14 May - Sami Frasheri school in Pristina

“When will Kosovo join the EU?”

A difficult question to start the “EU teach a day” programme by a pupil of the Sami Frasheri school in Pristina.  Alison Weston, the chief of staff of the EU Special Representative office, gave the first lecture in the course of the programme that will continue until the end of this school year and give children at schools all over Kosovo the possibility to learn more about the EU and to discuss Kosovo’s European future.

Alison Weston, EUSR Chief of Staff together with the Deputy Minister for Education Agim Hyseni marked the first lecture of the programme stressing that the European perspective of Kosovo is largely in the hands of the young people in Kosovo. Agim Hyseni: “Kosovo’s people in Europe and the young generation in Kosovo are the guarantee for achieving EU integration.” Alison Weston started her lecture by explaining what Europe Day stands for and that we are actually remembering the day of the historic speech of the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman in 1950 when he proposed that France and Germany should work together to make sure that war between the two countries will be impossible. “The EU is a great idea, thanks to this idea we have now over 60 years of peace and stability in Europe, leaving behind terrible things that happened in the past. To make the EU work is not easy as all EU countries have different histories, traditions, languages and cultures and it takes a lot of time and commitment to overcome the differences and to find a common way forward. But the remarkable story is that the EU managed to do this again and again over many years”.

To some of the questions there is no final answer though, just like to the one when Kosovo will join the EU. In that case the answer was that there is no concrete date as EU accession of Kosovo depends on too many factors. It was though possible identifying the most important factor of them all and that is how fast Kosovo manages to work through the challenging reform agenda. So in the end it will depend largely on the Kosovars themselves how fast they will enter into the EU.