MONTENEGRO IS BACK ON THE MAP, AND IT NEED NOT BECOME RURITANIA: EUROPE IS THE WORLD’S LEADING THEATRE OF STATE PROLIFERATION, BUT MORE DOES NOT NECESSARILY MEAN WORSE
The Guardian – United Kingdom
Jun 01, 2006
How many countries are there in Europe? Your answer depends on what
you mean by Europe – and what you mean by a country. The European
Union currently has 25 member states. The Organisation for Security
and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has 55 “participating states”, but
they include Andorra, the Holy See, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San
Marino, which are all within the bounds of the EU without being member
states, and Russia, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Canada and the United States – some or all
of which would not be considered by some or most Europeans to be in
Europe. When the central Asian “stans” joined the OSCE in 1992, someone
quipped that its Europe now resembled Nicholas of Cusa’s definition
of God – His centre being everywhere and His circumference nowhere.
The Council of Europe, which claims on its website to represent
800 million Europeans, has 46 member states, including Andorra,
Liechtenstein, Monaco and Turkey. The Eurovision Song Contest has
a variable line-up, but this year’s 24 entries included hopeful
crooners from Turkey, Armenia, Moldova and Israel. The Miss Europe
beauty pageant has had contestants from Turkey, Israel and Lebanon.
The Union of European Football Associations (Uefa), which describes
itself as “the governing body of football on the European continent”
and, interestingly, “an association of associations based on
representative democracy”, has 52 members, including Andorra,
Azerbaijan, Turkey and Israel, but also England, Scotland and Wales
as separate national teams. (We are so used to this, we forget how
odd it is.)
However you draw up the tally, there’s no question that Europe has
more countries per head of population than any other continent. China
is one country for 1.3 billion people, Europe is between 45 and 55
countries for, at most, 800 million people. On a generous estimate,
we have an eighth of the world’s people but a quarter of the world’s
states. This week, we’ll get one more. Step forward, Miss Montenegro!
On May 21, 86% of the 484,720 people on the newly cleansed Montenegrin
electoral register (described by the OSCE as the best in Montenegrin
history) turned out to vote in a referendum – and 55.53% of them
chose independence. According to rules embraced by Montenegro, under
pressure from the EU, a majority of 55% on a turnout exceeding 50%
was needed for the vote to be valid. So they just scraped through. You
may well ask by what right the EU, whose Maastricht treaty was passed
by a majority of just 51% in a referendum in France, imposed this 55%
hurdle on Montenegro. In the event, the effect was positive, for it
meant that the mainly Serbian opponents of independence participated
fully in the voting, believing that they could win. It will now be
harder for Serbs to question the result’s legitimacy.
The Montenegrin parliament has to formalise the claim to independence,
and the knotty details of a velvet divorce from Serbia must be
negotiated, but there’s no doubt that a country called Montenegro
will soon appear on the political map of Europe. Or rather reappear
– for Montenegro has been there before, between 1878 and 1918. As
Elizabeth Roberts reminds us in her richly detailed and timely new
history of Montenegro, Realm of the Black Mountain, in the 1870s
the Montenegrins were supported, idolised and idealised by liberal
Britons on account of their armed struggle against the Ottoman
Turks. Gladstone described them as “a band of heroes such as the
world has rarely seen”. Tennyson gushed:
They rose to where their sovran
eagle sails,
They kept their faith, their freedom,
on the height,
Chaste, frugal, savage, arm’d by day
and night
. . . and so on, and on. The resulting kingdom of Montenegro was the
model for the comic Ruritanian-style kingdom of Pontevedro in Franz
Lehar’s operetta The Merry Widow – provoking an angry demonstration by
Montenegrin students at its premiere in Vienna. It was extinguished
with the help of the western allies after the first world war,
and replaced by Yugoslavia; but 80 years on the “sovran eagle” –
double-headed, crowned, yellow gold on red – will again fly over the
black mountain.
This is, in the first place, a shattering defeat for the nationalist
project of a Greater Serbia, opportunistically embraced by the
post-communist Slobodan Milosevic. Many Montenegrins, like the
communist-turned-dissident Milovan Djilas, considered themselves to be
“quintessential Serbs”, even “the salt of the Serbs”, and Montenegro to
be a historic heartland of Serbianness. When Kosovo follows Montenegro
to independence, as it surely will, then Serbia will be a landlocked
rump state – a bruised, brooding loser of European history.
Yet the Montenegrin pole-vault over the high bar set by the EU is
also a defeat for a certain west European approach, which kept urging
the former Yugoslavs to stay together when they obviously wanted
to part. In the region, people referred to the Union of Serbia and
Montenegro, the ramshackle state structure that Montenegro has now
voted to leave, as “Solania” – an ironic reference to Javier Solana,
the EU’s foreign policy chief, who was its main architect.
Solana’s fear was that a Montenegrin dash to independence might
encourage Kosovo Albanians and Bosnian Serbs to demand the same,
undermining the fragile peace that the EU was working to preserve
in the Balkans. Though the fear was understandable, I believe this
approach was misguided. If peoples really want to divorce, and that is
possible within the frontiers of viable states, they should be allowed
to. What matters is that they do it by peaceful, constitutional and
democratic means.
To be sure, the resulting patchwork of little states has elements of
absurdity. Once there was a language called Serbo-Croat. Officially,
there are now four different national languages: Serbian, Croatian,
Bosnian and Montenegrin. If and when the four countries eventually
join the EU, will there be simultaneous interpretation between the
four official languages? Even if common sense prevails (something you
can never count on in European institutions), the result of having so
many small states must be a further increase in the EU’s transaction
costs of diversity.
But the costs within a dysfunctional multi-ethnic state are even
higher. The unresolved issues of sovereignty and constitutional status
have crippled attempts at economic and social reform in Serbia and
Montenegro and Kosovo for the past five years. Sometimes it’s better
to cut the Gordian knot; sometimes good fences do eventually make good
neighbours. Now the citizens of Montenegro and Serbia know that they
have to make their own way to prosperity, democracy and the rule of
law. Only then can they advance, via the OSCE, the Council of Europe,
Uefa, Miss Europe, the Eurovision Song Contest and Nato, to today’s
ultimate seal of European belonging: EU membership.
If the EU keeps its doors open but its entry standards high, the end
of Solania need not mean a return to Ruritania. State proliferation
in Europe makes things more complicated in the relations between
countries, but simpler inside them. More need not mean worse.