Can the Balkans unite again?

A Balkan region could one day play the role of uniting the region through common interests.

Empires come and go. The Ottoman-Muslim empire was among the better, and the Iberian-Catholic and European-Protestant among the worst. In the Ottoman empire, religions of the kitab (‘the book’: Judaism, Christianity, Islam) were respected; Turkish was not imposed. Religious-linguistic entities survived in the Balkans as opposed to in Latin-Caribbean America. National independence movements succeeded: Greece in 1829, Serbia and Rumania in 1878, Bulgaria in 1908, Albania in 1912.

But the nation-states were incomplete, and a century ago the Balkan League - Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro – declared war on the Ottoman Empire, and won. Then came the Second Balkan war of 1913 among the victors, Serbia-Greece-Romania against Bulgaria over Macedonia, which Bulgaria lost. Today this all sounds disturbingly familiar, and very far from Immanuel Kant’s ‘eternal peace.’ Wars may be over right now, but the recent wars cost many more lives than the Balkan wars of 1912-13, with an estimated 122,000 killed in action, 20,000 from wounds and 82,000 from disease. Positive peace seems far away; there is only some unstable negative peace.

Peace improves with equity and harmony, and is reduced by trauma and conflict: equity (cooperation for mutual and equal benefit), harmony (mutual empathy), reconciliation to reduce violence from trauma, and resolution processes to reduce violence from conflict. The conclusion will point in the direction of a Balkan Community – not only west Balkan – in southeast Europe, corresponding to the Nordic Community in the northwestern corner. This would give a new and positive meaning to ‘Balkanisation.’

Decline and fall

The Balkans were doubly divided in the 11th century: the schism between Catholics and Orthodox in 1054 – like the 395 split between the western and eastern Roman empires, Rome versus Constantinople – and then the declaration of war on Islam by Pope Urban II in November 1095.

Two dividing lines converged in Sarajevo, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Ground Zero for Euro-quakes. The Habsburgs from the northwest annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, and the Ottomans from the southeast defeated the Serbs in 1397 and were themselves defeated in the 1912 Balkan war, leaving behind Slavic and Albanian Muslims. A couple of years later, in 1918, the Habsburgs also went the way of all empires: decline and fall. The End.

The Soviets came, and went, the same way, in 1991; the U.S. Empire is following – by 30 years – meeting its fate not in the Balkans but in Afghanistan where empires are said to go to die. Do competing empires need each other so if one goes, so does the other? Anyhow, today the Balkans are run by Brussels: by the deeply-troubled European Union's "high" representatives, and by Nato, itself led by a bankrupt country.
Wars, wars, wars. The west uses the Balkans as a projection of its own repressed cruel history, but Balkan countries also carry their own burden of responsibility.

Greater Austria and Greater Turkey are gone. But put greater Hungary-Croatia-
Bosnia-Serbia-Albania-Macedonia on the map, and then take a look through the 'peace lens': what a fascinating part of the world, from Austria to Greece, Dalmatia to the Aegean, Moldavia! What diversity! Add symbiosis, and equity, and we are almost there.

Today the parts of the former Yugoslavia often find more common ground as a community than inside their fractured new-born countries. A Balkan region could one day play the role of uniting the region through common interests and joint projects. All that is needed to start such a bloc is a Balkan Commission with an Assembly, one chamber for the states, one for the nations. The Nordic experience is that the community survives even with three states inside and two outside the European Union. Give the nations a veto in matters of vital importance to their identity. The task is to come up with an equilibrium, and the Swiss seem to have done so for more than 700 years.

Everybody must be represented, everybody must feel at home, and the benefits – as well as the risks and costs – must be reasonably mutual and equal. Educators can make the traumas and glories of all states and nations shared property, for empathy, for harmony. Historians can bring perpetrators and victims closer to each other by producing histories acceptable to both. Politicians, and diplomats, can become more creative and find new conflict solutions, not lukewarm compromises.

Clearly such processes take time, but much bilateral groundwork is being done. Yes, Mostar divides Bosnia-Herzegovina. But there was, and is again, a bridge - maybe Bosnia-Herzegovina with a smoother federation could become a bridge joining three Balkan nations? And how about a federal Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia – all within an overarching Balkan Community, doing well on all four peace tasks, building symbiosis among its beautifully diverse parts? Might this be a model for Europe, and the world? Balkans of all kinds, unite; you have only your self-pity to lose.