Post-Conflict Rehabilitation: From Aid to Development

Abstract

The new European approach regarding the economic aspects of post-conflict rehabilitation (PCR) in the so-called Western Balkans was set out in the preparation documents for the EU Summit in Thessaloniki in June 2003. It stated, inter alia, that as the Western Balkan countries gradually moved from stabilization and reconstruction based on aid to association and sustainable development, policies pursuing economic and social cohesion at both the national and regional levels would become increasingly relevant. What was required was to better integrate the goal of economic and social cohesion into EU policy towards the region. There was a pressing need for new strategies to promote structural reforms across the region, including additional forms of pre-accession assistance. This would encourage states in the region to mobilize their own resources to support positive development in particularly critical areas. At the institutional level, these countries should be granted the status category of pre-accession without negotiations, which would enable them to access the pre-accession funds such as SAPARD (Special Accession Program for Agriculture and Rural Development) and ISPA (Instrument for Structural Policies for Pre-accession). In other words, these countries should be treated as pre-accession candidates without the obligation to open negotiations on membership until they were found by the Commission to be fit on their individual merits. The region in question consists of five states—Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Serbia and Montenegro—that have already joined the process of stabilization and association with the EU, together with Bulgaria and Romania. In the summit’s final document, the five countries undergoing the process of stabilization and association were given the message that “the gates of Europe are open, and prospects of entering the EU are encouraging.” It was said that it was expected that Bulgaria and Romania would be granted full membership by 2007. In this document, all the states were for the first time mentioned as countries within the Western Balkans region, and thus this term was officially introduced into the policies of the EU. Having in mind what had gone on in the region’s tumultuous recent past, at the point the region of the Western Balkans became one of the regions where the processes of post-conflict resolution should be practiced within the new framework, tailored to new developments in the area. The first step in this direction concerns the need to make a major change in the strategy of providing further financial cooperation or financial support to the region. The cooperation or financial support that is provided should be directed at making the region capable of independent economic development, formulated as making the tran-