EU Strategy in the Balkans

The International Crisis Group, Brussels

10 July 2001

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

So begins Charles Dickens’ great novel A Tale of Two Cities.

It often feels like that in the Balkans, where hope is continually jousting with despair, where you can wake up in the morning to signs of spring but close the shutters on an evening dark and cold.

Rarely more so than recently. Despair as guns and rockets crackled around the mountains near Skopje, and refugees were on the move again. Hope as, a few hundred kilometres to the North, Belgrade democrats sent Milosevic to The Hague. Hope again as the EU-NATO brokered cease-fire took hold in Skopje. And today, political turbulence in Croatia. Next week, who knows?

Surveying this mixed scene, and given the strategic importance of the region for the EU, it is not unreasonable to ask: what is our response? Do we have a strategy for the Balkans? What do we hope the region will look like by, say, 2010 or 2015? How do we intend to accomplish our vision? Are we succeeding, or does the conflict in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia portend a second decade of war?

I want, today, to set out our long term strategy for the region. I believe that it can work – indeed it is slowly beginning to work. But it will take time. We have to settle in for the long haul. We have to give the strategy the time it needs to work, and make sure it is strong enough and flexible enough to cope with the inevitable set-backs and reversals as they occur, as they will. It is a matter of slow, steady, incremental, not particularly glamorous work: building stability brick by brick, day by day, month by month, year by year. Because this corner of our continent remains volatile, and at any moment any part of it can still topple into crisis.

I have been a European Commissioner for some twenty-two months now. My involvement in the Balkans is more recent than many of you. I follow and admire the work of the ICG, and the many other analysts who take such a close and devoted interest in the affairs of the region.

The Balkans are part of Europe. We are – as it were – in the same boat. Our past and our futures are intimately bound together. Our peoples want the same things – peace, stability, high standards and decency in public life, freedom, prosperity and opportunity. We have a shared interest in working together to combat organised crime, to ensure respect for minorities and to help build strong states in the region which are capable of protecting the interests of all their citizens, and of being dependable and good neighbours.

That is what EU taxpayers want from their heavy investment in the Balkans. They want and are entitled to know how we are doing.

But what are we trying to do exactly?

I think it can be simply stated: our objective is to transform this part of our European continent, to equip it to sustain liberal democracy and the rule of law, rooted in strong institutions, supported by thriving market economies trading with each other and with the wider Europe.

My hope and my aim is that children starting at primary school today in Albania, in Bosnia, in Croatia, in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, will, when they come to leave school, be living in countries – their own countries – that are radically changed for the better; prosperous, stable European democracies, at peace with each other and at peace with themselves, either members of the EU or well on the road to membership.

To put it like that is to recognise clearly the scale of the task.

This is a big vision. It will take time and effort to make it a reality. It has taken the founding Member States of the EU half a century to reach the degree of integration achieved today. It will take some fifteen years from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the accession of the first candidate countries in 2004.

No one should be put off by these time scales. But we need to understand – and we need to explain to our populations – how long this is going to take; that slow progress doesn’t mean no progress.

An ambitious vision like ours also requires close partnership with other key players. With NATO, whose military commitment will be crucial for many years to ensure the security necessary for peace to take a strong hold. Within the Stability Pact, with the UN and the OSCE, with the World Bank, with the EIB and the EBRD, with NGOs, with the United States, and with others, and above all with the peoples and governments of the region.

How far we have come

Over the last two years, we have made a determined effort to develop a long-term approach and to improve the EU’s performance in the region.

Within months of taking up our posts, Javier Solana and I produced a report for the European Council that set out our vision for the region as a whole, as well as candidly acknowledging some of the failings of the EU’s policy, and ways in which it might be improved.

More needs to be done. But in under two years, we have developed a strong strategy, persuaded the region, our Member States and the wider international community to back it, and we have begun to deliver.

