All Western Balkan countries have committed, at least officially, to joining the European Union and promised to tackle organized crime head-on, which would be one of the priority areas of their accession negotiations. The European Commission National reports have repeated ad nauseam that the emphasis should be on obtaining a track record of prosecuting organized crime with final convictions. However, at the same time, the Balkans remain at the center of the global network of organized crime, as evidenced by police discoveries linked to cocaine trafficking in Europe and reports showing high levels of crime and low societal resilience to crime. How is it that the Western Balkans fail to provide adequate responses to organized crime? And how is all this possible despite international aid and under the scrutiny of EU enlargement auditors? The answer only surprises those who haven’t been paying attention. democratic decline in the Balkans this has been going on for years, in the shadow of weariness with EU enlargement.
The unholy marriage between organized crime and politics
The first clear signal from the EU that something had gone terribly wrong came in 2018, with the publication of the landmark report A credible enlargement perspective, a European Commission strategy document that aimed to breathe new life into the faltering WB6 accession process. The document provided a diagnosis of the problem: “Today, these countries exhibit clear elements of state capture, including links to organized crime and corruption at all levels of government and administration, as well as a strong entanglement of public interests and private. »
The fact that state institutions and criminal structures are inextricably linked in the region is not new information, but it is a fact. the first time the problem was recognized and explained by the European Union, often ironic. Open politicization, state captureundue influence,”stabilitocracy“, competitive authoritarianism, hybrid diets: these are just a few concepts understanding complicated vocabulary this was used to describe the same phenomenon that has been recorded repeatedly in the Western Balkans. The problem in question is that political elites took control of the state apparatus and subjugated it to their own private interestsleaving poor citizens in an environment of increasingly restricted freedoms and rights.
These questions are particularly important in Montenegro, where a local strongman, President Milo Djukanovic, has built what some call Mafia state for almost three decades of uninterrupted reign, which was recently challenged by a new coalition government which won the last parliamentary elections. The regime change in Montenegro and the subsequent reforms led to the greatest drug seizure of more than a ton of cocaine in the history of the country. In Kosovo, after a long reign of wartime leaders, new Prime Minister Albin Kurti won the elections by running a joint campaign with current President Vjosa Osmani. saying they “both share the determination to end the endemic capture of the state by a corrupt elite.” In Serbia, with the pursuit war against the mafia which has been going on for a year, it seems that the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has started a final confrontation aimed at getting rid of the criminal tentacles of the infantry while preserving the political-criminal octopus built by the all-powerful Serbian . President, Aleksandar Vucic.
It’s ungodly marriage between organized crime and political elites represents the biggest obstacle: at least according to first impressions after the recent regime changes, the only way forward is not to focus on the fight against organized crime as such, but invest in democracy. After all, how can governments with clear ties to organized crime be truly expected to lead efforts to combat these same criminal groups?
This paradox appears in a recent UNODC report report, which found that the number of charges brought against organized crime groups in the Western Balkans has increased sixfold, while the number of final convictions has been halved, meaning that prosecutions are twelve times less effective than before. This report reveals that “the number of people prosecuted for committing an offense as a member of an organized crime group is increasing, while the number of people convicted is falling, suggesting a gap in collection of evidence, the establishment of successful prosecutions and the appropriate adjudication of organized crime. case. » One possible reason for this is state control of the judiciaryUnder political leadership, law enforcement arrests and charges organized crime groups to show their resolve to the EU and others, while the cases are poorly constructed and stand no chance in court.
The curse of EU enlargement
How is it possible that, despite the strong involvement of the international community, the billions in development aid and the very strict – but fair – assessments of Brussels bureaucrats, these terrible developments have gone unnoticed and unaddressed for so long?
An argument made not long ago by Jan-Werner Müller, professor of politics at Princeton University, on the question of the democratic backsliding of Hungary and Poland within the EU, applies well in the Western Balkans. He claims that the “liberal technocratic Brussels repair team” assumes democracy will always be supported by nation states and is only interested in the more narrowly defined rule of law. This is why “the attack on political rights and independent institutions appears as a technical problem, and not as the conscious authoritarian project that it actually is.” Once considered a technical problem, it is then assumed that rule of law issues can then be “solved” by adopting action plans, road maps, building capacity, developing strategies, by establishing cross-border cooperation or using any other tool in the enlargement policy repertoire, including financial aid. These are obviously all necessary and sometimes useful prerequisites, but are doomed to failure due to a fundamental misconception about what needs to be fixed.
To add insult to injury, research shows not only that EU conditionality has limited potential to reverse these negative trends, but that it is actually contribute to making things worse. As some researchers have argued in a recent article, it was established that “the limited impact of EU political conditionality in the Western Balkans with widespread state capture (…) has effectively contributed to the consolidation of such damaging governance models”. The argument put forward is that the way conditionality currently works allows clientelist networks composed of companies and politicians by emphasizing economic and political reforms. Furthermore, given that it is a top-down process, it also weakens political competition and executive accountability within candidate countries. Finally, conditionality legitimizes corrupt national elites through high-level interactions with EU and member state officials, as evidenced by recent visits from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen in Serbia, just two weeks apart.
The recent change in enlargement methodology adopted by the EU – although arguably a third significant revision of this process in the last decade – will most likely once again he fails to keep his promises. The main novelty is the so-called cluster approach, in which the most important rule of law issues are grouped under Cluster I and should, at least on paper, establish a better link between the political criteria, the quality of democracy and technical aspects. reforms that are being undertaken. For the citizens of the Western Balkans, the only hope is that this new approach will work and that democracy, even if severely attacked and undermined, will prevail.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISPI and BCSP.
