How would the US react, for example, if Florida declared its independence in 2020 because it had a majority Spanish-speaking population that aligned itself more with Castro than Bush?
The imminent independence of the province of Kosovo from Serbia is at present the topic of hot debate and flaring tempers up north.
The United States and many European nations are solidly backing the call for an independent Kosovo, while Serbia and her long-time ally Russia are vociferously against such a move. The pro-independence faction cites democracy and an end to ethnic and religious tensions as the main reason for taking its stance, and views Russia’s opposing view as muscle-flexing and backing a long-time friend and ally in Serbia.
While there is much to be said for the merits of a fluffy democracy being patched together from a war-ravaged region, the motives of the pro-independence lobby do not appear to be any more sincere than they were when it invaded Iraq to liberate its people and find those weapons of mass destruction to save us all from certain doom.
To push Serbia into accepting the loss of a sizeable chunk of its sovereign territory without actually being sensitive to the history and the implications would be to create another Israeli-Palestinian conflict right on Europe’s doorstep.
The history of Kosovo, and the Balkans in general, is complex, bloody, much manipulated and a subject often devolving into fierce argument. However, the generally agreed facts are:
Slavic tribes comprising the nucleus of people that became the modern Serbs moved south and settled the lands of present-day Serbia and Kosovo during the fifth and sixth centuries BC. That means that Serbs have been present there for more than 1 400 years. Albanians as a collective people were first recorded in 1043, in Greece and not Kosovo, roughly 500 years after the Serbs had settled the area. Efforts to place them as a people in Kosovo using linguistic techniques before this time have ended in pure speculation.