Tag: Balkans
Why the rush?
I spoke this morning via Skype to a conference in Pristina on the Kosovo-Serbia Dialogue: Nomalization or an Aggravated Status Quo. These were my speaking notes, which I did not follow religiously:
1. Thank you all for accommodating me by Skype. I’ll miss the pleasure of your company but appreciate the opportunity for my views to be heard.
2. As I hope you all know, I am an opponent of land and people swaps in the Balkans, for many reasons:
- They would be an admission that neither Belgrade nor Pristina is able to treat all their citizens properly and equally under the law, which is the main requirement of NATO and EU membership.
- They would lead, sooner or later, to massive displacement of Serbs from south of the Ibar River and Albanians from Serbia proper.
- Germany, the Netherlands, and other EU members will not approve accession for partitioned countries.
- I don’t believe any of the deals I’ve seen could be welcomed by Presidents Vucic and Thaci or approved in parliament in either Belgrade or Pristina, and certainly not in a referendum in Kosovo.
- A land swap would destabilize Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Milorad Dodik has been clear about his intention to lead Republika Srpska to secession if Kosovo is partitioned.
- A land swap in the Balkans would strengthen Russian claims to the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the secession of Transnistria, Donetsk and Luhansk as well as the annexation of Crimea.
- UN membership for Kosovo would only be possible if Washington were to concede on those issues, which it has no interest in doing.
3. Land and people swaps are a zombie idea: it wanders the earth looking for its next victim and is difficult to kill because it is dead already.
4. So why so much attention to a zombie idea and so much urgency about concluding an agreement?
5.Presidents Thaci and Vucic are both ethnic nationalists, not liberal democrats. Ethnic nationalists have a hard time dealing with numerical minorities. If they are equal, what use is being part of the supposedly privileged minority?
6. But President Thaci long resisted the idea of partitioning Kosovo. Why did he change his mind?
7. Best to ask him of course, but my explanation is this: he saw that Belgrade was making progress with the idea in Washington, where there is also an ethnic nationalist administration.
8. John Bolton was opposed to Kosovo independence and would be pleased to wreck a Clinton protégé, which Kosovo certainly is.
9. So when Bolton said he would entertain partition ideas if Vucic and Thaci could agree, President Thaci became concerned that he would be outflanked and end up with a one-sided proposition: northern Kosovo would go to Serbia without any gain for the Albanians.
10. So he invited the Presevo Albanians to Pristina and made it clear that no one-sided proposition would pass muster. It would have to be reciprocal.
11. That was a reasonable thing to do, but it does not mean that there really is an acceptable proposition, even a reciprocal one.
12. How can Vucic give up the territory in southern Serbia that Thaci wants, in defiance of concerns about the security of Serbia’s main route to the sea? How can he survive abandonment of Serb communities and religious sites south of the Ibar?
13. How can Thaci give up North Mitrovica, which was majority Albanian before the war, as well as Trepca and Gazivoda, his country’s main natural resources and water supply respectively?
14. So people come up with fantasies about 99 year leases, foreign management, and extra-territorial status that are simply too elaborate and risky to convince a serious person that they would last. The zombie emperor is wearing no clothes.
15. I’d like to finish with a question: why the urgency? I understand why Belgrade might feel some pressure for an early solution, as its EU accession is fewer years in the future than Kosovo’s.
16. But Kosovo should know that once Serbia enters the final stages of accession it will have to do whatever the EU member states ask. And one of the things they are certain to ask is complete normalization of relations with Pristina.
17. I fear, however, that some people in Belgrade and Pristina may feel some urgency because of President Trump’s promise of a Rose Garden ceremony.
18. They are unquestionably a nice occasion but let me be clear: a Rose Garden ceremony does not ensure impunity.
19. I’d be happy to see Presidents Vucic and Thaci cut a deal sooner rather than later. Kosovo might even want to offer concessions on payment of World Bank debts and the planned roles of the Kosovo army, as well as protection for the Serbs south of the Ibar.
20. But to sell your sovereignty for a bowl of porridge, or a Rose Garden ceremony, would be a historic and unforgivable mistake.
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The bromance isn’t going well
Agon Maliqi raises three legitimate issues in response to my post welcoming Kosovo’s negotiating platform:
1) Domestic costs of prolonging this indefinitely not taken into account;
2) Can we rely on EU accession as a carrot considering EU crisis?
