The trouble with the Balkans, it has been said, is that they produce far more politics than can be consumed safely at home.

On Sunday, Kosovo formally declared independence to the accompaniment of festive celebrations by the good citizens of the world’s newest country. We can but wish them well as they chart a new course inside a new Europe free of the distracting conflicts that ravaged the continent until the middle of the 20th century.

It would be naive, however, to believe that the centuries-old history of Serbian-Kosovar conflict is now ended. The two iconic cases of international intervention in 1999 were Kosovo and East Timor. As the recent attempted assassinations of the latter’s president and prime minister show, the euphoria of independence is not enough to sustain the structures and practices of a civic community and viable polity. And it must not be forgotten that the Serbs venerate Kosovo as the cradle of their nationhood, dating back to the war with the Ottoman Empire in 1389 that they lost. Their sense of victimhood and grievance has deep roots that will likely outlast Sunday’s "setback."

Like East Timor, Kosovo may prove to be a postmodern "sovereign" state, dependent for economic survival and territorial integrity on outsiders. Or as John Laughland put it in the Guardian, "an entity that may be sovereign in name but is a U.S.-EU protectorate in practice." The European Union will underwrite the country’s economy and security, and its high representative can override decisions by Kosovo’s government, just like in Bosnia. Thus is power fatally disconnected from responsibility.

But there is a larger question for outsiders. Do we really want to take on the burden of determining, by force, the quest for independence by all the world’s wannabe secessionists?

Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia was guilty of ethnic cleansing and unspeakable atrocities against Kosovars. His quest for Greater Serbia produced the opposite effect of continually shrinking borders, as more and more territorial units peeled away along ethnic fault lines. But this still does not mean that the blame lay 100 per cent with the Serbs, and that the Kosovars were nothing but innocent victims. In 1999, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, the former U.S. secretary of state and ambassador to Yugoslavia, wrote in an article not exactly friendly to Mr. Milosevic that "The Kosovo Liberation Army earned its reputation as a terrorist group." NATO became the tool for the KLA policy of inciting Serb reprisals through terrorist attacks in order to provoke NATO intervention. How many Western countries had the KLA on their security watch list as a criminal and terrorist organization before 1999?

Meantime, the liberation of Kosovo by NATO was followed by reverse ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Roma – under NATO’s watch as the security guarantor – receiving nowhere near the matching coverage of Serbian atrocities against Bosnians and Kosovars in the international media. Since 1999, while many mosques have been built in Kosovo, many churches have been burned. Will Europe and NATO stand in the way of the quest for Greater Albania across Kosovo, southern Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro – perhaps even Greece?

UN secretary-general Kofi Annan acknowledged in 2000 that his call for a debate on "the challenge of humanitarian intervention" had led to fears that the concept "might encourage secessionist movements deliberately to provoke governments into committing gross violations of human rights in order to trigger external interventions that would aid their cause."

Indeed. By one estimate, in rough, round and easily remembered figures, there are about 20 broadly homogeneous nation-states, 200 states and over 2,000 nationalities in the world today. To support, or to give the impression of international encouragement, to armed secessionists is to risk unleashing the most violent phase of human history ever.

Let’s start with the 100,000 or so remaining Serbs inside Kosovo. Will they accept Kosovo’s new status? Why should they? The rest of the world is not short of secessionist and irredentist movements, including in Europe. Will Basque and Catalan separatists be encouraged or discouraged? Have secessionists in Aceh, Kashmir and Taiwan been delighted or perturbed? After this, it’s hard to see why the Turkish Cypriots will accept reunification of Cyprus under any formula.

Do-gooders must accept responsibility for the unintended, but predictable, consequences of their actions. Much as they might like to think otherwise, the overriding message from the Balkans to the rest of the world – including Russia, China, Indonesia, and India – is that might is right. Maybe the collapse of colonial-era borders and the dismantling of dysfunctional states is an irresistible force of contemporary world politics. If so, if bad borders mean mounting bloodshed, our most interesting times are just beginning.

 

Ramesh Thakur is distinguished fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and professor of political science at the University of Waterloo and co-editor of Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention. Published in the Globe and Mail (Canada), February 20, 2008.

---