Elizabeth Pond is a correspondent for The Washington Quarterly based out of Berlin. She's also a non-resident fellow at the center for transatlantic relations. Her specialty is tracking the dynamics of transformation. She previously served as a foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor in Asia and Europe before writing books with grants from a variety of think tanks, most recently the US Institute of Peace. She's the author of four books on post-Cold War Europe. Beyond the Wall: Germany's Road to Unification; The Rebirth of Europe, on the Euro and the lurch toward a more common foreign policy; Friendly Fire: The Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance. Today she'll be speaking about her newest book Endgame in the Balkans: Regime Change, European Style. On a personal note that I'm particularly interested in hearing her, I went to Sarajevo for President Clinton as his special representative at the end of the war in 96, spent two years there, and after the end of the Kosovo war went back, along with Muskovy's husband, to spend time in Kosovo and the rest of the Balkans in terms of the peace-making process, post those wars. So, personal statement, this is a most interesting day, and therefore please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Pond. Given that introduction, I think I should mention an anecdote that I think you will appreciate, and that is that Dick Colbert decided not to endorse my book after he read what I wrote about Dayton, so. I did get a few other endorsements that are on the book. I think I should start out by saying thanks to all of you for turning out for a talk that is not about Afghanistan or Iraq or the mess in the Middle East. The Balkans have become quite boring at this point and I appreciate anybody who shows an interest in it, especially on a Friday. In fact I was musing on the plane coming here this morning from Saint Louis why anyone would want to come listen to a talk on the Balkans. And I came up with a couple of hypotheses. The first one was that maybe it's time to take a new sounding after the death of Slobodan Milosevic, just before Bulgaria and Romania become members of the European Union, and just before Kosovo becomes independent. I am persuaded that Kosovo will have conditional independence as of probably spring of next year. But I would mislead you if I pretended these were the reasons-- Oh, and the second reason is, just to hear some good news after having paid attention to Afghanistan and Iraq all the time. But I would mislead you if I pretended that these were the reasons that I wrote the book. I started my research and thinking about the book about five years ago, when the picture was anything but optimistic. In fact, there were times along the way when I asked myself why I was spending this time on such a gloomy subject. And it was only as I got toward the end of the book, which was really last summer, that I began thinking, "You know, things aren't so bad there." And I hope that my relative optimism is not just a reflection of the contrast with other parts of the world, but I think I can justify my relative optimism, so let me try. The questions that I started with were, "Can outside intervention, whether hard or soft, have an impact, a positive effect of democratization, modernization, of societies that have not had any acquaintance, any background, with democracy, or in many cases with the modern world?" If you think of Albania, which was hermetically sealed till 1989, 1990, incredibly so, can outsiders have an impact? And in particular, can the magnet of European Union Membership, the prospect of European Union Membership at the end of the day, is that strong enough to bring these countries through the very painful reforms that they have to go through. Now this is very difficult. In the United States, Britain, France, Germany we've sort of built our systems on trial and error over 150, 250 years. They're doing it all in one generation. And it is very painful, there's a lot of indigestion, and it's amazing that things are going as well, relatively, as they are. And the-- another way of phrasing that question would be, Can Europe's seizure of the American idea of soft power, which the United States developed at the end of-- again, by trial and error, after World War II, can that work to transform the Balkans in particular? Can the drive for peace and prosperity that is this blessed zone of the European Union, which is why the Balkans want to get into it, can that work as a bridge for them to learn something of what postmodern Europe has learned and is practicing? Which is what they call "not giving up sovereignty, but pooling sovereignty." That is, to bring parts of their sovereignty to a European level where they can hope to deal with some of the issues that they couldn't possibly, as small nation states. Can they acquire something of the multiple identity that is now taken for granted in Western Europe? You know, somebody's a Bavarian, and a German, and a European, and these are not in conflict with each other. They're different parts in a way that is not true for Americans, but it certainly is true for Europeans. They have these multiple identities which co-exist with each other. And so solutions, political solutions, if you will, can be taken at different levels without raising conflict. Identity conflict. I should say also that what I will be talking about today