Like the great powers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the EU faces an Eastern Question. Political and ethnic violence that erupted in Macedonia last weekend is the latest symptom of a deep-seated disorder shaking an area of southeastern Europe that stretches from Greece to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The deaths of 14 ethnic Albanians and eight police officers in the northern Macedonian town of Kumanovo were followed on Tuesday by the resignations of the nation’s intelligence chief — who happens to be a first cousin of Nikola Gruevski, the prime minister — and of the interior minister.
But the true source of tension in the former Yugoslav republic is that it is a young state regarded with suspicion by its neighbours since its birth in 1991 and harnessed, under Mr Gruevski, to the causes of glorifying Slav Macedonian identity and neutering his political opponents.
In this sense, the turmoil harks back to the first Eastern Question, which centred on how to accommodate the aspirations of rival Balkan nationalities, not least the Slav Macedonians themselves, as the Ottoman Empire lost control of its European territories.
The first Eastern Question found a bloody and incomplete answer in the first world war and the peace treaties that followed. In the second half of the 20th century, communist rule and the Cold War kept a lid, more or less, on frictions among the region’s states and on social and economic tensions within each of them.
Now a second Eastern Question is taking shape. It encompasses issues such as Greece’s struggle to reform itself and stay in the eurozone, Kosovo’s struggle to survive as a functioning state and Macedonia’s struggle to persuade its neighbours, notably Greece and Bulgaria, that its grandiose nation-building effort is no threat to their territorial integrity and cultural identity.
The second Eastern Question also involves the EU’s struggle to square the circle of upholding regional stability while sticking to its plan, announced last year, to deny membership of the bloc to more Balkan countries until 2019 — indeed, for most if not all of them, probably much longer.
Just as in the pre-1914 era, the powers of western Europe find themselves acting, with questionable success, as political schoolmasters and financial treasurers to the region. They construct minutely detailed aid-for-reform deals for Greece, covering everything from fiscal rectitude to the timeframe within which professional tourist guides should be issued with identity cards.
None of it seems to achieve lasting improvements in Greek public administration. But it has produced a 25 per cent collapse in economic output, as well as bringing to power the most radical leftist government in a European democracy since 1945.
The US and its European allies have also poured billions of dollars and euros into Kosovo, doubtless to justify their controversial decision in 2008 to recognise the former Serbian province as an independent state. But all this money did not prevent the sudden exodus last winter of tens of thousands of desperate Kosovars — an estimated 5 per cent of the population — into the EU, mostly without the required visas.
According to the World Bank, 29.7 per cent of Kosovo’s 1.8m people were, in 2011, on the poverty line of €1.72 per day (Kosovo and Montenegro, though non-EU states, use the euro). Unemployment rates in Kosovo, Macedonia and Greece are at catastrophic levels, ranging from 25 to 30 per cent of the workforce.
Clientelism, corruption and public suspicion of state authority look much the same in Greece, a EU member since 1981, as they do in Macedonia, a candidate member since 2005, and in Kosovo, which is far from EU membership because five of the EU’s 28 countries do not recognise its independence.
These defects point to the essence of the second Eastern Question. At heart, it is about how to promote good governance in a region beset with fragile democratic and civil institutions, severe economic distress and states that are, paradoxically, both weak and overbearing towards citizens.
