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From: Global Power Europe
On Sunday or Monday, Kosovo is likely to finally declare its independence from Serbia. Hopefully this will be one of the final acts of the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession, which saw the Western Balkans degenerate into carnage and disorder. It will also lead to the creation of another country on the European continent, perhaps destined to become one day a Member State of the European Union. Equally, Serbia will be shorn of its remaining pretensions as a potential hegemon in the region; dreams of a ‘Greater Serbia’—which claimed so many lives during Slobodan Milosevic’s wars of aggression in the 1990s—will fall into the dirt. Pruned of Kosovo, Serbia will be but a rump of the former Yugoslavia, yet in a better position to face the future as a modern European nation. And as the power of the European Union moves in to fill the vacuum, the residue of Russian influence in the Western Balkans will evaporate.

This of course all relies on good policy, something Europeans have lacked until recently when dealing with the countries that were once Yugoslavia. Jacques Poos’ presumptuous declaration in 1991 that the ‘hour of Europe’ was upon us, that the European Community was ready and able to settle the urges of succession felt by many Yugoslavs, never came to be. Europeans looked on as an area proximate to their homeland witnessed the re-emergence of concentration camps, and as genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ returned to haunt the continent. The murderous actions of Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica were certainly the most excessive of the violence, particularly as European soldiers were ordered not to intervene as the killing took place. In part, it was out of this failure that the Islamist movement gained ground, hoping to use the massacre as a means to recruit new blood to the Islamist cause—with enormous and ongoing implications. And that the Americans with their advocacy of a more aggressive and interventionist approach against the Serbs turned out to be right worked only to compound Europe’s ignominy. Far from being the ‘hour of Europe’, the whole affair became the hour that many Europeans have since tried hard to forget.

The stakes are still high. A poorly managed independence bid by Kosovo on the part of we Europeans could still see a return to considerable violence and bloodshed, leading to a serious security problem. And with the United States bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, there will be no ‘Uncle Sam’ to come to our rescue. At least Europeans learnt certain things from their decade in the former Yugoslavia: the Bosnian wars produced the furrows into which the seeds of a wider, deeper and harder Common Foreign and Security Policy were planted, and for the subsequent creation of the European Security and Defence Policy. Tangible outcomes—from the European Rapid Reaction Force, the European Security Strategy, and the European Battlegroups, along with the new institutional architecture in Brussels—should ensure that we Europeans now have the capabilities to deal with similar disorder in the future. As such, the successful management of Kosovo’s independence might be considered as the culmination of what has been a difficult learning curve. But for those tools and policies to effectively be put into practice requires a coherent European stance to begin with. Unfortunately, that is the problem: Cyprus, Romania and Greece have continued to disagree with the common European line set down by London, Paris and Berlin, who are in turn supported by all remaining Member States.

The unhelpful approach to Kosovo taken by Cyprus and Greece raises issues concerning both Member States’ true allegiances. Mark Leonard, Director of the newly founded European Council on Foreign Relations, has accused them as being the ‘Trojan Horses’ for Russian interests in the European Union; that is to say, they often lean towards the Russian as opposed to the European approach on a range of issues, and veto European policy when the need arises. This is problematic at the best of times, but over the issue of Kosovo it is downright unacceptable. We cannot have certain Member States taking orders from foreign capitals, particularly when those capitals are increasingly arrogant, bellicose and working against our collective European interests.