On the Commission side:

• We have put in a place a new and simpler regulation – Community Assistance for Reconstruction, Development, and Stabilisation, or CARDS – governing all our assistance to the region, and focused it on the major priorities of the Stabilisation and Association Process, our central policy for the region, on which I shall say more later.

• We have considerably speeded up the delivery of EU aid in much of the region.

• We have set up the European Agency for Reconstruction, which is delivering our assistance in Kosovo and now in Serbia and Montenegro too with a speed and efficiency that outpaces most other donors. There are still problems, I know. I am determined we will resolve them. But we have started to make a real difference, and the establishment in Brussels of our new aid delivery office, EuropeAid, in January this year will soon start to improve our performance more widely, with its faster procedures, increased staff, and devolution of management to the field.

• We supported the opposition to Milosevic through our ground-breaking Energy for Democracy programme with the G17 Plus, and our Towns and Schools for Democracy programmes, and through media support.

• When Milosevic fell, we devised a €200m emergency aid package to help Serbia through the winter, delivered 7000 trucks of heating fuel and paid for 70% of Serbia’s electricity imports, all delivered in record time. I want to see us now start to match that performance world-wide.

• We have swung into action to back the Covic plan in the Presevo Valley with practical projects making a visible difference to everyday lives, reinforcing the moderates, undermining the extremists.

• We organised – with our colleagues in the World Bank – the very successful Donors’ Conference for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in Brussels two weeks ago, mobilising €1.5bn for the coming year.

• We have drawn up and implemented radical asymetric trade measures, unprecedented in their openness on agriculture, effectively opening the entire EU market to exports from the Balkans without demanding reciprocal concessions.

In the region, the big picture looks very different today to when I started this job. Democratic, reform-minded governments in Belgrade and in Zagreb always were – and remain– a prerequisite for a lasting solution throughout the region. Yet nineteen months ago, Tudjman was still in power, and Croatia was in the political deep freeze. Just ten months ago, Milosevic still ruled the roost in Belgrade, and the European Union and the US, with others, were busy helping to support the independent media, and to shore up democracy in Montenegro.

I remember some argued that there was little chance of change in Belgrade. It was said that our policy of backing the opposition, reaching out to the people of Serbia, while tightening the pressure on Milosevic was misguided. It was said then that we lacked a strategy, and that at the rate we were going, Milosevic would be in power for years to come. Look at Castro, they said. Look at Saddam Hussein. But today – thanks to the determination of the Serbian people – Serbia is a democracy. Croatia – if one is prepared, as a ‘Brit’ to overlook sending one of her gallant sons to defeat England’s champion Tim Henman and take the Wimbledon title yesterday (I’m told that he’s become an honorary Englishman) - has made enormous political and economic strides under its reforming government.

Change, in other words, that some thought impossible has happened.

Overall, the regional picture is better than a year ago. Democratic, reform minded governments are now in power across the region. Diplomatic relations have been restored between all of them. All have joined – or are joining – key international organisations, including the UN, the IMF, WTO, OSCE. There is evidence of a more constructive approach to common problems – including a greater maturity in managing crises and tensions in bilateral relations. Take, for example, Croatia’s efforts to isolate Bosnian Croat extremists; Albania’s approach to the crisis in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia; and Belgrade’s handling of the insurgency in Southern Serbia. A network of regional co-operation initiatives is picking up steam, ranging from the South East Europe Co-operation Process to the Adriatic-Ionian initiative. And there are a growing number of regional trade and other bilateral agreements between the countries of the region, including, notably, the MoU on free trade signed under the auspices of the Stability Pact last month.

At the same time, we face new and serious problems, which threaten these achievements, and which, if we do not resolve them, risk setting off a new conflagration. In the Balkans, like the old English floral dance, it is often a case of two steps forward, one step back.

