Geopolitics in the Balkans

I prepared this lecture for a presentation earlier in the summer, but circumstances conspired to prevent me from giving it. So I’m letting it sit here, for anyone who might be interested:

It is a pleasure to be with you remotely, even if I do wish we were all in Dubrovnik. It was not a stop on my many flights into Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia. I was lucky even to see Split, where my UN flight landed once when the Serbs were making it impossible to do so in Sarajevo.

• The world has changed dramatically since then. So have the Western Balkans.

• Let me start there. You will hear from many people who live in the Western Balkans, especially in Bosnia and Serbia, that nothing has changed.

• This reflects their disappointment in what has happened in the last 25 years. I share that disappointment. I would like to have seen far more progress.

• But it is not objectively true that things haven’t changed. Per capita GDP is on average at least twice as high as it was before the 1990s wars. Apart from Covid-19, it is safe to travel throughout former Yugoslavia, regardless of ethnic identity or national origins. You can say pretty much whatever you want in all the former Yugoslav republics and in Albania, even if organizing politically and publishing are still not entirely free in several countries. Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Muslims worship freely, often in renovated churches and mosques.

• The question is how this progress was achieved, and why does it appear to have come to a halt sometime in the middle of the first decade of this millennium.

• The 1990s, we know now, were truly the unipolar moment, when the US had no rivals and together with Europe could do what it wanted in the Balkans and much of the rest of the world.

• With a lot of help from Croatia, NATO used force to end the Bosnian war and compel Serbia’s withdrawal from Kosovo in 1999. The US and EU also negotiated the end of an Albanian rebellion in Macedonia in 2001, with NATO backing.

• Washington and Brussels then together invested massive financial and personnel resources in Bosnia and Kosovo. The former was eventually run by a European with US support and the latter became a UN protectorate run by Europeans with American deputies. Their mandate in Bosnia was to install a sovereign, democratic government. In Kosovo, it was to build self-governing democratic institutions, with a view to eventually solving the sovereignty question.

1. Macedonia remained self-governing, but with European and American monitoring and sometimes financing of its 2001 Ohrid agreement.

1. The unipolar moment began to end with the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the US responses in Afghanistan and Iraq, which the Balkan successes encouraged.

1. But the joint US/EU state-building processes in Bosnia and Kosovo had significant momentum and continued. So too did the peace implementation in Macedonia.

1. The process stalled in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2006, when the parliament failed to approve by the required two-thirds constitutional changes the Americans and Europeans wanted.

1. In Kosovo, the UN first imposed a program of “standards before status” and “later standards with status,” leading eventually to supervised independence in 2007, after which progress slowed.

1. In Macedonia, political and economic reform lasted a bit longer, perhaps through 2008, but the financial crisis that hit Europe and the US hard in that year made the going much slower.

1. The Balkans have not had an easy time of it since. All the Balkan states are heavily dependent on EU economic growth. The Greek financial crisis and economic collapse, the flood of immigrants after 2011 from the greater Middle East, and the Brexit referendum in 2016 gave Europe more urgent and higher priority problems than the Balkans.

1. These developments also made Europe more cautious about the prospects for enlargement.

1. Brussels began to slow roll accession, which in turn slowed the necessary economic and political reforms. Would-be autocrats faced much less challenge than they would have in the 1990s.

1. In Bosnia, some politicians returned to the virulent ethnic nationalist rhetoric of wartime, with little constraint imposed by Washington or Brussels. The country is now stalled in its own constitutional contradictions, imposed by Washington and Brussels.

• In Kosovo, the economy has done relatively well, after an initial spurt the authorities managed to limit Islamist radicalization, the courts began to prosecute some high-level corruption cases, interethnic crime dropped dramatically, the army is now getting support from NATO, and there have been several peaceful, if sometimes turbulent, transfers of power.

• Kosovo now faces its greatest post-independence challenge: the pending indictment at the Specialist Chambers in The Hague, a nominally Kosovo court run by the Americans and Europeans, of the President, the head of the political party he founded, and eight other still unnamed Kosovo Liberation Army fighters.

• In Macedonia, a one-time economic reformer unable to deliver reform after 2008 or so gave the country a political nightmare that was finally dispelled with help from U.S. and European muscle, leading eventually to an agreement with Greece to change its name to North Macedonia and allow it to become a candidate for EU accession as well as a member of NATO.

• In the meanwhile, Croatia, became a member of the EU, Serbia began to normalize its relations with Kosovo, and Montenegro managed to get into NATO and put itself in pole position for EU membership.

• In short, things are a lot better in the Balkans than they were in the 1990s, even if progress is slow and serious trouble spots remain.

• Today’s world is however dramatically different from the one that existed in the 1990s.

• While still globally dominant, the US faces regional challenges from China, Russia, Iran and even North Korea that take priority in Washington over the Balkans.

• The Balkans in general, and Bosnia and Kosovo in particular, were the objects of top-tier attention in the 1990s. They now get much lower priority.

• That is true in Europe as well, where Brexit, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, and illegal immigration are issues that, each in its own way, cast a shadow over Balkan aspirations to join Europe. 

• At the same time, Moscow and Beijing are paying more attention than ever before to the Balkans.

• The Russians are interfering blatantly by both violent and nonviolent means in the region: assassination, media manipulation, renting crowds, and financing political parties are all being used to slow if not halt Balkan progress towards NATO and the EU.

• The Chinese are using their financial strength to loan, build and buy. Caveat emptor of course, though Beijing’s behavior is a lot more salubrious than Moscow’s and likely to produce some positive results for those Balkan countries and companies that know how to do business.

• It comes however with political strings attached: the Chinese will expect those who get their money to toe the line on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Uighurs, and Covid-19.

• Turkey—also a strong force in the Balkans for historical, geographic, and cultural reasons—has taken a dramatic turn in a more Islamist and autocratic direction.

• The secular Turkey that contributed well-trained forces to NATO interventions in the 1990s has all but vanished. Erdogan’s Turkey is building mosques, capturing Gulenists, and encouraging political Islam while still trying to maintain its previous good relations with non-Muslim countries in the Balkans.

• How does all this affect the Balkan countries?

• The Turkish influence is direct and palpable.

• In Bosnia, it is exercised mainly through Bakir Izetbegovic, now head of the leading Islamist political party.

• Though still largely secular in orientation, Kosovo is far more Islamic than it once was and has cooperated with the capture and rendering of Gulenists. President Thaci treasures his relationship with President Erdogan.

• China has focused its attention mainly on Serbia and Montenegro, the former by buying assets and the latter by building an important highway.

• Most Kosovars might welcome more interest in investment from Beijing. I wouldn’t fault them for that but only urge caution about the financial and political conditions, which can be onerous.

• But Beijing doesn’t like break-away provinces. Perhaps because of that, Japan is showing some interest in Kosovo and should be able to provide far better deals.

• Russia is still far more politically important to Serbia than China, because it holds the veto in the Security Council over Kosovo membership in the UN. Belgrade has tried to continue its non-aligned hedging between the West and East, even though it claims the ambition of joining the EU. It buys arms from Moscow but trains more with NATO.

• 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.