Kosovo has been in the Serbian news a lot lately so I wanted to get a bit of historical background on the place. In February they declared independence and that caused protests in Serbia. It is a place of conflict and violence.
Kosovo was the southern part of Serbia. It held 20% of the Serbian population and composed about 12% of its land mass. The area is small compared to the USA, with Kosovo only being ¼ the size of my home of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It is actually only a bit bigger than Iron county. The majority (> 90%) of the population is Albanian but many Serbs consider it the “cultural heartland” of the nation and the scene of Serbian Orthodox monasteries, historic battlefields, and other historic sites.
It was my goal in reading Kosovo: A Short History by Noel Malcolm, to learn more about why some Serbs feel so strongly about the place, considering it is now mostly Albanian. The question of Kosovo independence is a touchy subject with Serbs and this particular book caused many ill-feelings with the Serbs. It is not my place to form an opinion this question and I will read more on Kosovo. I can say it is sad to have had so much death and hate in the breakup of Yugoslavia. This is the last bit of it. The topic of Kosovo will come up in conversation with my future Serb friends and I do want to visit the place to see it for myself, so some background on the area will not hurt.
In general, I disagree with the former US president Woodrow Wilson regarding his view on independence movements. When the great powers were deciding the fate of nations and peoples after World War I, he had the philosophy that if an area was mostly homogeneous in regards to ethnicity, that they should have self-determination. That sounds nice, but the world is more complex than that. I see that a strength of the USA is the union of many different kinds of people to form one unified government and more importantly, one economy. Personally, I believe that standard of living takes precedence over everything and it is nicer to live in a bigger economy. There are more opportunities to earn a living and have a better home and lifestyle for individual families. I am not sure that this movement of smaller and smaller nations is beneficial in this regard.
I am mix of Slovak and Polish descent. I am a “pan-Slavist” and wish that the Slavs would have banded together from the beginning to form one country. They would have had a better standard of living and wielded more power in defending themselves against larger outside powers like the Ottomans and the Nazis. According to Wikipedia there are 320 million Slavs. Imagine if Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia along with the Slavs of former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria formed one country. It would also be more powerful than current European heavyweights, Germany and France.
As I move through the book, I’ll blog more about what I am learning.
