Commission support likely to be ignored

Next week, the European Commission will recommend that the member states begin membership talks with Macedonia. The Commission did the same last year without success, and there is no suggestion that member states are any more inclined to follow the Commission’s recommendation this time around. 

Macedonia gained candidacy status in December 2005, primarily because the EU wanted to encourage the government in Skopje to continue implementing the 2001 Ohrid agreement, which ended an ethnic-Albanian insurgency and pulled the country back from civil war.

Since then, Macedonia has made progress, but it is no nearer to opening membership talks. Greece is expected to block Macedonia’s bid as long as it refuses to change its name, which Greece says implies a territorial claim on a Greek province. Bilateral talks appear stalled.

Determination

Antonio Milososki, Macedonia’s foreign minister, told European Voice earlier this year that the status quo was disheartening but had not, so far, dampened the government’s determination to undertake EU-related reforms. This is indisputably true of the country’s business climate. Macedonia ranks ahead of several EU member states on the World Bank’s latest “Doing business” review, taking fifth place in the eastern Europe and Central Asia group.

But Commission officials are less sure that Milososki’s view applies to many other areas, and not all of Macedonia’s problems are related to Greece’s blockage. Next week’s progress report calls on the authorities to be more focused on implementing much-needed reform. Officials say that the centre-right government has wasted political energy and scarce funds on a project to build a central square in central Skopje in honour of national heroes, starting with Alexander the Great.

This is of little interest to Macedonia’s ethnic-Albanian minority – estimated at around one-quarter of the country’s population of just over two million – and a provocation to Greece.

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