We mustn’t let this dishearten or depress us. We must resist the temptation to return anxiously to the drawing board, wondering if we should rip up our plan and start all over again. Because there is no better option but to press on. We must keep our basic offer to the Balkans firmly and visibly on the table: practical and political help to integrate into the European mainstream, for those countries prepared to implement drastic reforms, and live up to the values that have shaped our own destiny in recent decades.

Full co-operation with The Hague Tribunal is one indication of commitment to those values, that lie at the heart of the Stabilisation and Association Process. It matters.

Without justice, there can be no lasting peace in the Balkans. Croatia’s President Mesic is absolutely right: it is only by establishing individual guilt that the idea of collective guilt can be removed; it is only by establishing justice that states can begin to work with and trust each other again. The transfer of Milosevic was a truly historic step forward. But it was not the end of the road. All indictees – wherever they are – must be transferred to The Hague. I applaud the decision of the Croatian Government to comply with their international obligations in respect of indictments by the ICTY. I urge the people of Croatia to support that decision, difficult though that may be for many of them to do: it is the only course of action open to their government if it is serious about Croatia’s European future and international commitments. I also welcome the newly expressed readiness of the authorities in Republika Srpska to co-operate fully with The Hague Tribunal: let them now deliver. It is six years tomorrow since the massacre at Srebrenica. Karadzic and Mladic have been running from international justice for too long. It is high time they too faced a fair trial in The Hague.

I do not want here today to get into complex and important constitutional questions; into the future status of Kosovo, for example, important though that is; into the prospects for a historic settlement between Albanians and Serbs. I am not ducking them. But they are not the whole story.

Because the cleverest and most imaginative constitutional arrangements in the world are without meaning if they cannot be implemented and sustained. Which is why – without prejudice to all of the above – it is so important that someone gets on with what Tim Judah called in an excellent article the other day the ‘dull stuff’.

Dull – perhaps. But vital. Just as almost twenty years ago in my first Ministerial job I found myself working on what many regarded as the dull business of trying to improve housing and social conditions in Northern Ireland, of trying to re-establish local government there, all as it turned out stepping stones to later progress.

So I want to stand back, and focus in more detail on the rationale behind the Stabilisation and Association Process and on what implementing the strategy really means, both for the EU and for the region.

I don’t imagine that people in the Balkans – any more than in EU Member States - have a very precise notion of the finer points of the EU’s institutional architecture. But they identify the EU with security, with jobs, with a decent and rising standard of living, with the rule of law upheld by accountable, democratic, clean public institutions, a system in which rights of minorities are protected by law, not by carving out territory. They recognise the EU as probably the most successful conflict prevention and resolution mechanism in history. And they desperately want to be part of it.

This gives the EU enormous leverage. Our task is, through the Stabilisation and Association Process, to use it – together with a judicious mix of what diplomats call sticks and carrots - to inject, over time, stability, democracy and the rule of law into the body politic of the countries of South East Europe, much as the enlargement process has helped to bring stability to the candidate countries in the decade following the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its European Empire.

We offer – in these Stabilisation and Association Agreements – a special and demanding contractual relationship. It reflects the status of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as potential candidates for membership of the EU. The whole process of preparing for, negotiating, and implementing the agreements constitutes a powerful motor for change.

It offers the region a dynamic relationship with the EU, in which we help these countries to transform their systems of government, so that they become capable of delivering the stability their citizens crave, and step by step, become more like Member States and in so doing prepare themselves for membership.

But co-operation is a two way street. In exchange for the assistance we offer, the countries will have to demonstrate unequivocally that they really share the EU’s core political values, including respect for human rights, regional co-operation, full co-operation with the ICTY, and refugee return. They will need to work hard on economic reform in order to build solid market economies capable of competing freely and openly with Member States and they will need to build administrations capable of implementing EU law in a way which wins the confidence of Member States and creates the confidence necessary for the high degree of integration which comes with EU membership. Not only will the Commission help guide each country through the process but the EU is also making available considerable financial support to back it up - €4.65bn over the next six years, not counting contributions by Member States. This year alone we are spending,as the Commission, over €850m in the Balkans.

