A new itinerary for the Balkans

The EU’s decision to lift visa restrictions for citizens of three countries of the former Yugoslavia is a major step forward.

This weekend the European Union will do something that many people in the Balkans thought impossible: it will open its borders to visitors from three countries of the former Yugoslavia. As of 19 December, citizens of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia will no longer have to obtain a visa for visits of less than three months to the Schengen area of border-free travel.

Visa restrictions have been very effective at maintaining a feeling of profound isolation across the Balkans. For close to two decades, the countries of the former Yugoslavia have found themselves on the wrong side of what Kostyantyn Yeliseyev, Ukraine’s chief negotiator with the EU and a deputy foreign minister, calls a “new ‘Berlin Wall’ of visa restrictions” between the EU and its neighbours to the east and south-east. The feeling is especially acute in the former Yugoslavia, devastated by a decade of war, economic collapse and social upheaval.

When the real Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago, Yugoslavs were free to travel without visas across Europe, but they were quarantined when war broke out in 1991. That forced isolation has persisted until now.

Visa agreements

In recent years, the EU has signed visa facilitation agreements with all the countries of the Balkans as well as with Ukraine, Russia and Moldova. Those agreements were supposed to make travel to the Schengen area easier: applying for a visa was to be cheaper and faster. However, officials from these countries complain that the process is not working as designed.

European Voice has seen numerous examples from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia and Ukraine of embassies of EU member states violating the terms of the agreements. Certain consulates appear routinely to fail to inform students and pensioners that they are eligible for a waiver of the visa fee. While it is impossible for outsiders to know or to prove, it is possible that the fee – €35 – might be pocketed by the consular staff, usually local, who receive applications. Some consulates also appear routinely to demand documents that are not required by the agreements, for example, medical records, including HIV tests. Applicants describe such demands as “humiliating”.

Officials from the countries affected describe such violations as systemic and say that complaints to the European Commission have remained unanswered. A senior government official recalled how staff at a member-state consulate openly solicited a bribe when he applied for a visa for a private trip. Anecdotally, it seems that visa applicants have fairly accurate ideas of what might await them in certain consulates, so they will avoid the Austrian or Spanish consulates and go instead to the consulates of the Netherlands or Denmark, for example.

Thus, irregularities at certain consulates are not only a major nuisance for visa applicants; they also shift the burden of processing applications to other countries’ consulates, putting additional strain on the resources of those consulates that fully implement the facilitation agreements. (Travellers are supposed to apply at the consulate of the main, or first, destination, but the rule is easily circumvented in practice.)

Fact File

WHAT IS SCHENGEN?

The Schengen area includes all EU member states except Ireland and the United Kingdom, plus non-EU members Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. The Council of Ministers keeps a ‘white list’ of non-member states whose citizens do not need a visa for visits shorter than three months. Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia have now been added to that list.

In principle, a Schengen visa enables its holder to travel throughout the entire Schengen area without the need for additional permits. There are exceptions to this rule, known as ‘Schengen minus’ visas. Greece, for example, requires that Macedonian citizens obtain a separate, national visa in addition to their standard Schengen visa, an arrangement that will come to an end with Saturday’s lifting of visa requirements.

LIBERALISATION V FACILITATION

The ‘visa liberalisation’ from which the three Balkan countries will now benefit is distinct from ‘visa facilitation’, currently in force with all the countries of the Balkans as well as Russia, Ukraine and Moldova.

Visa facilitation agreements, concluded in exchange for commitments to take back illegal migrants, reduce the standard, non-refundable visa fee of €60 to €35 and exempt certain groups from the fee altogether, for example pensioners, students, children or close relatives of people residing in the EU. An EU official estimated that in most countries, 50%-80% of applicants fall into one of these groups.

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The agreements also stipulate that visa applications must be processed within ten calendar days and list the documents that have to be submitted to support the application.

A popular decision

Such conditions explain the exuberance with which people in Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia welcomed the decision by the EU’s justice ministers on 30 November that they will no longer need visas. “It’s a big step for Macedonia and was enthusiastically greeted by its citizens,” said Sanja Kostovska, an analyst at the Center for Research and Policy Making in Skopje. Many, possibly most, citizens of these countries have relatives or friends in the EU that they have not been able to visit freely – until now.

Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina are not part of the current round, but are likely to qualify next summer. Kosovo will remain in limbo because not all EU countries recognise its claim to statehood. There appears to be little appetite on the part of the EU – above all, Germany – to lift restrictions on Ukraine. But the EU could yet make life easier for citizens of these countries if its member states implemented the agreements that they have already signed. The wall of visa restrictions has been moved, but it has not been dismantled entirely.