Europe's game, old Balkan disputes

This month the world commemorates the thirty-year anniversary of the beginning of the end of communism. Thirty years ago crowds of angry demonstrators attacked the Berlin Wall, the most famous symbol of the world's division in two hostile camps of the Cold War. There were no shots or casualties in the attack.

The keepers of the wall were no longer there. His giving them orders to kill people had ended, along with his ideology, which justified that power. The experiment of communist utopia had failed, after 72 years of attempts to make it happen, according to instructions from Marxist prophecy.

After victory over fascism, liberal democracy had marked the second major ideological victory over a century, which British historian Eric Hobbesbawm rightly called “the century of extremes”. Within the night, references to the future had changed: Marxist hope had given way to capitalist hope. The fundamental question people asked in the countries just emerging from the communist empire of where their countries should now walk was answered immediately: these countries should become part of the European Union and the Atlantic Alliance, NATO.

For this to be achieved, these countries had to implement a package of deep structural reforms, which above the ruins of the centralised planning economy would build the free market economy, while totalitarian rule structures would be replaced by liberal constitutional order. This package of reforms was then baptized under the name “democratic dissemination”. It's all like the imaginary road Dantes Aligier makes at Divine Comedy - first it goes through hell, then through purgatory and finally reaches heaven. In the case of new countries from communism, hell constituted totalitarian regimes, purgatory the transition period, and paradise times when liberal democracy, free market economy, and human rights society would be built.

In its history, Europe had not experienced a greater climate of general optimism than in the days following the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the excitement - filled Ushningia for victory in the Cold War, Japanese-American philosopher Francis Fukuyama sat down and wrote the book “End of History and Last Man”. He had obeyed, and now he wanted to convince the world, that the end of human hostilities had come, and from now on, there remained nothing but living in peace and liberal happiness.

Thirty years later, this climate of optimism has disappeared. Its home has been a climate of pessimism, which has features of what renowned Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl since 1935 called “The sound of Europe” With that term Husserl meant the depletion of the spiritual forces of European civilization, the loss of European confidence in their universal values. More than the conclusion, Husserly's opinion was the prediction, and today this prediction seems to have been fulfilled. Europe today feels fatigue in everything it does, while postmodernism on its values has become pan-European sensitivity. At the institutional level the European Union is experiencing a major structural crisis, the end of which does not appear on the horizon. Great Britain, with the feeling that the European ship is sinking, made the decision to abandon it, but those who inspired that decision have not yet found another rescue ship. B R EXIT will remain in history as an example of the dangerous lies hidden within the Messianic promises of populism.

On the other hand, the large draft integration of former communist countries into the European Union has remained in half. The last country to have been admitted to the European Union was Croatia in 2013, while more and more powerful are the voices that say after Croatia there should be no expansion of the European Union. The first of these voices is nothing less than France's President Emmanuel Macron. At the recent meeting of European Union leaders, it was Macron who prevented the decision to open integration negotiations with Albania and Northern Macedonia. The other Balkan state, Serbia, although it started earlier these negotiations, has remained in the country number one. The reason is that its progress on the road to European integration cannot continue any step further until it resolves its dispute with Kosovo, which since 2008 is an independent state known by 115 states, among them and most of the European Union member states. In this context, Serbia is making efforts to change the European stance by threatening to become part of Russian plans for a major Eurasian alliance that would oppose the West in global geopolitical. Currently, this threat is not being taken seriously by the European Union or the US.

The reasons are numerous, and among them is the fact that Russian plans for a Eurasian camp against the West are clearly irreplaceable. In addition to the United States, these plans were opposed by Great China and Japan, countries that in many ways put Putin's Russia behind them. In this way, Serbia, not to remain at the crossroads between East and West, is obliged to agree to sit at the table of dialogue with Kosovo to find a solution to the historic conflict it has with it. So far this European Union-led dialogue has brought no significant results. Many small agreements, which have been reached so far between Kosovo and Serbia, have remained only on paper, because the two countries have not had the full will for their implementation, and the Brussels Democrats have not been able to impose this implementation. Currently, all expectations are at the crucial inclusion in Washington's dialogue, which has openly expressed interest in helping both sides find a solution. The interest has two reasons: the first is that independent Kosovo constitutes an American project, and the second concerns the fact that overcoming historical disputes in the Balkans diminish Russia's chances of exercising its influence in this area. What happens remains to be seen! The Western Balkan countries have yet to hope that Europe's fatigue, which Husserl predicted, will not include the United States and all those who speak of the US-century “end of time to be false messengers.

This scripture is published in Israel's renowned newspaper The Jerusalem Post, dated 11,11,2019

The author is a professor of political philosophy at Pristina University.