This was a new and progressive face for Nato, the same one it has since used to seduce much of the European Left. Previously, in the Nordic countries, Atlanticists have had to sell war and militarism to largely pacifist publics. This was achieved in part by presenting Nato not as a rapacious, pro-war military alliance, but as an enlightened, “progressive” peace alliance. As Timothy Garton Ash effused in the Guardian in 2002, “NATO has become a European peace movement” where one could watch “John Lennon meet George Bush”. Today, by contrast, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland abandoned their long-standing traditions of neutrality and opted for membership. Nato is portrayed as a military alliance — and Ukraine a war­ — that even former pacifists can get behind. All its proponents seem to be singing is “Give War a Chance”.

The Jolie campaign marked a dramatic turn in what Katharine A.M. Wright and Annika Bergman Rosamond call “Nato’s strategic narrative” in several ways. First, the alliance embraced celebrity star power for the first time, imbuing its unremarkable brand with elite glamour and beauty. Jolie’s star power meant that the alluring images of the event reached apolitical audiences with little knowledge of Nato. Second, the partnership seemed to usher in an era in which women’s rights, gendered violence and feminism would assume a more prominent role in Nato rhetoric. Since then, and especially in the past 12 months, telegenic female leaders such as the Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, and Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, have increasingly served as the spokespersons of enlightened militarism in Europe. The alliance has also intensified its engagement with popular culture, new technologies, and youth influencers.

Of course, Nato has always been PR-conscious, and has long engaged culture, entertainment, and the arts. Who could forget the 1999 album Distant Early Warning from electronic duo Icebreaker International, recorded with funding from the defunct “NATOarts” and inspired by the radar stations along Alaska and Canada’s northern periphery built to alert Nato of an incoming Soviet nuclear strike? Or the 2007 feature film HQ, produced by Nato’s public diplomacy division, which depicts life inside the alliance and a mock diplomatic response to a crisis in the fictional state of Seismania? Just about everyone it turns out. But what makes Nato’s more recent strategic turn so effective is that it has successfully echoed candidate countries’ progressive local traditions and identities.

No political party in Europe better exemplifies the shift from militant pacifism to ardent pro-war Atlanticism than the German Greens. Most of the original Greens had been radicals during the student protests of 1968; many had demonstrated against American wars. The early Greens advocated for West Germany’s withdrawal from Nato. But as the founding members entered middle age, fissures began to appear in the party that would one day tear it apart. Two camps began to coalesce: the “Realos” were the moderate Greens, politically pragmatists. The “Fundis” were the radical, uncompromising camp; they wanted the party to remain faithful to its fundamental values no matter what.

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Predictably, the Fundis believed that European peace would be best served by West Germany’s withdrawal from the alliance and tended to favour military neutrality. Meanwhile, the Realos believed that West Germany needed Nato. They even argued that withdrawal would return matters of security to the German nation-state and risk rekindling militaristic nationalism. Their Nato was a post-national, cosmopolitan alliance, speaking numerous languages and flying a multitude of flags, protecting Europe from Germany’s most destructive impulses. But Nato membership at the end of history was one thing. Germany going to war again — the most forbidden of taboos after World War II — was something else entirely.

Kosovo changed everything. In 1999 — the 50th anniversary of Nato’s founding — the alliance began what academic Merje Kuus has called a “discursive metamorphosis”. From the mere defensive alliance it was during the Cold War, it was becoming an active military compact concerned with spreading and defending values such as human rights, democracy, peace, and freedom well beyond the borders of its member states. The 78-day Nato bombing of what remained of Yugoslavia, ostensibly to halt war crimes committed by Serbian security forces in Kosovo, would forever transform the German Greens.

At a chaotic May 1999 party conference in Bielefeld, the Realos and Fundis fought bitterly over the bombing. Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the most prominent Realo, supported Nato’s war; for this, conference attendees pelted him with red paint. The Fundis’ proposal called for an unconditional cessation of the bombing, which would have also meant the collapse of the Green-Social Democratic Party (SDP) coalition government. The peace proposal failed, crushing the anti-war faction of the party, who would leave the Greens in droves. Instead, the Realos’ moderate resolution triumphed by a comfortable margin. After a brief pause, the bombing of Yugoslavia was allowed to continue. With the Greens’ crucial support, the Luftwaffe flew sorties over Belgrade, 58 years after their last aerial bombardment of the Serbian capital. It was the first German military operation undertaken in Europe since the Second World War.

