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Obama and the Balkans: What Kind of Multilateralism?
(...) As unpleasant as it may be for Europe to hear, the stabilization of the Balkans during its painful transition in the 1990s was made possible by the United States. Although America initially stayed out of the conflicts that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the fighting ultimately stopped only after President Bill Clinton summoned the warring parties to Dayton in 1995.
When Kosovo started looking like the next chapter in the region's bloody history, it was again the U.S. that took decisive action, with Europe happy to support Washington's lead.
And finally, the U.S. made the final call to recognize Kosovo's independence last year, facing down Russia along the way, even if most of the EU member states subsequently followed suit.
Now, with the new Obama administration in the White House, many have wondered about the future of American involvement in the Balkans, with calls for Washington to re-engage in order to "protect" its investment in the region.
A string of experts and officials has recently been reminding the United States of its unfinished business in the Balkans. (...)
[Just before the U.S. presidential election last year, Richard Holbrooke and Paddy Ashdown] (...), both of whom played crucial roles in the creation of post-war Bosnia (Holbrooke as broker of the Dayton Agreement and Ashdown as high representative of the international community to the country), argued that the situation could be reversed "provided the EU wakes up, the new U.S. administration gets engaged, and both renew their commitment to Bosnia's survival as a state."
In early January, two other senior experts warned about the lack of international -- and in particular, American -- attention to the Balkans. Morton Abramowitz and Daniel Serwer suggested that "a divided EU is allowing the Balkans to slide toward greater instability, while the U.S. remains mostly on the sidelines." (...)
[And a couple of weeks ago, Gordon Bardos] contended that the new Obama administration would need a "new framework for dealing with the region." This framework, he argued, should go beyond "Washington's essentially neoconservative understanding of the Balkans," which over the years reduced the region's problems to "a Manichean struggle between 'good' and 'bad' nationalisms," that could be "dealt with by ignoring international institutions such as the U.N., and encouraging unilateral American action and the application military force."
There is some truth to his argument. But to a large extent, U.S. action in the Balkans was not so much about unilateralism as it was about taking charge in situations when it was clear that the EU's paralysis was effectively hindering Brussels from taking a decisive course of action. The U.S., after all, never did anything in the Balkans over the objections of the EU, and most European nations went along with both NATO's intervention in 1999, and with Kosovo's independence last year.
In this sense, the U.S. and the EU complemented each other well in the region. Washington cleared the road, while the EU made sure things stayed on course, partly through massive financial assistance but, above all, through dangling the possibility of eventual EU membership. Washington acted swiftly and effectively in times of crisis, while Brussels subsequently took over to finalize things through patient and persistent political negotiation.
But if it's true that the Obama administration should renew America's commitment to multilateralism, so, too, should Europe.
The lack of progress in the region and the risk of regression have at least in part to do with the downside of Europe's principle stabilization mechanism, namely the promise of EU membership. To put it simply, the process just takes too long. Besides Croatia, none of the prospective member states can actually see the light at the end of the accession tunnel.
And as even Croatia can attest, the enlargement process is often used by other member states to wring concessions from the candidate nation on bilateral disputes. For Macedonia (due to a name dispute with Greece), but especially for Serbia (due to its refusal to recognize Kosovo's independence), that may be more than they're willing to accept.
To make matters worse, the EU is no longer even very convinced about enlargement. Whereas the "Big Bang" of 2004 -- which saw Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungry, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia admitted -- was greeted with excitement, and the entry of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007 with a sort of inertia, further expansion now provokes more a sense of fatigue than enthusiasm. That hasn't gone unnoticed in the Balkans, resulting in a state of "Eurosis" throughout the region.
There is little that Washington can do about the pace of enlargement, which is a European affair. But the problem has a tremendous impact on the region, which, on top of everything else, is contained in a continental ghetto by the EU's rigid visa policy.
The U.S. should not be expected to step in once again and take care of what the EU has neglected. So when Washington considers calls for a new multilateral approach to the region, it should ask Brussels how it plans to contribute.
