The Stability Pact and economic strategies for the Balkans
The Stability Pact and economic strategies for the Balkans

Summary/Abstract: A flowchart of the major international institutions and initiatives involved in reconstruction, development and stabilisation is highly complex, even without the special dimension of Kosovo assistance and the protectorate. Since mid-1999, however, the key initiative is the Stability Pact – both in terms of finances and the organisations involved. Whereas the lead organisations in Working Table I are evidently the Royaumont Process, the UN and the OSCE, Table III is “in the hands of” the WEU, the EU’s CFSP and – to a far lesser extent – NATO and the PfP. Table II, the economic Table, has the largest number of lead organisations, including most of the international financial institutions, the EU, SECI, EBRD, EIB, BSEC (Black Sea Economic Co-operation) and the CEI (Central European Initiative). A key dilemma of all the international programmes, and the EU strategies in particular, is the internal asymmetries and heterogeneity of the Balkans. The differences in economic development, stability and prosperity between the EU-15, ECE and SEE are relative: the differences within the region are of a similar magnitude. Consequently, regional co-operation is hard to achieve and the conditionality principle of the European Union tends to consolidate differences and differentiation within the region, where typically almost every country has its own “level” of bilateral relations with the EU as the dominant regional (economic) power.

• Details
• Contents