How bad are the FRYs?

EUROPE: "Former Yugoslavia patches itself together: Entering the Yugosphere; Almost 20 years after political bonds were severed by war, day-to-day links between companies, professions and individuals are quietly being restored," The Economist, 22 August 2009.

Lately I've been hearing some audience members say, "You can't call the Balkans intervention successful, because Bosnia is still uncertain, Kosovo is bad, etc."

My reply is always that there's bad and then there's bad enough to warrant a return intervention. The latter just isn't in the works.

Interventions by the military aren't cure-alls; they merely buy time for better solutions to emerge amidst some semblance of stability. The best you can do is reset the conditions so that connectivity can resume and blossom.

This piece suggests that such connectivity is real and growing in the Balkans.

Why is this inter-republic business connectivity growing?

At a recent summit of the cold-war relic called the Non-Aligned Movement, Serbia's president, Boris Tadic remarked that companies from former Yugoslav republics should join forces to bid on construction projects or specialized military-equipment contracts. His Croatian counterpart, Stipe Mesic, responded approvingly. Companies from "our countries," he said, were too small to compete in other markets by themselves.

This is exactly the sort of logic I proposed in my Blueprint-era brief where I offered a journey from disconnectedness to connectedness not unlike what Ian Bremmer eventually published in his J-Curve book: fake states are penetrated by globalization and the divorce proceedings begin, as everyone wants their freedom and detachment from the neighboring "losers." If nasty enough, you have a real breakdown of order and those straight-line borders get redrawn in some version of "ethnic cleansing" (i.e., they're made squiggly again). But then, once independent, the logic of overlapping economic interests comes to the fore, and you see the integration process resume--this time based on economic logic versus whatever past imperial impulse held sway.

So you go (visually, a journey from left to right on an X [stability]-Y [connectedness] axis) from boxes stacked next to each other (upper left of resulting curve, equating to disconnected and stable), then to squiggly-lined entities pricking up against one another (at the bottom of the trough where the resulting entities are connected but unstable), then to an overlapping Venn (up the other side of the curve, where they are now connected and stable).

More detail from the article:

From Slovenia to the Macedonian border with Greece, most people in the region have a lot in common, even if they do not talk about it much. Every day the bonds between them, snapped in the 1990s, are being quietly restored. Yugoslavia is long gone; in its place a Yugosphere is emerging.

This huge shift in the daily life of the western Balkans is happening without fanfare. Few people have even noticed it. Those within the sphere take it for granted. Those outside are blithely ignorant. Perhaps that is not surprising. Good news is no news.

The currently planned "conquest" of Croatia by Serbia? "Not by armed force but by Cipiripi, a Serbian chocolate spread." Point being, companies more and more treat the whole package as a single market.

Closing:

The trick over the next few years will be to consolidate what people have in common, keep their governments focused on that, and try to bring the region's politics and business more closely aligned both throughout the Yugosphere and, ideally, with the rest of Europe, too. The European Union was founded to cement peace on the continent, and in the Yugosphere that job is not yet finished.

Damn that incessant optimism!

Good piece worth reading.