There are many differences between the Balkans and the Middle East, but they have two things in common. Both regions are former pieces of the Ottoman Empire that have not found stability since that empire receded in the late 19th century. Both also have been objects of serial intrusion by outsiders who impose their interests and then flounder as their policies fail and hegemonies decline.
The Balkan region – a fluid concept with changing “membership” over the past two centuries – continues to struggle to orient itself in the wake of the collapse of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The shards of that country are going in different directions. Slovenia and Croatia have acceded to the European Union (EU) and now give casual advice to EU and U.S. officials on how to stem the West’s serial failures in the region.
Partly due to the skill of Serbian Prime Minister and President-Elect, Alexander Vucic, Serbia has graduated from being the villain of the 1990s to the perceived adult of the region. It is a candidate for EU membership and maintains decent relations with the West. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, recently met with Vucic in Belgrade to discuss political and military cooperation. Yet Belgrade skillfully manipulates the West and Russia while avoiding making meaningful concessions to either.
Both chronic and acute dangers are apparent further south and west, drawing greater international attention than anytime since 9/11 and provoking facile comparisons to the Sarajevo of 1914. In these newly-minted countries, those in power work mainly to ensure their control of state-owned or ministry-controlled enterprises and the jobs they can deliver. Those in opposition boycott parliaments or otherwise make sure they cannot function. In Kosovo, a disputed territory south of Serbia, this has involved tear gas attacks inside the legislature.
Kosovo’s sovereignty from Serbia was stunted by mismanaged American diplomacy between 2006 and 2008, and saddled with an asterisk (literally – it is permitted to attend joint regional meetings when Serbia is present only if no country names are used or if Kosovo’s is followed by an asterisk signifying its lack of universal recognition as a state). Five members of the EU continue to reject the country’s sovereignty and to reject Washington’s strange position that Kosovo is a unique case having no relevance to other existing European sovereignty questions ranging from Catalonia to Georgia. The U.S. and EU recently scotched Pristina’s effort to act like a real country by vetoing its desire to create a national army. Kosovo’s contested status enables Serbia to benefit from a one-sided deal brokered by the EU in April 2013. The latter mandates an internationally-recognized status for an association of Serb municipalities in Kosovo while continuing to deny Kosovo itself universal recognition.
Bosnia labors under the unworkable Dayton constitution, which lashes together a centralized Serbian entity – the Bosnian Serb Republic – with the hopelessly fragmented Bosniak-Croat “federation.” This Bosniak-Croat federation was a product of the Washington Agreement of February 1994, which cobbled together still-largely mutually hostile Bosniaks (a word revised to give Bosnians a civic identity but adopted only by the Muslims) and Croats. That deal was folded into the Dayton Agreement in 1995 to ensure both parties understood they had to adhere to the obligations they entered into in Washington, even as they were getting grafted onto a Bosnia with a second (Serb) entity. Fortunately, right now no one wants to go back to war. Nevertheless, those attempting to translate Western civic teleology into a functioning multi-communal system in Bosnia remain a small, powerless sliver lacking popular credibility and practical strategy.
Macedonia is a tragedy in the making. During the 1990s, it avoided a very real threat of civil conflict because of the skillful leadership of then President Kiro Gligorov. Gligorov leveraged a small international military presence and established a norm by which notables representing the country’s ethnic Albanians became part of succeeding Macedonian governments. A round of fighting in 2001 led to the Ohrid Agreement, which codified this arrangement and remains far more important to the country’s stability than its constitution. This was a remarkable accomplishment, given that Greece refuses (and will continue to refuse) to recognize Macedonia’s existence under that name, and inside Serbia and Bulgaria, there remain objections to different aspects of Macedonian identity. However, the Ohrid arrangement is fraying badly. Macedonia’s current political class is a ruinously incompetent group of patronage bosses devoted to their own material well-being and to keeping themselves out of jail.
This all is par for a course set more than a century ago, around 1878. Since then, each of a series of externally imposed security caps on the region has held for a couple generations. But whenever the larger European system breaks down, which is happening currently, so does the prevailing Balkan status quo. It is important to remember that outside Cold War-era Germany, the Balkans is the only part of Europe where World War II did not definitively settle borders and statehood.
It also is important to understand that the United States, Russia, and the EU continue to have no idea how to relate to a region they have struggled with for a quarter century. Washington has done little to serve the interests of its two erstwhile clients of the 1990s – the Bosniaks and the ethnic Albanians.
Russia’s closeness to Serbia, often ascribed to religious and pan-Slavic sentiments, is more than a little overrated, but serves Vucic well as he walks a tightrope among various domestic constituencies while seeking assistance from all the outsiders. Russian President Vladimir Putin largely uses his support for Serbian interests (and opposition to developments like Montenegro’s putative NATO membership) to counter the American enemy and to burnish his nationalist credentials, somewhat like his Tsarist predecessors tried to do with Bulgaria and Serbia before World War I.
The EU’s unbroken failure to manage Balkan affairs goes back at least to 1992-93, when it set up shop in Mostar, Bosnia’s second city, promising to make it into a civic, multicultural European success. Mostar remains divided between its mutually hostile Bosniak and Croat communities. The EU could clarify one issue by saying it will not grant membership to either Serbia or Kosovo until and unless they peacefully agree on the latter’s status. Of course, clarity is not what the EU does.
Another round of fighting, as Western hegemony weakens, is the region’s most likely future.
To break the pattern, some solution would have to emerge from a new generation of actors and thinkers inside the region willing to stand up to the unhelpful outsiders – that is, all of them. This would include a necessary disgorging of meaningless rhetoric involving invocation of “transition” teleology and the region’s supposed “European path.” Those envisioning a productive Balkan future would focus on trade, transport, communication, commerce, politics, and cultural activities devoted to the interests of perceived communities larger than families, patronage networks, and ethnic communities (make no mistake – “ethnic” and “sectarian” remain relevant categories in this region, as in other regions around the world).
Vucic’s recent call for a regional customs union or common market actually is not a bad starting place for such an effort. This is not a new idea. A 19th century version of the idea died abruptly with the assassination of Serbia’s King Michael Obrenovic, and a proposal along these lines by Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz (Tito) could not survive the split with the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin. Albania and Kosovo object that this would just restore Serbian hegemony; any serious effort along these lines would have to be accompanied by Belgrade’s unequivocal recognition of Kosovo’s sovereignty. Like other matters in the region, the likelihood of this is murky.
