total. In Bulgaria's case, the figure is somewhat bigger - 4-5% - but still ridiculous. In the overall area, mutual trade is little over 10%. Of course, mutual exchanges need to grow, but it is unrealistic to think of it as the solution or even a lever for the region's development. To ask Romania or Bulgaria to first develop their relations with countries in the area and only then to become aspiring structures to European Union integration, in practice means two things: 1) to demand these countries to postpone those aspirations forever; 2) to condition their accession not only on their own progress, but on others' too. Once endorsed internationally, this group called "Southeast Europe" will remain labelled as such. There will be no use for one country or another to do better; the area will be treated as a whole. The fate of every country in the area will be judged according to the fate of the entire region. Individual performance will be increasingly irrelevant. The standard of international treatment will be the standard applied to the area. And this standard will be that applied to the weakest and least achieving country. It is the Albanian standard, a country where, unfortunately, the dissolution of the state's authority is no longer merely a threat, as in Romania, but a grim part of reality. Instead of trying, after the success with Greece and Turkey, to deal with Balkans' problems by encouraging economic and political separation from the curse of the region for these countries which, although not much better off, are still one step ahead in institutional and economic terms, thus gradually diluting the vulnerable and incendiary zone, the West is seeking solutions in a chimerical cross-border economic structure. The impression is that such a structure (for instance, a customs union or, even more, a customs union with a common international currency, such as the euro) would be much easier to control internationally and would also provide a means to melt down at least weaken ethnic passions. But it is only an impression. They are ignoring the remarkable capacity, specific to the area, of generalising evil faster than the good. Before it brings the expected benefits, a cross-border economic structure in the Balkans would create a heaven for criminal networks that would come to control everything - even the countries that have so far escaped racket control - the more "advanced" in the area, such as Bulgaria and Romania. About this, the West is warned not by theories but by the crudest reality. After the model of what is already happening in Western protectorates (Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia) that resulted from the violent breakdown of the former Yugoslavia, a cross-border structure devoid of national identity designed for "Southeast Europe" will be travelled far and wide, in complete freedom and unconstrained, not by the BMWs of Western investors bringing stability and prosperity, but the Mercedes of Albanophone mobsters, who defy the French, Britons, Italians, Germans and even Americans in the KFOR, sheltered by their inability to be also policemen besides militaries, and by a policy that was badly conceived and badly enforced, which solved nothing in the Balkans and which, by muscling in a illusory structure, without any economic basis, will further complicate things, until a new incendiary outburst in the area.
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