Following the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the German Greens’ Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has continued in Fischer’s tradition, scolding countries with traditions of military neutrality and imploring them to join Nato. She has invoked Desmond Tutu’s line: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” And the Greens have even ventriloquised their own dead members, including Petra Kelly, an anti-war icon and longtime advocate for non-alignment who died in 1992. Last year, Greens co-founder Eva Quistorp wrote an imaginary letter to Petra Kelly in the newspaper TAZ. The letter borrows Kelly’s moral stances and inverts them to justify the Greens’ embrace of war. Quistorp wants us to think that if Kelly were alive today, she would have been a Nato supporter. Addressing the long-dead Kelly, Quistorp asserts, “I bet you would shout out that radical pacifism makes blackmail possible.”

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Earlier this year, Germany’s Federal Foreign Office also rolled out a new “Feminist Foreign Policy”, the latest of several European foreign ministries to have done so. This new orientation, also adopted by France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Spain, paints cosmopolitan militarism with a faux-radical feminist gloss, opening the domain of war and security to women’s rights activists. No-nonsense feminist leaders are depicted as the ideal foil to authoritarian “strongmen”.

Sweden was the first country to adopt such a policy in 2014, permitting it to project its longstanding state feminism abroad, and to assume a new moral posture in the international arena. Domestically, there were positive Atlanticist stories in women’s magazines. In the “Mama” section of the Swedish newspaper Expressen, targeted at female readers, one interview with Angelina Jolie emphasised that Nato can protect women from sexual violence in war. Jolie also stressed that there is little difference between humanitarian aid workers and Nato soldiers, as they “are striving towards the same goal: peace”.

The academic Merje Kuus has written that Nato enlargement involves “a two-fold legitimation” strategy. First, Nato is rendered ordinary and unremarkable, pedestrian and everyday, and second, it is portrayed as above reproach, vital, an absolute moral good. The effect of this, she says, is the simultaneous banalisation and glorification of Nato: it becomes so blandly bureaucratic that it is below debate, and so “existential and essential”, that it is above debate. And this legitimation strategy has been evident in the limited, tightly-controlled debate about Euro-Atlantic integration in the Nordic countries, neither of which held referendums on membership. After decades of popular resistance to the alliance, Nato, it seems, is above democracy. But as Kuss writes, that does not mean that Nato is imposed on a society. The aim is instead “to integrate it into entertainment, education, and civic life more broadly”.

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Evidence of this is everywhere. In February, Nato held its first ever gaming event. A young employee of the alliance joined popular Twitch streamer ZeRoyalViking to play Among Us and casually chat about the danger disinformation poses to democracy. With them was a mountaineer influencer and environmental activist named Caroline Gleich. As their astronaut avatars navigated a cartoon spaceship, they spoke about Nato in glowing terms. By the event’s end, the stream had turned into a recruitment effort: the alliance employee talked about the perks of his job and encouraged viewers to check the Nato website for employment opportunities in fields such as graphic design and video editing.

The event was part of Nato’s “Protect the Future” campaign. This year it included a graphic novel competition for young artists. The alliance also courted dozens of influencers with large followings on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and brought them out to the headquarters in Brussels. Other influencers were dispatched to last year’s Nato Summit in Madrid, where they were asked to create content for their audiences.

The European Left has been utterly captivated by this show. Following the path taken by the German Greens, major Left-wing parties have abandoned military neutrality and opposition to war and now champion Nato. It is a stunning reversal. During the Cold War, the European Left organised mass protests attended by millions against US-led militarism and Nato’s deployment of Pershing-II and cruise missiles in Europe. Today, little more than the hollowed-out radical rhetoric remains. With hardly any remaining opposition to Nato left in Europe, and the alliance’s creeping expansion beyond the Euro-Atlantic area, its hegemony is now nearly absolute.

Kosovo then was a province in the south of Yugoslavia, a landlocked area slightly smaller than the Falkland Islands. It was officially part of Serbia — the largest of the Yugoslav republics — but was heavily disputed: 90% of the population were Albanian by ethnicity, Muslim by faith. And Kosovo had, for differing reasons, a revered place in the histories of both Serbia and Albania, integral to each’s sense of national identity. As George Orwell noted in 1945: “Yugoslav politics are very complicated and I make no pretence of being an expert on them.”

