UK and the Western Balkans (IRC Report)

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, at a time like this you realise why it is sometimes unfortunate to be placed in a certain position on the speakers list. I rise to thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, for his introduction, only to realise, in comparison with him and our last two speakers, how little I know about the subject beyond a layman’s prejudices. But I will make one or two observations that I hope the Government will take on board.

First, on the subject of NATO, I found the Government’s response frankly disappointing. Under “Euro-Atlantic integration” they say:

“We agree that, providing Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia meet the requirements for NATO membership, their accession would be a welcome step towards greater stability in the Balkans”.


I do not have the expertise of the last two speakers, but I must say that I was struck by the sheer complacency of that statement. It is then followed by three paragraphs about Macedonia.

I hope that the Government realise that last October the entity of Republika Srpska made a proclamation of military neutrality that was deliberately aimed against NATO membership and which specifically referred to military alliances. If we extend NATO membership much further, we are in danger of devaluing it altogether. We are already in a position where Article 5 guarantees are pretty meaningless over large swathes of membership, and, with reference to Bosnia-Herzegovina, I certainly do not see that it is anywhere near being an acceptable ally to allow into NATO.

On Macedonia, in paragraph 43 of our report we say that the Government should support this, with or without the name issue being solved. I am sorry, but there is a thing called the Greek veto, and it will not be solved without the name issue, so we should be doing all we can to support the current talks, which at last look as though they might head in the direction of a solution.

As regards Serbia, I do not see that there is any will or wish in Serbia to join NATO. I was in Belgrade last year and was struck, first, by the number of people who seem to be rather fond of the Russians, and, secondly, by the sheer outright hostility towards the European Union and the West. They have not forgotten the bombing and what happened in the area and still bring it up on many occasions. We need to take that firmly into account. Kosovo, of course, is not widely recognised by a number of NATO and EU members. I agree that in the end that problem will probably solve itself—but it is a problem.

Briefly on EU membership, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, that the EU has made a complete mess of the area. I also agree with Jean-Claude Juncker that there should be no further expansion for a good period of time. The EU has overreached itself, largely because it wished to stabilise the former Soviet bloc countries of eastern and central Europe. It allowed countries into the EU which, frankly, should never be there. The level of corruption which one still finds in Bulgaria and Romania is quite unacceptable to EU values. In the minds of some people, what is clearly needed is a sort of waiting room, not a situation in which we import more conflict and division into the EU. I remind the Minister, although it is slightly off the point in the context of this report, that Croatia and Slovenia, which are EU members, have shown themselves quite incapable of accepting the rule of international law in border disputes. So I do not agree that postponement is not in the UK’s interest. However, whether it is in the UK’s interest or not, we are in the process of leaving the European Union.

That brings me to another point in the government response. When talking about aid, they say:

“After our exit from the EU, we will have more say over how we target UK funds previously channelled through EU programmes, thereby enhancing the flexibility and impact of our spend”.


What does the Minister mean? Is he saying that the money we have spent through the EU we would not otherwise have spent in the way it has been spent in the past, which is why we need more flexibility—or that we will no longer co-operate with the EU in how we spend our money? Will there no longer be any political co-operation? Or is this just Foreign Office words for saying, “We’re leaving the EU, we’re not going to have much influence, but we’d better put the best show on that we can”? I suspect it is probably the latter.

In closing, perhaps I may make one other point. China is, as I have said on many occasions, the biggest challenge to our values and to what is going on in the West. In paragraph 83 of our report, we quote Timothy Less, one of our witnesses, who said that,

“if China was not willing to put its money into some of these big infrastructure projects, nobody would, and the Balkans would not have the new railroads, ports, roads, factories and other investments which the Chinese are currently financing”.

That is a statement of fact—and the fact of the matter is that China is beginning a foreign policy in the West and we seem to be sleep-walking into it. We have an obsession with Russia but we do not really look at what China is doing. I predict that, in 10 to 15 years’ time, we will wake up and find that a lot of Governments, particularly those in the Balkans, will have huge debts to China and will effectively become Chinese, not Russian, proxies in western foreign policy.

The Russians do not have the money or the influence and, above all, they are not particularly liked. The Chinese are playing a very subtle and very clever game. They are not tying any political demands to their loans and they are almost the equivalent of the payday lender: it is easy to get the loan but hard to get out of the dependency relationship. I counsel that the Foreign Office should, with our colleagues, have a very close look at the consequences of Chinese involvement in the western Balkans, Greece and a number of other countries, and at the impact that this could have on common foreign and security policy, in so far as we have any, after we have left the EU.