Damn Yalta! Damn Tito! As soon as I started learning Russian, it dawned on me whilst looking at an atlas that all Yugoslavia means is Land of the Southern Slavs. Land of the Southern Slavs? Only a Brit could deem lumping so many traditionally warring ‘foreigners’ together in one nation and expect it to work. Almost as bad as all the straight lines we see from the Colonial Borders in Africa. And we expect peace? I mean, boundaries in Africa aren’t even ethnic in many cases, nor do they follow any topography or natural frontiers. I can just imagine a half-drunken British General, his moustache soaring into the heavens like two arcs of flame, muttering to himself as he scrawls a straight border over distinct tribal boundaries, using a ruler so as not to accidentally cross the line into the Belgian Congo, French Cameroon, German Tanganyika or whatever.
In Europe, borders are simply so complex- try looking at a historical map of Silesia from the 1920s, for instance. Plebiscites abound, every nation claims part of every other and you can’t publish any kind of impartial map because the boundaries are so specific any interpretation of them will offend someone.
Kosovo, though? Not that I’m a great fan of Mr. Putin and his recently deemed successor, but Russia has always traditionally backed Serbia. Think WWI- the Russian Lion will roar sometimes, that’s what it’s doing now. Supporting its fellow Slavs. Fair enough, one could say, but that would be ignoring the Serbian atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo in 1991 against Bosniaks and Albanian Muslims.
In 1900, a nation could only be independent if it could muster enough gold and armed forces- hence why there were so few nations in Europe those days. Small nations that did exist, such as Liberia, only did so as puppet states of others. Today, however, thanks to the UN, any nation of any size can exist and expect to for its forseeable future. This is why the Balkans have been able to fragment so easily.
A letter in this week’s New Statesman (in which Julian Clary wrote a superbly funny article, might I add) pointed out the fact that we’re more than happy to let Albanians in Kosovo who’ve murdered innocent Serbs have independence, but we won’t let the Serbs in Bosnia unite with Serbia proper. This of course leads me to point out that the writer’s surname did happen to end in an ‘-ic’. You can take it as read he was probably a Serb, but the guy did have a point. There probably is a bit of racism against the Serbs from the international community- not as much as this (http://www.ww1-propaganda-cards.com/s002slide.html) from the First World War, but still a fair amount.
Due to the way we run nations today, being interdependent, Kosovo won’t need huge amounts of natural materials, money, or military forces to survive. But it is true that Kosovo contains a huge amount of Serbain historical sites- if we go on the premise that every majority ethnic group in an area should have independence, then so many nations would loose the cream of their culture. For example, if the Home Counties over the next five hundred years or so had so much immigration that they were around 80% non-English, would we give independence to them on this premise? No, we wouldn’t. So why is it any different with Kosovo?
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20051101facomment84603/charles-a-kupchan/independence-for-kosovo.html
^ This describes quite nicely how the Serbs in Kosovo live- undoubtedly, an independent Kosovo would not be fair to the Serbian minority. How many more nations are going to succeed in Europe? The more that do, the more nationalism they will experience. Kosovo will be a satellite of Albania, rising nationalism there. And nationalism plus Balkans is never a happy mix, as they learnt in Srebenica, Gorazde, and all over Croatia in World War Two and 1991. Funny, demographically, isn’t it? We have peoples like the Uyghurs (8 million), Kurds (16 million), Assyrians (4 million), and Copts (8 million) without their own nations, yet Europe has managed to give everyone self-rule. Very nice. If only they could do the same in Asia and other continents.
From what I can see, there’s Vojvodina, Dalmatia, Illyria, Herzegovina, and Srpska (Bosnian Serbia) left without independence. This kind of links in to what I put about nations like Spain in my last post, and what division can cause. Anyway, I wish them the best in Kosovo. But also, the Serbs too. In Serbia and there.
I can recommend the book Åsne Seierstad wrote about the Serbs and Serbia in 2003. Better than Michael Palin’s depiction of the country, though. A bit deeper and more incisive than a Serbian rock-star. Not that I know a great deal about Serbia- all I can remember about going there is seeing the Cathedral in Belgrade (pretty amazing, actually) and a bad coffee outside the city of Niš. Southern Serbia is nice, though. Quite Meditterean in many respects. Perhaps in twenty years’ time or maybe sooner, we’ll see the polo-neck sweater wearing, tinted sunglasses, cigarillo smoking intelligensia buying holiday homes there. And at the same time complaining about housing shortages. Lovely little paradoxes we live in, eh? 