The Kosovars were a small minority in Yugoslavia, who had long faced discrimination, and long sought independence. That had seemed an implausible hope, but by the time the province came to Blair’s attention, things were looking very different. In the first half of the Nineties, Yugoslavia had been ripped apart, with Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia splitting to become independent countries, the latter two after wars of a bloodiness not seen in Europe since 1945. The Kosovars were still a minority, but — with Yugoslavia reduced from six constituent republics to just two, Serbia and Montenegro — they now made up a fifth of the country’s population. Not so small anymore.

In 1995, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began armed actions; by 1998, the insurgency had escalated into serious conflict. The Yugoslav military was attempting to suppress the KLA by terrorising the population: hundreds were killed, thousands raped, and hundreds of thousands displaced. This was the point at which the situation forced itself into the international spotlight, provoking a sense of horrified déjà vu: the earlier Yugoslav Wars had cost the lives of up to 150,000, and made the term “ethnic cleansing” common currency. Many in the West were, retrospectively in some instances, feeling ashamed that such destruction had been allowed to run rampant in Europe. Then, the United Nations had tried to contain the killing with an arms embargo and the deployment of some ineffective peacekeepers; mostly they had looked on sorrowfully. And now it was happening again.

“I saw it as essentially a moral issue,” wrote Blair in his memoirs. There was a humanitarian disaster unfolding, and — as in Ukraine today — the blame lay at the feet of one man: in this case the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević. Action was needed. By June 1998, Britain was talking with its Nato partners about the possibility of an air and land operation; it was another nine months before, in March 1999, Nato began bombing Yugoslavia. “We have learned from bitter experience not to appease dictators,” explained Blair, who largely drove the initiative. “We tried it 60 years ago.”

There was — again, as today — political consensus, with backing for the government’s actions from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, then led by William Hague and Paddy Ashdown respectively. Even Blair’s own party was mostly in support. A few on the Left pointed out that the lack of UN authorisation made the bombing entirely illegal, but a motion condemning Nato’s actions was signed by just six of the usual suspects, including Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Notably absent was Ken Livingstone, who joined Blair in comparing Milošević to Hitler. Robin Cook and Clare Short — who would both later resign from the cabinet over Iraq — were fully on board, the former as foreign secretary, the latter dutifully doing the media rounds to defend the government.

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Television news played its part in preparing the public for military action, with extensive coverage of the appalling suffering being endured by the Kosovars. In the press, the most notable cheerleaders were to be found at the Guardian. As early as April 1998, an editorial was calling for “intervention if only on humanitarian grounds” and for “the deployment of troops”. On the eve of the bombing, the leader column was headlined: “The sad need for force.” We have become familiar with that sense of sorrowful necessity in the last 12 months.

It was confidently predicted that 72 hours of bombing would be sufficient to force Milošević into retreat. That didn’t happen, and the days stretched out into weeks and months. Along the way, there was a series of Nato errors: the accidental strike on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; a cluster bomb aimed at an airfield that hit a market, killing more than 60 Serbian civilians; the deaths of 87 Kosovar refugees in a bomb attack on the village of Koriša. In the face of these blunders and the absence of a swift victory, Blair ramped up the moral rhetoric: “This is no longer just a military conflict. It is a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity.” To prove the point, Milošević was indicted for crimes against humanity by a UN tribunal.

But the public was losing faith. Although an early opinion poll showed two-thirds supporting the use of ground troops, the Labour Party’s own focus groups reported far less enthusiasm. At a time when public spending was still under tight control, people wanted to know, why was money being spent on waging war? Philip Gould, Blair’s much-trusted pollster, urged him to ignore the findings and carry on, but press secretary Alastair Campbell was furious with the electorate’s lack of gratitude: “It made you wonder why we bothered sometimes.”

In the event, it took 78 days before Milošević agreed an unconditional withdrawal of Serbian troops, and even then, it was Russian diplomacy and the threat of a Nato land invasion that proved decisive. There was a limit to what bombing alone could do (as Martin McGuinness of the IRA helpfully pointed out). Nonetheless, the operation had achieved its objective. Indeed, it went further. So damaged was Milošević’s standing among Serbs that the following year he lost the presidential election and was dragged from office. (He was subsequently extradited to The Hague to face charges of war crimes, dying before the trial could conclude.) Regime change had not been the war’s aim, but it was achieved.

