The contrast between Pristina and Belgrade in northern Kosovo, the region of a non-sovereign State

In February 2008 Kosovo’s government declared its independence from Kosovo, a decision today recognized only by about seventy countries in the world. The author is convinced that the lack of international legitimacy grounds does not allow full sovereignty over this region. In fact, the 1244 Resolution of the United Nations Security Council is still valid, and it does not speak of independence, but only of administrative autonomy; furthermore, Kosovo does not have the typical fundamental preconditions of a sovereign state, such as real control over its own territory and the foreign recognition of state power which in this case is insufficient even inside the EU, since five out of twenty-seven its members do not consider Kosovo a sovereign state but only a Serbian province. As for the first of the above mentioned conditions, the dispute which went on between July and August 2011 regarding control over northern Kosovo’s border with Serbia really showed Priština’s government’s incapability to control not only their border crossings but also the region north of the river Ibar, whose mainly Serbian population refuses Kosovo’s institutions and recognizes only its Serbian citizenship. The UN, NATO and EU-legitimized international missions in Kosovo - which operate independently and are more or less accepted by the local ethnically divided population - are unable to implement shared institutions among the inhabitants, and are also incapable of limiting the power of criminal organizations who control the territory. The only role those organizations are able to play successfully is to avoid the degeneration of ethnic tensions into open violence, and therefore to avoid a civil war in the very heart of Europe. The problematic relationship between Serbia and Kosovo is very evident on the borders, but they could get better if the EU should, in a reasonable amount of time, accept as equal members all the Balkan countries currently assembled into a sort of “black hole”, an area of instability and disorder unwanted in the “important” Europe, but nevertheless a menace for the entire continent. The admission of those countries into the EU would not equal to admitting their ethnical and economical problems, but on the contrary their governments who fuel ethnic-national contrasts would gain even more legitimization from the inhabitants’ benefits deriving from the EU. The facts prove this theory as solid: inside EU, the ethnic conflicts in the member states (especially United Kingdom, Spain, Romania, Slovak Republic and Cyprus) lost their destructive potential not before, but after those states were admitted into a supranational community. In fact, the admission is characterized by a reduction of the traditional nation-state’s value (which is considered more and more anachronistic in today’s global competition), and generally favoring a more ample aggregation that however does not destroy local identities. On the other hand, the idea that Belgrade and Priština can reach a settlement without their admission into EU (which would make their contrast over northern Kosovo useless) is utopian: in fact, there is no possibility of conciliation between Serbia’s request for exclusive sovereignty over the region north of Ibar, and Kosovo’s demand of full control over the entire Kosovo territory, considering the fact that the non-Albanian population is not willing to accept a Kosovar national identity for themselves.