But no amount of money can change the fact there is no magic wand, no quick fix for a decade of war, on top of four decades of Communism and centuries of underdevelopment and neglect.

The very core of the Stabilisation and Association Process consists in tackling the institutional weakness that besets, in varying degrees, the entire region. Rectifying that is the key to long term stability, and - as philosophers would say – the necessary though not sufficient condition for eventual EU membership.

It’s not a new problem. The 1914 Carnegie Endowment report into the causes of the Balkan wars noted: ‘…if we look for palliating causes of these gross lapses of basic decency and the rule of law, we must find them in the immaturity of national institutions and civic character’.

One of the main reasons why the Balkans are so unstable is that democracy and the rule of law have never put down strong roots. Empires have come and gone; governments have risen and fallen; but democracy – and above all the rule of law – has never settled.

Today, at least, all the government leaders in the region talk the language of Europeanisation and reform. But I sometimes wonder how many really understand what it means, or the major practical and cultural adjustments it entails? And I wonder – sometimes – if we in the EU really grasp the scale of the challenge we have, quite rightly taken on?

The Stabilisation and Association Agreements are a practical agenda for change. They create a partnership which brings the EU right inside how each state works – or doesn’t – and allows it to work with those states to make the changes necessary to upgrade their performance to the EU’s level.

It is this very practical work that will decide the success or failure of our efforts in the Balkans, as much as the more glamorous strategies and statements that emerge from meetings of European leaders. These have their place. They give impetus and visibility to what we are trying to do. But they are not enough on their own. The EU’s responsibility does not end the minute the ink is dry on the latest declaration or decision to move the process a step forward. It is only a beginning which those on the ground have to be given the time to turn into real change. And real reform, real progress has to determine the EU’s decisions to move further in its relationship with each country. We should not discredit the process, water down its integrity by constantly feeling obliged to offer some new step forward, like opening negotiations on a new agreement, before our partner is really ready, or hustling negotiations to a premature close. We should not lose faith in the attractiveness of the final destination to the countries in transition out of fear that they may lose faith in the process if it seems too tough. It is tough precisely because the destination is so worthwhile.

What is this practical agenda? It is the mammoth task of installing the democratic and institutional software to enable market based economies to generate wealth, attract the foreign direct investment that will make them sustainable, and trade with each other and the European Union; and it involves creating institutions - from civil services to police, from central banks to immigration and border services, to a free and independent media – that function efficiently and accountably, in a way that commands the confidence of each and every citizen, not just those who happen to be in the ethnic or political majority.

It is no coincidence that the Stabilisation and Association Agreements are modelled on the Europe Agreements we have with today’s candidate countries, and draw heavily on our experience and success there. They are proven instruments, reconfigured to the situation in the Balkans. They impose heavy obligations, which is why I am so concerned that we should not rush this process or over-politicise it.

Because it is not enough just to photocopy EU legislation and hope for the best. Laws have got to be enforced and understood, not just proclaimed. In the Balkans, as elsewhere, people have got to be convinced that the law will protect their legitimate interests and they must respect it. If reform means hard work and some sacrifice, as it will, people need to understand why it is worth it. That requires careful preparation and patient persuasion. If reform is to stick, it can’t just be imposed by visiting EU officials. Better to take time, to work intensively with each country, and do the job properly. In the EU and in the wider international community we must have the patience to let the process bed down and avoid the temptation to rush constantly from one new plan to another or try to reach distant milestones before more immediate ones have been passed.

The need for stronger institutions and greater implementation capacity is common to the whole region. As the European Stability Initiative noted in a recent report the very talented posse of democrats at the top of the Serbian government is a bit like the hyperactive brain of a dinosaur, struggling to mobilise the body of an inert bureaucracy. That might be said of several countries in the region. But the underlying causes of institutional weakness vary from country to country. That is why each Stabilisation and Association Agreement is tailor-made.

