I came to Belgrade today with a heavy heart. Normally, I would have sat down with Zoran Djindjic to gossip about the state of affairs in the world, in Europe, in the Balkans, in Serbia. We would talk about mutual friends even mutual enemies. Now, he is tragically taken by an assassins bullet.
Zoran Djindjic was a man confronted with difficult tasks in difficult times. In order to achieve the things he wanted, he had to manoeuvre between and sometimes with the forces of heaven and those of hell. Sometimes, thats the hand history deals you. Zoran was not a saint, but he turned into a hero.
Thanks largely to him, Serbia now is on the road to join the rest of Europe: building peace and prosperity, regaining the future after trying to revisit the past.
Others played important, even decisive roles. But without Zoran, far less would have been achieved. He was a true man of Europe, and he will be truly missed.
The Balkans: Europes crucible
I have had the good fortune of working with this part of Europe for nearly eight years. Sometimes full-time as the representative of the European Union, the vaguely defined international community or the United Nations; sometimes just as an individual devoted to the peoples and the challenges of the region, representing nothing more than my own conscience. For me, this region represents some of the most complex aspects of Europes past, and some of the most important challenges of our future.
I have come to a radical, even shocking, belief: the future of Europe will be decided by the future of the Balkans.
Let me try to explain. In our part of the world, the Balkans is more than any other the meeting-place of cultures, traditions, nationalities and religions. No other part of Europe has been ruled by multi-national, multi-ethnic empires for so long.
Many emperors of the Roman Empire during its last centuries came from these lands, poised between east and west. Some of the brightest brains and the most skilled statesmen of the Ottoman Empire came from here. The reasons were the same: when cultures clash, there can be violent conflict, but also immense creativity.
The horrors of this part of Europe really start with the establishment of nation states. Here, this process encountered a mosaic of peoples, cultures, traditions and religions without parallel. There was no way of drawing clear borders for nation states based on one people, one language, one history and one religion.
In this region that for millennia had not known national borders, these lines were more often than not drawn in blood.
There is in the Balkans, then, a complex history of creativity and violence. One of my favourite sources is the set of briefing books prepared for the British and Imperial delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Their section on the Balkans starts by noting dryly, The first attempt to solve the Balkan problem might be attributed to the Persians. It goes on to attribute this regions challenges to the succession of various races who have from time to time entered it as conquerors or as settlers, sometimes occupying definitive areas, but frequently living side by side, with little mixture or amalgamation, in regions in which none of them can justify any exclusive claim.
It adds that this worked in a firm, accepted and stable framework, but that, as soon as this was removed, [Balkan peoples] have shown a tendency to racial, dynastic, or national enmities which have led to internecine strife and laid waste the country.
The language can be updated, but the essence of this view remains and reverberates.
Yugoslavia: facing the shells
In our own generation, when the framework that was Yugoslavia was broken up by the national revivals of Europe following the fall of the evil Soviet empire, we too saw national strife, ethnic brutality, cleansing and murder returning.
This disintegration was certainly aided by the red or the brown political forces trying to gain or hold onto political power, using the politics of fear to advance their aims: a Milosevic here or a Tudjman there.
But it was also a return to the Balkan wars of the end of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th century. Now as then the sometimes naïve and ignorant policies of the international community carried some responsibility.
Since the wars of the 1990s, we have tried to heal the wounds, and show a path towards the future. It is eight years since fighting stopped in Bosnia and Croatia; four since there was war over Kosovo and our bombs fell also over Belgrade; two since there was open conflict in Macedonia.
I vividly remember the sounds of the exploding shells, the falling bombs, the thundering guns. Most of the people you meet in the streets do. They dont say it; but all over this part of Europe, be certain that they do.
Healing these wounds and memories will not come easily. Creating firm frameworks that bypass the politics of fear and make it possible to regain faith in the future is also far from easy.
Our balance sheet is mixed. In Croatia, we turned a blind eye first to the ethnic crimes and cleansings of Milosevic in Vukovar and elsewhere, and then to the ethnic crimes and cleansings of Tudjman throughout western Slavonia and the Krajina.
In Bosnia, we met in Dayton to agree on a complex constitutional structure meeting the minimum demands of everyone but the maximum demands of no one. Gradually and grudgingly, we are trying to help in taking that forward.
Here in Serbia, we tried to aid the setting up of some sort of structure between Serbia and Montenegro. If we are honest, it might have created more obstacles than opportunities. History will judge.
For Kosovo, we tried in Rambouillet to create a peace, failed, and stumbled into a war that ended without a permanent peace. We celebrated success in making it possible for close to a million Albanians who had been forced to, or chose to flee, to return, but stared failure in the face as close to a quarter of a million Serbs and other minorities were forced or chose to flee after the UN and Nato took over de facto responsibility.
In Macedonia, we again failed to see the signs of war. We were negligent. But we managed to limit the damage and secure an agreement, and are now trying to help in taking that country forward.
In every circumstance, we could have done more. But we should also recognise what we did, under circumstances that were more difficult than most of us could imagine.
I remember a Danish girl commanding a Leopard tank in the north of Bosnia under the proud flag of the UN during one of the worst periods of that horrible war. A group of Muslims had come under fire from a Serb pillbox position. She immediately opened fire against it. She saved the ones she wanted to save.
