Xenophon Paper 2 pdf - ICBSS

egion. Again, certain countries of the BSEC have gained a particular expertise in aspects
of transitional and post-transitional politics that qualifies them to be leaders in particular
fields of education and training. While the Russian Federation obviously stands out in
most respects in relation to all other BSEC members, simply because of its size,
administrative and academic capacity and experience, some smaller countries have
also achieved considerable results. Bulgarian NGOs have been among the leaders in
the region in developing anti-corruption policies, and their experience should be
transmitted to the rest of the region.
A particular facet of the kind of educational cooperation that needs to be fostered in the
BSEC is the involvement of civil society. There is a shortage of expertise and managerial
efficiency in the state institutions when they are faced with the need to act very quickly
to address the educational needs of specific target groups, while NGOs, which, until some
years ago, had matured through a long and arduous process of competing with
monopolistic states in most of the then-transitional countries that are now members of
the BSEC, have also developed these specific skills.
Diplomatic training appears as one of the most pliable areas for cooperation, because
it is based on certain common methodological principles, and the foreign policy priorities
of most BSEC countries are highly compatible and largely EU-centred. Yet, even this
particular aspect of education involves certain potential controversies, such as the
importance and interpretation of international law. Serbia, for example, emerges from
a tradition whereby practically the entire diplomacy has been conceived as being
fundamentally based on international law; thus most of the diplomatic training in the
recent past has included a great deal of international law. The latest developments in
the practice of diplomacy question this approach, and Serbia faces this controversy in
a particularly painful way, through the final phases of the determination of the status of
Kosovo, underway during the writing of this paper.
A multi-layered region
The BSEC is a regional organisation that, despite all the commonalities between its
member states, exhibits, at the same time, considerable disparities partly due to the
different stage of European integration the states find themselves in. One of the most
obvious issues in this light is the freedom of movement, where citizens of some member
countries face virtually no visa barriers, while those of other still struggle with grinding
processes of visa approval that jeopardise not just the idea of a free and equal membership
in a regional organisation, but also threaten the enthusiasm for the transition process
that leads towards the EU. There is space for the BSEC as an organisation to lobby for
a more equal treatment of all the countries and for the inclusion of those that have not
yet achieved the candidacy status for the EU on the ‘white Schengen lists’, thus minimising
the practical differences in the treatment of citizens from different BSEC member states.
122 UNFOLDING THE BLACK SEA ECONOMIC COOPERATION VIEWS FROM THE REGION