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COVID-19 isn’t the only epidemic in the Balkans.
There is an even more deadly one: proposals to move borders. There
is no vaccine to prevent their spread. Below is a good pictorial
summary, courtesy of Rada Trajkovic, who tweets:
Balkans corrupt, criminalised, illiberal
leaders have been so emboldened by their unfettered domestic power
grabs that they now believe they can play a (bloody) game with our
borders. Perfect distraction from their poor domestic records & a
way to destabilise the EU for decades.
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Greater Albania, Greater Serbia, Greater Croatia:
the wet dream of Franjo Tudjman, Slobodan Milosevic, Hasan Pristina.
Everyone wins!
But of course there are losers, both on this map
and beyond. The Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims to the American press, no
matter how unreligious) get an indefensible, rump state surrounded
by sworn enemies and ripe for radicalization. The Kosovo Albanians
lose their state and become the northeastern province of Albania.
The major Serb Orthodox sites south of the Ibar River in Kosovo
would no longer be sustainable. Macedonia loses perhaps 40% of its
territory. Several hundred thousand people (maybe half a million or
more?) on the “wrong” side of ethnically defined new borders would
have to relocate or run the risks associated with minorities in
ethnically defined states.
Beyond this map the repurcussions would also be
dramatic: once the principle of not changing borders to accommodate
ethnic differences is breached, the Russian position on South
Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, Transnistria in Moldova, and Crimea
and Donbas in Ukraine would be vastly strengthened. Russian
challenges to the terriorial integrity of Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania would not be far behind.
All of this is well understood in the United
States and Europe. Few in Washington, London, or Brussels are
interested in opening Pandora’s Box. But the West is distracted. The
US is confronting a long list of foreign policy challenges. The EU
is preoccupied with COVID-19, economic recession, and the aftermath
of Brexit. Ditto the UK. Chancellor Merkel, the EU’s trump card when
it comes to pursuing liberal democracy in the Balkans and many other
matters, is getting ready to retire without a worthy heir apparent.
The current preference in the West is not to move
borders but to make them less cumbersome. This proposition goes
under the heading of “mini-Schengen,” an effort on the regional
level to mirror the EU’s borderless Schengen area. Removing visas,
tariffs and non-tariff barriers while shortening the waiting time
for trucks at the all too frequent border stations in the Balkans
could improve efficiency and hasten the day that the Balkans can
join the “maxi” Schengen area.
That is a much easier and more promising prospect
than moving half a million people, many of them against their will.
Violence is the only force that could achieve what the map above
projects. American and European troops would either need to suppress
murder and mayhem in Kosovo, Bosnia, and North Macedonia or
evacuate, something that would no doubt be celebrated in Moscow. Nor
would violence stop there: the Serbs of Montenegro would seek union
with Serbia while the Bosniaks of Serbia’s Sandjak seek union with
rump Bosnia, pushing aside people of other ethnicities in the
effort. Perhaps the Russians could use renewed Balkan violence as a
pretext for deploying their own troops, as they did recently to end
the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
In short: the map above is a proposal for death
and destruction, instability, NATO and European embarrassment, and
still another Russian win, in addition to ensuring the ethnic
nationalist political stranglehold in the Balkans for another
generation. Those who propose such an outrage merit oppropbrium from
real democracies. I hope the US and EU can spare a few moments from
their many other priorities to give this distraction the diplomatic
equivalent of the Bronx cheer it deserves.
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