SURVEY: THE BALKANS

Europe’s roughest neighbourhood

Jan 22nd 1998
From The Economist print edition

It is tempting to leave the fissiparous Balkans to their own devices; but unless the West remains deeply involved, there is little hope for the region, argues Brooke Unger

YOU cross no border to get from Belgrade to Pristina, yet as you approach the city a flak-jacketed policeman will inspect your passport. If you arrive on a windy day, the uncollected rubbish will swirl about you. There are no rubbish collectors in evidence, only police, who spend their days flagging down cars at random, extracting “fines” for offences they invent on the spot. In the villages around Pristina it is worse: policemen routinely harass and occasionally torture inhabitants, who answer with smouldering hatred. This, surely, is the grimmest spot in Europe, the crucible, some fear, of its next war.

Pristina is the capital of Kosovo, a province of Serbia* almost entirely peopled by Albanians, most of whom regard Serbia as an occupying force. To Serbs, though, Kosovo is hallowed ground. Here Prince Lazar fell in glorious defeat to the invading Ottoman empire in 1389, opening an epoch of oppression that ended only when Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991. Serbs would no more think of yielding Kosovo to Albanians than would Jews of handing Jerusalem to Palestinians. Serbia’s corrupt and brutal rule is supposed to make this clear to Kosovars, but it also feeds an enraged separatism that makes an uprising seem all but inevitable.

Western diplomats watch this slow dance to disaster with horror. The fear is that domestic violence in Serbia could turn into yet another Balkan war. Macedonia, a least a quarter of whose people are Albanian, might be dragged in, and with it neighbours that have never stopped questioning its newly won statehood: Bulgarians, Greeks, Yugoslavs and Albanians. If Greece got involved, so might Turkey, its bitter Aegean rival. Their clash would weaken NATO’s southern tier. Would Russia, patron to both Serbia and Greece, stand aloof?

The Balkan region has a penchant for “producing more history than it can consume”, as Churchill once put it. This century it triggered the first world war, used the second as cover for inter-ethnic slaughter and fought three wars of its own. The latest of these, a four-year conflict across three of the five republics that used to make up Yugoslavia—Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina—left some 100,000 dead and drove 3m people from their homes. Some 35,000 NATO-led troops are now in Bosnia to stop that tiny, strife-filled country from going to war again. In Macedonia and on the border between Serbia and Croatia the United Nations is maintaining much smaller operations to keep the peace. And in Albania last year foreigners led by Italy intervened to end anarchy after the collapse of a number of pyramid selling schemes.

History has left the Balkans with borders that coop up together peoples who occasionally kill one another and divide them from those they deem their brethren. The Yugoslav wars of 1991-95 began as an attempt by Serbia to unite all Serbs under one political roof when it became clear that Yugoslavia—a state shared by Orthodox Christian Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Roman Catholic Croats, Albanians and assorted minorities—was breaking up. That ambition unleashed, Croatia could demand no less for Croats. Serbia and Croatia waged war against Bosnia’s Muslims, who make up that country’s largest ethnic group, and also, in Bosnia and in Croatia, against each other. The peace treaty negotiated in 1995 at Dayton, Ohio, and the NATO troops sent to enforce it, are keeping Bosnia’s Muslims, Croats and Serbs from each other’s throats, and the ethnic imperialists in Croatia and Serbia at bay. But the rumbling among Albanians in the south is the sound of a history factory still in full operation.

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Ballots and butter

In the Balkans memories are fixed; it is the maps that shift. So it is not surprising that peace plans often come in cartographic form. Henry Kissinger, a master global strategist and former American secretary of state, recently suggested Bosnia should be allowed to break up into separate Serb, Croat and Muslim states. Some Serb intellectuals think Kosovo should be partitioned, into a Serb half in the north—with the most revered national monuments—and an Albanian half in the south.

The idea that peoples and borders should coincide looks appealing partly because it seems to have worked elsewhere in the area. Slovenia, by far the richest ex-Yugoslav state and the only one to get an early invitation to join the European Union, has been quietly homogenising itself for decades. Even as a constituent part of Yugoslavia, it used to require migrants from other parts of the country to obtain permits to work there. Croatia, which cut its Serb population from 12% to 5% in a quick and brutal reconquest of land during the latest war, is ex-Yugoslavia’s second-richest country.

Contrast their fortunes with those of ex-Yugoslavia’s more multi-ethnic states. Neither Bosnia nor Macedonia feels certain of survival, let alone prosperity and membership of the European Union. By an ironic twist, Serbia, the inventor of ethnic cleansing, is the victim of a historical trick that happens to make it the most multi-ethnic successor to Yugoslavia bar Bosnia. Only two-thirds of its population are ethnically Serb.

