Michael Rossi

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has sent political shockwaves around the world and risks galvanizing like-minded national populist movements in weak democracies throughout Europe, and in particular those in Southeastern Europe. However, day-to-day politics and previously agreed to commitments by countries and territories in the region will, for the most part, keep politics from becoming too volatile and unpredictable. Additionally, the apparent inheritance by Germany as the leader of liberal democratic development in Europe will keep most ambitions in check for the sake of EU integration and eventual membership.

This paper argues that current Western-backed approaches to conflict resolution in Kosovo have failed to alter Serbia’s policy toward the region and have contributed to the exacerbation of political tensions between Belgrade and Brussels, while deepening ethnic cleavages between Serb and Albanian communities. While there is no possibility of Kosovo returning to Serbia’s control, there is an equal unlikelihood that Serbian-populated regions of Kosovo, especially the north, will submit to Pristina’s authority. Most importantly, there is little hope that Kosovo can gain full international recognition and membership in international organizations without a compromise settlement with Serbia. While territorial partition has long been a suggested option, I conclude that the best possible solution for Kosovo, given the positions of all parties involved, is a process of significant decentralization beyond the internationally supported measures in the Ahtisaari Plan. A model of consociational power sharing is
one in which Serbian and Albanian municipalities are granted high levels of autonomy similar to arrangements made for Bosnia. While this solution may not be ideal and further weakens central authority, I argue that consociationalism reduces the problems
of ethnic conflict, encourages local self-government, and preserves the overall territorial integrity of Kosovo.

Developments in Serbia’s democratic consolidation over the past six years have been both ongoing and progressive. Yet the establishment of a widely shared and collectively accepted political culture that has departed from the ethnocentric and
euroskeptic narratives of the Milosevic era remains incomplete. Additionally, the failure by Serbian socio-political elites in appropriating alternative narratives of Serbian history and culture that demonstrate a tradition of shared values and identities with other European communities has stymied public acceptance of
Serbia’s European integration and public trust among its leaders. This paper argues that Serbian socio-political elites can appropriate narratives and symbols of Serbian collective identity that have been either sidelined or neglected by previously established ethnocentric narratives, and ascribe new systems of meaning and codes of behavior that qualify European liberal democratic values. I argue that a plentiful reservoir of democratic capital can be found in the histories of Serbian communities
in Vojvodina over the past three centuries, and the urban cosmopolitanism of Belgrade from the late 1860s up to the present period.

here has been speculation in recent weeks that the leaders of Kosovo and Serbia have explored the option of a land swap, with some predominantly ethnic-Albanian areas of Serbia being traded for Serbian majority areas in Kosovo. my paper argues that an exchange of territory would do little for the Serbian or Albanian communities involved and could pose a threat to the stability of the region.

Though Kosovo’s relations with the Serbian government in Belgrade have certainly improved and a series of agreements reached in April 2013 under EU mediation committed both sides to long-term normalization of relations, questions remain as to what happens next. Officials in Pristina, Belgrade and Brussels need to address a number of additional truths that have become all too inconvenient and, like the previous five, risk keeping Kosovo in political, economic, and diplomatic limbo.

Kosovo has one of the most decentralized unitary governments in the world, with highly conflicted understandings over the nature of power-sharing. The paradox of conflict resolution in deeply divided societies is that it almost always creates new problems while attempting to solve old ones.

If Kosovo is ever to be the functioning state its supporters think it is, considerable attention will have to be paid to issues of power-sharing between Kosovo Serbs and Albanians, reduction in the dependency the United States and other powers place in  highly corrupt individuals to ensure stability and order, and an honest assessment of conflict resolution with Serbia that defines what Kosovo’s status is within an international legal framework.