in trying to summarize what I believe is happening in the Balkans is somewhat antithetical to my book. Because I really started writing my book just trying to figure out what was happening. Which was quite difficult, it's the most difficult book I've ever written because there is no such thing as the Balkans. Every land in the Balkans is different from every other land, every corner of ever land is different from every other corner. And so any generation you make is going to be false. Nonetheless, I will try to make some. The first sign of hope, I would say, is that war is no longer the default mode of settling disputes. Now this is quite extraordinary if you think of the kind of hatred that was generated and the spiral of warfare as sons, brothers, fathers, were killed, mutilated, ethnically cleansed in these terrible wars of Yugoslav succession. Because this kind of thing is self-perpetuating, so how do you stop it? Well, it has been stopped. There are certain question marks, but they're at the margins. Second, the kind of international intervention in the Balkans and this includes the initial military intervention, but also the mass of advisors who have gone to the Balkans from the European Union and from the United States, but mostly from European Union countries, either bi-laterally or as EU in such fields as the environment, justice, rule of law, institution -building is enormous, it's huge. And what has worked, or what has worked best, is empowering of local reformers, some of whom didn't know, before all these events started, that they were reformers. But discovered that they were, in the course of things. And this is quite impressive, actually. Because you have a continuity of the old Communist elites. And so how do some of these separate out? How do you find the reformers among them, and re-enforce them? Well, it has been done, to a considerable extent, in varying degree in the different countries, but it has been done. The third success, I would say, is the institution-building. And the fourth, which I really only decided quite recently, is I think a certain critical mass has been reached in the Balkans, where the striving of one country to qualify for EU membership has an effect on the others, because they don't want to get left behind. Again, it may be fairly un-sophisticated at the start, certainly at the public level of just figuring, well the Western Europeans are peaceful, they have security, they're prosperous, we want to be that, so we want to be part of the European Union. Or at a more concrete level, we want to travel in Western Europe. We want to do it without visas or we want to get visas without a lot of fuss. And I would just add an aside here, and that is that I think the international criminal court for ex-Yugoslavia has had a bad press. And I have come up being quite an admirer of what they have accomplished. What people generally think about when you say The Hague Tribunal is the fact that Milosevic has never-- there was no verdict in his case. And so there's a feeling of, how can the victims say they got justice if Milosevic was not convicted, and he died 50 court hours short of this verdict. Well, there were mistakes made, and there's no doubt about this, in the prosecution of Milosevic, but what the court has done in all the other cases and in this case too is to establish legal truth about the atrocities in the 1990s. It's not historical truth, but it's legal truth, and it makes it a lot harder for anybody to deny the atrocities, at Sweverniza or elsewhere. This is a very important body of knowledge and of consensus. The second thing that has hardly been treated in American or in European media, I would say, is the learning process that the impact that the international court has had on the local courts. Beginning last year, Serb prosecutors have been indicting Serbs on war crimes charges. Croatian prosecutors have been indicting in Croatian courts Croats who have been charged with war crimes. And Bosniak courts, it's a little bit different because it's a hybrid court with internationals, nonetheless, Bosniak prosecutors are beginning also to indict Bosniak suspects of war crimes. And this is quite extraordinary, considering the background of the courts, the highly political courts, and highly subject in the past to political manipulation. So there is a real learning process going on here. All right then, let me, just run down each of the lands briefly, and just to explain, I had to define what I was going to treat as the Balkans, because it's a rather elastic term. And what I did is, I said that any country that is already a member of the European Union, I'm not going to deal with, because they're already in a different category, that means I didn't touch Slovenia, except, as I've mentioned in connection with other Balkan lands. It also means that I didn't treat Greece, which is a shame. I simply couldn't handle Greece. But the reason it's a shame is, that the kind of transformation that Greece went through, rather belatedly, in fact, as a European Union member is very relevant to other Balkan countries. And the other reason is that starting with George Papandreou, the foreign minister, Greece has had a real Balkan policy, which Turkey has not. It was fairly easy to exclude Turkey because Turkey does not have a Balkan policy, is not terribly interested in it. And Turkey's own problems with the EU are so egregious, they