Is Europe’s old flashpoint, the Balkans, rearing its head as a worry once again? A recent statement by Angela Merkel may have deserved more attention than it got. Speaking to some of her party members, the chancellor warned that if Germany closed its border with Austria, the outcome might be an escalation of already rising tensions in the Balkans. “I don’t want to see military conflicts becoming necessary,” she said.
With the approach of winter and the continuing inflow of refugees and migrants, Europe’s south-eastern flank will certainly be the place to watch in the coming weeks and months. But are we really talking about the outbreak of war? Merkel has been under sustained political pressure for opening the door to refugees two months ago. She has been trying hard to convince her domestic constituency, especially in Bavaria, that her policies are sound.
The concern she expressed in that statement was no doubt sparked by the nasty squabbling and disarray among Balkan states over how to deal with hundreds of thousands of desperate people cramming through their borders, on to trains and across fields, sometimes even wading through rivers, in a frantic rush northwards. So far, the Balkan states have been a transit point. But if borders close in Germany and elsewhere huge numbers of people will end up camped in these countries, and a bad situation risks becoming very volatile indeed.
Merkel’s choice of words was no doubt aimed at conveying a sense of urgency. It also had a purely domestic purpose. By framing the problem as one which might, if not dealt with properly, spark conflict in Europe’s weak Balkan underbelly, she possibly intended to scare people into acting preventively.
But to many – inside and outside Germany – it sounded like a wild overstatement. One former high-level official from the western Balkans told me he didn’t think the situation would get “that bad – not as bad as it once was”. The Croatian prime minister reacted bluntly: “There will be no armed conflict.” He also added that if Germany closed its border to refugees, Croatia would “do the same, even faster”.
A risk of armed conflict? It’s not as if we were back in another era, when Otto von Bismarck declared: “If there is ever another war in Europe it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.” Last year marked the centenary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, and that history is not being revisited.
Nor are the Balkans today where they were in the early 1990s, when Slobodan Milošević’s strategy of hyper-nationalism and calls for a Greater Serbia led to full-scale war and the worst crimes against humanity on European soil since 1945. Times have changed. Peace accords, democratisation, efforts towards political reform and Euro-Atlantic integration have transformed the region since the Balkan wars ended 16 years ago.
But this is hardly a topic on which Merkel can be suspected of ignorance, or carelessly sensational assessments. Germany’s weight, its history, and the chancellor’s personal activism in framing Balkan questions as strategic European ones is well known. Long before the refugee and migrant crisis hit, Merkel had tried to focus attention on the region’s woes and the need for more European mobilisation. She initiated special EU Balkan summits. She was the only European leader to get on the phone to the Albanian and Serbian prime ministers, urgently calling for calm when riots broke out after a football match in Belgrade between their national teams in October 2014. Later that year, she publicly warned that Russia’s neo-imperial appetites, as demonstrated in Ukraine, could also have dire consequences in the Balkans.
There is no doubt government relations have frayed in the Balkans. It started when Hungary walled off its border with Serbia, leading refugees to find other routes further west. Croatia then Slovenia became overwhelmed. There have been dramatic scenes of refugees trekking in the cold and messy police deployments; and worrying exchanges of insults between political leaders blaming each other for the chaos. Serbia has had a better record of welcoming migrating families – possibly because its government wants to burnish its credibility for EU accession talks, or because Serbs remember the trauma of having thousands of forcibly displaced people during the 1990s wars – but it also has started threatening to block its border.
Vessela Tcherneva, a Balkan analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations thinktank, is struck by how quickly interstate relations could deteriorate in the region. “It’s scary,” she says, “it’s as if a genie had been let out of the bottle”. Old animosities have reappeared. Some in Serbia have called officials in Croatia “Ustashi”, a reference to Croatia’s second world war fascists. Governments have started hinting of deploying soldiers along borders to channel migrants. There is a return to hardcore security and territorial obsessions – the sort of thinking which, in the last two decades or so, had been become politically incorrect. Mental barriers of restraint seem to come apart. Add to that the corroding factor of mafia groups raking in profits from the trafficking of migrants, and the Balkan picture does indeed appear dim.
The western Balkans are a poor region with low growth, massive unemployment and a GDP per capita less than half of the EU average. Left alone these countries will not be able to deal with the consequences of becoming a buffer zone where thousands of refugees and migrants are blocked or sent back to from richer European countries. Even if only two western Balkan states, Slovenia and Croatia, are EU members, the whole region should be included in European discussions about forging mechanisms to address the refugee crisis – and all countries should benefit from those mechanisms. Getting dialogue back on track and not giving up on full EU integration for the Balkans could go a long way. But so far, the EU has not matched its promises of better coordination and resources with convincing action.
The bottom line is that Europe needs to rediscover its unfinished business in the Balkans, a region that lies on its borderlands and where its values are being crucially tested. This is, after all, where much of Europe’s destiny has been defined and where the lessons of history must not be forgotten. Twenty years ago the Balkans needed to be pacified with the deployment of 50,000 Nato troops. Talk of armed conflict now is clearly an exaggeration. But going back to the deployment of military hardware and troops – this time to control Europe’s external borders – is the kind of nightmare Merkel may be warning about.