Kosovo: Linking accession and sovereignty

In an interview with Transitions Online, Balkans watcher István Gyarmati argues in favour of an independent Kosovo. 

The Balkan region has fallen away from the eyes of the world as international efforts to stabilize Kosovo, Bosnia, and Macedonia have borne fruit. But in the case of the first two, a sustainable political settlement has yet to be found. In Kosovo this question is most pressing, and in March the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative in Kosovo, Soren Jessen-Petersen, said that negotiations on the province’s future would start before September.

Earlier this month the International Commission on the Balkans released “The Balkans in Europe’s Future,” a report on the future of the western Balkans. The commission is supported by foundations such as the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and its members include internationally known Balkan experts such as Karl Bild and Bruce Jackson as well as several heavyweight figures from the region, including a number of former ministers and the former leaders of Macedonia and Albania. 

TOL spoke to Istvan Gyarmati, a member of the commission and a former Hungarian diplomat with extensive Balkan experience from 1991 onwards. 

The report’s introduction deplores a “piecemeal” approach to Balkan policy, and takes the prospect of European Union accession as its overarching theme. It is in the context of Kosovo that the report has attracted the most interest:

“The commission advocates a four-stage transition in the evolution of Kosovo’s sovereignty. Kosovo’s sovereignty should develop from the status quo as defined by [UN] Resolution 1244, to ‘independence without full sovereignty’ (allowing for reserved powers for the international community in the fields of human rights and minority protection), to the ‘guided sovereignty’ that Kosovo would enjoy while negotiating with the EU, and finally to ‘shared sovereignty’ inside the EU.”

To read the interview in full, visit the Transitions Online website.