In every country in the Stabilisation and Association process, we are now working closely with the governments and communities to change things; and the intensity of that work will grow in the coming years, as the assistance and backing of our CARDS programme increasingly kicks in.

Let me give one or two examples of what I mean:

• We are working to improve judicial capacity, training judges in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and computerising court records in Albania, so judges across the country can see how similar cases have been handled, and work towards a more consistent application of the law.

• We are advising on the drafting of new legislation, to make sure it is EU compatible, and user friendly for foreign investors.

• We are advising and equipping police forces, for example in Albania, to enable them to handle tense situations in a way that doesn’t provoke disorder.

• We are helping countries – the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Albania and Croatia, for example - to take advantage of the trade concessions we have offered by making sure their goods meet EU standards, through a series of trade facilitation measures, such as the improvement of phyto-sanitory inspection facilities, developing systems for the mutual recognition of standards, ensuring more efficient processing; and we are helping more generally to get agriculture back on its feet again.

• We are building professional customs services, on which the free flow of goods depends. In Albania, Bosnia and Kosovo this work has made a big difference already - increasing revenue yields and seizures of illegal goods. In Albania, where we have been running a customs assistance mission since 1997, customs revenues have gone up from €170 million in 1997 to € 364 million in 2000. We have put in place a new customs code in line with the EC’s, and a recruitment system based on merit, through open competition, a career structure which is also based on merit and which offers incentives for promotion, not for corruption. This system, developed as a pilot customs service, is now serving as a model for overall public administration reform in Albania.

• Our highly effective customs assistance mission in Bosnia has helped establish a common customs policy and tariff, and to model the customs and tax administration in Bosnia on EU standards.

A decade of war and instability has provided the perfect conditions for organised crime networks to become well established, efficient and violent. Criminal gangs exploit the weakness of border management in the region, and of local law enforcement agencies. Gangs based in the region are now involved in the trafficking of human beings, and act as a staging post for some two thirds of the heroin seized in Member States, as well as in money laundering and cigarette smuggling.

This pernicious web of organised crime feeding nationalism and extremism – and vice versa – corrupting and emasculating public administrations, police and the judiciary is one of the biggest threats to the EU’s ambitions for the region. Our electorates will increasingly demand decisive action to deal with the obscenity of Europe’s prostitution traffic and the violence it brings in its wake, and to cut back on the car crime on our city streets which supplies the region with flashy cars.

I would love there to be quick solutions. There are not. Again we have to be systematic and persistent.

• We intend – through the CARDS programme and working closely with Member States – to establish a functioning Interpol network in each country, fully linked to the rest of the Interpol network and, increasingly, with Europol.

• We will help to establish a functioning regional judicial and prosecutorial network, including joint investigations and prosecutions dealing with cross border crime.

• We will help to establish a common and Schengen-compatible policy on visas, immigration and asylum.

We are going to step up our efforts to help the countries of the region establish effective border management and border control, building on the impressive progress that has been made in Bosnia with the establishment of the State Border Service. The emergence of five new nations from the break-up of the former Yugoslavia has created over 5000 kms of new international borders in the region. Many of these are not even marked, the emergent border control agencies are weak and ineffective, and the border crossing points are not equipped to handle the traffic crossing them. Our help ranges from significant funding for major new border crossing points, or equipment, such as the border communications system we are supplying in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, to simple but effective procedural techniques such as harmonising opening hours and promoting shared facilities – thereby also building cross border co-operation and trust .

It is a huge agenda. At the same time, throughout the region, we are getting on with the basic work of physical reconstruction: fixing roads and bridges, building houses, mending power grids and electricity lines.