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Insofar as Kosovo is remembered, it’s seen as, to use Blair’s description, “a just war”. The comparisons between Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany were historically illiterate — and tone-deaf, given the history of the country in the Forties — but there was a clear aggressor, who everyone agreed had to be defeated. It was also, from a British perspective, a clean war. There were around 13,500 dead, most of them civilians, but Nato had no combat fatalities at all. And it was welcomed by those in whose name it was being fought. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, but it was notable that they blamed Milošević, not Nato. The Kosovars were overwhelmingly in favour of the military intervention, and Blair in particular was seen as a hero. When he visited the capital, Pristina, a few weeks after the cessation of hostilities, he was greeted by huge crowds, chanting his name, waving Union Jacks and presenting him with flowers. “Tonibler” and “Bler” became popular names for male children born in Kosovo that year (as with the Kosovan footballer Bler Thaçi).

“War is never civilised,” said Blair in his moment of triumph. “But war can be necessary to uphold civilisation.” It was the kind of paradox that appealed to him and was so integral to his oratory: the civilising war, the imposition of democracy. The victory, he believed, confirmed his “doctrine of international community” — which he outlined during the conflict: those with military power, he argued, had the right, indeed the duty, to intervene where possible against “a despotic, dictatorial regime”, even if there was no “immediate threat to our interests”.

It was the philosophy that later fed his fervour for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and of Iraq in 2003. There was the same talk of good and evil, of how we should never appease dictators; the same predictions of swift success. And in the case of Iraq, there was a similar failure — much more controversially this time — to get UN backing. But by now, Blair was, said Labour’s ex-deputy leader Roy Hattersley, in a “messianic mood”.

Neither of those ventures, of course, ended well. There was no repeat of the welcome in Pristina, and the unforeseen consequences were catastrophic. The destabilising of Iraq led to the emergence of Islamic State; Afghanistan reverted to Taliban control as soon as western troops departed. Nor was Nato’s later bombing of Libya in 2011 any more positive: Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown, but then another, longer and more costly, civil war broke out. All are, by any normal measure, failed states. The Foreign Office currently advises British citizens not to travel to Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya.

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It also advises against all but essential travel to northern Kosovo, and there’s a warning for the whole country: “Terrorists are likely to try to carry out attacks.” Media attention has long since moved on, but even with the continuing presence of KFOR — the Nato-led peacekeeping force, now much reduced in numbers — Kosovo is still not stable. Maybe that was inevitable. In public, this was “a battle between good and evil”. In private, Blair acknowledged that “the KLA were not much better than the Serbs”. The Nato victory was followed by Kosovan retaliation. There was an exodus of Serbs and Roma in a further wave of ethnic cleansing; churches were attacked, just as mosques had once been; and there have been frequent outbreaks of violence over the years: more than 200 KFOR personnel have lost their lives.

There have also been knock-on effects internationally. In 2004, Amnesty International published a report revealing how women were being trafficked into the province from Albania to work as prostitutes, meeting the demands of the 50,000 peacekeeping troops stationed there. And it wasn’t just adult women. “I was forced by the boss to serve international soldiers and police officers,” a 12-year-old Albanian girl told the researchers. Amnesty concluded that the UN and Nato forces were “not only failing to protect the human rights of the women and girls, but are in many cases themselves using them for sexual gratification and are even allegedly involved in trafficking itself”.

By the time the report was released, the sex industry created for KFOR had grown, becoming the centre of a network that sold woman and girls into prostitution in western Europe — 1,400 were being smuggled into Britain every year, it was estimated. When in 2005 ex-cabinet minister Harriet Harman analysed the successful prosecutions for people trafficking, she concluded that, “in nearly every case the culprit was Albanian or Kosovan, some of whom had been allowed in as refugees”.

The legacy of Kosovo was also seen in the transformation of Nato, now an organisation prepared to initiate war beyond the UN: a fact that ensures Kosovo still has traction in Russian propaganda. Answering western criticism of the invasion of Ukraine last year, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was quick to talk of Nato’s “illegal use of force” in 1999. And, in the context of Ukraine, it’s hard not to see Blair in Pristina as the model for Boris Johnson, or indeed Keir Starmer, in Kyiv. (How envious they must be to see all those Toniblers.) Adoring crowds and moral certainty are a seductive combination, particularly for a politician feeling a lack of honour in his own land.

