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Closer to the goal than the starting point

I prepared these notes recently for a briefing on the Balkans:

1. First, caveat emptor: my perspective is perforce a long term one. I first went to Bosnia more than 30 years ago. My inaugural UN flight into Sarajevo from Zagreb was hit by small arms fire.

2. I needn’t tell you how much it annoys me when Bosnians claim that nothing has changed while sitting with me in a café in Sniper Alley.

3. It annoys me even more when American and European academics regard the statebuilding enterprise in the Balkans as a failure.

4. I agree with all their complaints: there is too much corruption, too little ethnic reconciliation, too much state capture, too little rule of law, too much partitocracy, too little civic engagement.

5. I also agree that getting into NATO and the EU is hard and getting harder: enlargement exhaustion, concerns about immigration, worries about the Euro, and growing xenophobia will make accession difficult.

6. The tone of international relations has changed from the halcyon late 1990s, when the unipolar moment appeared to entail the triumph of liberal democracy and regional economic integration.

7. We are in a period of surging ethnic nationalist enthusiasm, including in the US. The Trump Administration is a white nationalist one whose empathy for Balkan nationalisms is evident.

8. But some things have not changed, at least in word and in part in deed: the promise of NATO and EU accession has been maintained, despite rumors of its demise.

9. All the countries of the Balkans are closer to the moment when they will qualify for NATO and the EU than they are to the early 1990s, when former Yugoslavia came apart.

10. No one can guarantee membership, as it is unclear when and if the political window will open. I trust the Trump Administration will keep the promise to get North Macedonia into NATO next year and that the EU will maintain its promise to open accession negotiations.

11. But after that, things will get harder. If the EU window does open in 2025, as Brussels has promised, it will certainly be a narrow one.

12. If I were a betting man, I’d put a small sum at good odds on Montenegro: it shows the kind of serious commitment to adopting and implementing the acquis communautaire required.

13. The big issue there is pluralism in a country much of whose opposition opposes independence as well as NATO membership. Montenegro needs a constitutional, pro-EU, pro-reform opposition. But it already has free media and a half-decent judicial system (that’s a B- in professorese).

14. Serbia in my view faces bigger problems. With a more complex economy, it will have more trouble implementing the acquis, even if it passes all the necessary legislation.

15. Just as important: Serbia lacks commitment to the needed political reforms. Neither its media nor its courts are independent. It is an electoral autocracy and also lacks a serious, pro-EU opposition.

16. For Macedonia, the main issue today is September 30: if the referendum passes, Skopje will have an opportunity to move quickly to NATO and begin serious EU accession negotiations, provided of course that the Greek parliament also approves the Prespa Agreement and Skopje manages to implement it.

17. Kosovo and Bosnia are the remaining laggards. But discussion of them requires that I deal with the current elephant in the room: swaps of land and people, border correction, partition, or whatever you want to call redrawing current borders to accommodate ethnic differences.

18. The idea is not new.

19. It was the basis of the Vance/Owen plan for Bosnia in the early 1990s, a plan that caused ethnic cleansing as ethnic nationalists tried to homogenize territory they expected to own.

20. Zoran Djindjic was pushing it for Kosovo before his assassination. Some even believe it was the motive for his murder, since it entailed giving up most of Kosovo.

21. Hashim Thaci and Aleksandar Vucic have been discussing it for years in their Brussels meetings, without however coming to a conclusion.

22. There are good reasons for that: Belgrade will not want to give up control of its main route south to Thessaloniki and the sea, and Pristina will not want its main water supply in Serbia.

23. I would add that if the north is incorporated into Serbia the viability of Serb communities south of the Ibar River is doubtful. But you don’t have to believe me: Father Sava, who in many respects is the leading light of the Serbian church in Kosovo, will tell you the same.

24. The issue of Greater Albania would then become a real one. That is the dog that hasn’t barked in the Balkans for decades.

25. Its bite could be much worse than its bark, requiring thousands of NATO troops to supervise the exodus of Serbs south of the Ibar and Albanians from Serb-majority areas in Serbia. How ugly would that be? And how expensive?  Read more