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? 

26. Just as important: a land/people swap in Kosovo will have repercussions in Macedonia, Bosnia and Serbia proper, as well as in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.

27. State Department colleagues will right away say that isn’t right: nowhere else is there a realistic possibility of a mutually agreed swap between sovereign states. I agree.

28. But that doesn’t matter at all to the ethnic nationalists, who aren’t into legalities. Milorad Dodik has made it clear that a swap in Kosovo will mean re-energizing his own independence push.

29. Gruevski-style Macedonian nationalists will feel the same way, not to mention Greeks and Albanians who want to divide Macedonia. Bosniaks in Serbia’s Sandjak will want to follow suit.

30. The ethnic dominoes won’t stop there. Putin will claim that the land swap justifies independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia and possibly also Transnistria and Donbas.

31. And he will certainly demand recognition of the annexation of Crimea as the price of accepting rump Kosovo into the UN.

32. Yes, I really do believe there is a Pandora’s box. Opening it would be a colossal mistake for U.S. diplomacy.

33. So what is the alternative?

34. It is admittedly a dull one: complete the process of NATO and EU integration that has made a great deal of progress during the last two decades.

35. First item on that agenda is approval of the referendum in Macedonia. The Administration has been correct to roll out its big guns—so far VP Pence and Defense Secretary Mattis—in support. The risk is not defeat, but failure of 50% of registered voters to go to the polls.

36. Washington will also need to push Greece hard (but quietly) for approval in its parliament.

37. Next up is the Kosovo/Serbia quandary.

38. Serbia needs an agreement sooner rather than later, because in the final stages of EU accession all prospective members need to surrender on any outstanding issues.

39. Kosovo does not need an early agreement, since its accession is farther off. Consequently, a reasonable compromise now will be one in which Serbia gets something, but not land or people.

40. I think Belgrade might settle for some limits on the Kosovo army and improved protection for Serbs and Serb sites in Kosovo, both of which Pristina might be more than willing to concede. Mutual recognition and exchange of ambassadorial level representatives would have to be part of the package.

41. UN membership would not be part of such a deal, not least because Serbia can no longer lift the Russian veto, if it ever could.

42. What about Bosnia? Once Kosovo is settled, Bosnia will look much easier: partition will be ruled out and improvements of governance will again be on the agenda.

43. My own preference is to start with a small package: the state government in Bosnia should have all the authority needed to negotiate and implement the acquis. I don’t think a lot more than that is required, even if it is desirable.

44. Such an EU clause should not find much opposition in principle. And it would, if passed, fundamentally change the political calculations of the Serbs and Croats, who would then have every reason to seek positions in the state government, rather than avoiding it.

45. I assume neither Serbia nor Bosnia will in the near term have the political consensus required to join NATO. I don’t see that as a problem, as NATO would have a hard time accepting them.

46. Once the Bosnia equation is solved, there will be little but time and political will standing between the Western Balkans and the EU.

47. Nor is the time likely to be long: with the political will, all the countries of the Western Balkans are closer to EU membership than to the catastrophe of the early 1990s.

48. Completing the process is likely to take less time, require fewer resources from the US, and have far more satisfactory results than upsetting the applecart at this point.

49. I only wish the Middle East, where I spend most of my life these days, would have the prospects that the Balkans have.