just don't really have anything to do with the Balkans. So I therefore will just deal with the rest of the countries, which means ex-Yugoslavia, plus Albania, plus Bulgaria, plus Romania, however much the Romanians say "We are not in the Balkans, the Balkans start south of the Danube." Okay, let's start with Bosnia. Again, the main accomplishment is that war was ended. That's very clear. The second main accomplishment is that refugees returned. Half of the population, 2 million out of 4 million, were kicked out of their homes, either by war or by ethnic cleansing or otherwise. And these refugees, after a slow start and a lot of pressure from outside, began to come back, and protection of the international peace forces, which is very important. These people have come back. A million of these two million homeless have come back to their homes, some of them to sell their homes, but it's important that they've come back to their homes also in areas where they were minorities, not just where they were in the majority now. And it has been done relatively peacefully. Quite peacefully, in fact. Again, considering the background. Furthermore, there has been progress in the past few years in moving Bosnia toward a unified country and a unified government would be an exaggeration, but a government and a state that acts more on the federal level than it did initially. Because the Dayton agreement, which was a tour de force to end the war, set up an absolutely impossible system of governance, with two entities, the Republic of Srpska, and the Federation with Croats, essentially, Croats and Muslims, Bosniaks in it, and ten Cantons, and so many layers of bureaucracy that it has been difficult to get things done. Now, the way things have been done is that the high representative, and particularly Patty Ashdown, who is the most recent high representative, have really been running the country. And after they got the bond powers, they had powers of dismissal even of elected officials, and so forth. And so what they have done is largely write the legislation and it's been very easy for the local politicians to hide behind this, and say to their own constituency, "Well, I didn't really want to do this but I was forced to do it by the high representative." What is happening now, and it's going to be very interesting, is that they can no longer hide behind the high representative. Schilling, who is there now, has taken a softly softly approach and made it clear that he wants his own position to end as soon as possible. And so there's a bit of turmoil there, it's not clear how it's going to come out. But the politicians are going to have to make their own compromises, and they're going to have to stand behind them now, in a way they haven't before. Anyway, what I describe as Patty Ashdown frog-marching the Bosnians to act as a single country, to act more as a single country, includes-- well, includes the single license plates, started before his time. And also the United Customs officials started before his time too, which has its own irony, because the whole object in trying to bring the Balkans together, or one of the objects, is to try to have a free trade area, so it's kind of-- it's kind of funny to set up customs, very strong customs agencies, and have the revenues of these governments at this point basically depend on the customs. But anyway there is a unified customs agency now. There is unified police intelligence and there is a unified army. And I'll just say here that the objection is made, well it's just a unified army on paper because they'll remain in ethnic regiments, sort of Croats and Bosniaks, but if not only the command is at the federal level-- if there's a single command at the federal level, Chief of Staff is at the federal level, and perhaps most important, the budget is at the federal level. I think under these circumstances you can call it a unified army. Now this is not unique to Bosnia but it's certainly clear in Bosnia, there's a certain fatigue with elections and politics, and a certain cynicism about politics. Only 54% turned out in the recent election. And while that might not be a bad turnout for the United States, the United States at this point has a fixed system. I imagine you had a lot of discussions about that, and I won't say anything more about that, about the United States. But it is important, if there's to be transformation in the Balkans, that enough of the elites and semi-elites and the public get behind the changes. So that's another question mark. Okay, Macedonia very quickly. Macedonia has been pulled back from the brink by internationals. Pulled back from the brink of ethnic war between the Slav Macedonians and the ethnic Albanians, and not only once, it's been a couple of times and each times it seems they're just clinging on by their fingernails, but they are clinging and that's all to the good. They now have, interestingly, in the new cabinet, they have four young ministers who have been educated in the West and are coming in with new ideas. We'll see what happens there. Croatia. In many ways this is the clearest example of the pull of the European Union, and of potential membership. Croatia was very much helped by Tudjman's dying when he did, so that before he was indicted before the international court. So there hasn't been the same kind of psychological burden, or not as heavy, for the Croats as for the Serbs on this issue. But