Much of this physical reconstruction work, like the institution building, helps to build the regional co-operation that we very much want to encourage. It is not enough for the countries of the region to co-operate with the EU. We want them to co-operate increasingly closely with each other, as they undertook to do at the Zagreb summit last year. Some problems – such as the parlous state of the environment in the region- call for regional solutions. So do co-operation on border management and the fight against organised crime, as I have just explained; so too the promotion of trade within the region. Investors will want to be sure not just that they can depend on the rule of law and contracts being honoured, but that they will be able to sell within the regional market of 25m consumers, as well as beyond it. Poorly connected infrastructure impedes economic recovery. The system for distributing energy between countries is very limited; and yet a single market for energy would solve many of the region’s energy problems.

In other words, one cannot treat each individual country, still less the region, as if it is in an isolation ward. If our strategy is to make sense it must contribute to the EU’s wider strategic goal of a continent of Europe that is united and inter-connected. So energy, infrastructure and communication links in the Balkans need to be part of the massive task of reconnecting our whole continent. The Stability Pact, whose perspective is wider than the Balkans and which has successfully recruited the Central and East European countries to the cause of integrating the Balkans into the European family, has a special role to play here. That is why, for example, we and the World Bank are working very closely with the Pact on developing comprehensive transport and energy strategies which plug the Balkans back into wider Europe.

But how are we doing with the strategy in each country?

In Albania, we are making headway, admittedly from a very low base. Progress towards fiscal sustainability and economic growth has improved, with help from us. On balance, we were prepared this summer to recommend that negotiations towards an Stabilisation and Association Agreement should begin, and we will present a mandate for negotiations, if possible before the end of this year. But Tirana is under no illusions as to how much needs to be done to establish the rule of law and reform public administration, and any Stabilisation and Association agreement will have to take account of the very considerable weaknesses that remain to be tackled.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, we have set out – in our Road Map – a clear series of steps that Bosnia needs to implement. We wanted Bosnia to be absolutely clear about what they needed to do; and we are not about to change the goal posts. But I very much regret that so far too few goals have been scored. The Road Map amounts to a basic guide to operating as a State: remember we conduct our bilateral relations with States so they must be able to engage with us meaningfully in negotiations on a Stabilisation and Association Agreement. So let’s see some real progress on the Election Law, on property law implementation, on the building up of state level institutions that actually work. Then – but only then – will we be able to give the go ahead to a feasibility study as a first step to SAA negotiations. Unless we insist on Bosnia keeping its side of the bargain, we risk creating a permanent international dependency which will never be able to dig itself out of its own difficulties.

In the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, there has been enormous political progress in a very short time. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia really does appear determined to make a break with its recent past. But the real work of institutional and economic reform is only now beginning, and the constitutional relationship with Montenegro remains unresolved. The Donors’ Conference which we organised with the World Bank has provided the funds needed to get that reform underway in the coming year. It will be a formidable task – both in Serbia and in Montenegro. I can announce today that we intend to hold the first meeting of the Consultative Task Force with the FRY – the first step in the Stabilisation and Association process – on 23 July, and we hope to make good progress.

In Croatia, the government elected last year has made a very impressive start on reform. It has accomplished a speedy return to the European mainstream and concluded the negotiation of a Stabilisation and Association Agreement in record time. It was initialled in May, and will be signed in the Autumn. That Agreement offers a framework for the formidable political and economic reform programme on which Croatia must now embark; it represents the beginning, not the end of that process.

And what of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia? We signed a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with Skopje in April this year. It was the first country to conclude such an agreement with the EU. Some people – given the grave crisis that the country now faces – wonder if this was entirely wise.

I believe it was the right thing to do. It recognised the structural reforms that the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia had carried out, and which had been praised by the World Bank and others.

What has happened in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, however, reinforces rather than undermines my central theme in this speech: the importance of not rushing this process, of building up institutions capable of commanding the confidence of the minority as well as the majority, as well as the importance of building up capacity in the region to tackle organised crime, manage borders properly and so on.

The Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia provides for just that. It commits the government to specific steps to protect the rights of minorities. In that sense is providing a framework within which to help tackle the present crisis, and to tackle the legitimate grievances of the Albanian community which need to be addressed as part of an overall political solution.

