Welcome to the Balkan Alps, home of the European redneck.
The borders between countries have mostly been ironed out by now. Yet a few hotly-contested disputes continue to play out in power vacuums. More specifically, in the Balkan mountains of Europe, the sudden dissolutions of the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia led to some major clusterfucks in the 21st century.
Chief among them is the Kosovo-Serbia conflict. The question of whether the ethnically-Albanian people of southwestern ‘Serbia’ should have their own country, known as ‘Kosovo,’ continues to boil over into outright violence to this day.
The Kosovo question has always been fraught with tension, as there is a significant Serbian population in Kosovo too. This led to an all-out war in 1998, where Kosovars kicked some Serbian ass, leading to their current status of de facto independence. The fighting continues to this day, however, in the hearts and minds of the Albanian and Serbian people.
Just last month, violence broke out in northern Kosovo as a new batch of ethnically-Albanian mayors took office among a large Serbian population. Serbs had boycotted the elections and aggressively protested the results, to the extent that riot police were called in to help the new mayors take office.
The global response was largely to condemn Kosovo, despite these being regular elections. No illegal or even surprising actions were taken here, yet the global zeitgeist seems to be swinging in favor of Serbia. As if to illustrate this, Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic wrote the following on a rolling camera lens at the French Open:
“Kosovo is the heart of Serbia. Stop the violence”
Today, there are over 700 Serbian trucks currently blockading the border of Kosovo.
This is in response to a widely unpopular bill in Kosovo which would make it illegal for Serbian goods and Serbian trucks to pass through the Serbia-Kosovo border.
The game is afoot… yet again; the only question is whether it turns violent… yet again.
The funny thing is, it would make a lot of sense for Kosovo to just join Albania, right?
97% of Kosovars are just ethnic-Albanians… Being Albanian is their whole national identity. There are no ethnic-Kosovars. So if Albania is right next-door, why not just join them?
Well, according to a 2019 poll by the Open Society Foundation, both Kosovars and Albanians are only lukewarm on the idea. Only 54% and 63% of them respectively supported reunification of a ‘Greater Albania.’
It seems to me the Albanian people of both countries are generally receptive to the idea, but are gradually talked out of it by the powers that be. For example, respondents are often asked as a follow-up: “Would you support a reunification tax?” Which, of course, instantly causes support for reunification to crater.
This ultimately makes sense. Why would you pay a tax just to dilute your own voting power? Power does not give up power easily. Whether you are a voter or a ruler, if you believe yourself to have some amount of sovereign power, you will not give any portion of that up without a gun to your head.
Thus, we can expect a sovereign state of Kosovo to exist for the foreseeable future… Unless/until that gun finally appears to their head.
