From war to peace

I spoke at the Media Centre in Belgrade yesterday about my recently published Palgrave MacMillan book, From War to Peace in the Balkans, the Middle East and Ukraine. Here are my speaking notes for the occasion:

1. It is a pleasure to be back in Belgrade, and a particular pleasure to give my first talk about this book here in a Media Center that witnessed so many of the pivotal events of the 1990s wars in the Balkans. Many thanks to Dusan Janjic for providing the opportunity!
2. Many of you will remember that period: the US and Europe fumbling for years in search of peaceful solutions in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo only to find themselves conducting two air wars against Serb forces, first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo.
3. But Americans have mostly forgotten this history. Europeans too often believe there were no positive results. Here in the Balkans, many are convinced things were better under Tito.
4. I beg to differ: the successes and failures of international intervention in the Balkans should not be forgotten or go unappreciated.
5. That’s why I wrote my short book, which treats the origins, consequences, and aftermath of the 1995, 1999 and 2001 interventions that led to the end of the most recent Balkan wars.
6. In my view, conflict prevention and state-building efforts thereafter have been partly successful, though challenging problems remain in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia.
7. The book examines each of these on its own merits, as well as their prospects for entry into NATO and the EU, whose doors are in theory open to all the Balkan states.
8. Bottom line: I believe all states that emerged from Yugoslavia as well as Albania are closer to fulfilling their Euroatlantic ambitions than they are to the wars and collapse of the 1990s.
9. They were making decent progress when the financial crisis struck in 2007/8. The decade since then has been disappointing in many different respects:

• Growth slowed and even halted in some places.
• The Greek financial crisis cast a storm cloud over the EU.
• The flow of refugees, partly through the Balkans, from the Syrian and Afghanistan wars as well as from Africa soured the mood further.
• Brexit, a symptom of the rise of mostly right-wing, anti-European populism, has made enlargement extraordinarily difficult.

10. The repercussions in the Balkans have been dire:

• Bosnia’s progress halted as it slid back into ethnic nationalist infighting.
• Macedonia’s reformist prime minister became a defiant would-be autocrat.
• Kosovo and Serbia are stalled in the normalization process.
• Russia has taken advantage of the situation to slow progress towards NATO and the EU.

11. Now the question is whether the West, demoralized and divided by Donald Trump and right-wing populists, can still muster the courage to resolve the remaining problems in the Balkans and complete the process of EU and, for those who want it, NATO accession.

12. I think Plan A is still viable. I also don’t see a Plan B that comes even close to the benefits of completing Plan A. Only three big obstacles remain.

13. First is ending the Macedonia “name” issue. Skopje and Athens are on the verge of doing just that. New leadership was required to make it happen.

14. For those who claim the West is prepared to tolerate corruption and state capture, I suggest a chat with Nikola Gruevski. If there is a viable liberal democratic option, the West will support it.

15. Second is normalization between Belgrade and Pristina, the subject of the conference that will open within the hour.

16. I’ll have more to say then, but let me say here that Serbia has already abandoned its claim to sovereignty over all of Kosovo, both in the April 2013 Brussels agreement and in opening the question of partition along ethnic lines.

17. I think that is a terrible idea, for many reasons I will outline later, but it confirms that Belgrade has no intention of ever again governing the Kosovo Albanians.

18. The third issue that needs to be resolved in the Balkans is the dysfunctional state structure that the Americans imposed on Bosnia and Herzegovina at Dayton.

19. It has kept the peace for close to 25 years, but it needs reconfiguration to enable the Sarajevo government to negotiate and implement the acquis communautaire.

20. These three are serious problems, but not insoluble ones. The road ahead is shorter than the road already traveled. Doubling back is a bad idea.

21. My book proceeds after the Balkans to apply lessons learned to the Middle East and Ukraine, which also face identity-based conflicts challenging sovereignty and territorial integrity, lie close to the Balkans, and share more Ottoman history than is generally acknowledged.

22. The lessons are these: leadership is key to starting, preventing, and ending wars; early prevention can work, with adequate resources; ethnic partition will not; international contributions can be vital; neighborhood counts; power sharing and decentralization can help.

23. This accessible treatment of what makes war and how to make peace will appeal to both scholarly and lay readers interested in how violent international conflicts can be managed. It is available free, worldwide, courtesy of my generous employer, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. To get it, click on the book cover at www.peacefare.net