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Ukraine, of course, is not Kosovo. In one sense, the argument today is even more clear-cut: Ukraine is an independent, sovereign nation, whereas Kosovo had no such status. (Indeed, it is still not recognised by all member states of Nato.) The Yugoslav claim that its forces were suppressing an internal terrorist threat carried some weight; the same is evidently not true of the invasion of Ukraine. The real difference, though, is the nature of the opponent. Blair’s interventionism depended, he said, on answering the question: “Are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake?” Nobody seriously thinks that Nato taking on Russia directly is either sensible or prudent.

Nonetheless, the rhetoric remains, despite all that has happened since Kosovo. The Ukraine War is seen in the moral terms advocated by Blair. Emotion is the order of the day, realpolitik is out of favour, and the political and media consensus is that this is again a fight between good and evil. The danger is of over-simplification. It is not hard to identify an evil, but good is a much less clearcut phenomenon. “War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress,” conceded Blair. More than that, it brings unintended consequences, which can amount to evils.

If Blair’s military adventuring had ended with Kosovo, foreign policy would be seen as a minor part of his legacy, rather than the dominant note that it now is. And the Kosovo War would be regarded as a qualified success, the negatives — including the lack of an exit strategy — outweighed by the positives. Few doubted that the cause was just, and most agreed that the violence and the death toll would have been worse had Nato not got involved. It might even be remembered for making the case for Blair’s doctrine of liberal intervention. There was an emergency, a clearly defined solution, and a task that was accomplished. There was also, however, the hazardous, illusory hope that the solution could be replicated in very different circumstances.

There is a strict timetable to crises in Kosovo. It runs like this. First, after a disagreement between Serbia’s leader and Kosovo’s, a deadline is set by the Kosovo side to do this or that, or barricades are erected in Serbian-inhabited north Kosovo. The diplomats go into hyperdrive, harsh words are spoken, and the Serbian Army deploys to the border, making sure that clips of military convoys circulate on social media. Serbian nationalists fantasise that they are actually going to do something and Serbian tabloids froth that Kosovo-Albanians are about to wage war against their people.

At this point, parts of the Western media wake up and journalists, who never seem to clock that Nato has thousands of troops in Kosovo pledged to protect it from Serbia, think that it might invade. Then, deal done, the barricades come down until the next time.

Today, we are at the fag end of the latest cycle. The barricades which stood for 20 days have come down and everyone has gone home — but this time, it was a pretty close-run thing. The barricades were in fact trucks blocking the roads in some 14 places. Just over a week ago, as I visited one in the village of Rudare, a colleague pointed out a petrol tanker. People were not very happy about it, he said. It was full; if there were a violent incident, it could explode.

As we spoke, judges, teachers, doctors — in fact it seemed the entire haute bourgeoisie of Serbian north Kosovo — wandered up and down, chatting to friends and warming their hands on flaming braziers. Some were here because they wanted to be, others because their political appointee bosses had ordered them to be. Leaders of the main Kosovo Serb party were here too. At one point, a car zoomed up and four masked young men jumped out and strode off purposefully. In the nearby divided town of Mitrovica, where Serbs live in the north and Albanians in the south, the north is festooned with Serbian flags and spray-painted with stencilled crests of something called the “Northern Brigade”. They read: “Don’t worry… We are waiting!” But who are they? A Serbian militia in waiting? No one knows for sure.

In hushed tones, residents tell me that, in the last year, 600 men have been sent for military training in Serbia. But there is no way to know, unless you start asking questions of people who would really not appreciate them, what is true and what is a misinformation spread by BIA, Serbia’s intelligence service, which is widely believed to hold the whip hand around here. Meanwhile, locals were queuing at cashpoints. With the barricades having closed the two border posts in the north, they were worried that banks would run out of cash.

Ask people in north Mitrovica what they want and, at the end of the day, it is just a normal life — the type that no one here has enjoyed for more than a quarter of a century. But how likely is this? How to cut Kosovo’s Gordian Knot, which has left the fate of Serbs and Kosovo-Albanians (and Kosovo and Serbia) tied to one another? The Kosovo war ended in 1999, but still the diplomats and political leaders have been unable or unwilling to agree on a final framework for peaceful coexistence.