3) Will there be leaders with political capital to pull it off?
He concludes that waiting seems the higher risk.
I don’t agree. Of course there are domestic pressures, but the proper role of leadership is to manage those, not to cave to them. I don’t think a flag at the UN or in Belgrade is what most citizens in Kosovo are thinking about: their primary concern is jobs. When you start counting your GDP growth at 3%, you are not doing so badly, but the economy has slowed significantly:
Maybe a bit more attention to that and less to the sovereignty question is in order.
Nor is there any sign that giving up a piece of Kosovo’s territory to Serbia, which is what the President has been proposing as a short-cut to an agreement, will be accepted either by the Parliament or the citizens. Kosovo’s best negotiating strategy is to make its red lines clear–that the Platform does–and wait until Serbia is hungry enough to talk.
I understand those who doubt the future attraction of the EU, but what better choice do either Serbia or Kosovo have? Euroskepticism in my experience (which is now many decades long) is tightly correlated with the business cycle. Kosovo’s near-term goal is getting a Schengen visa waiver, this year. Ensuring that is far more important right now than signing on the dotted line with Serbia.
Once we are passed whatever the Brits are going to do to themselves, as well as the ridiculous trade war Trump has conducted with China, my guess is the recovery will resume. Everyone, including those who live in Kosovo, will cheer. No one can ever guarantee that the political door to the EU will open, even if Kosovo gets busy and qualifies in 10 years or so. But most of the benefits of EU membership accrue by qualification, not membership. The money a candidate gets during the process is also pretty good.
As for political leadership, I have been critical of President Thaci’s pursuit of a people and land swap, which would demonstrate that both Kosovo and Serbia are incapable of treating their minorities equally under the law. Thaci would do much better to sit back and wait for President Vucic to come to him, which should happen sooner rather than later if he hopes to get anything for whatever they agree. Neither is listening to me at the moment, but their bromance isn’t going well:
Are these really the political leaders who can pull off the historic compromise between Kosovo and Serbia? May be, but they are not sounding like it right now. The simple fact is that neither can get a land swap through his own parliament, never mind the referendum promised in Kosovo.
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Bravo, but Kosovo can wait
On the eve of today’s 11th anniversary of its independence, Kosovo has published its “Platform for Dialogue on a Final, Comprehensive and Legally Binding Agreement on Normalization of Relations Between the Republic of Kosovo and the Republic of Serbia.” There are a lot of things to like in this document, including:
- A clear statement of Kosovo’s negotiating goals, which has been lacking: Serbia’s recognition of Kosovo as a sovereign and independent state.
- Re-assertion of the validity of the Kosovo constitution on the state’s entire territory and explicit rejection of any cession of part of that territory.
- Reciprocity: for Albanians in Serbia to be treated as well as Serbs in Kosovo, for war crimes committed by Serbs to be treated like war crimes committed by Albanians, including in a special tribunal.
- Refusal to create any layer of government between the central one and municipalities (read any association of Serb municipalities with governing authority or responsibility).
- Approval of the ultimate agreement in a referendum and by parliament in both Kosovo and Serbia.
- Provisions for transparency, inclusivity, and accessibility of the state negotiating team.
- Settlement of outstanding wartime issues (accounting for missing persons, return of displaced people, return of property, compensation, reparations, division of sovereign debt, etc.).
- An end to UN Security Council resolution 1244 and approval of the final agreement in the Council and the General Assembly.
- Conditioning of progress in EU accession on implementation of the final agreement.
All good. So what’s missing?
Two things:
- Clarity on how and when UN membership will occur. It may be implicit in the reference to UNSC approval of the agreement, but it will need to be explicit before the negotiations are concluded. The controlling powers are China and Russia: how will they be brought around to allow a breakaway province to enter the UN? China won’t like it because of Tibet. Russia may like it but will want a quid pro quo in Crimea and possibly also South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria.
- Any indication of what Serbia might get in the deal. It is not Pristina’s responsibility to worry about this in the first instance, but it will need to worry about it in due course. What would be helpful is for Serbia to publish a similar platform. It has never been clear what Belgrade wants from the talks with Pristina, other than convincing Washington and Brussels that Serbia is willing to talk. That itself does have value, especially as it has been done on an equal basis that implicitly acknowledges that Kosovo has a legitimate and independent governing structure (already also recognized in the April 2013 “Brussels agreement”).
