Kosovo Deal Will Challenge States That Denied Recognition (Balkan Insight, BIRN)
If Serbia and Kosovo manage to solve their decade-long dispute, the five EU countries that did not recognize Kosovo may have to adjust their foreign policies fast.
The five EU countries that have not recognized Kosovo might find themselves embarrassed and having to adjust their policies rapidly if Serbia and Kosovo agree on a final solution and get support for this from the West.
Slovakia, one of the five EU states that withheld recognition, says it is already preparing for a rethink.
“The conclusion of such an agreement between Belgrade and Pristina would create a new political situation, which will be properly considered,” Slovakia’s Foreign Ministry told BIRN.
Partly because it fears its own Hungarian minority might seek the same as Kosovo, Slovakia is in the group of five EU countries that have never recognized Kosovo, together with Romania, Spain, Cyprus and Greece.
The former province declared independence from Serbia in 2008. Serbia has never recognized it.
However, international pressure is growing on both countries to solve the decade-long dispute, if they are to assure themselves a future as part of the EU.
“Slovakia supports the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina and that includes both swift implementation of agreements achieved in the past as well as preparation of new agreements,” the Slovak ministry said.
It noted that the process of dialogue and the substance of agreements must be in line with the principles on which the EU is based, including respect for the rights of minorities.
“An eventual legally binding agreement concluded by Belgrade and Pristina should also be conducive with the European perspective of the Western Balkan region and should strengthen the region’s peace and stability,” it added.
Slovakia is not the only Eastern European country potentially disturbed by the pace of events in Kosovo and Serbia.
Recognizing Kosovo as a state could mean new problems for Romania whose large Hungarian minority is seeking its own autonomous area in the Transylvanian region.
Romania’s three main ethnic Hungarian parties, the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, the Popular Hungarian Party in Transylvania, and the Hungarian Civic Party, on January 8 launched a joint demand for territorial, local and cultural autonomy.
The move annoyed politicians in Bucharest who see the demands as unacceptable, especially after Hungary revealed in January that the declaration had been initiated and mediated by Katalin Szili, the envoy of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Although the Romanian authorities did not answer BIRN’s questions on this matter, it is widely reported that in bilateral meetings between Serbian and Romanian officials, the fact that Romania had not recognized Kosovo was routinely underlined as something that Serbia can count on.
Cyprus, divided into two parts by the Turkish invasion in 1974, is even more averse in principle to the recognition of a breakaway entity like Kosovo.
“Cyprus, for reasons of principle, cannot recognize and will not recognize a unilateral declaration of independence,” the then Cypriot Foreign Minister, Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis, was quoting as saying by The Independent in 2008.
“It’s not because we're afraid that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, TRNC, would declare independence because they already did it in 1983, and got a very strong reaction from the [UN] Security Council,” she added, the same report said.
Demetris Samuel, head of Communications at the Cyprus Foreign Ministry, told BIRN that nothing had changed at all in Cyprus’s stance since then.
“The position of the Republic of Cyprus on this issue has been clearly articulated on many occasions … We do not see any merit in commenting on the basis of hypothetical scenarios,” he said.
Of all the five EU non-recognizing countries, Spain, with its restive Catalonia region, has perhaps been loudest in proclaiming its opposition to Kosovo’s recognition.
In the wake of Catalonia’s abortive bid for independence last year, Pedro Sanchez’s centre-right predecessor, Mariano Rajoy, took an even tougher line than the rest on Kosovo, to the point of boycotting a May EU summit in Sofia with six Western Balkans countries, just because it included Kosovo.
Finally, the last of the five countries that could create difficulties for Kosovo in its intention to be fully recognized is Greece.
Greek chief of diplomacy Nikos Kotzias repeated on April 11 in Belgrade that his country would not recognize Kosovo. In return, Serbia’s Foreign Minister, Ivica Dacic, said that Belgrade respected Greece’s stance on Macedonia – whose name it objects to – adding that “Serbia was wrong when recognized Macedonia under this name [its official name] instead of [the UN term] Former Yugoslav Republic Macedonia, FYROM”.
However, since the situation changed dramatically between Greece and Macedonia, which have now reached a deal on their own historic dispute, reports have speculated that Greece might change its stance on Kosovo as well.
Dusan Janjic, from the Forum for Ethnic Relations, a think tank, told the Russian outlet Sputnik in February that Kosovo was on the agenda of Greece-Macedonia negotiations.
Janjic added that Greece was ready to recognize Kosovo’s independence if Washington asks it to, in order to secure its economic prosperity.