The Balkans aren't Gap-bad anymore

ARTICLE: While Europe Sleeps, Bosnia Seethes, By NICHOLAS KULISH, New York Times, September 5, 2009

The point of my description of "success" in the Balkans isn't that the place is now perfect or that instability can't still occur there. The point is, the Balkans are no longer a flashpoint. No one can imagine wider war on this basis. When the region shifts its discussion from defense to security, then it's part of the Core.

If the drift of public attention away from Bosnia is a result of more pressing issues in an age of terrorism and rogue nuclear states, it is also a function of the simple fact that this ethnically divided country finds itself in the middle of a far more united, stable and at times downright boring Europe than in the days of the civil war.

Bosnia could well return to violence, but it has lost a large measure of what might be called its Franz Ferdinand threat. For all of the moral and humanitarian arguments for getting involved in the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, there was also the severe lesson from Archduke Ferdinand's assassination in 1914, which provided the spark for World War I. That lesson was simple: conflicts start in the Balkans, but they do not necessarily stay there.

The end of the cold war brought elation but also trepidation. In hindsight, the march of countries like Poland, Hungary and Romania from the Warsaw Pact into NATO and the European Union may appear steady and all but predestined, but the paths of those newly freed countries were anything but certain at the time. Bosnia was a starkly destabilizing factor in a far more unstable continent. The fighting that began in the spring of 1992 was not quite three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and less than a year after the attempted coup of August 1991 in Russia, and came hard on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Today, the picture has changed again. Now that Europe is no longer the fault line of a divided world, it looks ever more like a retirement community with good food and an excellent cultural calendar. Spies cut from the George Smiley cloth could really come in from the cold, retiring with legions of their countrymen to the Spanish coast, with no more to worry about than the decline of the pound against the euro and the sinking value of their condos.

The European Union has its share of problems, including a rapidly graying population projected to shrink by 50 million people by 2050 and deep troubles in integrating the immigrants -- particularly from Muslim countries -- it so drastically needs to reverse the demographic slide. And the union's energy security depends on its often capricious and at times menacing neighbor to the east, Russia.

Russia's invasion of Georgia last summer served as a stern reminder that things can still get rough outside of the gated community, and certainly made newer members like Poland and Estonia nervous about the sturdiness of the fence.
Renewed fighting in Bosnia may not launch World War III, but it could well spread to other parts of the former Yugoslavia, including Kosovo.

Kosovo, you dare say?

Again, the point is that the Balkans scenario has been dramatically reduced in its potency. The worst situations (Bosnia and Kosovo) remain, but bad neighborhoods will always be part of the Core's landscape. Dealing with those bad neighborhoods is a complex affair, all right, and the dependency state created in Bosnia has done little good and much harm.

But the strategic conversation has been totally altered.