Later, it was found out that she had fired no less than 72 tank shells into that poor pillbox. Asked by the commanding general why she had fired 72 rounds, she answered that it was because she didnt have more.
Others were sitting far away, pontificating. But we should never forget that many dared to face the devil on the ground in the horrors of the Bosnian war.
They did not save everyone. They certainly achieved less than they wished for. But many more would have died, and far less would have been possible today, had it not been for their courage and that of the leaders who sent them.
From Belgrade to Baghdad
Here in Belgrade, the minds of many are also on Baghdad. The bitter experience of the Balkans should teach us two lessons. First, the world is sometimes confronted with an evil that cant be just appeased. Diplomacy at some points reaches its limits, and force has to be used.
Second, force is never enough. There are no simply military solutions, no quick fixes or easy, early exits. If we are interested in building peace, not primarily in waging war, our commitment has to be long-term, deep, and often difficult.
The mighty fortress of Kalemagdan, where the Sava meets the Danube, was for centuries a fortress of the Ottoman Empire: an empire that stretched from Bihac in north-western Bosnia down to Basra on the Persian Gulf.
Today, many of the security challenges we face are found in this area from Bihac and Basra. Many constellate around the same question: can we build state structures in which different peoples, cultures and religions can live peacefully together?
Yugoslavia and Iraq, after all, were created under roughly the same circumstances at roughly the same time. The issues of Kurdistan might not be so different from those of Kosovo. Cyprus where efforts at a peaceful settlement have just been stalled by the intransigence of old forces is found roughly halfway between these two challenges.
All over this vast region, the most difficult issue is the choice between disintegration and integration. Our policies on this choice should be policies of design rather than policies of default, where things are left to drift until a frantic rescue is called for as the consequences of drift become clear.
The disintegration option often looks, superficially, like the less complicated one. With military might, you can always separate armies and states.
But options that are easy early on are often dangerous further down the road. One disintegration easily leads to another; one border leads to another. Balkanisation is not a stable state of affairs, but a process without end.
As we are confronted with Basras complexities, we have every reason to refocus attention also on this region. For we cannot claim that we are able to create true conditions for peace and prosperity there if we are seen to be failing here.
Rebuilding: Europe must lead
I believe that all the issues of the Greater Middle East require a true partnership between the United States and the European Union. There might be disagreement on tactics. But there cannot be much disagreement on strategic goals.
Equally, all the issues of the Balkans require true leadership by the European Union. I am convinced that such leadership, including the United States and Russia in the process, will be truly welcomed on the other side of the Atlantic.
We are investing massively in preventing war in this region. There are no truly reliable figures for the costs of our combined military commitments. But a task force by the US Council on Foreign Relations recently estimated the costs of US military forces in the Balkans from now until 2010 at $8-12 billion, and we can estimate European costs for preventing war in this part of Europe at 50-80 billion over the same period.
These are vast sums, but the real question is whether we are ready to invest as much in building peace as we are in preventing war. EU reconstruction commitments to the region are by far the largest, and they run at approximately 0.5 billion a year. The discrepancy is great.
These countries have been hit by a horrible combination of old-style economic systems, sanctions and strife. During the 1990s, the GDP per capita of Poland increased by around 50%; in the same period, it decreased in Serbia by at least the same proportion.
The task is staggering. The process of de-industrialisation continues. There is huge underemployment in the countryside throughout the region. For many, migration seems to be the only way in which a better future can be built.
We have every moral and political and social reason to help in meeting this challenge. The EU should be ready to take further steps in integrating these countries for economic growth and cohesion throughout Europe. Nato must do whatever it can through Partnership for Peace and other programmes. Furthermore, we should discuss whether the time has come to reform the institutions we have built to help the region integrate with the rest of Europe.
The past in the future
The 20th century left a horrible legacy of ethnic separation, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Europe. The creativity and culture of our continent suffered losses of monumental dimensions.
Gradually, we have tried to start to create a new future. We are starting to build a federation of nation states that I believe will one day encompass all of Europe to the west of Russia and the Ukraine, and ultimately stretch from the shores of the Arctic Ocean in the north to the edges of the Mesopotamia plains in the south.
Gradually, we see our nations opening up not only to each other, but also to the world outside. Globalisation is not an empty concept. Gradually, we are starting to reclaim the cosmopolitan past that gave Europe its true greatness.
Only a century ago, there were more Turks than Greeks in Thessalonika; more Albanians in Belgrade than in Pristina; more Serbs in Sarajevo than in any another city but Belgrade; more Jews than Lithuanians in Vilnius.
This situation will never return. But our future is dependent on us being able to live together far better than we managed to do during the last century. This is the essence of our effort not only to secure peace, but also to promote peace and to rekindle the creativity of Europe.
It is not always easy. The past can often be a vast barrier to the future. We often fear the uncertain. We tend to stick to what we know. We are all more or less tribal creatures.
It is in this part of Europe that we have seen the stark consequence of failure more than anywhere else in our generations. Here, many of us had to wake up to the fact that we were no longer part of a post-war generation of Europeans. Issues of peace and war, of integration or disintegration, of the meeting of cultures creating conflict or unleashing creativity, can be seen more clearly here than anywhere else in Europe.
How we all Swedes or Serbs, Croats or Canadians, Bosnians or Belgians, Albanians or Americans handle these issues will set the stage for our future. Not only in the Balkans, but in each of our own societies.
