The EU's handling of the Kosovo final status issue has been a dog's breakfast. After deciding that the EU would take the lead and act in concert, the member states then tore up Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" and started playing their own tunes.
It has been a disastrous cacophony. Europeans have poured many billions into the Balkans to stabilise the region over the past decade, and since the end of the Kosovo war in 1999, have expended vast diplomatic and political effort on the region. We have derived real benefits from a long-term strategy that aims at the integration of all Balkan countries into the EU. And yet when it came to the critical decision, we allowed the US and Russia to take the lead—not on the question of Kosovo's independence, but on the timing and framing of the province's final status.
The Americans let it be known long before negotiations ended that they would move to recognise Kosovo swiftly. This, of course, removed any incentive that the Albanians might have had to seek a proper settlement. The Russians replied that they would guarantee Serbia's sovereignty over the province by deploying their veto at the UN security council.
Forced into making a decision by Washington and Moscow, the EU consensus collapsed. A majority opted to recognise the Republic of Kosovo (albeit in some cases reluctantly), while a resolute minority said "no" (or in the case of Cyprus, "never").
The British and Americans assured other EU members that an avalanche of other countries would sign up for recognition as soon as Europe and US signalled their intention so to do. The idea was to suggest that the Russians were playing silly buggers, in part as a sop to a pan-Slavist tradition but also as a way of using Kosovo as a bargaining chip in other conflicts in the former Soviet Union. London and Washington further insisted that Kosovo was a "unique" case whose recognition would have no implications for secessionist issues elsewhere in the world. But when push came to shove, it turned out that the Russians were the ones with their finger on the global pulse. Almost everyone else in the world saw Kosovo as an uncomfortable precedent. The point is not whether recognition of Kosovo's independence was right or wrong, but that EU supporters of independence failed to make the political case on the wider global stage.
The big emerging powers—Brazil, China and India—show no inclination to recognise. Despite its confessional connection to Kosovo's Albanians, Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim state, looked on in horror at the move, fearing it could threaten its own territorial integrity. Apart from Afghanistan and Turkey, the Islamic world has cold-shouldered the new state for various reasons (including the vast sums of Russian money that are being washed through the Gulf). And if the supporters of recognition do not muster a majority in the UN general assembly by September, then Kosovo's attempts to join the key organisations of global governance will be largely in vain.
If Kosovo is not recognised by the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the WHO et al, then who is going to look after it? The Americans who were so keen to recognise? Nope—they feel they've done their bit. Obviously the Russians aren't going to help. The Saudis are always ready to fund the construction of mosques and madrassas, but are less interested in the prosaic issue of creating jobs. That leaves the EU.
If Kosovo's international future looks precarious, this is reflected in domestic conditions. The west has recognised a state which is de facto partitioned. Kosovo has five governments—the Kosovo government itself; the UN administration, the EU institution-building operation, the Serbian government (which functions in the Serbian areas) and Nato, which still has 16,000 troops there. And while the UN will probably go by summer, the new country remains an ungovernable mess with high levels of both unemployment and organised crime.
The EU will now be lumbered with responsibility for a chronically dysfunctional state for many years to come. There is a general election in Serbia in May—if we are lucky the pro-EU parties will win, but at the moment the nationalist parties are successfully making hay out of the Kosovo debacle. If they win, then the EU will face a recalcitrant, mischievous Serbia in the heart of the Balkans, capable of causing real disquiet in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a payback for the Kosovo recognition. Jealously guarding the sovereignty of member states when it comes to major foreign policy decisions is going to prove an expensive business for the EU.
