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Albania and the EU

Albania and the EU

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About this Event

19 Jan 2004

Albania and the EU

 

Speech of Mrs. Ermelinda Meksi
Albanian Minister of European Integration

At the Institute of European Affairs
19 January 2004

It gives me a great pleasure to meet you here in the beautiful capital of Ireland and to warmly thank you all for being here and specially my host for making it possible.

My aim is to share with you come thoughts on Albania’s relations with the European union and on the process of stabilization and association of the Western Balkans. I would try to keep the balance between giving the background information and the analytical points which I think might be of interest for you.

An Overall Background

With an area only slightly smaller than that of Belgium and a population of only 3.2million, Albania is one of the smallest countries in Europe. However, thanks to its location on the Adriatic coast of the Balkans, it has a favourable geopolitical position, which makes Albania an important factor of stability in the South-East Europe. In its road towards European integration, Albania lost much time. The reasons come from inherited backwardness and poverty to regional conflicts and internal crisis. During the difficult years of transition, Albania had to face the challenges of turning an ineffective planned economy into a market economy with social responsibility, of creating stable constitutional system, of regaining public confidence and social cohesion. Our society has to face as well the realities of the domestic agendas of all democratic western countries: enviremnment concerns, unemployment, migration, demographic issues, social decomposition and educational deficiencies.

In December 2003 a new coalition government has been formed, the Government of Imtegration. New challenges lay ahead of this government in accelerating the progress on the country’s reforms in conformity with the requirements of Stabization and Association process. Albania has already passed the state of post-crisis and emergency management and has embarked on the road fof medium and long-term development. The government has clearly shown its strong commitment to continue to go towards the irreversible way of democracy, free market economy and prosperity.

Some Glimpses of Albanian Road to European Integration

Albania has started the first institutional contacts for the establishment of the diplomatic relations with EU since 1990, but they became intensive with the signing in May 1992 of the Agreement of Economic Co-operation and Trade. This was a non-preferential agreement, which is still in force and will continue to be as such until the Stabilization and Association Agreement will be signed.

From the political point of view, the history of relationship starts in 1993 when Albania has asked to initiate the negotiation process for an European Agreement “sui generis? with Albania , which nevertheless was not of typ0e of the Stabilization and Association Agreement. The European Commission has evaluated the moment as premature for Albania, while Albania’s relations with EU have deteriorated as a consequence of the outcome of 1996 parliamentary election that brought about many question marks of the status of democracy in Albania.

The crisis of 1997 following the collapse of pyramid schemes has put the “status-quo? on the relations between Albania and EU. Only at the Zagreb Summit of November 1999, the European commission presented to the Council the Feasibility Report of initiating the negotiations with Albania for the Stabilization and Association Agreement with EU.

During twelve years of transition, Albania’s history of relationship with EU can be seen indeed as the history of building the state of law, public order, justice and infrastructure.

We are fully aware that the key to integration process is to build a sustainable democracy that respects the institutions and the state of law based on a sustainable free market economic development.

The Actual State of Negotiations

The official o0pening of negotiation with the EU for the Stabilization and Association Agreement on 31 January 2003 constitutes a new more advanced phase of the contractual relations between Albania and EU. This constitutes as well a bigger challenge in the long road of integration into EU.

The Albanian government has explicitly expressed in its program that country’s integration in EU remains its main priority. Integration in EU is an absolute priority not only for the government, but also for the political spectrum and Albanian society in general. We have also aimed at increasing the participation and contribution of all the other actors of society and of the civic society in this process.

We have already gone through 7 intensive rounds of negotiations. We have negotiated over 60 articles, and there are almost 60 other to be negotiated in order to draw to a close the Stabilisation Association Agreement. We have concluded the Re-Admission Agreement that is estimated by EU as an important progress and an example that should be pursued by other countries included in SAP (Stabilisation Association process). Our attention is currently focused on accelerating the pace of reforms in Albania, on intensifying fight against organised crime and corruption, on the functioning of democratic institutions, ion imp0lementing legislation and stability of administration especially of the customs and tax administration. We are convinced that SAP is the main Framework of relations with EU. We have focused our attention on increasing our abilities to implement obligations that derive from SAA particularly in the area of Justice and Internal Affairs.


Regional integration

European Integration cannot be achieved without regional integration. Albania not only has played and continues to have an important role in regional stability, but it has undertaken many initiatives in order to deepen regional cooperation. Regional policy and relations with neighbour countries remain the fundamental axis of the Albanian foreign policy. We have good relations with all countries of the region. Albania has played an active role even in the framework of the Stability Pact considering this is a complementary process to the process of the European Integration. We have already signed the Free Trade Agreements with all the countries of the region and we are in the process of their all-round deepening by expanding relations and contacts on all levels.

Albania and the Western Balkans

I want to upgrade a bit of the focus of my speech and put the attention to the Western Balkans and the specificity of its European integration process.

