January 14 2008 Financial Times
Balkan unrest remains a recipe for disaster By Anatol Lieven
In their dealings over Kosovo's independence, the European Union and Russia need to take their points of departure from reality and common responsibility for the stability of the European continent, not from legalism or self-righteousness.
The Russians must recognise that, whether they and the Serbs like it or not, Kosovo will soon become independent and will be recognised as such by the US, the EU and many Muslim states. If this is not granted soon, the Kosovo Albanians will revolt.
By vetoing United Nations recognition and giving moral support to Serbian intransigence, Russia can help keep Kosovo unstable and spread in-stability across the region. In the worst case, it could help produce a war that would destabilise not just the Balkans but Europe and deal a terrible blow to Russia's relations with the west; but Moscow needs to ask itself how it can be in Russia's interest to do this and take actions that will drive western Europe closer to the hardline antiRussian positions in the US.
EU governments also need to recognise two realities. First, that just as trying to keep Kosovo in Serbia would lead to Albanian revolt, so too trying to force Mitrovica, the remaining Serbian area of Kosovo, into an independent Albanian state would lead to Serbian revolt. Given the de facto "ethnic cleansing" by Albanians since the Kosovo war, to ask the Serbs to accept either Albanian or western guarantees of their future safety is absurd.
There have been veiled threats from the Albanian side that if Mitrovica is separated and joins Serbia, this will lead to revolt by local Albanian minorities not just in Serbia proper but also in Macedonia. To this there should be a very firm western response. The EU and Nato have rested their moral right to hegemony in the Balkans on the claim to guarantee stability and prevent conflict. They have also given promises to defend the stability and territorial integrity of Macedonia.
The other reality the west needs to recognise is that, just as it is impossible to force Kosovo back into Serbia, so it is impossible to force Abkhazia and South Ossetia into Georgia. Quite apart from the backing of Moscow and coethnics in the Russian north Caucasus for these republics, it should be obvious from recent history that their indigenous peoples can no more trust the Georgian state than Kosovo Albanians can trust the Serbian state.
Kosovo's independence will inevitably have repercussions for the Georgian separatist regions and Nagorno-Karabakh and Trans Dnestr. For the west to say Kosovo is a unique case is empty, given the obvious parallels.
To resolve these issues and restore elementary consistency to its own position, the west does not need to recognise Abkhaz and South Ossetian independence -- something for which Moscow is in any case not asking, given the obvious lessons for some of Russia's own restive minorities.
Rather, the west should extend to these republics the same solution that leading western countries have sought for nearby Nagorno-Karabakh (though so far without success): namely a "common state", in which Azerbaijan -- or, in this case, Georgia -- will retain de jure sovereignty, and therefore the theoretical possibility of future reunification by consent, while formally acceding to de facto independence, including most notably, full control over local armed forces and external borders. In all these cases, as in Kosovo, this would have to be accompanied by limited partitions, in which certain regions (such as Mitrovica, or the ethnically Georgian Gali and Svan districts of Abkhazia) would remain with the former sovereign.
Before they go any further with their existing policies, the big powers should remember this: the catastrophic first world war began with a dispute over the status of Bosnia-Herzegovina, an area of no interest to the vast majority of the Europeans who died.
The risk today from the Balkans and Caucasian conflicts is far less -- but none of the territories concerned is worth any serious risk to the international system. What is more, the governments of 1914 could not imagine the dreadful use to which Hitler and Stalin would put the consequences of the first world war. Today, we do not have that excuse. We know very well the uses to which Osama bin Laden and his Chechen allies would put a serious clash between the west and Russia.
The writer is a professor at King's College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington. His book, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World, co-authored with John Hulsman, has just been published in paperback by Vintage
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008