Of course Belgrade has also appeared to want territory, especially the majority-Serb municipalities north of the Ibar River. The Platform however is unequivocal in seeking “recognition of Kosovo’s independence and statehood within the existing borders.”
There are outstanding issues that might have value for Serbia: the composition and capabilities of the Kosovo army, the functions (other than governing) of the not yet created Association of Serb Municipalities, and Kosovo’s assumption of its share of Yugoslavia’s debt (mentioned in the Platform). But I doubt these will be sufficient to lead to an early agreement. More likely, Serbia will not engage seriously until the failure to reach an agreement with Kosovo noticeably slows its progress toward EU accession. Then it will be too late: all the leverage in the endgame of EU accession lies with the individual member states, which have to ratify accession, not with the candidate country.
One member state has dared to say what we all have known for years but no one wanted to say out loud. At the Security Council 10 days ago Christoph Heusgen, the German representative, said bluntly in a prepared (therefore cleared in Berlin) statement:
The only way that Serbia will enter the European Union will be with a successful normalization dialogue, with the recognition of Kosovo.
Belgrade would be wise to enter a serious negotiation sooner rather than later, while it can hope to still get something in exchange for recognizing Kosovo. Now that it has made its position clear, Pristina can afford to wait, as its EU accession is much further in the future.
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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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- I beg to differ: the successes as well as the failures of international intervention in the Balkans should not be forgotten or go unappreciated.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- {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.
- All can hope to be EU members, and NATO allies if they want, by 2030, if they focus their efforts.
- {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.
- {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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Plan A is still viable. I also don’t see a Plan B that comes even close to the benefits of completing Plan A.
- When I wrote the book, three big obstacles remained. Now there are only two.
- 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.
- Skopje and Athens have now resolved this issue. New leadership was key to making it happen.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The second big obstacle is normalization between Belgrade and Pristina, which will require mutual recognition and exchange of diplomatic representatives at the ambassadorial level.
- 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.
- {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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The Balkan regatta
I’m not a handicapper, but it seem to me the race for EU membership in the Balkans is shifting. Serbia is often referred to as the “frontrunner,” but it no longer really is, if it ever was. Macedonia has been a laggard, but that too is no longer the case. Kosovo is having a hard time keeping up, but that is in part due to an unreceptive EU. Bosnia and Herzegovina still occupies last place.
Serbia was arguably never really in first place, but by now it has certainly yielded to Montenegro, which has opened 32 chapters of the acquis communautaire required to become an EU member (and closed 3 of the 32). Serbia has opened 16 and closed 2. But Montenegro also has an easier path to EU membership, as it lacks many of the industries that Serbia needs to make comply with EU regulations. Montenegro also has a far freer press, whereas Serbia’s is under the government’s informal but still tight control. Both countries lack the fully independent and professional judiciary that will be necessary before accession. That is the long pole in the tent throughout the Balkans.
The big difference between Montenegro and Serbia lies in foreign policy. Montenegro, already a NATO member, is fully aligned with the EU on Russia. Serbia is not: it hosts a Russian “humanitarian” base and has refused to go along with sanctions against Moscow for its annexation of Crimea. Belgrade has no intention of seeking NATO membership. Serbian President Vucic recently gave President Putin a hero’s welcome in Belgrade, complete with paid crowds bused in from the provinces.
Skopje’s resolution of its “name” dispute with Athens has thrown the door to NATO wide open. Accession for “the Republic of North Macedonia” will follow as soon as ratifications are received from the 29 other members. The name change will also re-initiate Macedonia’s stalled EU accession process. As with Serbia and Montenegro, the long pole in the tent will be an independent and professional judiciary, but North Macedonia will likely make quick progress on other chapters.
Kosovo carries several burdens that the others don’t, even though all its legislation has been required to be EU-compatible since independence. Its stalled dialogue with Serbia needs to get restarted. Only after a fully normalized relationship can it hope to open accession talks, because of opposition from the EU’s five non-recognizing members. In addition, the EU sets a particularly high bar for Kosovo. This was apparent in its postponement of a visa waiver program even after Pristina had fully met many more requirements than any other country in the Balkans. Judicial professionalism and independence will also be a serious challenge in a country where personal relations count for a lot and institutional consolidation is still limited.
