The New Experiment

Celebrants in Prishtinë on February 17, 2008

On February 17, 2008, Kosovo, a formerly autonomous region of Yugoslavia under UN administration and a NATO protectorate since 1999, declared itself an independent and sovereign state. The declaration was celebrated by the country’s Albanian majority and vehemently denounced by Belgrade, who backs Kosovo’s 100,000 Serbs (5.5% of the country’s population) and views the region as the birthplace of the Serbian nation. Afghanistan was the first country to formally recognize Kosovo as a sovereign state, followed quickly by the US and most European nations. Today 43 countries recognize Kosovo’s independence.

Stuck in a political deadlock with Belgrade, isolated from the region (only one of Kosovo’s neighbors, Albania, recognizes it as a state), and now at odds with the UN administration (UNMIK), Kosovo’s future looks anything but rosy. As the poorest nation in Europe, 45% of Kosovars live below the poverty line, 15% on less than one Euro a day. Unemployment is at 53%. Remittances from overseas make up 15.2% of the population’s total income. Once a breadbasket of Yugoslavia, agriculture only accounts for a quarter of Kosovo’s GDP. 90% of Kosovo’s legal cross-border trade are imports.

The economy is bad, and it doesn’t look to be getting any better. Kosovo’s education system is struggling. The country’s infrastructure is outdated and in disrepair after the war. UNMIK spends most of its $200m annual budget on “institution building” initiatives—training officials and politicians in the philosophies of internationalism and the rigors of bureaucracy. Efforts to mold Kosovo into an EU statelet don’t appear to have much traction. Jeremy Harding wrote that “because of longstanding attitudes in Albanian society, there is only a dim sense of the purpose served by the state or public institutions”. Mentor Agani, an academic in Prishtinë, told Harding “We [Kosovars] lived outside the state for years and became very good at subsistence. Statehood is not a skill we’ve had”.

Statehood is an experiment for Kosovo, and for the international community involved there. Like Bosnia, Kosovo is a country faced with the legacy of a brutal ethnic conflict never resolved and the persistent specter of nationalism. And like Bosnia, Kosovo is a country that must manage the sudden appearance of capitalism’s social and political dimensions.

But unlike Bosnia, Kosovo is a country free of prohibitive power-sharing agreements that make any political future unrealistic. Nationalism, kept alive in Bosnia by a constitution which subordinates the state to the sovereignty of the country’s three constituent nations (Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats), may fade quietly from Kosovo, a country with one majority (Albanians) and one minority (Serbs).

Last week several internationals admitted to my editor that post-war Bosnia—Dayton Bosnia—was an experiment. After 13 years it is clear, they said, that the West’s experiment of a Dayton-style, multi-ethnic state in the Balkans has failed. In Kosovo, a new experiment has begun: how a state can proceed out from under the perceived yoke of Western administration, an administration that has “infantilised” and “depoliticized” the Kosovar population, and effectively disenfranchised the Bosnians.