Europe's Balkan Failure

Something is terribly wrong with Joe Biden visiting the Balkans next week. It isn't his expertise that is at issue. Few Americans understand the region better than Biden, who had the temerity to call Slobodan Milosevic, the late Serbian dictator, a "war criminal," to his face. The problem is that a visit from the vice president of the United States is even needed nine years after Milosevic lost power, a decade after NATO intervened in Kosovo, and 14 years after determined U.S. diplomacy ended the war in Bosnia.

Sadly, Biden's visit to Serbia, Kosovo, and, most especially, Bosnia, is all too necessary. The reason is simple: Europe is still not up to resolving its own security problems. Brussels is indifferent at best, and divided at worst, when it comes to the pressing issues in the Balkans. Five EU states still do not recognize Kosovo. The European Union lacks a viable policy toward Bosnia, leaving Washington to lobby most consistently for the steps that would bring the country into the EU.

By default, U.S. leadership remains indispensable in the region. Fortunately, it is quite welcome. Biden will get a warm reception in all three countries, including from Serbia's leaders, who are eager to open a new chapter in relations with the United States.

But the challenges Biden will face are serious and complex. The most acute is Bosnia, a country whose chronic ethnic divisions have defied one of the most intensive, multilateral nation-building efforts ever attempted. Last year, for the first time since the war ended, there was anxious worry in Sarajevo about renewed conflict. Even if the parties never pick up arms again, Bosnia risks permanent stagnation, a quite plausible scenario that would put the substantial American investment -- and continuing American interests -- in Bosnia at risk. In the words of a former senior Bosnian official, without swift reform the country is doomed to become an "economic colony" of its neighbors, supplying cheap labor from its chronically underperforming economy. Instead of an inevitable EU member, Bosnia is more likely to remain an unwelcome, dysfunctional and divided country, with an aggrieved Bosniak (Muslim) plurality, a frustrated, increasingly defensive Serb entity, and an anxious, existentially threatened Croat population.