Bridge construction in the Western Balkans may be a microcosm of Europe’s fragmented, post-American future.
During the Kosovo War of 1998-1999, the main bridge over the river Ibar in the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica was an important focal point. “On one side, sitting in chairs outside the Dolce Vita bar and listening to Italian music, are the Serbs,” one reporter wrote. “At the other, young ethnic Albanians mill around – each group warily eyeing the other.”
Twenty-five years later, simply reopening the bridge to traffic is still a controversial matter – as is the ongoing construction of new bridges over the river, launched by the government of Kosovo, to connect the Serbian-majority in the north with the Albanian-majority south of the town. In recent days, Serbian nationalists accused the authorities of “scoring political points on Serbian backs…No one consulted the Serb people in any way when they decided to start building these bridges,” one leader said as a petition was launched on the Serbian side to halt the construction.
Frictions between groups living in ethnically mixed areas of Europe are a fact of life. But such frictions can take on a new bitterness outside of multinational structures providing for common security and prosperity, such as NATO and the EU.
As the United States rethinks its long-standing commitments to Europe – from the Pentagon’s planned troop reductions in Europe through President Trump’s equivocation over NATO’s mutual defense guarantee to the administration’s ambivalence over Ukraine – many are worried that the vacuum will embolden Russia to test the alliance’s conventional defenses. It is a reasonable concern, but it is only one of many that such a scenario would entail.
Another dangerous possibility is the prospect that many parts of Europe would start to resemble Mitrovica, driven by ethnic hatreds actively egged on by outside governments.
A US withdrawal would certainly encourage some, perhaps most, European countries to work more closely together, as we are already seeing with Europe’s ‘coalition of the willing.’ Perhaps a core of EU countries would join forces to create a common fiscal capacity to pay for defense – something that European federalists have been calling on for decades. Yet, it is also clear that there will be some EU countries that will decide to stay away from such efforts. Some of them – think Slovakia and Hungary – risk drifting even further away as Europe’s core makes irreversible decisions about further integration.
Some may formally leave the EU – if that sounds absurd, consult David Cameron – others may just linger on the bloc’s outermost periphery while the core moves ahead with a tighter form of integration. What happens to NATO in the case of a US withdrawal from Europe is anybody’s guess but Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, has been floating the idea of the country’s “neutrality,” i.e. its withdrawal from the alliance.
It is perfectly possible that the geopolitical turmoil set in motion by the absence of US leadership could turn the currently observed democratic backsliding in parts of Eastern Europe into a story of broader regional decline. That would reduce some of the once-successful post-communist nations to poverty and geopolitical irrelevance. Hungary, after all, is by some metrics already the poorest nation in the bloc.
To see what happens next in countries such as Slovakia, Hungary, or Romania, one needs to realize that Eastern Europe’s integration into NATO and the EU has been a singularly effective tool in neutralizing the many grievances and hostilities existing between countries of the region. The counterfactual may well look like the Balkans, with its border and name disputes, breakaway regions, and constant efforts at mutual destabilization – periodically exploited by outside powers.
Hungary, which lost two-thirds of its territory and population in the post-World War I settlement, is a case in point. At no point has Viktor Orbán abandoned the idea that this fate must be reversed. “We will be there at the funeral of those who wanted to put us in the grave,” he said in 2020, pointing at Western powers and accusing them of having “raped the thousand-year-old borders” of the country. “The decisive battle must be fought by the generation following us, the fifth generation after Trianon [the 1920 treaty creating modern Hungary]. They must take the final steps.”
Ominous as it sounds, such rhetoric could be dismissed as overwrought, if only Orbán had not long been laying the predicate for such a “decisive battle.” For years, his party, Fidesz, has been holding its summer retreat in neighboring Romania, in the Hungarian-speaking town of Băile Tușnad. This year, Ukraine exposed a Hungarian spy ring operating in Transcarpathia, among its ethnic Hungarian minority. For fifteen years now, Orbán’s government has funneled money into soccer clubs and other organizations in Hungarian-majority areas in Slovakia, buying up real-estate, and even meddling in election campaigns.
Should some countries of the region become unmoored from the EU and NATO, and should Russia’s war against Ukraine succeed in some form, such tensions will rise, fueled by Budapest. Whether or not they stop short of violence is hard to predict. Yet, seeing Hungarian versions of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska set up on territories of its neighbors is plausible. This would be the definitive nail in the coffin of the idea of Europe whole, free, and at peace.
In places such as Kosovo or Bosnia, adverse geopolitical outlooks, dysfunctional governance, and ethnic tensions are mutually reinforcing, creating a vicious cycle from which countries find it hard to escape – up to the point where local governments can’t make trivial decisions about building bridges without inflaming ethnic passions.
What can policymakers in Europe do against such catastrophic scenarios? For one, they must exercise prudence in toying with ideas of transAtlantic disintegration – as opposed to toying recklessly with the idea of “neutrality” (as Robert Fico does) or “hussar’s cuts” (an idea of balancing advanced by Viktor Orbán’s advisors). Secondly, they must ensure that their countries are at the table with the big players such as Germany, France, and Poland when the critical decisions about the EU’s future are made.
One can only hope that their choices will be better than those taken by their predecessors the last time Europe faced similarly seismic geopolitical shifts.