The Western Balkans has shown to be a highly diverse region. The two most dominant structural phenomena occurred in Western Balkans over the last decade are the wide rural underdevelopment and de-industrialization. Both generated massive structural problems for the economies having major consequences for development in the region. Serious structural development problems are common to the region as a whole. Visible legacies of a half century of socialist development followed by several wars in former Yugoslavia or the political and social unrests in Macedonia and Albania, have shown that economies of the countries of the region are compatible in the nature of problems they are facing. The compatibility of problems necessitates common policies and instruments for addressing them.

On the other hand, the countries of the Western Balkans have developed, more or less, the same kind of structure of their products, which, in general, makes their economies non-complementary to each other products. The structure of exports is more or less similar throughout the Western Balkans countries.

Free trade agreements between the countries were introduced extensively over the last years. The network of free trade agreements will further stimulate trade, investment and thereby economic development. It will be of great importance that the countries make full use of the potential that the trade measures, as well as of the network of free trade agreements, provide. In this respect, creating a common market attractive for foreign investment, that could diversify the products and potential exports, is essential for the development of the region. Work in this direction is crucial in preparing the region for future integration into the European market.


While European integration is clearly the end game, a crucial component of this path is regional integration, which has been strongly reaffirmed as a precondition for further European integration. European experience has shown the necessity to complement free visa liberalisation, border control and migration in general. In this respect, asking with the effort to establish a free a trade area a visa-free movement in the western Balkan has become imperative: the countries of the western Balkans should commit themselves to explore the possibilities of abolishing visa requirements for travel between our countries, through bilateral agreements, also ensuring compatibility of such measures with EU requirements. Instruments like the stability pact could have done more in this respect.


Same vision-new instruments

There is a pressing need for new strategies to promote structural reform across the region, which is essential to reversing decades of economic isolation. And while much still remains to be done, it needs to be acknowledged that the governments of the region have taken significant steps to move ahead. But, the hard reforms the Western Balkans needs do not happen by themselves. They must be driven by a shared vision of the governments and peoples in the region to emerge from a difficult past in order to join the European family.

As the political and economic map of Europe will be drawn in 2004, the view opens up to the wider horizon of Europe integration. This is clearly where Western Balkans belongs-it cannot remain an enclave within an enlarged European Union.


Balkans European partnership.

The real challenge ahead of both EU and the countries of the region, is to increase the impact of European support to the Western Balkans by introducing new strategies based on the lessons and techniques of European integration process for the new members countries.


The stabilization and association process has laid the foundation for the further reforms required for the countries to prepare for a closer relationship with the European Union. The mechanisms for enhanced political dialogue and regional co-operation should be further developed through the establishment of a new political scheme, the Balkan European integration process, building on the success of the November 2000 Zagreb summit and on the general affairs council conclusions of may 2002. The introduction of European partnership, inspired by the pre-accession phase of the current enlargement, is expected to give a fresh impetus to reforms. It should give a clear public signal of the special and inclusive nature of the privileged relationship between the European union and sap countries as well as of the pre-accession process, these partnership would identify priorities for action in supporting efforts to move closer to the European union.

Pre-accession without negotiations. In the context of Western Balkans European integration, the generalised approach of standards before status could make any sense. The status would be membership in the EU. Standards would be the usual Copenhagen criteria that entail, inter alia, the determination whether a country is a functioning democracy that relies on the rule of law, including the protection of human rights and the right of minorities, and is a functioning market economy that could withstand competitive pressures of the common market.


The model of customs union with turkey constitutes a model to be offered to the rest of Western Balkans countries. There are equally powerful strategic arguments for extending the pre-accession without negotiations to the Western Balkans. It will enable the EU to engage much more intensively in development challenges of the countries, bringing new financial resources and institutional tools into play and encouraging their internal reform processes.


Cohesion polices for the Western Balkans.

Integration of the countries of the Western Balkans to the EU will be kept distant unless they manage to address properly their structural economic problems. In this respect providing them with pre-accession support while still in the Stabilisation and Association Process would provide long term incentives for them to develop their own tools for regional and European integration, while addressing their structural economic problems.


It would be essential for the European integration of western Balkans to begin to employ new assistance strategies, applying the experience gained from cohesion policies elsewhere in Europe. The principle idea in this point is that, the European Union considers cohesion as a guiding principle of the EU policy towards the region, broadening the Stabilisation and Association Process to include additional forms of pre-accession assistance. It may be appropriate during the Irish Presidency for the EC to examine how lessons from the cohesion funds can be applied to the Western Balkans, including co-financing, conditionally, regional development planning and partnership between the Commission and national and regional government.


Introduction of cohesion polices to Western Balkans would not require a major new commitment of EU financing witch goes beyond the budgets already foreseen for the CARDS programme. At present, the European Union allocates no more than €500 million in total assistance to the countries of the Western Balkans-equivalent percent of their GDP.


It goes without saying the Western Balkans countries have a vital interest for the EU accession process to be accelerated, for its regional dimension to be enhanced and for standard pre-accession and accession instruments to be used as much as possible. Introducing the practices of cohesion in the Western Balkans is more about developing new assistance strategies, than allocating substantial new financial resources.


Thank you for attention

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