Still, Bosnia brings up the rear. It has been saddled with a coordination mechanism that gives both its entities, the Federation and Republika Srpska, as well as the ten Federation cantons and the Brcko District veto power over negotiation and implementation of the acquis. This is unworkable. Only when the Sarajevo government gets full authority to negotiate and implement the acquis will Bosnia be able to make serious progress on EU accession. NATO membership for Bosnia is ruled out for now by the leadership of Republika Srpska, which shares Belgrade’s antipathy for the Alliance as well as its affection for Russia and Putin.
So here is my sense of the regatta: Montenegro>Macedonia>Serbia>Kosovo>Bosnia. Serbia has slipped a couple of places, Macedonia is gaining, Kosovo is lagging in part because the EU wants it that way, and Bosnia is bringing up the rear.
Of course there are serious questions about the condition NATO and the EU will be in when any of these countries accede. Brexit, President Trump, and ethnic nationalist populism are real drags on the liberal democratic evolution of the former Yugoslav states, where ethnic nationalist populism in the 1990s became homicidal and even genocidal. But let there be no doubt that the accession processes are still the best thing going for the Balkans: they give people and governments there purpose and hope.
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Make Plan A work
I’ve had several requests from Balkan publications for my end-of-year views on the situation in the region. I’ve so far passed them up, but a few words here seem appropriate.
The Balkans are at peace and far more prosperous than they were in the early 1990s, when war ripped apart former Yugoslavia. Now European Union members, Slovenia and Croatia were then fighting for survival as Serbia tried by force to hold the Federation together, or at least hold on to territory it regarded as “Serb.” Bosnia suffered three and a half years of war, ethnic cleansing, and eventually genocide. Kosovo endured less, but only because NATO was prepared to intervene sooner. Macedonia and Montenegro mostly escaped war, but only with difficulty and international help.
Things are much better now. Per capita income is markedly higher. Ethnic nationalism barks a lot but seldom bites. No army in the Balkans is capable of sustained warfare and no public would support it. All the region’s citizens except Kosovo’s can travel visa-free throughout the European Union. All the remaining non-members of the EU have been promised an opportunity to join the EU. All have signed agreements with Brussels that provide many of the trade and financial benefits of membership, along with ample pre-accession funding.
People in the Balkans are nevertheless dissatisfied. Resurgent ethnic nationalism plagues Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Economic growth is slow, corruption is endemic, and the prospect of European Union accession distant. Big issues remain unresolved. Approval of Macedonia’s far-reaching Prespa agreement with Greece is uncertain. Kosovo and Serbia are far from normalization of their relations, despite years of negotiations. Governance in Bosnia and Herzegovina is increasingly dysfunctional, due to a peace settlement that is difficult to change. Complaints rather than satisfaction are dominant 25 years after the Dayton peace agreements began to bring an end to the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
I think it is wrong to be discouraged. The post-war Balkans region is uniquely advantaged. Its proximity to Europe brought it far more attention and assistance than is typical after conflict. Think of Syria, which will get precious little Western help after far more destructive wars than anyone in the Balkans suffered. Each of the Balkan countries emerged from the 1990s with the prospect of democratic, even if illiberal and imperfect, governance. Only one of the Arab Spring countries, Tunisia, comes even close to that. Except for Iraq and Israel–each imperfect and illiberal in its own way–none of the Middle East can come even close to the freedom of expression and association Balkan citizens today enjoy.
So my message, argued at length in From War to Peace in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Ukraine, is that Plan A is far better than any conceivable Plan B.
The path into EU and NATO for those who want it is getting steeper. But neither has closed its doors. I can well understand those in Kosovo who are discouraged because Brussels has delayed giving the country visa-free status, even though it met all the manifold requirements. But 2020, when the EU says it will be ready to proceed, is just around the corner. It would be a colossal error not to stay on track. Montenegro, already in NATO, seems to understand that and is likely to qualify next for EU membership. Serbia needs to clean up its courts and free up its media, in addition to meeting the technical requirements of the acquis communautaire and normalizing its relations with Kosovo. Skopje and Athens need to maintain their agreement, even if it faces a setback in one of their parliaments. Bosnia and Herzegovina will be the last piece of the Balkans puzzle to find its proper place, but it will do so if it focuses on making the Sarajevo government capable of negotiating and implementing the acquis.
There is nothing insoluble in the Balkans. 2019 should be devoted to making Plan A work. There is no better Plan B.
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