“Serbia will not join the European Union before Albania,” Edi Rama declared for Politico during a visit to Brussels, despite the fact that Belgrade has been designated a front-runner in the race for membership.
It sounds barely realistic. Serbia, as well as Montenegro, have begun, since a few years now, begun accession talks and the European Commission’s Strategy for the Western Balkans predicts they will be member states by 2025, with no other country receiving such mention.
Albania still hasn’t opened negotiations and most likely won’t this year. In April, the European Commission will publish its report on Albania, in which it is expected to recommend the start of negotiations. After meeting Prime Minister Rama, EU High Representative Federica Mogherini already tweeted enthusiastically “I see in Albania the determination, the dedication, a desire, an aspiration, an identity as Europeans […] We in the Union need this energy.”
However, the European Parliament and the European Council – comprising member countries’ heads of state – set to meet in June will most likely reject this recommendation, considering the fact that Albania has broadly failed to make any significant progress on any of the five key conditions. The same thing happened in 2016 when, initially, the commission gave a hopeful recommendation, but the Council failed to reach an agreement.
“We strongly believe the Commission report should be positive,” Rama stated. “For the Council, it’s a fight down to the last second because we need to convince everyone that there is only one right thing to do.”
According to Politico, Albanian diplomats identified France, Germany, and the Netherlands, as the key countries to get on board for a positive Council decision. As Exit has explained before, the Netherlands’ primary concern remains Albanian criminal activity, France’s is Albanian immigration (according to Eurostat, Albanians make up the majority of asylum seekers in France), and Germany seems unhappy with Albania’s attempt to fulfill membership criteria, especially regarding drugs and crime.
Yet, according to Rama, even though Serbia is ahead of Albania in the road to membership, it will not join the EU before Albania, as a result of its relations with Kosova. An arrogant Rama told Politico:
Serbia will not become a member of the EU before Albania. This is something we know for sure. Serbia has to go through the painful process of recognizing Kosovo or at least [solving] the Kosovo problem. I strongly believe some magic has to happen — which will not happen — so that they get into the EU before us.
On the one hand, it seems exaggerated on Rama’s part to speak with certainty about the impossibility of a Serbia–Kosova agreement in the span of the next 7–8 years, and, on the other, it ridiculous through, through this prophecy, he seems to revel in childish, and preemptive, schadenfreude.
The Prime Minister reiterated his assertion, first disseminated to the public via EU Ambassador Romana Vlahutin, that “Albania is in some ways further ahead on the road to EU membership than Serbia or Montenegro because it has undertaken a major reform of its justice system, designed to root out widespread corruption.”
Politico, in its commentary, however rebukes this claim by reminding readers that “the EU’s new Western Balkans strategy, published last month, […] is also blunt about how far away the six would-be members — Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia — are from joining the bloc. It says all of them have “links with organized crime and corruption at all levels of government.”
Rama’s response was as follows:
Rama acknowledged his country had to deal with these problems. But he also pushed back against stereotypes he said were often applied to countries that aspire to join the EU.
“When Bulgarians wanted to enter, they were the country that tried to kill the pope. It was everywhere. Romanians were the country that were somehow guilty for having made Europe discover prostitution. We now have to deal with this notion of a special thing in our DNA connected to crime,” he said.
The main reason for Rama’s statements, however, is his fear that if Serbia enters the EU before Albania, it will have a veto on Albania entering the EU.