what happened also, it was not just Tudjman's timely death. There were two people in particular, and here is a question, or the issue of empowering local elites. President Mesic came in immediately, elected within weeks of Tudjman's death in a surprise vote, and as a very moderate politician. Including, he went to the Hague to testify in war crimes cases against fellow Croats, which was held against him by a number of Croats, but he did it. I mean, this illustrates the extent of what he's been doing. And the second is the current Prime Minister Sanader, who has become the leader of Tudjman's HDZ political party and has managed quite skillfully to sideline the worst nationalists. Now he hasn't cleaned it out altogether, he certainly hasn't cleaned out the security forces, but it's going in that direction. And the test of Croatian response to the demands of the European Union is measured in particular, certainly also by the reforms, political and economic reforms, but particularly by the delivery of General Gotovina to the Hague. Now what happened there is that Croatia, on the quiet, began cooperating with the Hague in terms of giving them access to the security archives. And since it was the security forces, or elements of the security forces that were basically shielding Gotovina and enabling him to remain a fugitive for so many years, this gave international police enough information to go find Gotovina in the Canary Islands, arrest him, and send him to the Hague. This is something, obviously, that the Serbs have not been willing to do with Lottage. Romania. Romania's a very interesting example because it seemed for many years, as if, again with the continuity of the old Communist elites, and a lot of the old Communist practices, it seemed as if Romania would say "yes yes yes" to everything that the EU demanded of them, write the laws, and then not implement them. And the particular issue that the EU was very energized about was corruption and corruption in high places. And what has happened by a kind of odd series of events, having to do with the last election, is that a cracker jack minister of justice, Monica Macovei, who was previously a human rights lawyer, is not indebted to any of the parties, and is absolutely no-nonsense, including plunging ahead with indictments and investigations even having to face such problems as coming home at night once, and fortunately not turning the light on, and discovering that the gas in her apartment had been turned on. So she's a gutsy lady, and not exactly what you would expect from the stereotype of Romanian politicians. Bulgaria-- actually, I have to say, I have a very soft spot for Bulgaria, and one of the things that is really endearing about Bulgaria is that though they got off to a very slow start, in many ways they looked like the slowest of any of the Balkans after all the changes, 1989, 1990, things got so bad and they got in such a crisis and hyper-inflation was so high and the economy was so bad that in 96-97, demonstrators were now on the street, and I won't say forced the government to resign, because there were a lot of steps between the demonstrations and the resignation, and it was not clear that this was how it was going to come out, but it did. And they went cold-turkey. And they just started the-- for example, they set up a currency board and the currency has been stable since then. It may be the only country in the world where a currency board has been popular and is still popular, I don't know. And this was particularly hard because the Bulgarians unlike the Poles or the Northeastern Europeans, had no opportunity Bulgarian economists had no opportunity before the changes to learn very much about the market economy. Those who wanted to had to find some ruse in order to do it. One economist I talked to learned Polish in order to read the Polish economic literature about market economy. Another economist I talked to went to Moscow to study, not because he would be able to study market economics there, but because he would have access to the closed libraries, and read some of the stuff himself. So they really went cold turkey and economically, and also to a certain extent, politically. To a considerable extent, politically, I'd say. But they have had the same problem as far as the EU is concerned with corruption. Not that corruption is unknown to other Balkan countries. It's certainly there throughout the region. But it has been quite bad, and it's been quite public and dramatic in the case of Bulgaria because of all the, what are apparently, contract killings of different Mafia bosses in Sofia and in suburbs of Sofia like Amsterdam. But what has happened now, and here's one of the cases where watching your neighbor get closer to the European Union has acted as an incentive, what the Bulgarians have done now is they've hired a former Dutch prosecutor to help them with some of their search for corruption. They have stripped immunity from ten members of parliament, they have indicted, let's see, at this point there are ten fairly high politicians who have been indicted for corruption, and most interesting, perhaps, for the first time they have extradited those who have been charged in Italian courts, or in any Western courts, in this case, to Italy, to face the charges. So things seem to be changing there too. Oh, I just, on terms of how far you get on the ladder toward the EU I meant to say, with