Bosnia’s EU membership bid gets boost

Council decision puts country one step closer to official ‘candidate’ status.

Bosnia and Herzegovina cleared a hurdle in its effort to join the EU Tuesday when the bloc’s governments gave the green light for the European Commission to assess whether the country should be given official “candidate” status.

The decision by ministers meeting in Brussels is a procedural step in what promises to be a long road to EU membership for the country, which submitted its accession application in February. But it was hailed as a “historic moment” for Bosnia by its Prime Minister Denis Zvizdić, weeks before local elections on October 2.

“This is very good news,” said Amer Kapetanović, Bosnia’s assistant minister of foreign affairs. “It means encouragement, which is important at this particular moment. It sends a strong signal to pro-European forces but we need to embrace the work ahead.”

In their statement Tuesday, representatives of EU national governments asked the Commission to determine whether Bosnia should be given candidate status — a step that would allow negotiations to begin on specific “chapters” between the Bosnian government and the Commission to prepare the country for membership. Currently five countries are candidates for EU membership: Turkey, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro.

The decision on Bosnia “makes clear that the enlargement policy is credible,” said Ivan Korčok, Slovakia’s ambassador to the EU.

The EU’s opinion on whether to grant candidate status to Bosnia will be based on the government’s response to a list of around 2,000 questions the Commission will send in the coming months on the country’s economy, society and politics.

In August, Bosnian authorities agreed to an EU demand that it set up “a coordination mechanism” to ensure the country’s often conflicting government entities and institutions speak with one voice in the application process.

While support for EU membership in Bosnia is high, some politicians were more realistic about the challenge facing the government if it wants to make progress in its accession bid.

“We need less ‘historic’ moments,” said Davor Vuletić, a Social Democratic MP in Bosnia. “The questionnaire from the Commission will be the first serious challenge for the recently agreed [coordination mechanism]. Hopefully it will force politicians and the administration to focus on concrete issues exploring its own capacities to meet EU standards.”

The statement by the Council of Ministers on Tuesday also reiterated the EU’s “unequivocal commitment to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s EU perspective as a single, united and sovereign country … ” — an allusion to ongoing attempts by Bosnia’s Serb entity of Republika Srpska to break away from the country.

The president of the Serb entity, Milorad Dodik, has vowed to go ahead with a controversial referendum Sunday on whether to keep its national holiday the same as Serbia’s. This is despite a ruling by Bosnia’s Constitutional Court Saturday that the vote should be canceled on the basis that it undermined the country’s state institutions and its constitutional order.

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Last year, the court ruled that the national day, which is also a significant date in the Orthodox Christian calendar, discriminated against the Bosniak minority and was therefore unconstitutional.

EU ministers on Tuesday also requested that the Commission “pay particular attention” to a 2009 European Court of Human Rights ruling that the Bosnian constitution discriminated against minorities by reserving membership of the country’s three-man presidency to an ethnic Bosniak, Serb and Croat.

The ruling, which has not yet been implemented, was a major obstacle to Bosnia’s EU accession talks until an intervention by the British and German foreign ministers, Philip Hammond (now chancellor of the exchequer) and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in 2014. They sought assurances from the Bosnian authorities that the ruling would be implemented at some point but that it should not hold the country back from implementing other necessary reforms.

“The responsibility is now in the hands of Bosnian politicians who have to make sure the country continues to progress [with its reform agenda],” said Tanja Fajon, a Socialist MEP from Slovenia and member of the European Parliament’s delegation to Bosnia. “The citizens of Bosnia deserve their leaders’ full commitment to this.”