No cigar: on Kosovo’s new deal, Catherine Ashton and the “single voice”

... membership. Moralising about the lessons learnt in the New York Times, Lady Ashton stressed her advocacy of soft power, as she did many times before. What she seems not to be aware of is that the EU’s most effective such tool has always been enlargement - and the West Balkans may be the only place where that is still plausible. The other crucial factor to Mrs Ashton’s success was that peace in the Western Balkans is in the interest of everyone in the EU. The normalisation of the status ...