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The Washington Quarterly 23.4 (2000) 171-175



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Has Anyone Seen Our Policy?

Misha Glenny


The Balkans threatened to explode again last spring. With the aid of some judgment and even more luck, the European Union and the United States prevented three tumors in the western Balkans from turning malignant.

The feared outbreak of widescale violence around Mitrovica, the divided city in northern Kosovo, did not happen.

Tension in the Presevo region of southern Serbia, called Eastern Kosovo by Albanians, did not degenerate into a messy firefight between Kosovo Liberation Army-backed rebels, Serb police, and Kosovo Peacekeeping Force forces as some at NATO headquarters feared.

Montenegro, the tottering domino, still stands.

Despite the good fortune, the EU, United States, and NATO still have developed no coherent strategy that will ensure long-term peace and democracy in the region. In the short term, the absence of a coherent strategy for Balkan reconstruction ensures that small but potentially dangerous crises can flare up unexpectedly at any time, as they did in both Mitrovica and Presevo. In the long term, the policy void may create a fundamental sense of mistrust between Balkan countries and the West that could undermine attempts to stabilize the region.

Clues to Progress

Last spring, as tension in these three areas relaxed, Western policymakers breathed a sigh of relief and turned their attention to more constructive matters. On the political front, the long-awaited Stability Pact Donors' Conference, held at the end of March in Brussels, did not break down in confusion [End Page 171] as some had predicted. In fact, thanks to careful planning, the conference exceeded its funding target; $1.8 billion will now be diverted over the next 18 months into the so-called Quick Start program. Quick Start is intended to finance high-visibility projects designed to have the maximum impact on the greatest possible number of Balkan citizens so that Western assistance ascends from the realm of bureaucratic imagination into an uncertain Balkan reality.

The shift from political crisis to economic reconstruction was a welcome relief. Chris Patten, the EU external affairs commissioner, has indicated that the success of Quick Start will be crucial in sustaining support within the region for the West's strategy. But already the sense of policy drift--especially in Kosovo and Serbia--has begun to overshadow the Stability Pact's promise of swift investment.

In Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, the head of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), seems determined to force through a bold program that could see municipal elections take place in Kosovo as early as October. To complement this renewed spirit of commitment, a rhetoric of complacency is at last yielding to a language that admits there is much unfinished business in the Balkans. Even Lord George Robertson, secretary general of NATO, for whom the glass is invariably half-full, now concedes that "no one can be satisfied with the current situation."

Patten and Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, are more specific: "Western policy in the Balkans," they reported to the EU heads of government in March, "suffers from the multiplicity of institutions," and "from complex and lengthy procedures for policy formulation." Balkan policy is made and executed by a bewildering number of overlapping and competing organizations, and this clearly leads to a degree of confusion. But according to Carl Bildt, Balkan reconstruction faces a more fundamental hurdle: "It is less a question of too many cooks spoiling the broth," the UN special representative to the Balkans has said. "It is more that we don't have a recipe."

Deciphering the Strategy

To solve the baffling case of the missing policy, the EU and the United States have to disentangle operational problems from strategic goals before clarifying exactly what those goals are. Patten and Solana have now grasped the tactical issue. Their report and recommendations are sober and sensible. The most pressing problems are Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro, and Stability Pact implementation, in that order. On Kosovo, the big issue is civil and voter registration, a massive operation that is being jointly carried out by Kouchner...

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