Stepping into the track of the former Stability Pact for South East Europe, the newly-founded Regional Cooperation Council (RCC) is now a fully operational new “voice” of this challenging and still unsettled part of Europe. The true meaning and value of the establishment of the RCC can be measured by the fact that, for the first time in modern political history of South East Europe, so often stigmatised by the “Balkanisation” stereotype, 12 countries in this corner of the continent decided to take the wheel of mutual cooperation into their own hands.
For well-known reasons, dramatically written in Europe’s history, the political maps of this region have always been drawn outside, in other European capitals, as part of wider European power plays.
This new regional ownership can certainly be taken as a measure of new maturity and recognition of the political fact that due to miscalculated policies, unfinished transition and plethora of other reasons, South East Europe is still lagging behind the rest of the continent in terms of fully adhering to the values and standards allowing for the full accession into the Euro-Atlantic family of free and democratic nations.
Regional cooperation is, of course, a self-understood platform of a new Europe just as it is an important criterion for further advancement of candidate and potential candidate countries towards the EU. But, probably equally important, it is by now – after four wars in the region over the last decade and a half - a genuine reflection of the view of the predominant part of the region’s political elites that they do not have the luxury of losing time by allowing to continue to be drawn into the old controversies, petty politics and vicious circle of grievances. The time has come to win the future.
Reconfiguration of international relations and Europe’s own dilemmas underline even more the added urgency for the reform processes in the negotiating or aspiring countries of South East Europe. Nobody can do the job of the political leaderships in the region, but the region’s leaders themselves. Possible changes in the international agenda or refocusing of the EU attention may also indicate the necessity to sustain and accelerate the pace of advancement of South East Europe. In many aspects, the year 2009 may be a crucial one for this part of Europe – drifting of the international political landscape and necessity to deal with the remaining open statutory issues in the region may mark the forthcoming year as critically important, in particular for the Western Balkans.
The key challenge will be to preserve stability and cooperation in the light of a necessity to thread through the remaining open issues, from post-Kosovo situation to Bosnia- Herzegovina’s constitutional debate and several other critical challenges, in order to truly finish the peace in the Balkans. For the RCC, in such an environment, the key mission will be to keep alive the simple message that development cannot be put aside whilst solutions for open issues are being sought. Roads and schools must be built, economies must advance.
Waiting for the solutions of political issues and leaving the economic and social development aside would mean inviting prolonged stagnation, with critically clear and ominous social and security consequences. The Regional Cooperation Council, by now profiled definitely as a key interlocutor of the European Union for the development related issues in South East Europe, is here to assist and, together with the Governments of the region, generate and coordinate initiatives and projects aimed at an accelerated economic and social development. Focus of the RCC expertise and cooperation will primarily be on the energy and infrastructure sector, but equal attention will be paid to security, economic and social development, justice and home affairs, and building human capital in South East Europe. Seeking synergy between multinational development projects coming from the Governments of the region with the EU’s multi-beneficiary strategy for the forthcoming period, the RCC will serve as a link also with international financial institutions and development agencies.