In the wake of Yugoslavia’s disintegration in the Nineties, Kosovo, Serbia’s southern province, remained locked within Serbia — even though its population was overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian, rejected Serbian rule and was repressed by Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s then leader who had stripped the province of its autonomy. Following the Kosovo war of 1998-99 between Kosovo-Albanian guerrillas and Serbia, and then Nato’s intervention, Kosovo became a UN protectorate. In 2008, it declared independence. This was recognised by most, but not all, Western countries, and rejected by Serbia, Russia and China among others. Kosovo’s Albanians argued they had the right to self-determination; Serbia argued that its territorial integrity trumped that, even though no one in Serbia actually wanted or wants to reintegrate a region full of hostile Albanians.

Of Kosovo’s population of 1.8 million, some 100,000-120,000 are Serbs. More than half live in central and south Kosovo, while the rest live in the north, a compact area abutting Serbia. Now, say local Serbs in the north, the tables have turned. Marko Jaksic, a lawyer and political activist from north Mitrovica, says that Albin Kurti, Kosovo’s prime minister, “is doing the same things as Milosevic during the Nineties, only we have changed sides.” It is the type of argument that makes Kosovo-Albanians incandescent with rage.

Jaksic and I were talking in the Number One, a hotel café a few hundred metres from the bridge over the Ibar which divides the city in two. He starts the conversation by pointing out that exactly 10 years ago I had asked him what the solution for Kosovo was, and that he had said that the border between Kosovo and Serbia was not “up there”, meaning north of where we were, but “on the bridge”. He believes that Kosovo should be partitioned. It is an idea which comes and goes like the tide. Until he went to The Hague in 2020 to answer charges of war crimes, Hashim Thaci, until then Kosovo’s president, and Serbia’s leader Aleksandar Vucic toyed with the idea, but key Western countries moved to quash it.

Nor was partition popular in Kosovo and Serbia. The problem was not north Kosovo, but rather the precedent. If north Kosovo returned to Serbia, then what about the Albanian-populated Presevo valley in Serbia or the Albanian-inhabited regions of North Macedonia or the Serb and Croat regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina? So, Pandora’s Box remains closed. How, then, can Kosovo-Serbs live normal lives in Kosovo, especially in the north?

The answer to this question is surprisingly simple. With political will there is no issue between Kosovo and Serbia, and between Serbs and Albanians, that cannot be resolved or at least fudged. The two sides have been talking in an EU-sponsored dialogue for more than a decade and plenty of agreements have been struck — even if they have not all been implemented.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also injected new vigour into negotiations, which are led by the EU’s Miroslav Lajcak, who is supported by Gabriel Escobar, an American diplomat. However, since June, they have been firefighting, tamping down crises over number plates, identity cards and now barricades. But they have a plan, supported by France and Germany, which could be the basis for a long-term settlement. The diplomats talk of the “two Germanies”, by which they mean that Serbia and Kosovo could live side-by-side (like the two Cold War Germanies did), not recognising one another officially but as independent states.

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But this is only half of the equation. In return for de facto recognition, which means being treated like a neighbouring state by Serbia, Kosovo is expected to abide by a commitment it signed in 2013 by which Serbian municipalities in Kosovo could form some type of association, giving them effective autonomy in fields such as health and education. Kosovo’s constitutional court has rejected this and Kurti campaigned vigorously against it in opposition, but now the pressure is on from his Western backers to find a way to deliver it in one form or another.

The current crisis has set back the cause of normalisation badly. Serbs have resigned from parliament, from the judiciary and, in the north, from the Kosovo police force. They also resigned from local assemblies, which triggered elections for new ones which have now been postponed until April after electoral offices in the north were attacked. Tatjana Lazarevic, the editor of the KoSSev news site in the north, says that since the Serbs quit the police, Albanian members of the Kosovo police have been sent north and locals see them “100% as an occupation force”. She adds that Serbs in the north “didn’t want to integrate into the Kosovo state… and neither do they want that today”. But if there is a normalisation deal between Kosovo and Serbia, she thinks, people will just live with it.

If that were the case, if there were a deal, what choice would Kosovo Serbs have?  Kosovo’s north can be a dangerous place. If it is in Serbia’s interest to make a deal, dissent won’t be tolerated. This is a place where politics and organised crime overlap, even more so than everywhere else in the Balkans.

Despite the high-stakes game played with the barricades these last few weeks, it is not all doom and gloom. Lajcak told me: “Tensions have never been higher in 20 years; mistrust has never been deeper.” But Jeff Hovenier, the American ambassador to Kosovo, struck a more optimistic note. He told me that, while the ultimate goal was mutual recognition of Kosovo and Serbia, “which is unfortunately not possible right now, today’s challenges can still be overcome. If you see this agreement, this work as an interim step towards that… there are real possibilities.”

