A Bronx cheer for a dumb idea

COVID-19 isn’t the only epidemic in the Balkans. There is an even more deadly one: proposals to move borders. There is no vaccine to prevent their spread. Below is a good pictorial summary, courtesy of Rada Trajkovic, who tweets:

Balkans corrupt, criminalised, illiberal leaders have been so emboldened by their unfettered domestic power grabs that they now believe they can play a (bloody) game with our borders. Perfect distraction from their poor domestic records & a way to destabilise the EU for decades.

Greater Albania, Greater Serbia, Greater Croatia: the wet dream of Franjo Tudjman, Slobodan Milosevic, Hasan Pristina. Everyone wins!

But of course there are losers, both on this map and beyond. The Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims to the American press, no matter how unreligious) get an indefensible, rump state surrounded by sworn enemies and ripe for radicalization. The Kosovo Albanians lose their state and become the northeastern province of Albania. The major Serb Orthodox sites south of the Ibar River in Kosovo would no longer be sustainable. Macedonia loses perhaps 40% of its territory. Several hundred thousand people (maybe half a million or more?) on the “wrong” side of ethnically defined new borders would have to relocate or run the risks associated with minorities in ethnically defined states.

Beyond this map the repurcussions would also be dramatic: once the principle of not changing borders to accommodate ethnic differences is breached, the Russian position on South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, Transnistria in Moldova, and Crimea and Donbas in Ukraine would be vastly strengthened. Russian challenges to the terriorial integrity of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania would not be far behind.

All of this is well understood in the United States and Europe. Few in Washington, London, or Brussels are interested in opening Pandora’s Box. But the West is distracted. The US is confronting a long list of foreign policy challenges. The EU is preoccupied with COVID-19, economic recession, and the aftermath of Brexit. Ditto the UK. Chancellor Merkel, the EU’s trump card when it comes to pursuing liberal democracy in the Balkans and many other matters, is getting ready to retire without a worthy heir apparent.

The current preference in the West is not to move borders but to make them less cumbersome. This proposition goes under the heading of “mini-Schengen,” an effort on the regional level to mirror the EU’s borderless Schengen area. Removing visas, tariffs and non-tariff barriers while shortening the waiting time for trucks at the all too frequent border stations in the Balkans could improve efficiency and hasten the day that the Balkans can join the “maxi” Schengen area.

That is a much easier and more promising prospect than moving half a million people, many of them against their will. Violence is the only force that could achieve what the map above projects. American and European troops would either need to suppress murder and mayhem in Kosovo, Bosnia, and North Macedonia or evacuate, something that would no doubt be celebrated in Moscow. Nor would violence stop there: the Serbs of Montenegro would seek union with Serbia while the Bosniaks of Serbia’s Sandjak seek union with rump Bosnia, pushing aside people of other ethnicities in the effort. Perhaps the Russians could use renewed Balkan violence as a pretext for deploying their own troops, as they did recently to end the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

In short: the map above is a proposal for death and destruction, instability, NATO and European embarrassment, and still another Russian win, in addition to ensuring the ethnic nationalist political stranglehold in the Balkans for another generation. Those who propose such an outrage merit oppropbrium from real democracies. I hope the US and EU can spare a few moments from their many other priorities to give this distraction the diplomatic equivalent of the Bronx cheer it deserves: