BRUSSELS, Dec. 20 (UPI) -- You do not need a degree in history to grasp that peace and security in Europe depend on peace and security in the Balkans. The First World War started in Sarajevo in 1914 and the last major European conflict of the 20th century ended in and around the Bosnian capital a decade ago.
The region is now at peace, but European leaders know that it is a fragile peace that could be shattered at any moment -- as it was when ethnic violence erupted in Kosovo last year, killing 19 and displacing thousands.
"Stability in the Balkans is part of Europe's stability," Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik told reporters in Brussels Monday, launching Vienna's upcoming presidency of the European Union.
The threat of Balkan instability spreading to the rest of Europe, along with a fair dose of guilt at the European Union's inability to quell the bloody conflicts of the 1990s, has spurred the bloc's leaders into action after years of hoping the problems of the region would simply vanish with time.
"For the European Union, war is a bad thing, but war in its neighborhood is a particularly bad thing," says Nicholas Whyte, Director of the International Crisis Group's Europe program. "The EU's strategy towards the Balkans is entirely built around preventing an outbreak of violence."
Despite last year's 'big bang' enlargement -- which saw 10 mainly former communist countries join the Brussels-based bloc -- and in spite of widespread public hostility towards taking in another batch of poor countries on Europe's southeastern fringe, EU leaders have not shied away from offering the Balkan states the prospect of Union membership.
On Oct. 4, the same day EU foreign ministers agreed to start membership talks with Turkey, they opened negotiations on Croatia's bid after it became clear Zagreb was actively helping in the hunt for indicted war criminal Gen. Ante Gotovina.
Later in the month, the 25-member club opened negotiations aimed at concluding a Stabilization and Association Agreement -- seen as the first step towards EU membership -- with Serbia and Montenegro.
On Nov. 21, almost 10 years to the day after the Dayton agreement put an end to the bloodiest of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, foreign ministers agreed to start negotiating a stabilization agreement with Bosnia and Herzegovina. The European Union also runs the 8,000-strong international peacekeeping force in the country and is in charge of reforming Bosnia's police force and judicial system.
Finally, on Friday, despite French worries about the Union over-extending itself, European heads of state offered the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia the coveted status of "candidate country."
With the exception of Albania, all the countries of the region are now firmly on track towards membership of the Union some time next decade. But enormous obstacles remain in their path.
Firstly, the very borders of the Balkans are still fluid. Montenegro will hold a referendum on whether to break free from Serbia in the spring, and there is every reason to believe voters will choose to do so. Talks about the status of Kosovo, a largely self-governing province of Serbia that experienced a short, violent conflict in 1999, have just begun and the prospects of an agreement that will please both the Albanian majority and the Serbian minority appear slim.
"The possibility of chaos spreading out from Kosovo is taken fairly seriously in Brussels and other capitals," says Whyte -- which is why the European Union is mulling over a plan to take over much of the province's judicial, administrative and law enforcement machinery if the status talks recommend some form of independence next year.
The second major problem is organized crime. A paper presented to European leaders by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana last week states: "Organized crime in the Balkans constitutes a serious political, economic and security problem for the countries of the region, and is a major source of crime in EU member states." Solana called on the European police agency Europol to carry out a detailed study of the impact of organized crime in the Balkans before March. There are also plans to hold a meeting of justice and interior ministers from the European Union and the western Balkans dedicated to organized crime in Vienna on May 4-5.
The final, and potentially biggest problem, is public opinion. One of the reasons French and Dutch voters said "no" to the EU constitution in May and June is because they felt the club had grown too far, too fast. A clear majority of Europeans are opposed to Turkey joining the Union and there is little enthusiasm for letting in most western Balkan states.
Austria, which takes over the rotating EU presidency on Jan. 1, has pledged to make the Balkans one of the priorities of its six months at the helm of the bloc. But until the European Union rediscovers its self-confidence and the countries of the region sort out their borders, calm ethnic divisions, tackle corruption and crack down on organized crime, Vienna will have trouble convincing European voters that the inclusion of the Balkan states would make the Union more secure, prosperous or powerful.