Ivan Vejvoda, a Serbian analyst and head of the Europe’s Futures programme of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna concurs. Despite the current stand-off, “both sides realise they need to do this, but they are still looking for a way in which they turn out to be the winning side, but there is no winner in this. Everyone will lose out on something — or rather, no one will get everything they want. But that’s exactly what compromise is about: to achieve a situation where one goes forward.” He then proceeded to list examples from Northern Ireland to the Faroe Islands to the Basque country to the South Tyrol where all manner of workable solutions for minority rights have been secured.

Kurti himself thinks that Serbia remains uninterested in a compromise and Vucic says Serbia will never recognise Kosovo. Vucic still wants partition, Kurti said to me and talks as if he is “in search of a time machine… sometimes he wants to go back to 1999 and sometimes to 2007 [before Kosovo declared independence], but you know… the train has left the station. We cannot go back there anymore.” Many of the diplomats find Kurti stubborn and that has lost him some Western support, but his policy of playing hardball with Vucic has been delivering results. Vucic is on the backfoot and has had to concede on several issues in the past few months: on 15 December, Kurti applied for EU candidacy and has also finally secured a promise that Kosovo’s citizens will no longer require Schengen visas from 2024.

Yet amid all these technical solutions, a part of the problem — in fact, a very big part of the problem — is personal. A few years ago, I interviewed Hashim Thaci, who had been a leading member of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army when Vucic had been a minister in Milosevic’s government. When the interview ended, he asked me: “Are you seeing Aleksandar?” At first, I drew a complete blank — then I realised he was talking about Vucic. There are no such first name term niceties nowadays. Vucic and Kurti despise one another. When Vucic was a minister, Kurti was a political prisoner in a Serbian jail; on 1 December, Vucic publicly called Kurti “terrorist scum”. The lack of any personal rapport makes finding a deal that much harder.

After leaving the Number One in north Mitrovica, Jaksic and I walked to the bridge over the Ibar as I was returning south to Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. You can walk across the bridge, though it has been barred to traffic since 1999. Jaksic told me that, as a court administrator for the unified court of Mitrovica, he and his Albanian colleagues had parted company with tears in their eyes but as friends when he, like all the Serbs in the court, had resigned when Serbs quit Kosovo’s institutions. There was no going back now, he thought. But then we laughed about whether I would still be asking him the same questions in 10 years’ time. If I were betting, I would say there was a 60-40 chance that I will be.

Despite their distance in time and space, not to mention qualitative differences of magnitude and geopolitical significance, the conflicts in Ukraine and Bosnia nonetheless remain entangled. Fundamental questions that have surfaced over the past month — over European strategic autonomy, Germany’s status as a great power, multipolarity and the role of Nato expansion — all emerged with the war in Bosnia.

The German recognition of the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia in 1991 — in express defiance of the US secretary of state at the time, James Baker — spurred the collapse of the Yugoslav federation, leading to Bosnia’s bid for secession and its slide into civil war. At the time, German defiance of the US was taken to signal the revival of German power in the wake of the country’s reunification in 1990. Yet its fumbling for foreign policy independence was eventually ended by Washington, which reasserted its strategic domination on the continent with a Nato bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb forces that helped bring the war to an end in 1995. Followed by war in Kosovo in 1999, the wars of Yugoslav secession only ended in 2001 with a Nato deployment to end a conflict brewing in North Macedonia.

Although Western military intervention in another multi-national, multi-ethnic ex-communist federation spurred fears in the Kremlin that the West would reprise such adventures in the ex-Soviet Union during the Nineties, the collapse of the Russian state and the low price of oil meant that there was little Russia could do to stymie Nato expansion in the region. Russian weakness helped foster the mirage of a continent that had transcended great power rivalries, which would in turn smooth the path for Nato’s reckless policy expansion eastwards. Nonetheless, there were occasional portents of future conflict, such as when British Lieutenant-general Sir Mike Jackson refused the orders of his Nato commanding officer to fire on a Russian column attempting to seize Pristina airport in Kosovo.

