Op-ed by Bernard Kouchner, former French minister of foreign and European affairs.
Since the Balkan wars, Brussels has played a central role in reconciling Belgrade and Pristina.
The European Union has a mixed foreign-policy record. Its behavior on the world stage is driven by good intentions but often marked by indecisiveness and lack of cohesion. The clumsy and ineffective handling of the Ukraine crisis is only the most recent example. Yet there have also been significant achievements. Saturday marked the anniversary of the Brussels Agreement, the EU-brokered deal normalizing relations between Serbia and Kosovo.
The EU did little to prevent the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s; nor did it manage to halt the Balkan wars that followed. But since those wars came to a close, Brussels has played a central role in international efforts to bring peace and stability to the region.
In the years that followed the Kosovo War in 1999, the United Nations, under the leadership of Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon, began to rebuild Kosovo’s economy and create new administrative and political structures.
Yet such efforts, which received robust support from the EU, weren’t enough. As the U.N. secretary-general’s special representative in Kosovo from 1999 to 2001, I realized that after such a bloody confrontation there was no early prospect of cohabitation or reconciliation between Serbs and Kosovar Albanians. It was obvious that it would take time before the two sides could be persuaded to talk with each other. My successors and I worked behind the scenes to bridge differences.
This was no easy task, and it was easy to lose hope at times. When Kosovo declared independence in 2008, it provoked a political crisis in Belgrade, triggering then-Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica’s resignation and the collapse of his government; the two sides were further apart than ever.
The situation changed in July 2012. The new coalition government in Belgrade, led by Prime Minister Ivica Dacic and First Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, was convinced that Serbia’s destiny lay with the EU. Messrs. Dacic and Vucic were determined to seek Western integration, and they knew that Brussels had made normalization of relations between Belgrade and Pristina a precondition for opening accession negotiations.
In October 2012, the EU arranged the first ever meeting between Prime Minister Dacic and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in Brussels, allowing each to take the measure of the other. Messrs. Dacic and Thaci soon agreed to start direct talks. After six months of unremitting effort and nine further rounds of negotiations chaired by the EU, both sides signed a 15-point Agreement on the Normalization of Relations in Brussels on April 19, 2013.
Normalization may sound dull and unexciting. But taking into account the depth of hostility on both sides, the agreement could justifiably be called a historic turning point. In a region where the legacy of the past weighs heavily, both sides put the future first.
Leaders in both Belgrade and Pristina deserve credit for having shown the political courage to take deeply unpopular decisions. But the agreement wouldn’t have been possible without the EU, which mediated between the two sides and kept them focused on the prize: EU membership negotiations for Serbia and the signing of an EU Stabilization and Association agreement for Kosovo.
This isn’t the end of the story. Not all the issues are resolved. Serbia, along with several EU member states, doesn’t recognize Kosovo’s independence. And normalization is a process: The principles outlined in the Brussels Agreement have to be put into practice.
But one year after signing, the agreement remains on track. Problems are being tackled by both sides in a pragmatic and collaborative way. And the EU has formally opened negotiations on Serbian accession. The victory of Mr. Vucic and his Progressive Party in the recent Serb elections means there will be no change in Belgrade’s commitment to European integration and to the continuing implementation of the Brussels Agreement. On the Kosovar side, Mr. Thaci looks likely to remain open to dialogue.
There are still too many unresolved conflicts in and around Europe. Kosovo was one of them. But the Brussels Agreement shows that with the right leadership and the right incentives, even the most intractable conflicts can be tackled and a way forward negotiated.
