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From War to Peace

Here are the notes I used for my presentation of From War to Peace in the Balkans, Middle East, and Ukraine yesterday at Johns Hopkins/SAIS, which has made it available free world-wide at that link. I am grateful to colleagues David Kanin and Majda Ruge for commenting and critiquing. 

1. It is a pleasure to present at this Faculty Research Forum, which will I think be a bit different from others. I’ll be concerned not only with analyzing what happened and is happening now in the Balkans but also with what should happen. I will try to fill the academic/practitioner gap.

 

2. I am particularly pleased as the event includes two of the best-informed people I know on the Balkans: David Kanin, whom I first met when he worked in the 1990s at the CIA Balkans Task Force, teaches the Balkans course here at SAIS; and Majda Ruge, who is both a native of the Balkans and a colleague at the Foreign Policy Institute.

 

3. Some of you will remember the Balkans in the 1990s: the US and Europe fumbling for years in search of peaceful solutions in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo only to find themselves conducting two air wars against Serb forces.

 

4. But most Americans have forgotten this history. Europeans often believe there were no positive results. In the Balkans, many are convinced things were better under Tito.

 

5. I beg to differ: the successes as well as the failures of international intervention in the Balkans should not be forgotten or go unappreciated.

 

6. 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.

 

7. As for the causes of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, my view is that there were three fundamental ingredients: the breakup of former Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević’s political ambitions and military capability, and ethnic nationalism, particularly in its territorial form.

 

8. Where all three were present in good measure, as in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, war was inevitable. Where Milosevic’s political ambitions were limited, as in Slovenia, war was short. Where his political ambitions and others’ ethnic nationalism were attenuated, as in Macedonia and Montenegro, war was mostly avoided.

 

9. The breakup of Yugoslavia is now a done deal, even if Serbia continues to resist acknowledging it. So too are Milosevic’s political ambition AND military capability. No one has inherited them. The third factor—ethnoterritorial nationalism—is still very much alive. All the Balkans peace agreements left it unscathed.

 

10. Conflict prevention and state-building efforts since the 1990s have been partly successful, though challenging problems remain in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia. My former SAIS colleague Michael Mandelbaum is wrong: the transformation mission in the Balkans is not a failed mission, but rather an incomplete one.

 

11. He thinks it failed because his explicit point of comparison is an ideal: the U.S. he says did not “succeed in installing well-run, widely accepted governments in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, or Kosovo.” I think Bosnia and Kosovo are works in progress because they are so obviously improved from their genocidal and homicidal wars. State capture is better than mass atrocity.

 

12. The book examines each of the Balkan countries 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.

 

13. {slide} Bottom line: all the 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.

 

14. All can hope to be EU members, and NATO allies if they want, by 2030, if they focus their efforts.

 

15. {Slide} 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 and the euro.
• 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 much wider rise of mostly right-wing, anti-European populism, has made enlargement look extraordinarily difficult.

 

16. {Slide} 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 their difficult normalization process.
• Russia has taken advantage of the situation to slow progress towards NATO and the EU.

 

17. Moscow tried to murder Montenegro’s President to block NATO membership, finances Bosnia’s Serb secessionist entity, campaigned against resolving the Macedonia name issue, and undermines free media throughout the Balkans.

 

18. Now the question is whether the West, demoralized and divided by Donald Trump and other 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.

 

19. Plan A is still viable. I also don’t see a Plan B that comes even close to the benefits of completing Plan A.

 

20. When I wrote the book, three big obstacles remained. Now there are only two.

 

21. The first obstacle was the Macedonia “name” issue. For those who may not follow the Balkans, the Greeks claim the name “Macedonia” belongs exclusively to the Hellenic tradition and would like the modern, majority Slavic country that uses that name to stop using it.

 

22. Skopje and Athens have now resolved this issue. New leadership was key to making it happen.

 

23. For those who claim the West is prepared to tolerate corruption and state capture in order to ensure stability in the Balkans, I suggest a chat with Nikola Gruevski.

 

24. Washington and Brussels helped chase him from office in 2017, once his malfeasance was well-publicized and a popular alternative appeared on the horizon. If there is a viable liberal democratic option, the West has been willing to support it.

 

25. The solution to the name issue is deceptively simple: now ratified in both parliaments, the Republic of Macedonia will become the Republic of North Macedonia, which most of its inhabitants and most of us will continue to call just Macedonia.

 

26. The Republic of North Macedonia can now hope to join NATO, perhaps by the end of this year, and become a candidate for EU accession.

 

27. There is a lot more to it, but that is all that will matter to you and me. The rest is for the Greeks and Macedonians.

 

28. The second big obstacle is normalization between Belgrade and Pristina, which will require mutual recognition and exchange of diplomatic representatives at the ambassadorial level.

 

29. This is closer than most think. Serbia has already abandoned its claim to sovereignty over all of Kosovo, in an April 2013 Brussels agreement that established the validity of the Kosovo constitution on its whole territory and foresaw Kosovo and Serbia entering the EU separately and without hindering each other. Only sovereign states can enter the EU.

 

30. {Slide} Belgrade has also implicitly acknowledged Kosovo’s sovereignty in opening the question of partition along ethnic lines. Serbia would like to absorb the 3.5 or 4 (depending on how you count) municipalities in northern Kosovo, three of which were majority Serb before the war.

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