So let the entire war-torn world rely on this new and fragile détente between Serbs and Kosovars. And let the world’s trouble spots – from Israel and Palestine to Northern Ireland, the Caucasus and Africa – look to the Balkans and absorb the biggest lesson. Because if reconciliation takes place here, it can take place anywhere.
If you read an atlas, you might conclude that what is suffering in much of the world is “balkanization.” This term originally described ethnic fragmentation and conflict – up to and including ethnic “cleansing” – after the breakup of multinational empires. Balkanization, in the narrow sense of the term, is what happened to the eponymous peninsula after the withdrawal of the Ottomans, then after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. It fell on Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, when the British and French colonialists withdrew, or on the Caucasus after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
More broadly, I would define balkanization as the struggle between competing victim narratives and their use to spread hatred between groups who should rather live as good neighbors. In this sense, Lebanon and the entire Levant are balkanized. In my darkest moments, I fear that even the United States is heading in this direction.
Russia’s genocidal attack on Ukraine does not appear, at first glance, to be a case of balkanization. Rather, it seems like an atavistic war of imperial conquest – the attempt to re-establish an empire rather than the consequence of its collapse. Russian President Vladimir Putin compares himself to the tsars of yesteryear.
Yet Russians, including Putin, view Ukraine (and various other countries) more like the Serbs saw Bosnia-Herzegovina not so long ago, or how they view Kosovo today. That is, they deny the national identity of their neighboring state, relegating it instead to a subordinate role in their own ethnic or imperialist scenario. In both cases, the result has too often been atrocities.
Serbian and Russian stories rhyme in other ways as well. The two nations, as fellow Orthodox Slavs, often profess a special bond (which they apparently do not feel towards Orthodox and Slavic Ukrainians). They peddle similar narratives that they are threatened by a hostile West, with NATO – which bombed Yugoslav (i.e. Serbian) forces in 1999 to prevent atrocities against ethnic Albanian Kosovars – in the role of the villain.
Kosovo declared independence in 2008. But neither Serbia nor Russia recognize it as a country, and Moscow and Belgrade have so far worked together to block Pristina’s membership in the United Nations and other International organizations.
Kosovo’s Albanian majority, meanwhile, suspects its Serb minority of sedition or worse. The Serbian government, in turn, protests against the real or imagined oppression of its ethnic relatives in Kosovo and threatens to suffer the consequences. Violence is never far away. Last year, the trivial question of which license plates Serbian Kosovars should use, Belgrade or Pristina, almost became heated.
What Serbia and Kosovo share that other Balkanized regions of the world lack is a common aspiration: membership in the European Union. This gives Brussels some influence to promote a new narrative aimed at replacing the primitive victimization complexes of the Balkans.
This new scenario is called “Europe”. I dubbed it the Alsatian alternative, after the region – Alsace – that France and Germany fought over for generations before realizing they had to stop. After World War II, the sworn enemies reconciled and made national borders both sacrosanct and largely irrelevant within what became the EU. The Alsatians, whatever the language spoken by their ancestors, live today as free Europeans.
It is in this spirit that Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, channeled this week by announcing the rapprochement between Serbia and Kosovo, which he had chaperoned. The deal, he said, “is not for the European Union: it is for the citizens of Kosovo and Serbia.”
This new narrative of transcending differences and finding mutual redemption will obviously be a tough sell in the Balkans. Bosnia-Herzegovina is still hanging by a thread today. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic – who worked for Slobodan Milosevic, the “Butcher of the Balkans” – called Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti a “bastard terrorist”. Kurti, in turn, called Vucic “little Putin.” None of this is promising.
And yet Vucic and Kurti – like Bosniaks, Montenegrins, Albanians and North Macedonians – want to join the EU. It’s up to them to jump over their own shadow, as the Germans say. For Vucic and the Serbs, this must include condemnation of Putin, the antithesis of European values.
It is far too early to declare Vucic and Kurti the Balkans Sadat and Begin or anything like that. But peace and civility always begin with a gesture, however small, of courage and magnanimity. Perhaps this week Europe took a very small step towards overcoming balkanization as such.
Read more from Bloomberg’s opinion:
• After Ukraine, does Putin have his eyes set on another country? : Andreas Kluth
BBC’s Indian raid is just its latest attack on the press: Bobby Ghosh
Ukraine’s future is not in NATO, says Hal Brands
This column does not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist who covers European politics. Former editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and writer for The Economist, he is the author of “Hannibal and Me”.
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