Fighting is far from over in that area of Eastern Europe generally referred to as the Balkans, according to Stephen Fischer-Galati, professor emeritus of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Fischer-Galati labeled the recent conflict in Kosovo a "disaster" and said that he viewed the future in that region with "profound pessimism."
The level of destruction inflicted by western air strikes has resulted in a non-functional economy shackled to an antiquated industrial system which could not hope to compete economically with other nations.
"This area of Eastern Europe is doomed to live on borrowed money and possibly even borrowed time," he said.
That is a conclusion he also comes to after considering the region聮s tangled and bloody history, it聮s deep religious differences and its apparent ongoing destiny to be little more than a pawn in the political struggles of more powerful nations.
Fischer-Galati was born in Romania, educated at Harvard University where he completed his Ph.D in 1949 and taught at CU-Boulder from 1966 until his retirement 10 years ago.
He has published extensively on Balkan nationalism, guerrilla warfare and revolution, subjects he continues to write and lecture about in the United States and Europe.
While there are different views about just which countries comprise the Balkans, there is less dispute that Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Kosovo (a province of Serbia) share an unhappy past and an unsettled future.
With an intimate knowledge of the region, Fischer-Galati said the idea that Kosovo could function as an economically and politically viable independent state was ridiculous.
NATO聮s military action also established a very dangerous principle and precedent by intervening in the affairs of a sovereign state on the side of ethnic minorities because there are numerous such minorities scattered throughout eastern Europe.
Fischer-Galati said the Kosovo military conflict was essentially the product of reinterpretation of the "democratic" and/or "democratizing" mission of NATO, as expounded by President Clinton 聳 perhaps for diverting attention away from his personal problems at home 聳 and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, equally concerned with rectifying his past "pacifist" image and consolidating his current self-assumed role as a champion of global human rights and international peacemaker.
The bottom line was that with the Cold War ended, the United States was trying, through NATO, to maintain a significant presence in Europe while a nominally united European Union was trying to limit and eventually minimize American influence, he said.
Fischer-Galati predicted that one result of the Kosovo conflict would be the end of NATO in its current form and its eventual replacement by a wholly European security organization.
Kosovo was a side issue to the basic rivalries between the European Union, where Germany was trying to establish itself as the main economic and political power, and the only world "super power," the United States.
As evidence of that Fischer-Galati pointed to:
o How the Kosovo conflict is already largely forgotten by politicians and the media in this country.
o Statements by Secretary of State Madeline Albright and Secretary of Defense William Cohen that there would be no repetition of NATO military action in cases similar to Kosovo聮s.
o European actions designed to strengthen the Euro against the dollar as part of Europe聮s determination to compete effectively, if not to actually undermine, the predominance of the United States in the attainment of the "global economy."