The Balkans Need More Than Just Stability

Sarajevo bookends this century. Eighty-five years ago, a global war began there when Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist; this week, a Euro-Atlantic nation summit convenes in Sarajevo to try again to extinguish remnants of this modern Hundred Years’ War. The archduke will be watching.

Bosnia and Kosovo have shaken Western leaders out of their self-delusion that post-Cold War Europe could be whole, free and peaceful. We’re obviously not there yet, and we may never be. A vague trans-Atlantic consensus has emerged--painfully--that responding to violent crises belatedly and trying to enforce peace through intervention have severe political, economic and moral costs for the West.

Western Europe, with Germany in the lead, has championed the notion of a stability pact for the Balkans. First aired in draft form during April, and then given an imprimatur in June by the European Union and the G-8 industrial nations, the Balkans Stability Pact is meant to be long-term, regional and aimed at conditions that generate tensions or conflict. Such a pact, which has the aura of a regional Marshall Plan, has a potential price tag of $30 billion over five years.

But, the stability pact is not what we or the Balkans need. It is diplomatic Prozac at a time when shock therapy is required. It is offering inducements and rewards before the heavy lifting. It suggests that we can finance and educate the Balkans toward market democracy long before a secure milieu exists in which to nurture the fragile institutions needed to accomplish that.

The stability pact does nothing to address immediate and urgent sources of insecurity that surely will undermine the accord’s credibility. Those who started this war and earlier post-Yugoslav wars rest comfortably in Belgrade. Slobodan Milosevic may be the most recognizable, but six Serb leaders were indicted by the Hague tribunal, and many others investigations are underway. Meanwhile, the leaders’ army and police are intact, their money safely stashed, and there is no bounty on their heads remotely likely to promote their capture and arrest within Serbia. As long as these people are in power in Belgrade, Serbia remains an outcast nation; as such, it will be excluded from most assistance packages, thereby ensuring that such packages will be less effective.

Second, the Kosovo Liberation Army is far from disarmed, and the kind of vigilante retribution that we saw in Gracko is likely to recur. The KLA’s mafia-like connections to shadowy financiers, arms traffickers and the global drug trade bode ill for any thought of handing Kosovo’s governance over to “democrats.”

Third, beyond Kosovo, the Balkans Stability Pact will be constructed on unstable ground as long as the region includes collapsed states, nationalist authoritarianism and shaky coalition governments with miserable economic records. The Balkans have them all.

And, fourth, the stability pact is primarily an EU “show.” After providing the lion’s share of military muscle to force Serb withdrawal from Kosovo, Washington is in the back seat. Given Europe’s Balkans track record, the pact’s efficacy or longevity may suffer.

Odd as it may sound, stability for Southeastern Europe without first ensuring security is perilous. The German design implies a Balkan peninsula made docile through economic infusion, intertwined by trade and increasingly dependent on the EU. But, as long as it is a region populated by failed states, weak political institutions and extremist public personalities, docility can quickly usher in demagogues ready to attack democratic and market reforms as sellouts to foreign interests.

After the photo ops and ceremony, it will not be long before we see that the basis for Balkan security has yet to be created. Without it, stability will begin to erode as soon as the ink is dry.

With the Balkans Stability Pact, we and our allies seek to hold in check political dynamics in a volatile region. Europe, and to a lesser extent the U.S., will throw money at the problem, hoping that long-term palliatives will constrain the chance for violent upheaval or further ethnic conflict while encouraging democratic behaviors.

But stability isn’t democracy. Ongoing, grinding poverty is a stability of sorts, as were the four decades of Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria. When yesterday, today and tomorrow are indistinguishable, you’ve discovered stability. But it is also numbing and dumbing and the antithesis of plural, tolerant societies or entrepreneurial capitalism.

The peoples and countries of the Balkans may, indeed, need substantial instability before they can find security--instability to rid themselves of war criminal presidents or aging nationalist general presidents; instability to leap toward real market economies without heavy state intervention; instability during a concerted attack against organized crime and instability as their societies are forced by law to eliminate ethnic biases.

A Balkans Stability Pact that pumps billions of euros and dollars into Southeastern European infrastructure projects or thst increases the level of civil society builders may relieve the West of accumulated guilt for delaying intervention as genocidal plans were made and implemented. But such measures will not ensure social, economic or political stability.

The path toward market democracy and peaceful behavior must be first cleared of human and institutional obstacles. For such an endeavor, the stability pact’s silent raison d’etre--to improve conditions within the Balkans so that peoples of that region stay home and eshew mass violence--misses the mark.

The archduke may want to warn someone.