Western Balkans

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, we have heard a most moving tribute to Lord Ashdown. I want to be the first to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, for sharing that with us.

I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Helic. How fortunate we are that she has brought so much valuable experience of the Balkans to this House. This is a region which deserves special attention in this country. It is not a faraway place; in fact, it remains one of the world’s flashpoints, and we are one of the nations responsible for its stability and security. The noble Baroness mentioned the threats from Russia and Serbia in that region and was focusing on Bosnia and Herzegovina. I can think of no one except the late Lord Ashdown who has voiced such a concern more than once, and we all remember the warnings that he gave us in previous debates about NATO and the Balkans.

I was a neighbour of Paddy Ashdown. We used to meet at Crewkerne station; he preferred it to Yeovil, I think, as it was a bit quieter. I admired his enthusiasm and of course his success as a parliamentarian. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, mentioned his service in Hong Kong. He continued to maintain an interest in human rights in Hong Kong. My noble friend Lord Alton wanted me to say specifically that Lord Ashdown was patron of Hong Kong Watch alongside my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Patten.

We need to act on the warnings from Lord Ashdown and others but only if we continue to co-ordinate carefully with our European allies after we leave the EU, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, said. I have to mention that I travelled alongside her to Kosovo not very long ago, and she is a most persistent questioner of Ministers, not just here but in the Balkans, so I am sure she will get back there.

Essentially, the warnings were about the power of nationhood. We in this island, even with our long history of four nations, can hardly appreciate the strength of feeling between ethnic groups that fought each other only in the last generation. Srebrenica remains a symbol of the worst genocide imaginable in our lifetime, and that community is still devastated and scarcely able to rebuild, although some individuals and charities have done extremely well. Many other towns, such as Mitrovica in Kosovo, which we have visited, straddle a fault-line that will need patching for many years to come if present boundaries are to be maintained.

So we say that only NATO and its related forces can guarantee peace, and only the EU can bring new ideas that should ensure that this peace will endure. We say all that, yet we know the limits of those guarantees and of our outreach.

I will focus today on the concept of EU enlargement, a concept that many of us hope will not be forgotten during Brexit. I have tabled a short debate which will explore our own Government’s present attitude, but we need to look back to the beginning. The UK was one of the principal architects of enlargement within the EU, and it has consistently supported the western Balkans. In fact, our political parties under John Major and Tony Blair had almost formed a consensus on this: that it was important for the EU to embrace a wider Europe, and that was the kind of Europe that suited us.

Freedom of movement and migration became plus factors within our economic policy, and we felt almost closer to the new entrants from eastern Europe than to the growing attempts at unity among the founder members and the eurozone countries as a whole. This in turn has led to an expectation in the region of our continuing involvement, which remains today.

These perceptions were assisted by the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the process of so-called democratisation: the application of the EU’s Copenhagen principles such as the rule of law, human rights and good governance. But there was an underlying business motive too, mixed with pure avarice. We all know examples of this: the potential for western Europe to pour investment into the east regardless of what system was there or what was replacing it, to turn decades of communist philosophy into productive business almost overnight.

It is easy to look back and to blame President Putin for wrecking this dream, but as our own EU sub-committee pointed out some time ago, if Russia now looks like the spoiler, it was the EU that rushed headlong into a region that required a lot more careful planning and handling than was realised in Brussels. Ukraine and Crimea became the wake-up call that brought Europe to a sudden halt. Now we seem to have the old battle lines of a residual Soviet empire to confront all over again.

The idea of enlargement has been discredited, I think quite unfairly, because it remains a sensible policy provided we take it much more carefully and seriously. We have to recognise that ambitious projects like EULEX in Kosovo and the anti-corruption programme in Ukraine may not fit into those societies as easily as we expected. We and the EU have already had to rethink the justice chapters in new member countries like Bulgaria and Romania. Even in the older states like Hungary we have to recognise the effects of migration and the rise of what we call the right wing. They express the fear that many majority and minority communities have of being overrun, wherever they are. In short, Brussels is having to contain the uncontainable and somehow it has to reconcile the extremes.

Ethnic tensions have become such an issue in the western Balkans that there is even an attempt to redraw boundaries. The Presidents of Serbia and Kosovo have been discussing it for most of the past year and more recently in Alpbach, but without any conclusion. The Commission is quite rightly resisting this because it could easily bring more conflagration.

Meanwhile, there is NATO, which has had a much better press than the EU in the Balkans because its activities are more visible and measurable. Open conflict has been avoided so far. Joint exercises all the way from Riga down to Odessa, even with Serbia, have brought confidence.

More difficult has been the confrontation of Moscow’s insidious dirty tricks, most of them mentioned already by the noble Baroness, Lady Helic. There are reports of arms supplies to militant groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the coup in Montenegro, the Serbian propaganda train in Kosovo, the possible subversion of the new agreement on North Macedonia and frozen conflicts all around the Black Sea. Russia needs to keep these in play to make up for its own strategic inadequacies. However, we must be thankful that the OSCE, mentioned in earlier debates, is keeping a close watch on all of this, especially the Ukraine conflict.

It is fair to say that our own parliamentarians have shown a strong interest in the region. I attended part of the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s recent conference in Portcullis House as a member of its executive committee and I was very impressed by the quality of contributions from the Balkan delegates, many of them women who are current or former Ministers. We have also had a series of reports in Parliament, from the International Relations Committee in January and most recently from the Foreign Affairs Committee. HMG’s responses to these reports show that there remains a very real commitment to the region and to, for example, increased security via the Berlin process, which was one of the achievements of the western Balkans summit.

The noble Baroness, Lady Helic, asked for a well-developed strategy. However, leaving the EU is bound to reduce any direct diplomatic influence we have, for example in the conditions surrounding membership applications. We have yet to see whether, in the next stage of negotiation in April, we can maintain our position in a new form of partnership. That is yet to be revealed. As a remainer, I can only wish the FCO well in this vital endeavour.

Talking of membership applications, I want to ask the Minister something, although he may not have the answer at the moment. Why have we gone back on Kosovo’s visa liberalisation? Are we making every effort through the Foreign Office and the EU while we are still members to facilitate that? It is going backwards, not forwards.