EU leaders agreed they would soon open talks with Serbia on joining the bloc, as they wrapped up a two-day summit on Friday that also freed up billions of euros to battle youth unemployment.
In what EU President Herman Van Rompuy hailed as a “productive” two days, leaders from the 27-country union said they would open accession talks with Serbia “by January at the latest.”
At the same time, they adopted a mandate to start talks on a Stabilization and Association Agreement with Kosovo, which may eventually pave the way for membership negotiations of its own.
Photo: EPA
The decision to start accession talks with Serbia was made possible after Belgrade made a pledge to normalize relations with its former breakaway province Kosovo.
In Belgrade, Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dacic welcomed the decision as “final and historic,” but said he wished talks would begin earlier than January.
Dacic aims to bring his country into the EU fold within four to five years, an ambitious target given the complexity of negotiations required to join the bloc.
More than 1,000 nationalists marched in the Serbian capital to protest against the government’s “concessions” over Kosovo in order to win Brussels support.
“Serbian leaders are so spellbound with the EU that they are betraying Kosovo for it,” conservative opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica told the protestors.
In spite of Europe’s long and debilitating crisis, eastern European states continue to bid to join the bloc of 500 million people. Croatia will officially join at midnight today, becoming the first new arrival to the club since Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, and only the second member after Slovenia of the former Yugoslavia since its bloody break-up in the 1990s.
Van Rompuy described Croatia’s impending accession as “truly an historic moment ... for your government, for the citizens of your country” as well as “a milestone for the region as a whole.”
Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said his country’s journey to EU membership had been a long one, “with a lot of scrutiny, a lot of checks and balances, a lot of chapters.”
However, he vowed that Zagreb “will do anything and everything and beyond that to help and assist ... our neighbors who are not members of the club yet,” in a reference to Serbia.
Analysts said the EU’s opening to Serbia and the accession of Croatia are key milestones for the once war-torn Balkans, but Brussels is pursuing a more cautious strategy than in past enlargements.
British Prime Minister David Cameron saw it as “remarkable progress” that Balkan countries, which had been embroiled in a bloody war years ago, should now be lining up to join the EU.
“I think when we look across the Balkans and remember the terrible things that happened there not so long ago, it is remarkable progress that countries are now joining the European Union or are preparing to join the European Union with a sense of peace and stability,” Cameron told reporters.
On the first day of the meeting on Thursday, the summit had freed up 8 billion euros (US$10.4 billion) in a drive to bring down high unemployment among the continent’s youths.
EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the decisions “will make a difference for our economies.”
However, the summit was not all plain sailing as leaders had to scramble to prevent Cameron from derailing the meeting over the tricky subject of the bloc’s seven-year budget.
Cameron ruffled feathers going into the summit with sabre-rattling on the £3.1 billion (US$4.7 billion) annual UK rebate from the budget won in 1984 by Margaret Thatcher.
Diplomats even accused Cameron of taking the summit hostage.
However, the British leader argued he had fended off attempts to whittle down part of the rebate.
“In this town you have to be ready for an ambush at any minute,” Cameron said, adding that accounting changes in how the rebate is calculated could have cost Britain £1.5 billion.
By contrast, EU diplomats insisted it was only a technical issue at the summit and the changes affected only 50 million euros at most.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home