HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------ANALYSIS - EU's Solana bags second Balkan success, adds weight
BRUSSELS, March 14 (Reuters) - European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana bagged his second Balkan diplomatic success in a year on Thursday, averting the breakup of the Yugoslav federation after a deal to prevent civil war in Macedonia.
The accord on new constitutional arrangements between Serbia and Montenegro signed in Belgrade was a fresh example of the 15-nation EU taking greater responsibility for stabilising its own Balkan backyard as the United States steps back.
"This is good news for Europe and the future of the western Balkans on the road to the European Union," European Commission spokesman Gunnar Wiegand said. "The agreement is a huge step forward in ensuring stability in the whole region."
The accord reflected the international community's determination to prevent further fragmentation in southeastern Europe, despite criticism from some Balkans experts, and was fresh evidence of a new transatlantic division of labour.
Solana is proving more effective at wielding the 15-nation bloc's carrots of economic aid, trade and eventual EU membership prospects to reshape the Balkans than a string of hapless European emissaries were in the early 1990s.
His support staff may be small, his budget derisory, his powers circumscribed and his access to EU aid funds indirect, but he makes the most of a few assets -- a giant contacts book, a winning hug, two mobile phones and an energetic spokeswoman.
PEACE WITHOUT HOLBROOKE
In tandem with NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, he brokered a peace deal last August that brought Macedonia back from the brink of major conflict.
The EU staged a successful donors' conference this week that raised $515 million in reconstruction assistance -- twice as much as expected -- to reward the former Yugoslav republic for respecting the accords giving ethnic Albanians greater rights.
The EU's embryonic defence force may take over running a 700-strong peace mission in Macedonia from NATO later this year, subject to diplomatic agreement, and EU policemen will take over from a U.N. police task force in Bosnia at year's end.
And under heavy EU pressure, Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic has agreed to a three-year moratorium on a breakaway referendum for his small coastal republic and committed to reshape Yugoslavia as a union called "Serbia and Montenegro."
By contrast, it took U.S.-led military intervention and the diplomatic head-banging of American special envoy Richard Holbrooke to end the Bosnia war in 1995 and NATO action in 1999 to force Yugoslav forces out of Kosovo.
But since Solana, a genial former NATO secretary-general and Spanish foreign minister, took over as the EU's foreign policy high representative in October 1999, he has given new bite to European diplomacy in the Middle East as well as the Balkans.
He played a key role in managing Western support for the Serbian opposition that lead to the toppling of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000.
Despite lacking most of the resources of the average foreign minister, the 57-year-old Solana is fast becoming the answer to Henry Kissinger's apocryphal comment that he would have consulted Europe but he did not know the telephone number.
When the United States notified its allies last October that it was about to launch the war in Afghanistan, the call to Europe went to Solana, not the EU's Belgian presidency.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell phones Solana almost daily to coordinate action on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, European security and a range of global trouble spots.
The close partnership has irritated some European foreign ministers who grumble that Powell does not return their calls, and that Solana, theoretically the humble servant of 15 EU masters, does not always brief them on his daily contacts.
Some critics say Solana has a politician's knack for picking high-profile issues that offer a quick win and skirting problems that do not offer such a media payoff.
U.S. DISENGAGEMENT
The former physics professor argues that he is simply concentrating on trying to stabilise Europe's "near abroad."
The EU's assumption of leadership in the Balkans has been quickened by America's preoccupation with the fight against terrorism after September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
U.S. troops remain in Bosnia and Kosovo, with a token presence in Macedonia, but Washington's attention is elsewhere.
"The gradual disengagement of the United States from the direct management of the post-war Balkans will accelerate," analysts Marta Dassu and Nicholas Whyte wrote recently in the strategic studies review Survival.
"As developments in Macedonia in 2001 demonstrate, military, economic and political responsibilities will be overwhelmingly assumed by the EU (and) its leading members," they said.
Solana, who negotiated NATO's first post-Cold War "Founding Act" with Russia, has helped shape warming political and economic relations between the EU and Moscow.
In the Middle East, where the EU was long sidelined by Israel's refusal to allow it a political role despite its major financial contribution, Solana has steadily built up the bloc's supporting role in regional diplomacy.
Despite occasional sniping from France, he insists that the Europeans can only wield influence in the region by working with and on the United States.
09:52 03-14-02
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