Remember Bosnia?

Bosnia’s recent unrest should remind people in Washington and Brussels that current policy towards the region is floundering. There are a myriad reasons for this—from outmoded stereotypes of the region’s problems, to rigid and inflexible bureaucratic thinking about how the Balkans should be integrated into the EU, to the fact that the major powers are using the states (or peoples) of southeastern Europe as pawns in higher-level chess games, or that that the Balkans now only get the attention of low-level bureaucrats from Foggy Bottom to Whitehall to the Quai d’Orsay, and, ultimately, the simple reality that at this moment foreign-policy establishments have more pressing world problems to deal with. Nevertheless, the fact that people are ignoring southeastern Europe does not mean that politics and time are standing still there, or that ignoring the problems will make them go away.