By Ivan Krastev
By contrast, the EU today is unwittingly losing its post-cold war hegemony in Europe in a fit of excessive concentration. Brussels has been so preoccupied with the task of advancing EU integration that it has failed to manage the disintegration on its periphery.
We are bombarded with the oft-repeated bromide that on February 24 we woke up to a different world. The truth is that this “different world” has been with us for a long time. The trouble is that we were reluctant to see it.
Now Russia’s aggression in Ukraine forces us to question some of our assumptions about Europe’s future. Yet it is clear that this can only happen by rethinking the past. The best way to understand how international politics is being remade is by focusing, with the shock of the invasion fully in mind, on some of the major developments over the past 30 years. Regrettably, the ultimate significance of many of these events eluded us.
Here is a thought experiment. Imagine two observers, who in the cold war’s aftermath were asked to predict how the new European order would evolve. One was based in central Europe — Prague, say — and was told that events there would define the continent’s future. For him, that is represented by the EU’s expansion and the transformation of post-communist societies on the western European model.
The other observer is in the Balkans. Her vision is shaped by the wars in former Yugoslavia and the contortions of postwar reconstruction. In her eyes, the collapse of communist regimes led to the rise of ferocious ethnic nationalism. Democratisation came with violent conflicts and ethnic cleansing.
This observer would agree with Clifford Geertz, the late US anthropologist, who in 1995 predicted that the newborn international order would be defined not by the wholesale adoption of western models but by an obsession with identity and difference. The political agenda would be set not by the question “When will Serbia or Albania join the EU?”, but by “What is a country if it is not a nation?” and “What is a culture if it is not a consensus?”
Am I wrong to believe that our Balkan observer will help us to better understand today’s Europe than the one in Prague? Isn’t our current state of paralysed surprise explained by our unwillingness to accept that what we saw in the Balkans was no ghost from the past?
Simply put, the EU cannot effectively deal with the crisis triggered by Russia’s attack on Ukraine if it fails to rethink its “Balkan experience”. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is not Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia, and Ukraine is not Bosnia. But it is the EU’s failure to transform and integrate the Balkans, rather than Brussels’ at least partial success in integrating central Europe, that must be the starting point of any viable strategy.
Three Balkan lessons are in my estimation of critical importance.
First, European integration can transform states, but it cannot make states. In its essence, the EU project is an attempt to overcome the 19th-century nation-state. But the challenge on Europe’s periphery was to build functioning nation-states. The attempt to replace nation-building with EU member state-building has backfired.
It is indicative that the EU’s engineering of minority rights-centred Balkan constitutions in the 1990s turned out to be less effective than majority-centred constitutions adopted in the Baltic states. The latest crisis on the Serbia-Kosovo border is a signal that “frozen solutions” that the EU left in the Balkans can easily become new conflict spots.
The second lesson is that the dissolution of the former communist federal states produced long, messy conflicts. One great peril for the states that emerged from these conflicts is depopulation. The longer the Ukraine war continues, the less likely that many refugees will return. Bosnia has lost 40 per cent of its population as a result of its war and postwar recession.
The third lesson is that the moment the war stops, Europeans will lose interest in the periphery. Reconstruction does not produce heroes or trigger strong emotions. Five of the EU’s 27 states still do not recognise Kosovo’s independence.
The trick the 1989-91 revolutions played on Europe was that because something wonderful and unexpected happened — the cold war’s end and the Soviet Union’s collapse — we became confident that we knew what the future had in store for us.
The writer is an FT contributing editor and chair of
the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, and fellow at IWM Vienna