Page 25 - BNE_magazine_11_2019

bne November 2019 Cover Story I 25
The failure of EU leaders to agree on a firm date to start accession talks with Albania and North Macedonia at the latest European Council meeting on October 17-18 is already having negative political repercussions within the two countries and risks a resurgence of the instability seen over the last few years.
After repeated delays in setting the date for accession talks with the two Western Balkan countries, most recently at the EU Council meeting in June, hopes – both in the two candidate countries and among European Commission officials – were high that an agreement at the October summit was more or less
a formality. Skopje and Tirana had, after all, already met all the conditions set by the European Commission for the opening of talks.
But in the weeks leading up to the summit, divisions among EU members over whether to allow the two countries, especially Albania, to progress towards membership of the bloc, became apparent. While the German Bundestag backed the opening of talks ahead
of the EU Council meeting, considerably fewer of its MPs voted to open talks
with Albania than with North Macedonia. Dutch MPs had similar reservations; in Netherlands there are serious concerns about Albanian organised crime and calls to suspend the EU's visa free regime for Albanian citizens.
In the end, however, it was France’s President Emmanuel Macron who held out against the launch of talks with the two countries, saying there must first be internal EU reforms to the negotiation process.
“France is arguing that the EU should be reformed before more countries can be offered membership. The French government has also questioned the methodology used in evaluating the situation and has insisted that the European Commission should submit one more report on the progress of reforms in the two countries. Both of these arguments are unjustified,” wrote Marta Szpala of the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW)
in an analysis of the situation.
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