WHY KOSOVO MERITS INDEPENDENCE?

What indepence may mean
Independence for Kosovo is, indeed, the only way to turn the resentful, impoverished population of Kosovo into a pillar of an international order in which they will have a stake and the same rights as other European nations. With their status and borders guaranteed, with their advancement in Europe conditional on their good behaviour, the Kosovo Albanians will have a strong incentive not to pursue any destabilising policy vis-à-vis the Albanian minorities in neighbouring countries - both Macedonia and Serbia proper experienced Albanian uprisings in the period following the Nato entry into Kosovo, a situation that the lack of definite borders only encouraged.
The Kosovo Albanians have had a very poor record where treatment of the Kosovo Serb minority is concerned, involving, in the orchestrated riots of March 2004 in particular, pogroms and the burning of Serb homes and churches. Yet with the Kosovo Serbs no longer representing a barrier toward independence, there is some reason to hope that Albanian behaviour toward them will improve.
The Islamophobic propaganda of Kosovo's enemies notwithstanding, the province was never a hotbed of al-Qaida or Islamist activity. On the contrary, Albanians are noted for their extremely moderate version of Islam; Kosovo was probably the only Muslim-majority country where the population demonstrated in favour of the US intervention in Iraq - as Saddam Hussein was widely viewed as a counterpart of the hated Milosevic. Independent Kosovo will not be a threat to European security.

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There remains the question of how Serbia will react to the eventual emergence of an independent Kosovo that its politicians have almost unanimously insisted they will not accept. A lot has changed in Serbia since Milosevic's heyday, and Serbian politicians can no longer mobilise mass popular nationalist feeling over the Kosovo question. This was demonstrated by the Serbian constitutional referendum - more truly a vote on whether Kosovo should remain part of Serbia. Even after it had disenfranchised the Kosovo Albanians, the Serbian government barely scraped past the 50% turnout threshold required to validate the referendum.
Furthermore, this number was reached only at the very end of a two-day ballot, amid a quite unprecedented level of propaganda from all sections of the political elite and media pressurising (indeed morally blackmailing) Serbian citizens to vote. The tactics included door-to-door canvassing and mass text-messaging; saturation media coverage of "patriotic" examples of the elderly, invalids, priests and others voting; and "patriotic" television programmes about the 1389 battle of Kosovo. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the Serbian people voted in favour of Kosovo's independence. They are resigned to it; there will be no Serb-nationalist backlash against it.
More dangerous, however, is the intransigence of the Serbian government, which may attempt to obstruct the process indefinitely, in part through attempting to amputate the northern, Serb-held part of Kosovo centred on the city of Kosovska Mitrovica. This territory was overwhelmingly Albanian-majority until the war of 1999, but Serbian leaders may attempt to repeat the strategy of territorial dismemberment previously attempted by Milosevic unsuccessfully in Croatia and with partial success (and massive human cost) in Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the very least, they may try to weaken the new state to the maximum, create as much regional instability as possible and extract the maximum concessions from the international community.
Whether the Serbian leaders succeed will depend upon the resolution of the international community in insisting on good behaviour. The UN already agreed, at Serbia's request, to postpone the announcement of Ahtisaari's plan until after the January 2007 parliamentary election in Serbia, out of fear that the plan would encourage support for the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party. Serbian prime minister Vojislav Kostunica and President Boris Tadic then unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the international community to delay the plan's announcement further until a new Serbian government had been formed.
Western leaders understandably want to appear receptive to Serbian concerns, but they may also realise that Serbia's dead-end policies toward Kosovo can only prolong regional instability. With Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece already in the EU, and Nato and Croatia set to join soon, Serbia naturally belongs in both organisations, but it will be a better member of both if it drops its unrealisable claim to Kosovo - much as Romania dropped its claims to parts of Ukraine and Moldova as the price for Euro-Atlantic integration.
Serbia's readiness to create trouble will depend to a large part on the role of Russia, which is using Serbia as a pawn in its own imperial game, and looks set to withhold UN recognition from Kosovo unless it receives concessions elsewhere - possibly over the question of Abkazia and South Ossetia, formally autonomous entities in Georgia that broke away in the 1990s with Russian support, and whose reintegration into Georgia Russia is preventing.
Abkhazia's and South Ossetia's constitutional relationship to Georgia superficially resembles Kosovo's constitutional relationship to Serbia, yet there is no reason why the US and EU should conflate the two issues and permit Russian interference in a region - the western Balkans - that was not in the Russian sphere even during the cold war, and that is now entirely encircled by Nato and EU members.
Opponents of Kosovo's independence argue that it will set a precedent and trigger a chain reaction of conflicts over other secessionist territories that would then demand independence - according to Serbian foreign minister Vuk Draskovic, these would include northern Cyprus, the Basque country, Corsica, Northern Ireland, Scotland, South Ossetia, Chechnya and Taiwan.
This rather comical argument ignores the fact that throughout its history, Europe has embraced the emergence of newly independent states, from Switzerland and the Netherlands in 1648 to Montenegro in 2006; indeed, most states in Europe today originally seceded from a larger entity - as indeed did the United States. The emergence of new states has never meant the collapse of the international order or a free-for-all, but is simply an inevitable, unavoidable and ultimately desirable part of Europe's evolution.