West Balkans: Council of Europe

Alyn Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Nokes, and to make the winding-up speech for the Scottish National party. I commend colleagues from across the House for making a number of powerful speeches that have provided some great insight into the region and the work of the Council of Europe. In particular, I commend the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) for introducing the debate and for his work on the Council. It is important that, post Brexit, the UK builds on existing links to deepen and strengthen them, because being absent from Brussels does not mean being absent from other ways of communicating and co-operating.

The western Balkans is at a pivotal moment, and it is important that while we rightly focus on events in and around Ukraine—especially the events overnight, with deeply worrying news coming from the region—we do not lose sight of the countries in the western Balkans, because they are vulnerable to what the hon. Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd) described as the baleful—that is the best word for it—influence of the Kremlin. There is a clear need for us to maintain focus there.

Colleagues know—I do not need to rehearse this—that I am a committed pro-European politician and pro-EU politician. I was a Member of the European Parliament for 16 years, and I greatly regret the UK’s absence from it. The EU is poorer for that, and the UK is poorer for it too. I think Scotland’s best future is as an independent state within the EU. We will come back to that.

One thing that I would say, arising from my 16 years in the European Parliament, is that it is important that colleagues remember that the Council of Europe and the EU are not in competition. There is always a risk of institutional vanity, but those organisations are best and most effective when they are in lockstep and in harness, working together. As a student in Warsaw in the ’90s, I saw that the EU accession track and the assistance that that brings from the Council of Europe, the Venice Commission and the EU itself can be hugely powerful spurs—a North star—for domestic reforms and capacity building in democracy, peace building, justice and the rule of law, which is hugely important for the western Balkans.

We have heard an important wake-up call from the Council of Europe, and I commend to the Chamber the resolution of 11 October, which states:

“The Parliamentary Assembly… firmly believes that helping Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Kosovo meet their aspirations for closer European integration is important not only for the countries concerned but for the European continent and will benefit all European citizens.”

It goes on:

“Surveys show that an increasing number of people in the Western Balkans, especially amongst the youth, are pessimistic about the prospects of EU accession. The European vision is losing its shine. In its place, ethno-nationalism has resurfaced, a very worrying development in a region in which the”

spectre of violence still looms large. It continues:

“The Assembly calls for a new impetus to be given to the European Union enlargement process.”

I could not agree more. Even if the UK is not part of the EU, I would hope we all agree that closer integration of the western Balkan states into the European framework, however that is defined, is in all our interests.

When I was a Member of the European Parliament, I always supported, as did many UK colleagues, a wider EU. I rejected any idea that the EU is a community of geography and that there is a limit to where Europe stops and starts. I explicitly rejected the idea that the EU is a religious community and that a Muslim country or a country with a significant Muslim population cannot be part of it.

It grieves me that those voices have been removed, and there is a risk, as the hon. Member for Henley mentioned, that voices that would see a more insular and more exclusive EU are stronger within EU discussions now that the UK is absent. That is something we should all regret, because such a development would be a tragedy for the west Balkans, given that the Kremlin is all too ready to gobble those countries up. We have seen what that can mean in the region, and we must do all we can, in all our forums, to ensure that it does not happen again.

I shall close with a few concrete questions to the Minister, whom I welcome to her place. I appreciate that she is newly in post and that the answers might not readily come, but in the context of the integrated review I hope she will take on in a constructive spirit the ideas she has heard today and the suggestions I shall offer.

There is a real, pressing need to expand and better fund the UK’s Council of Europe mission, because being absent from Brussels does not mean being absent from Strasbourg; quite the reverse. We need more resources, as well as more focus on what the Council of Europe is doing and what the UK can do within it.

We also need to increase bilateral support to build up precisely those democracy capacity-building and disinformation-countering measures across the states of the west Balkans. The UK is in a position to do that bilaterally or through the Council of Europe. I would applaud both approaches, and I would be glad to hear greater plans to see that come forward. The SNP has long called for an atrocity prevention strategy to be rolled out through the UK embassy network. Such a strategy would be important worldwide, but particularly in the western Balkans, where our excellent UK missions are doing sterling work, and an atrocity prevention strategy being higher up the FCDO’s agenda would help them in that. I really hope that we see a comprehensive Russia strategy in the integrated review. It is clear that the Kremlin is operating on multiple fronts, and we need to ensure that we are ahead of that and taking due note of it.

The western Balkans is an important part of Europe’s geography and an important part of our world view. I really commend the hon. Member for Henley on bringing forward this debate today. Where there are constructive ways to help the people of those great countries to get closer to us and enjoy the peace and prosperity that we enjoy, I will certainly support them.