The famous statement of the English historian John Robert Seeley is that Britain "conquered and colonized half the world in a fit of madness". In contrast, the European Union today is unwittingly losing its post-Cold War hegemony in Europe in a flurry of excessive concentration. Brussels is so preoccupied with the task of advancing EU integration that it fails to manage disintegration on its periphery.
They keep bothering us with the story that on February 24 we woke up in a different world. The truth is that this "different world" has been with us for a long time. The problem is that we haven't been willing to see it.
Now Russia's aggression against Ukraine forces us to reconsider some of our assumptions about the future of Europe. However, it is clear that this can only happen if we reconsider the past. The best way to understand how international politics is being reshaped is to focus, with the shock of the invasion in mind, on some of the key events of the last 30 years. The ultimate significance of many of these events has escaped us.
Let's imagine two observers who, after the Cold War, were asked to predict how the new European order would unfold. One is from central Europe, say Prague, and he is told that events there will define the future of the continent. For him, this is reflected in the expansion of the EU and the transformation of post-communist societies into the Western European model.
Another observer is from the Balkans and his vision was shaped by the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the upheavals of post-war reconstruction. In his eyes, the collapse of communist regimes led to the rise of raging ethnic nationalism. Democratization came with violent conflicts and ethnic cleansing.
This observer would agree with Clifford Gertz, the late American anthropologist who predicted in 1995 that the newborn international order would be defined not by the mass adoption of Western models, but by an obsession with identity and difference. The political agenda will not be determined by the question "When will Serbia or Albania join the EU?", but "What is a country if not a nation" and "What is a culture if not a consensus?"
Am I wrong if I believe that the Balkan observer will help us better understand today's Europe than the one in Prague? Isn't our current state of paralyzed surprise explained by our unwillingness to accept that what we saw in the Balkans was no specter from the past?
Simply put, the EU cannot effectively deal with the crisis caused by Russia's attack on Ukraine if it fails to rethink its "Balkan experience". Vladimir Putin's Russia is not Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, and Ukraine is not Bosnia. But the failure of the EU to transform the Balkans, not even the partial success of Brussels in integrating central Europe, must be the starting point of any sustainable strategy.
In my estimation, three Balkan lessons are of crucial importance.
The first is that European integration can transform states, but it cannot make states. At its core, the EU project is an attempt to overcome the 19th century nation-state. But the challenge on the periphery of Europe was to build functioning nation-states. The attempt to replace nation building with EU member state building had the opposite effect.
It is indicative that in the 1990s, the EU by designing the Balkan constitutions aimed at the rights of minorities proved to be less effective than the constitutions aimed at the majority that were adopted in the Baltic states. The latest crisis on the border between Serbia and Kosovo is a signal that the "frozen solutions" left by the EU in the Balkans can easily become new hotspots of conflict.
Another lesson is that the breakup of former communist federal states produced long, chaotic conflicts. One big danger for the countries that emerged from these conflicts is the decrease in population. The longer the war in Ukraine drags on, the less likely many refugees will return. Bosnia lost 40 percent of its population as a result of the war and post-war recession.
The third lesson is that the moment the war ends, Europeans will lose interest in the periphery. Renewal does not create heroes or evoke strong emotions. Five of the 27 EU member states do not yet recognize Kosovo's independence.
The revolutions of 1989-91. have deceived Europe by making us believe that because of something wonderful and sudden that happened, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, that we know what the future holds for us.
The article was published in the "Financial Times"
Translation: A. Šofranac
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