The 1990s in the Balkans have taught us, above all, that sustainable peace is a last resort. Peace among nations is the result of attrition and exhaustion, of mutual terror and actual bloodletting – not of amicable agreement and visionary stratagems. It took two world wars to make peace between France and Germany. By forcing an unwanted cessation of hostilities upon an unwilling populace in the early stages of every skirmish, the West ascertains the perpetuation of conflicts.

Wherever possible and applicable, the West should dangle economic carrots (such as EU membership) in front of the bloodied pugilists (although not ram them down their reluctant throats in shows of air superiority, as it did and still is doing in Serbia). Humanitarian aid should be provided and grants and credits for development to the deserving. But the military succor afforded by the likes of Germany to the likes of Croatia and by the benighted Americans to the most extreme elements in Kosovo served only to amplify and prolong the suffering and the warfare.

The West obstinately refused – and still does – to contemplate the only feasible solution to the spectrum of Balkan questions. Instead of convening a new Berlin Congress and redrawing the borders of the host of entities, quasi-entities and fraction entities that emerged with the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation, the West foolishly and blindly adhered to unsustainable borders which reflect colonial decision making and ceasefire lines. In the absence of a colonizing power, only ethnically-homogeneous states can survive peacefully in the Balkans and elsewhere. The West should have strived to effect ethnic homogenization throughout the region by altering borders, encouraging population swaps and transfers and discouraging ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation (“ethnic denial”).

But the West’s missteps in the Balkans were not confined to the political and geopolitical realms.

The West (actually, America) has many long arms, the IMF and World Bank being the most prominent. These ostensible multilaterals have committed yet another strategic blunder. Instead of weaning their clientele – the post-Communist countries in transition – off central planning and command economics, they engaged in Washington-based micromanagement of their economies. The Bretton-Woods institutions have become all-pervasive, multi-tentacled approximations of the Communist party. They dictate policy, involve themselves in the minutest details of daily management, veto decisions (economic and non-economic), cajole and threaten governments, block private sector lending and compete in the international credit and investment markets.

The post-Communist countries in transition – and Iraq today – are like infants taking their first steps in the demanding world of free markets and capitalism. The multilateral financial institutions are the mother figures. Good mothers let go, encourage in the child a sense of independence, self-reliance, learning by mistakes and the predictability of just rewards and punishments. Bad mothers refuse to acknowledge the emerging boundaries of their off-spring. They reward clinging behaviour and punish every act of separation and individuation. They are overweening, doting, crushing figures. In short: they micromanage.

The truth is that nations act out of self-interest. America’s involvement in the Balkans was not motivated by idealism, spurious or real. The passing of the USSR left a power vacuum in Europe and elsewhere, in erstwhile theatres of the Cold War. The USA stepped in to make clear who is the new sheriff in town and to establish its credentials as the sole superpower. Bosnia-Herzegovina and, later, Kosovo served merely to illustrate that saying “no” to the USA was not an option and that defiant dissidents in the New World Order will be severely penalized. The “humanitarian intervention” cover story was good for forging international coalitions and was thus used only twice and exclusively in Europe (America stood by and watched the Rwandan genocide unfold, for instance). Now, no longer in need of partners (or so it believes), the USA doesn’t even bother to pretend any more.

Imagination is a good thing, however as far as historical facts go, there’s no substitute for reality. Is the current demographic situation in Kosovo a result of a similar situation to the scenario that Alejandro just imagined? Clearly not. From the end of WWII, until the 1990, Albania was ruled by one the most hermetically closed and isolated regimes in the entire world, staunchly Stalinist until the very end. A regime that made even today’s N Korea look like a tea party, a regime that chastised the USSR and the rest of E European for being too liberal, and later China too for opening up trade with the US (in the late seventies). Everyone that has even a smidgen of knowledge of Stalinist Albania, knows that very very few tourists were allowed in and no Albanians could travel outside of the country. The punishment for every one crossing the border was extended to their entire family. Even those very few that managed to escape such hell, would logically settle in the US and West Europe rather than in the impoverished Kosovo.
From 1990 until 1999, while Albania opened up to the world, it was Kosovo to be ruled with an iron fist by the strongman of Yugoslavia Milosevic. It’s illogical to think that while he was making plans to eradicate the Albanian element from Kosovo, he would allow millions from Albania to settle in. And again, please provide one single shred of evidence to back up your claims.
But then, Albania’s entire population is only 3.5 million. At the end of the WWII it was a little more than a million. How was is possible then to fill Kosovo with two million “immigrants” as suggested here, and change so drastically the demographics there? Let alone that Serbia’s own official census since WWI, shows clearly that Albanians were always the overwhelming majority in Kosovo.
When someone starts making up stuff, it shows that they obviously have run out of valid arguments.

Countries die from internal rot, long before they are crushed from the outside. A fish rots from the head.

The entire Romanian political class is united against Kosovo independence except for the ethnic hungarian portion of it which is all for it. Why they desire to be a european bantustan (the proposed Szekler territory has no border with anybody but Romania) is beyond me but that’s what they’re agitating for.

As a result of lax immigration laws, a porous southern border and the prevailing multi-culti dogma, Arizona is flooded by Mexican immigrants who set up their own churches and elect their own mayors, marginalising the existing population. After a while, they constitute the demographic majority in that State, and they unilaterally decide to secede.

Now imagine that instead of Mexicans, its Muslims.

One reason I can think of is that it’s a choice between the EU and keeping them out of the hands (influence and investment) of Russia and China.

Why the US would want a stronger EU is a question to me. How is it good for us? Yet those large traditional countries in broken and needy national bits, especially in an economic sense, that can build a strong EU, and for the bureaucrats running that thing, this is a development devoutly to be wished for.

Mal asunto este de Kosovo y gran hipocresía de algunas naciones Europeas como por ejemplo Francia que con “mano dura” (política inflexible) reprimen sus focos separatistas nacionalistas mientras avivan los de otras naciones.

Les voy a resumir mi impresión desde España de lo acaecido en Kosovo. Imaginen que algún Estado norteamericano con el pasar del tiempo es masivamente poblado por mexicanos por poner un ejemplo y al ser mayoría “étnica” deciden independizarse de los USA. Eso mismo ha pasado en Kosovo la inmigración islamista Albanesa emigro a Kosovo, después fueron mayoría y después….

Tengan ustedes cuidado con los Europeos terminan siempre enredándolos y al fina quedan ustedes como los malos de las películas. Por otro lado los islamistas por muchos favores que ustedes les hagan siempre les odiaran, pues ellos lo que odian es la esencia de occidente, y ustedes son ahora la quintaesencia de esto.

Saludos desde España y reitero mis disculpas por no poder expresarme en inglés.