This survey will resist the fashion for cartography, for several good reasons. First, it is dangerous: redrawing borders usually produces bloodshed and refugees. And once started, there is no end to the remapping. If the Serb Republic gains independence from Bosnia, why should Kosovo not break free from Yugoslavia to join Macedonia’s Albanians, and why should both of them not eventually merge with their mother country into a Greater Albania? And what about Greater Bosnia? Sandzak, a region that straddles Serbia and Montenegro, has 250,000 Muslims who look increasingly to Bosnia. Then there are Greeks in southern Albania (which Greeks sometimes call “northern Epirus”) and Serbs in eastern Croatia. Most of the “greater” projects would involve dismembering Yugoslavia, still the region’s pre-eminent power.

Second, the idea of annexing territory settled by their kin has lost some of its appeal for the region’s mother countries. Albania and Bulgaria are too busy trying to build free-market democracies to harbour designs on Kosovo and Macedonia. Defeated, impoverished Yugoslavia has little appetite for swallowing Bosnia’s Serb Republic, at least for now. Only Croatia actively hankers after unredeemed Croat lands in Bosnia. The immediate risk to Balkan peace is not so much aggression but secession by minorities big enough to contemplate statehood, which in turn could trigger war. This survey will argue, therefore, that peace depends on how Balkan countries treat their minorities.

Rather than on redrawing maps, all efforts should be concentrated on curing two crucial Balkan failings: a dearth of democracy, and disastrous economic policies. Whereas Yugoslavia was the communist world’s most open economy, and one of the richest, most of its successor states have fallen far behind other Central European economies. Albania, Europe’s second-poorest country, has been confirmed in that status by the collapse last year of the pyramid schemes into which half the population had invested much of their savings, and by the anarchy that followed.

The regimes of ex-Yugoslavia and Albania range from the dictatorial to the democratic. But even where democracy is relatively well established, in Slovenia and in Macedonia, it is flawed. Political parties have too much power over every other institution. That discourages economic restructuring throughout the region and, in most countries, invites corruption and undermines the rule of law. War and trade sanctions on Serbia made matters worse in the three countries where most of the fighting took place. They entrenched authoritarian parties and encouraged region-wide smuggling that turned public servants into mafiosi. Now war-time leaders use a mix of nationalism and economic bribery to hold on to power. The cost of that bribe is reflected in the Balkan region’s large trade deficits. Consume and don’t worry about producing the goods to pay for it, say the demagogues to their people; in return, overlook our abuses of power.

Democracy and prosperity are not cure-alls; if voting were all that mattered, Bosnia’s Serbs would secede, as would Serbia’s Albanians and, perhaps, their brothers in Macedonia. But societies that embrace democracy and its accoutrements, such as the rule of law, independent institutions and human rights, are more likely to win the allegiance of their minorities. And if they fail in the end, as Czechoslovakia did, they are more likely to break up peacefully. Better models, though, are two Balkan countries outside the scope of this survey: Romania and Bulgaria. With their economies on the point of collapse, both recently elected reformist governments to replace regimes left over from communist days. Both started restructuring their economies and launched high-profile campaigns against corruption. Not coincidentally, both improved relations with minorities and with their neighbours. Military co-operation between Romania and Hungary, once hostile neighbours, is “the best in Europe”, says Jonathan Eyal, of the Royal United Services Institute in London. Bulgaria’s new president, Petar Stoyanov, has made overtures to Macedonia.

In violence-soaked ex-Yugoslavia and Albania, democracy will not come by itself. Democratic habits must be, and are being, imposed by outside powers, notably by the United States and Western Europe. That effort is most obvious where violence is most recent: in Bosnia and in Albania. Both have seen western troops restore order, and both are getting western lessons in democracy, as well as aid on a scale that rivals America’s post-1945 Marshall Plan. Elsewhere the western touch is lighter but still decisive. The region saw one of the few UN operations with a mandate to govern a territory (UNTAES in Eastern Slavonia), and the only one designed to prevent conflict before it starts (UNPREDEP in Macedonia). Croatia is being pushed towards democracy with a mix of threats and incentives that play on its yearning to join the European Union. Defiant Serbia is being contained in an “outer wall” of financial sanctions and encircled in a democratic noose: although the West cannot democratise Serbia directly, it is promoting democracy in all its neighbours, including its two satellites, Montenegro and the Serb Republic.

Among ex-Yugoslavia’s neighbours, the role of the West is no less important. Bulgaria and Romania are liberalising under the lash of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; Greece is more interested in joining Europe’s monetary union than in pursuing nationalist dreams. The Balkans are becoming, in effect, a quasi-protectorate of the West. This is no guarantee of stability. Western peacemakers sometimes seem as Balkanised as the region they are trying to pacify. They failed to stop the war in former Yugoslavia, and they have squabbled over how to keep the peace there. Since no war has erupted in the southern Balkans, they seem to think it is safe to pull UN troops out of Macedonia later this year. As tensions abate, the risk is that the West’s attention will flag. In this region of long memories and dusty maps, that would be a fatal mistake. Nowhere is that risk greater than in Bosnia.

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