Croatia, that the reward of Croatia was to receive a full candidacy for membership, which puts it ahead of any of the others except of course Bulgaria and Romania will be in January. Okay, just very quickly, I see I've talked longer than I wanted. Albania and Kosovo. Here, the most serious problem of many serious problems is organized crime. And it's-- again, organized crime is a serious problem, and international trafficking of drugs, women, et cetera, is a tremendous problem throughout the Balkans. But in the case of the Kosovars and the Albanians, it's particularly hard for law enforcement agencies to crack because they are based as the Italian mafias used to be based, on plans, on families that are very very hard to infiltrate. Finally, Serbia. And I came away feeling that Serbia is-- I'm almost more worried about Serbia than about any other country in the region. And it's a tragedy. Milosevic, the damage that Milosevic did to the Serbs is-- should be noted as much as the damage that he did to the Croats and the Bosniaks. Because he took a country that had sophisticated institutions, sophisticated professional class, the exodus of the professional class, partly under the hyper-inflation of the 1990s, is, I forget what the figures are, but it's something like 800,000. And when you lose that strata, you lose balance, you lose initiative, and you lose the capacity to-- or it's much weaker -- the capacity to transmit what needs to be done in politics to a broader electorate. What's happened now, what's happening now, is that Kosovo is and basically, the question, "Who lost Kosovo?" - it hasn't been lost yet but it will be the basic question is, "Who lost Kosovo?" that's what's driving politics. And the radicals who have taken over they started out as more, pro-greater Serbia than Milosevic did and they in many ways have continued this way, their leader Shesol is also indicted and is sitting in the Hague, but the radicals at this point, having never been in power in government at the federal level, at the national level, can blame everything on the centrist democrats, which they do. And so all of the terrible drop in living standard, the drop in the economy, which is rationally, you would say, okay, that's the result of Milosevic's wars, which is true but it's very easy for the radicals to argue that it's not that, but it's the fact that the centrists aren't being nationalist enough and aren't defending Serb interests. And so probably only, I've been told, probably only 15%, given this estimate, probably only 15% of the public is really extreme nationalist, but the radicals are, and because of this protest mode they are now running 38% in the polls, which is far above what the centrist and democratic parties are running. And there will be an early election in December, and it's probably a good idea to have this before Kosovo gets a conditional independence, but it still looks as if the radicals are going to-- they might become the government. And what this has done is, it's made the democratic centrists run scared. They don't dare say anything. Including-- they don't dare negotiate with the Kosovars about the future status of Kosovo. And instead of saying, "We're going to protect Serb interests, we're going to make sure that the monasteries are protected in any deal, we're going to make sure that the minorities are protected, we're going to make sure that de-centralization works to the benefit of Serbs so that they can rule themselves in their own communities, they just don't say anything, they just say "no no no no no." And in fact, several times, when several of them have just pleaded with Westerners to impose a solution on them so they won't be blamed for it. Now to go back to the public, if you look at opinion polls and sort of differentiate at opinion polls, what you find is that Kosovo in fact does not rate at the top. Understandably. It's issues of the pocket that rate at the top. They want jobs, they want better housing for the many refugees that are there, and so forth. But that's not the way politics is going. Politics is all about Kosovo and it's very poisonous. I would just say as a last point here about Serbia, that I don't want to sound too psychological, but a major problem is the mentality, and a major problem in particular is the feeling that Serbs have had, historically, and still have today, even what we would call moderate Serbs, that they are the special victims of history. Including the special victims of recent history. And this justified Milosevic's wars, it has justified other things that the Serbs-- it has justified, let's say, the failure of Serbs, of Serb politicians, to act now. I have to add here, in fairness, that the murder of Gingig in 2003 was a turning point in this because he really was pressing forward with these reforms. But he hadn't been able to reform the institutions, he was just on the verge of it. I don't think that's why he was assassinated, I think there were other reasons. But he was just on the verge of trying to tame the security forces and he was just on the verge of writing a new constitution that would give Serbia democratic institutions. And it's never come to pass. The institution that was passed a few weeks ago basically was an instrument to say, "Kosovo always was ours, always will be ours." And doesn't address the serious institutional issues. I talked too long. But now I'll open it up.
member. 