Our immediate priority, of course, must be to extinguish the conflict, and to achieve such a political solution.

That is what the EU – working exceptionally closely alongside NATO, and the US – has been intensively working to help achieve.

The main effort on the EU side has been led by Javier Solana, ably assisted on the ground by the ex-Presidency Ambassador Mark Dickinson and the Head of the Commission Delegation in Skopje, Jose Pinto Teixeira. I pay tribute to their efforts – their continuing efforts. Javier has been to Skopje countless times. I have made a number of visits myself. We now have Francois Leotard in Skopje, reporting to the High Representative. He is based in the Commission’s office, and is working intensively with Ambassador Pardew, the US representative, and of course with NATO, and the OSCE.

He knows he can count on the Commission’s total support. We have a substantial assistance package available for the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia under our CARDS programme this year of €42m, including €4m of our total €5m contribution to the South East Europe University at Tetevo, and money for local government reform. We have provided €2.5 m so far for housing reconstruction, as soon as security conditions allow, under our Rapid Reaction Mechanism – its first use in an emergency. ECHO, our humanitarian agency, is providing help to refugees and internally displaced.

We are also drawing up a new substantial package to back a peace agreement, once one is reached and is being implemented.

I can announce today that we are considering – subject to the usual approval of the Commission and Member States – a package of over €50m, including substantial budgetary assistance, tied to specific uses, if, but only if, there is a political agreement that is implemented.

Europe is ringed – from Kaliningrad in the North, to the Caucasus & Central Asia, to the Balkans - by an arc of danger and instability. We have to manage that danger, remove that instability. In the Balkans, we are providing evidence of a more coherent, long term EU approach, in which we try to harness all the immense resources of the European Union, and deploy them in support of our policy. We are slowly, steadily reinforcing and stitching together what Winston Churchill memorably called ‘the sinews of peace’. Whether we succeed or not is a key test of our nascent common foreign and security policy, of our ability to project stability beyond our borders and into our immediate neighbourhood.

There are, of course, those who advocate a different course. There are the cynics who have no hope of ever making any progress in the Balkans. There are those who contend that the region is a vortex of evil; that there is something in the Balkan gene that condemns people to fight and kill one another, and we should leave it well alone - as if that were historically accurate, morally defensible or politically wise.

There are still others who believe that the problems of the region can be solved by a grand conference and a bit of cartographic cut and paste; a sort of latter day Congress of Berlin. I must say that I don’t find that an immensely persuasive argument. The answer to the region’s problems is more enlightened government, not more inspired map making.

I take as my inspiration the more optimistic prescription of the monastic doctor in Ivo Andric’s classic, Bosnian Chronicle: ‘…the whole art of healing’, said the doctor ‘… consisted in recognising, seizing and using the forces that surged in the direction of growth, ‘as a sailor makes use of the wind’, and in avoiding and removing the forces that worked for decay. Wherever a man succeeded in catching hold of the forces of growth, he recovered and sailed on; where he failed to do it, he sank, quite simply and without appeal….’

I do not pretend that we have got it all right. I have no doubt that there are things we can do better. But we are, I think, on the right basic course, and we need to hold to it in the Balkans, just as we have held to it in Central and Eastern Europe.

The question is not whether we have a strategy, whether we have a comprehensive plan of action: it is whether or not we have the staying power, the political will, to see it through.

Back, once again, to those children at primary school. Just over a decade ago, a child at primary school in Poland was living in a country that was receiving food aid from the European Union. Today Poland stands on the threshold of becoming a member of the European Union, and the children who were still at primary school in Warsaw when the Wall came down will embark on their adult lives as EU citizens - their prospects in life having been utterly transformed.

We have the chance now – together - to make that sort of historic difference in the Balkans in the coming years.

This is not yet Mission Accomplished. Far from it. But nor, as the more encouraging events of the last year have shown, is it Mission Impossible.