Thus far the considered alternatives to partition have been in the nature of substitutes: ethnic cantons, ethnic federation and ethnic confederation. Post-Cold War multilateral peace-craft, however, has taken diverse initiatives to tackle the ongoing problems of partition.

These range from reversing partitions through:

• Full re-unification as in Germany.
• Limited unification through soft borders and devolution in Northern Ireland.
• Regional stabilization as a means of chipping away at internal divisions, as in the Balkans.

• Ethnic federation within a regional membership as in Cyprus.
• Completing incomplete partitions as in Palestine.
• Opening borders for the free movement of people, goods and services, as between India and Pakistan, and between divided Kashmir.

Tackling Partition in the Balkans

With the war in Bosnia, the international community accepted de facto partition as a short-term method of ending ethnic conflict in the Balkans.

But seven years after ending the war, the U.S., E.U. and UN have begun cautiously to reintegrate divided regions in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia, while offering these countries wider integration into European institutions.

The current U.S., E.U. and UN policy is to reverse the internal partitions that beset the former Yugoslavia through a combination of regional and country-based programs aimed at open borders, pluralist polities and the free movement of people, goods and services.

At the regional level, the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe has recently pushed through agreements on a number of key issues, in particular security cooperation, regional trade blocs, and community reintegration.

At the country level, the key priority today is strengthen nation building, in particular civil service and police training.

A. The Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe

Major Agreements Cooperative border control. Collective refugee and migration policies. Regional Arms Control and Verification. Fight against Organized Crime and Terrorism. Network of Free Trade Agreements. Joint Infrastructure Creation and Investment.

Croatia and Bosnia agreed in early 2003 to set up and jointly man border crossings between southern Croatia and the Bosnian Croat regions, with help from the E.U. and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Similar agreements should follow between Bosnia and Serbia and Montenegro.

The recent E.U. commitment to admit the countries of the former Yugoslavia is a major incentive for Pact members to implement their agreements.

The Stability Pact is now a stepping stone to the E.U., and the E.U. has assumed more and more responsibilities in the region, from leading administrations in Bosnia and Kosovo to taking over security cooperation in Macedonia (transferred from NATO to SHAPE).

The E.U. has also recently offered preferential market access to the Balkan countries to boost economic recovery, and its focus on joint infrastructure development will, when adequately implemented, put Pact members on a steady path for economic growth.

The biggest problem remains the extremely slow pace of return of refugees and displaced people. Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia and Montenegro are yet to exchange information on property damaged, lost or illegally occupied, though there is a small and steady return of refugees and displaced people to Bosnia, @100,000 per year.

Nation Building

Year	Policy
1996-99 Bosnia	Focus on stabilization. Elections (national, entity and municipal, every 18 months); repair of physical infrastructure; fiscal reform; support for civil society, especially free media and small entrepreneurs.
1992-02 Kosovo         Macedonia	First steps in nation building. Kosovo, Police Training Academy, 1999; decommissioning and integration of Albanian fighters into Kosovo security forces; elections, support for civil society, especially free media. Macedonia, 2000, police training; municipal development programs.
2002 Bosnia     Kosovo	Next steps in nation building. Bosnia, security integration of two entities begun, 2003; police and administrative services’ integration planned. Kosovo, Civil Service Academy decided 2002; Mitrovica brought under UN administration 2003.

The U.S. and EU have been quick to learn some of the nation building lessons in the Balkans. For example, inadequate attention to policing in Bosnia was partly remedied in Kosovo and Macedonia with rapid impact police training programs, and in both Bosnia and Kosovo international administrators are beginning to focus on building an honest and impartial civil service.

But progress has been surprisingly slow given the relatively high ranking the former Yugoslavia had in human development indices before the war.

Uncertainty about their political future has paralyzed Bosnian and Kosovar ability to draw upon their nation building resources, with the result that postwar administrative bodies have been dominated by ethnic politicians and war profiteers.

Similar conditions prevail in Serbia and Croatia, though to varying extents and for different reasons. As the twin centers from which the wars in the former Yugoslavia spread, Serbian and Croatian administrative bodies fell under the control of ethnic politicians and war profiteers early on.

With the recent arrest of Serbia’s former president Slobodan Milosevic, and death of Croatia’s former president Franjo Tudjman, it is now possible for the Balkans’ countries to tackle their partition problems together.

The U.S., EU and UN’s policy of combining regional and country-based programs to reverse internal partitions in the Balkans has a greater chance of success than it did earlier. Much depends on the extent to which next steps are synchronized.

Next Steps

· Security.

The prospect of integration into NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in late 2004 makes it possible to put national and regional security cooperation on a fast track. Coordinating the two will improve the chances of each — it will be easier to integrate Bosnia’s entity armed forces, for example, if it is accompanied by joint military exercises between Stability Pact members, especially the countries of the former Yugoslavia.

Joint exercises would also help stabilize Macedonia, and at a later stage perhaps Kosovo.

The key challenge for economic recovery is how to root out organized crime and corruption while enlarging the sphere of economic cooperation — and open borders — to cover the entire region. The Stability Pact initiatives on cooperative border management, customs control and training, and fiscal reforms under the World Bank, will considerably curb the problem.

So would better salaries for government administrators. The impoverished exchequers of the former Yugoslav countries are a powerful stimulus to the spread of organized crime and corruption. A focus on economic planning in civil service and parliamentary training programs could also speed up economic recovery.

In a welcome development, new E.U. police and civil service programs in Bosnia and Kosovo are accompanied by inter-parliamentary cooperation between Pact members and the European parliament, so that legislators and administrators will be on similar learning curves.

Even so the years of international administration have eroded the authority and responsibilities — and even more the accountability — of elected postwar leaders in Bosnia and Kosovo.

One way to begin reinstating political accountability is to have the elected Prime Ministers or Presidents take over some of the public duties that international administrators currently perform. For starters, they could make presentations/reports to donors’ meetings such as the G-8, and support networks such as the UN.

For Bosnia, there is a further problem. The constitutional arrangements that were agreed at Dayton in 1995 created ethnic troikas at both the presidency and the prime ministerial levels — so Bosnia has three spokesmen rather than one. Democratic political parties have asked for some years that the constitution be open to amendment, and that might now be a viable option.

Related Texts
·	High Representative’s Report 2002
·	UN Secretary General’s Report Kosovo 2003