Inane but serious

Tuesday saw a soccer brawl between the Serbian and Albanian teams, precipitated by a drone carrying a flag described as portraying “Greater Albania.” Last weekend, vandals scrawled graffiti on the walls and a gate of the Serb Orthodox monastery at Decani, as well as elsewhere in Kosovo later in the week.

These are silly but destructive demonstrations of Albanian ethno-nationalism. But they are also serious, because of the reaction they provoke. A visit of Albanian Prime Minister Rama to Belgrade is said to be in doubt due to the soccer incident, perturbing relations that had been relatively smooth. Serbs in Kosovo fear that the graffiti are prelude to much worse.

They are also serious because of the political message they send. There are Albanians who would like to re-open what the 19th century knew as the Albanian question:  will Albanians live in one country, or in several? There are Serbs who would also like to re-open the Serbian question:  will Serbs live in one country or in several?

The Balkan wars of the 1990s and the international community gave unequivocal answers to these questions:  both Albanians and Serbs will live in several countries. Many Serbs today live not only in Serbia, where they are a numerical majority, but also in Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo. Many Albanians live not only in Albania and Kosovo, where they are a numerical majority, but also in Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. The formerly internal borders of Socialist Yugoslavia, and Albania’s international border, were not redrawn to reflect ethnic lines but instead kept where they lay at the time of the fall of the Berlin wall.

Milosevic tried to redraw those borders. He lost that bid at war in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Albanians who imagine they can re-open the border question now are favoring a solution that Milosevic wanted. Moreover, their effort comes at a time when the international community is fighting a war in Iraq and Syria to prevent a redrawing of borders that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) would like to impose. It would also come at a time when the West is trying to prevent Russia from redrawing the borders of Ukraine to accommodate ethnic differences. Albanian ethno-nationalists can expect zero sympathy in the international community and a lot of resistance to their harebrained ideas.

Lots of such ideas survive however. It is up to Albanians who realize how dangerous and destabilizing they are to prevent them from spreading.

Russian President Putin is today enjoying an official visit to Belgrade in the midst of the Ukraine debacle, something that will annoy both Washington and Brussels. Albanians in Albania and Kosovo will do much better to focus on what really counts–qualifying for the EU accession that will one day make their borders invisible–than doing inane things that will alienate their friends in America and the European Union.