The war in Bosnia and the brutality that defined it shattered the Long Peace that had prevailed in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a similarly shattering effect on a public that seems to have forgotten the wars in former Yugoslavia. Such collective amnesia — which also omits the bloody Greek Civil War that ended in 1949 — evinces a peculiar Eurocentrism, which treats European territory as if it were holy soil consecrated for perpetual peace by European blood, and as if Europe’s bloody history of internecine war makes war less rather than more likely.

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The Nato-led international intervention that brought the wars of Yugoslav secession to an end were seen as restoring the peace of Europe. In reality, however, the diplomatic, military and humanitarian tools developed in the Balkans would become instruments for extending war outside of Europe. All the elements of the international intervention in the Bosnian war would be globalised in subsequent decades across conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Arms embargoes, sanctions against “rogue regimes”, No-Fly Zones that escalated into bombing campaigns conducted alongside proxy forces and favoured ethnic militias, the deployments of large and militarised United Nations peacekeeping operations, the establishment of protectorates and international criminal courts — all these became the political and military instruments of a new global humanitarian order. Bosnia remains a de facto protectorate of the European Union to this day, hosting international forces and even sporting a blue and yellow flag expressly modelled on that of the EU.

The implications of humanitarian intervention in the Balkans were understood in Moscow even if not in Brussels or Washington. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly cited the precedent of Nato’s 1999 Kosovo War as a legal and political justification for his dismemberment of Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which was modelled on how Nato oversaw the detachment and independence of the former Serbian province in 2008. So we find ourselves in a situation where Russia claims to be retaliating against Nato encroachment in its sphere of influence in Ukraine, while in the Balkans it is Nato and the EU that decry Russian interference in stoking support for Serb secessionism in Bosnia.

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This geopolitical tangle of imperial hypocrisy shows that we are fully returned to a baleful era of great power spheres of influence, depriving smaller powers in Europe of the political space for their sovereignty and independence. The Balkans have been returned to their nineteenth century status, as what was formerly a single sovereign state has been reduced to a clutch of small, dependent states enmeshed in mutual hostility and rivalry as they jostle for great power patronage.

Given the war in Ukraine and renewed geopolitical rivalries in the Balkans, what are the prospects for Europe’s middle and smaller powers to emerge from tutelage? During the First World War, the British journalist H.H. Munro published The Purple of the Balkan Kings, a short story during the First Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, which had laid the ground for the Great War itself. The story recounts the discomfiture of his absurdly named protagonist Luitpold Wolkenstein, a “financier and diplomat on a small, obtrusive, self-important scale” who, while sitting in his favourite Viennese café, is astounded to read of the military victories of the Balkan League in rolling back the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Munro recounts how vital the subordination of the Balkan states was to Wolkenstein’s mental tranquility:

“His judgment had been one of unsparing contempt for small-scale efforts, of unquestioning respect for the big battalions and full purses. Over the whole scene of the Balkan territories and their troubled histories had loomed the commanding magic of the words ‘the Great Powers’…”

Filled with dread at the prospect that the Balkan states might redraw the map of Europe independently of the Great Powers, and that they might even roll their military victories over into a “project of fiscal unity, extending over the entire Balkan lands, and further of a constitutional union”, Munro has his “plump-bodied café oracle” retire from his café in a depressive mood.

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Today, latter-day Wolkensteins are firmly back in charge in Europe, not only in Vienna but also especially in Brussels, with their own equivalents in Moscow. Social media provides them with a hubbub that would easily outdo an early twentieth century Viennese café for its complacent febrility and bourgeois extremism. Thinking of the two Eastern European wars that now frame the rise and fall of the era of liberal hegemony — Bosnia and Ukraine respectively — will Europe’s smaller states ever be able to assert their independence against imperial domination?

There is a real risk that a peace settlement for Ukraine reproduces the problems that have plagued post-war Bosnia, which has been carved up into separate, ethnically homogenous statelets with no meaningful central government able to exert sovereignty over the territory as a whole. Ukraine would also carry the further risk of being torn between West and East, with the two halves of the country divided between Brussels and Moscow respectively.

Describing Russian war crimes as “genocide” risks overshadowing the political questions at the core of the conflict. If Ukraine is to safeguard the independence it is fighting for, it must not only repel the Russian invasion but also avoid becoming a Western protectorate, dependent on Nato arms and EU aid to survive. Neutrality offers Ukraine the best hope of preserving its sovereignty. In due course, a neutral Ukraine may even offer an example of how smaller and weaker European states may escape Balkanisation in the years to come.