Well you are right, for a country that is barely a state at all, and one that until recently was only a region it’s stateliness could hardly be called a failure yet. But as I was in super-summerising mode I was trying to get across this point which was made in the Jeremy Harding article I linked to:

Once a supplier of farm produce to other parts of Yugoslavia, Kosovo now brings in almost all its food, along with fuel and building materials. Its leading ‘export’ is scrap metal, a harvest of rundown plant from the Milosevic era and Nato bomb damage. Kosovo’s trade gap is dramatic: imports account for 90 per cent of legal cross-border trade. The UN, the EU and Nato have frozen the conflict between Serbs and Albanians for the last four years; inadvertently, too, they’ve kept development on ice. If room temperature is ever achieved, Kosovo will look very much like a failed state.

But it was also little dig at the fact that it should be a state in the first place. The reason it is is to ensure that an ethnic minority can be free from the oppressive tyranny of another ethnic group, namely the serbs, but while enjoying their freedom they also have the opportunity to give the serbs that are now within their border plenty of grief. But it also seems to be a case that if, in the future, it cannot survive without the help of the UN, the EU and Nato then I was calling into question why it should have been created in the first place.

But it is true that Washington and Brussels will be centrally involved, not least because the Kosovan Albanian majority want them there and were - to some degree suspicious of the more broad based UN presence. I see that as problematic from the other direction that it is precisely a broad based approach that might help assuage Kosovan Serb fears and it is possible that a more pointed EU presence would in conjunction with Serbia develop appropriate linkages.

Well, it seems that Serbia is very much interested in keeping on the EU’s good side and that it seems that the EU have committed themselves to Kosovo, so with both gaining from Brussels it seems that a compromises in terms of inter-ethnic conflict could be worked out in terms of budgetary allocations.

But it seems that even if Serbia can be mollified that Russia still aren’t very happy about it.