L’Europe va-t-elle perdre les Balkans ?
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2017/07/01/l-europe-va-t-elle-perdre-les-balkans_5154313_3232.html
L’Europe va-t-elle perdre les Balkans ?
Miljenko Jergović, écrivain croate de Bosnie, met en garde contre un nouveau conflit et invite l’Union européenne à se réengager.
|
(L’intégralité de ce texte est parue dans la revue New Eastern Europe)
#paywall, mais l’article original est accessible sur le site mentionné par Le Monde. La conclusion :
Is Europe losing the Balkans ? – Eurozine
▻http://www.eurozine.com/is-europe-losing-the-balkans
The Western Balkans is, once again, ready for war, but not in quite the same way as in 1991.
[…]
The situation is quite different today. The nations of the Western Balkans are readying themselves for a war similar to the ones that began in 1914 and 1941. They need a wide context in which to settle their scores. They seek a war where they can die for foreign kings, emperors and sultans: for Putin, Erdoğan, Trump, or second-rate nutcases like Wilders or Le Pen, or some other wily populist whose name we are yet to hear but whose photo-fit portrait we can already visualise.
The Balkans have again become an arena for the kind of diplomatic manoeuvres that threaten one day to take on military shape. It is here in the Balkans that the Russians have, after an absence of a quarter of a century, returned to the European stage. And it is here in the Balkans that the Turks are re-establishing a presence in the very areas they were driven out of just over 100 years ago.
So has Europe sacrificed the Balkans? Before the outbreak of the First World War, it looked as if European powers had succeeded in pacifying the region. Austria-Hungary had secured an international agreement for the establishment of a protectorate over Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 and by 1908 had annexed the country outright – a move that nobody (with the exception of Serbia) seriously opposed. In the course of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Turkey was pushed back all the way to the Bosphorus. Russian attempts to increase its influence in the Balkans, through Serbia and the South Slavs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were a serious nuisance factor but not a major threat to peace. And then Gavrilo Princip killed the heir of the Habsburg throne in Sarajevo and, as we know, barely one month later the whole of Europe was at war; a war caused by paltry South-Slav rivalries of which Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Moscow and London knew very little indeed.
Europe has not quite lost the Balkans yet, but it will lose them soon if it remains blind to the consequences that might follow from such a loss. The price of Europeanising the Balkans today is probably higher than it was 20 years ago – when a golden opportunity to bring stability to the region was missed. But it remains incomparably cheaper than the price to be paid in the event of the Balkanisation of Europe. When Turkey’s foreign minister talks of the coming religious wars in Europe and when he claims that there is no difference between European social democrats and fascists, he is counting on the anti-European sentiments of Bosnian Muslims, Albanians in Macedonia, perhaps even Albania itself.
We still have time to upset his calculations. It is just a question of whether the various capitals of Europe really understand what Turkish and Russian calculations in the Balkans actually amount to.