By Maklen Misha
There are hardly any issues that enjoy such broad, if not unanimous, support from the Albanian public as the country’s integration in the EU and NATO. While the integration in the EU must for the time being remain a distant dream, there seem to be some significant positive signals as far as Albania’s prospect of joining NATO is concerned. In 2008 more than 15 years after it first expressed the desire to join the Alliance, Albania will have the best chance it ever had of realizing that goal. Were this to happen it would indeed be a momentous event, whose importance would be hard to fathom for those who do not understand the Albanians’ desperate need to belong in the Western family of nations. Albanian politicians on the other hand do understand the importance and great PR value of even the increased possibility of joining NATO so they have duly trumpeted it as a big achievement.
Albania’s politicians after all, like politicians the world over, are very adept at inflating any achievement or hint of achievement, however uncertain they may be, in order to score some points in domestic politics; let alone when NATO integration is in question. The same seems to be happening now too concerning the possibility of Albania receiving an invitation to join NATO in the Bucharest Summit in 2008 which has been presented by the Prime Minister as nothing less than a done deal. What he seems to forget however, is that the higher the climb the higher the fall that would follow if Albania does not receive an invitation. Not only would the government suffer politically, but there is a distinct and far more harmful risk that the public would start to get fed up at the integration process due to what they would wrongly perceive as broken promises on the part of NATO.
Because for all the assuring words coming from the Prime Minister and for all the flurry of diplomatic activity and lobbying conducted by the Albanian government – which deserves praise for these efforts – and for all the encouraging signals that there have been, it is far from certain that Albania will receive an invitation in Bucharest. Out of the Adriatic 3 countries only Croatia seems to be more or less assured of being invited, while the prospects for Albania and Macedonia are far more complicated. The complications seem to arise from two sources: domestic problems in the two countries and, perhaps more significantly, the evaluation of the situation in the region by NATO member states. In the case of Macedonia or to be correct FYROM there is also the added complication of the official name of the country and Greek opposition to it, which may very well prove an even more intractable difficulty than the domestic or regional situation.
When at the Riga Summit in 2006 NATO Heads of State and Governments stated that they might extend invitations to the Membership Action Plan countries, they did nevertheless clearly emphasize the need for these countries to meet NATO standards as a prerequisite to being invited. Meeting these standards requires among other things that these countries implement a number of reforms and preserve their stability. The reforms in Macedonia go beyond the scope of this comment, but it is becoming clear that some political tensions and incidents in parliament have provided opponents of Macedonia’s accession with enough ammunition to claim that that country’s stability is simply too fragile for it not to become a burden on NATO.
In Albania on the other hand, stability is not so urgent an issue as are the reforms which in order to be successful require cooperation and consensus from the whole political spectrum. It must be said that Albania’s governments have done much to implement the needed reforms. Thus there have been more concerted efforts and some success in curbing corruption and in the fight against organized crime, there have been pretty successful reforms of the armed forces, and the local elections of February 2007, although far from perfect, did not cause the sort of tension and upheaval the International Community has come to dread whenever Albanians cast their votes. Nevertheless one can hardly claim that the country has done enough to meet NATO standards. The tensions that accompanied the election of the new president in the summer, at a time when the country needed to be on its best behavior showed very clearly that Albanian parties still find it extremely hard – if not impossible – to reach consensus and place issues of national importance above narrow party interests. The electoral reform is as yet nowhere to be seen, thus raising the specter of another round of messy elections and political tensions in 2009 while the reform in the justice system, which has focused on the name of the Attorney General almost to the exclusion of all else, were it to continue in the same vein as it has thus far might very well give Albania’s aspiration to join NATO in 2008 its deathblow. In short if one did not know better one would be justified in thinking that Albania’s politicians are doing their best to sabotage their country’s NATO membership.
This behavior on the part of Albania’s political establishment becomes all the more irresponsible if one considers that even if the country had implemented all the required reforms to perfection, the situation in the region could still ruin its chances of joining in 2008. The uncertainty regarding Kosovo’s status and the ever growing threat of unrest caused by this uncertainty has many in NATO fretting over what the Alliance is getting itself into by inviting Albania and Macedonia. In fact there seem to be two lines of thought in NATO concerning the integration of these two countries. The one holds that they should be admitted in any case as this would help buttress regional security and assist in making the region more stable. (One would think twice before messing with NATO member states, as it were.) The other line of thought whose arguments – given the uncertainty over Kosovo – are just as valid holds that the Alliance must wait for the Kosovo question to be solved and the dust to settle before admitting Albania and Macedonia in its ranks. Otherwise they say NATO might just be letting in a hornet’s nest of instability and conflict. For the moment none of these groups seems to have the upper hand, but the pendulum might yet swing in either direction and Albania’s chances of integration with it.
Considering all these difficulties and complications that still lie ahead the optimism and sense of inevitability expressed by Albania’s Prime Minister seems rather misplaced. Although he has repeatedly shown himself to be a “glass half full” type of politician, and although the Albanian public certainly needs some good news and something to look forward too, in this particular case it would be better to err on the side of caution. The overwhelming majority of Albanians would be overjoyed if the Prime Minister’s optimism proved justified, but as NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer bluntly put it: “ƴhe tickets are not punched yet.”
The author is Director of Resarch at the Albanian Institute International Studies
