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Geopolitics in the Balkans

• The Russians have no purchase on the Kosovo Albanians, but their weight with the Kosovo Serbs and Serbia is felt there. Moscow is a strong advocate of a land/people swap between Belgrade and Pristina. That would help legitimize Russian behavior in Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia.

• How Moscow will be brought around to accepting Kosovo’s UN membership is still a mystery, even to those of us who think Kosovo independence and sovereignty is permanent.

• Washington continues to have enormous influence in the Balkans, but it is not the same Washington as even three years ago. Today’s Washington has an ethnic nationalist, not a liberal democratic, administration. Trump and some of his closest advisors are self-avowed “nationalists” who do not believe in equal rights or the independence of the judiciary.  

• They are actively trying to suppress voting by their opponents inside the U.S. The President has pardoned convicted American war criminals. 

• That in my view is why they were open to the failed land swap idea.

• As for Europe, it’s failure of nerve is all too evident to everyone in the Balkans: the now dropped French and Dutch vetoes on opening accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia—negotiations that might take a decade—was tragic. So too is the failure to provide the promised visa waiver to Kosovo after Pristina fulfilled dozens of conditions.

• The Western, liberal democratic influence in the Balkans has declined. The Eastern, autocratic and ethno-nationalist influence—if I can use that umbrella term to refer to the very different roles of Russia, China, and Turkey—has grown.

• Bottom line: responsibility for keeping the Western aspiration alive now rests more than in the past with the people of the Balkans: their governments, citizens, and society. The Europeans have disappointed. The Americans are doing likewise. The Chinese, Turks and Russians will lure the Balkans in bad directions.

• So the future of the Balkans depends, perhaps more than at any time since the breakup of former Yugoslavia, on the people of the Balkans. That is good, so long as they take advantage of the opportunities.

• Let me the bidding in several of the key countries. Is reform in the liberal democratic direction possible, or is it simply a pipedream?

• North Macedonia may be the easiest case. Now a NATO member and a candidate for EU accession, it is engaged in a vigorous campaign for parliamentary elections in less than a week (July 15). I would be more comfortable with the guys who settled the “name” issue with Greece than the still untested political heirs of the corrupt would-be autocrat who lost power in 2016, but there is a real possibility of alternation in power and an electoral mechanism that is working better than ever before. That’s progress.

• In Kosovo, alternation in power has become the rule rather than the exception, but the process is sometimes uglier than it need be. The unseating of the front-runner in the last election under pressure from Washington was repulsive. That said, the constitutional court decided on whether the appointment of a new prime minister was permissible and the transition proceeded in an peaceful way. That too is progress.

• The big problem for Kosovo now is the pending indictment of its president and the head of the political party he founded. Hashim Thaci has promised to resign if the indictment a judge at the Specialist Chambers in The Hague confirms the Prosecutor’s recommendation. Kosovo will then need a new president and likely a new government as well, if it is to avoid the constitutional requirement for new elections within 45 days of a vacancy in the presidency.

• Kosovo in any event needs a stronger government if it is to continue the “normalization” talks with Belgrade. Prime Minister Hoti should be aiming to match President Vucic’s 75% parliamentary support.

• I do not expect the court proceedings to have a salutary effect in Pristina, anymore than other war crimes proceedings have had salutary effects elsewhere in the Balkans. Most of Kosovo’s Albanian population will likely treat the ten indictees as heroes, not villains. The government will pay for and help with their defense, as the government in Belgrade has done for Serb indictees.

• That said, the removal of Thaci and his Kosovo Liberation Army comrades from official positions may open political space for reform. Especially if Vetevendosje (“Self-Determination”) returns to power in some guise, prospects for fighting corruption will improve, if only because VV will want to deprive those who have held power since independence of their privileges.

• I wish I could say the same about Serbia, where democracy has been deteriorating under President Vucic. The opposition certainly had good grounds when it claimed that conditions for free parliamentary elections held last month did not exist. The media are not free and the courts are not independent.

• I was unhappy however to see the opposition boycott the election, giving Vucic a landslide victory that he can exploit without any serious counterbalance. I hope that by 2022, when his mandate ends, that the opposition will be more unified, more organized, and more purposeful.

• In the meanwhile, Vucic will continue hedging in the tradition of Tito’s nonalignment. So long as he is allowed, he will play the Europeans and Americans against the Russians, then the Russians and Chinese against the Europeans and Americans.

• It is hard to say anything positive about the political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where ethnic nationalist parties continue to have a chokehold on power and exploit its many levels of governance to stay in power and line their pockets.

• Privatization might reduce the predation and instituting democratic procedures within the ethnic nationalist parties might open the possibility of replacing some of the party bosses, but resistance among the powers that be remains strong.

• The Europeans, especially the Germans, have been more concerned with maintaining stability in Bosnia and Herzegovina than with using their leverage to promote reform. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the one place in the Balkans where I think academic chatter about the international community supporting “stabilocracy” has real validity.

• But nothing is likely to work until the Dayton constitution the Americans wrote 25 years ago is revised. My personal preference is to eliminate both the two “entities”—Republika Srpska and the Federation—as well as the cantons in the Federation.

• That would leave Bosnia governed by the central—they call it the “state”—government and the municipalities. The latter should tend to citizens’ needs and the former should be empowered to negotiate and implement the EU’s acquis communautaire. 

• But that kind of radical reform would require a massive movement across ethnic lines throughout Bosnia’s population. Bosnians sometimes seem tempted to take their fate into their own hands, but repeated popular uprisings have fizzled with no serious change.

• I might wish it weren’t so, but it is fruitless to hope, as many Bosnians do, that the Americans and Europeans will sweep in and fix everything. The time for that is passed. Only the kind of popular uprising that swept Prime Minister Gruevski out of power in Macedonia can create the conditions for serious constitutional reform in Bosnia.

• Let me try to conclude. The picture of the Balkans that I’ve painted for you is not pretty. It does not have an enigmatic smile, or for that matter a martial triumph.

• The return of geopolitics makes the picture even more complicated and difficult. Russia, China, and Turkey are not interested in liberal democracy. The US and Europe have at least temporarily lost their once strong convictions.

• The Balkan region is still struggling to define itself as European and finding it difficult to reconcile that identity with its tumultuous and sometimes genocidal past.

• But Germany did that even in the midst of the greatest geopolitical struggle the world has ever known. Berlin made a clear choice for the West and has become a stalwart of liberal democracy and a model of economic prosperity and social cohesion.

• It is my fervent hope that the Balkans will find its own way to that kind of political, economic, and social outcome.