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February 9, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
solutions to disputes with neighbours.
All six countries will be assessed in a fair and objective manner on the basis of their own merits and at the speed at which they achieve progress.
The Commission underlined that it is ready to pre- pare recommendations to open accession negotia- tions with Albania and Macedonia, which the report said had made significant progress on their Euro- pean path, if they met the required conditions.
Implementation of judicial reforms is crucial
for Albania, while Macedonia, which has been a candidate country since 2005, needs to solve the “name dispute” with Greece.
Greece objects to the use of the name Macedonia as it has a province in the north with the same name. However, both Macedonia and Greece are optimistic that the issue will be solved this year. The Mac- edonian authorities say they expect that the solu- tion is possible and that the country can expect to be invited to join the bloc as early as this year.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama also expects his country, a candidate since 2014, to be invited to start EU negotiations in 2018. “We welcome what was said to Albania in the EU strategy. Negotiations clos- er than ever,” Rama wrote on his Facebook page.
Regarding Bosnia & Herzegovina, the Commis- sion will start preparing an opinion on the coun- try's membership application following the receipt of comprehensive and complete answers to its questionnaire.
“Bosnia could become a candidate for accession with sustained effort and engagement,” the Com- mission said.
Bosnia hopes to finally get EU candidate status this year. The country formally applied for EU mem- bership in February 2016 and was hoping to get candidate status in 2017. However, disagreements between the institutions of the country’s smaller entity – Republika Srpska – on the one side, and
the Muslim-Croat Federation and the central level authorities on the other have threatened Bosnia’s European future several times and have led to a significant delay in completing the questionnaire.
According to the state-level government, the questionnaire is now almost completed and should be sent to the EU soon.
The Commission noted that Kosovo has an op- portunity for sustainable progress through im- plementation of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement and to advance on its European path once circumstances allow.
Kosovan officials knew that there would be no clear language for their country in terms of its EU aspirations. Kosovan Deputy Prime Minister Enver Hoxhaj recently urged ambassadors of several EU member states to support a more balanced ap- proach for Kosovo in the new enlargement strategy.
Kosovo is considering applying for candidate status, but its relations with the EU are complicated mostly as a result of unfulfilled obligations, such as the failure to ratify its demarcation border agreement with Montenegro. Further progress in the Serbia- Kosovo normalisation dialogue is also required.
Analysts at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (viiw) said on February 6 that the new strategy “signals a more interventionist stance” by Brussels in the region.
“The Commission has put significant focus on two key areas: the resolution of outstanding security issues in the region, and the strengthening of
the rule of law,” viiw analysts said. “This repre- sents a change of focus from Brussels. Whereas previously the EU had assumed that improving economic connectivity would automatically bring about political cooperation, the approach now recognises that these two issues must progress together, and that sometimes the politics has to come first. Broadly, this also represents more of an interventionist strategy than previously; the
EU is pushing for major changes in state-building