Kosovo Divided. Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Struggle for a State

Calu’s book Kosovo Divided deals with the gap between the legal and institutional framework for minority protection and its actual implementation in post-independence Kosovo. The underlying research question of this bottom-up study is: ‘Why, how and to what extent has Kosovo been able to manage diversity as part of statebuilding by adopting a multiethnic legal and institutional framework designed to integrate, accommodate and protect the ethnic minority groups within its territory’ (1–2). Calu connects his case study to broader questions concerning the relationship between processes of state formation based on the norms of liberal democracy and endogenous factors related to the management of diversity and post-conflict reconciliation. His book is based on research into legal and political regulations combined with field research and interviews with civil society and political representatives of minorities in Kosovo conducted in 2012 and 2013.

The first chapter presents the theoretical framework for the study. Its logical structure is flawed and the connection to the empirical analysis that follows is not always clear. The first part of the chapter outlines some key challenges to liberal democratic statebuilding, with a particular focus on securing a unitary national state and the clash between endogenous concerns and externally driven statebuilding. Calu then engages with literature on post-conflict statebuilding, arguing that endogenous factors are pertinent for evaluating the success of such statebuilding. ‘The interplay between developing liberal/ democratic norms of governance and the focus on managing diversity (the integration, accommodation, and protection of minority rights) is the constant challenge that this book analyses in trying to reveal the intended and unintended consequences of statebuilding’ (29). The third part of this first chapter scrutinizes models for managing diversity. Most important for the author’s argument is the debate between consociational power-sharing and more integrative models. The Kosovo case study substantiates Calu’s argument that consociational power-sharing is appropriate for short-term peacebuilding, but a long-term strategy requires more integrative tools for building efficient and sustainable governance of diverse societies.

Chapters Two to Five then present the empirical analysis. Chapter Two provides an overview of the concomitant processes of statebuilding and post-conflict reconciliation in Kosovo, with particular attention to the period of international oversight and the Ahtisaari Plan between 1999 and 2008. Calu argues that in line with international standards of democratization and institution-building, Kosovo institutions made considerable progress in terms of democratic and legislative functioning, but did not have the undisputed legitimacy to make this work in practice, especially in relation to diversity management.

Chapters Three to Five outline in detail the constitutional, legal, and political measures to accommodate diversity and post-conflict resolution in post-2008, that is independent, Kosovo. Chapter Three deals with the Kosovo Serb community, Chapter Four with the other non-dominant minorities, and Chapter Five with decentralization measures. Each of these chapters provides a useful, if often legalistic overview of the extensive minority protection system in place. All three chapters develop the argument that the internationally engineered and externally driven model for diversity management clashes with endogenous factors, leading to unintended gaps between the de jure and de facto implementation of minority protection.

With regard to the Kosovo Serb community, shortcomings include the fragile legitimacy of Serb political representatives and the continued dependency on Serbian parallel institutions, which could not be eradicated by the economically weak and institutionally developing Kosovar state. Calu shows that while ‘pragmatic strategies and policies have been somewhat effective at the higher level of representation and participation of Kosovo Serbs […], this has not been properly expanded at the community level in order to secure a sustainable integration’ (105). The book shows that the Kosovo Serb political representatives and the Republic of Serbia have actually appropriated tools for self-government in line with the policy of non-recognition and anti-establishment. This trend has become even more obvious in the growing monopoly of the Republic of Serbia and its current political leadership over Kosovo Serb politics in most recent years, which is mentioned only in passing in the book.

For the non-dominant minorities, Calu critically analyses the hierarchization of minorities in Kosovo. He provides an overview of the different communities, very similar to the community profiles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), including questions of political representation, socio-economic status, and identity and culture. The consociational power-sharing model is clearly tailored to appease Serb resistance by providing far-reaching self-government competences and guaranteed access to central and local government. An unintended outcome of the asymmetric application of this model in a toned-down version to non-dominant communities is the marginalization and internal division of these communities. It also leads to ethnopolitical competition for scarce resources.

The fifth chapter assesses decentralization measures from a bottom-up perspective. Calu usefully distinguishes between territorial and ethnic decentralization. The latter is based on ethnically homogenous entities for demarcation and is in the case of Kosovo applied to the Serb community, leading to ten Serb-majority municipalities with considerable local government authority. For non-dominant minorities and the Albanian majority, a territorial approach to decentralization is applied, which bases borders on traditionally and socio-economically defined territories and typically includes ethnically heterogeneous populations. The only exception is the municipality of Mamusha with its overwhelming Turkish majority. Calu again gives an OSCE-type overview of the functioning of the six Serb-majority municipalities in what is called the south of Kosovo, in addition to the municipalities of Mamusha and Prizren—the latter serves as the model for an ethnically heterogeneous municipality. He argues that the unintended outcome of this mixed decentralization model is the segregation and isolation of the Serb community into enclaves with limited potential for socio-economic sustainability, but also the marginalization of the non-dominant minority communities in what are perceived as either Serb- or Albanian-dominated municipalities.

The conclusion highlights three central points. First, the gap between de jure provisions for protecting and integrating minorities in the Kosovo state and society and the de facto implications is enormous. It is the result of the overreliance on exogenous and Eurocentric models of liberal democratic statehood. ‘The externally led and externally designed solutions for managing ethnic diversity in Kosovo, and possibly in most other contemporary post-conflict statebuilding cases, have disregarded a fundamental issue deriving from the impact of endogenous factors: variation’ (196). Second, there are clearly volatile levels of integration and a hierarchical order among minority communities. Calu’s book usefully goes beyond the prioritized Kosovo Serb community (in policy-making and academic research) to incorporate the perspectives of other minorities. Third, the generalizing view on minority integration, based on the consociational power-sharing model tailored for the Serb community, might be useful for short-term integration and pacification, but in the long term disturbs ethnic cooperation and leads to segregation and marginalization.

The empirical basis of the book is rich, including interviews with a broad spectrum of political and civil society representatives. The analysis is slightly disconnected from the extensive but not always logically composed theoretical framework. The writing of names is irritatingly inconsistent—from the hypercorrect use of the Turkish, Albanian, and Serbian writing of Mamusha to incorrect writing of names of places and people in an insensitive variant without diacritics. All in all, however, Calu makes a useful contribution to the research on Kosovo and post-conflict statebuilding more generally. Particularly valuable are the systematic comparison of constitutional, legal, and political measures as opposed to their actual implementation on the ground and the considerable attention to non-Serb minority communities.