Marking 18 years of independence in a place where nationhood, memory, and forgiveness remain unfinished business
What makes a country? Is it language? Ethnicity? A common history? Geography? Is it easier to justify nationhood on an island, where the sea itself creates a border, than on a contested patch of land where every village contains an argument with the past? Or is a country simply a people determined to govern themselves and fend off others?
The answer is less obvious than we pretend, with our delusions of inalienable rights to self-determination and silly notions of indigeneity. The world today contains roughly 200 sovereign states. Is that the right number? Should there be more? Should there be fewer? What about supranational entities like the European Union, where nations voluntarily pool aspects of sovereignty in the hope that borders will matter less? I think it may be useful. Am I alone?
Most people go about their lives without pondering such questions. And then there is Kosovo.
I am here on Liberation Day, June 12, commemorating the end of NATO’s 1999 air campaign against Serbia and the arrival of international forces that would oversee Kosovo’s passage from Serbian province to protectorate and eventually to an independent state. Kosovo declared independence in 2008, making this the eighteenth year of its contested existence as a sovereign republic.
Contested is the operative word, and you can feel it talking to people here. Kosovo has a flag, borders, police, elections, ministries, passports, and a national football team. It functions in most respects as an independent country. Yet Serbia rejects its sovereignty. Russia and China reject it as well. Five members of the European Union still refuse recognition. Kosovo remains outside the United Nations, forced to justify its existence in ways most states never have to.
So Kosovo is a perfect illustration for the idea that there is no universally accepted formula for what makes a country. On one hand, it can feel like we are nothing without the recognition of others. One the other, the hell with the world. But not with the United States. Rarely have I sensed such appreciation for my American accent. Never have I heard such adulation for Bill Clinton, who was president at the time. There is a statue of him in the center of town.
And if you’d like more churches, there is also the unfinished Serbian Orthodox Church of Christ the Saviour, standing awkwardly beside Pristina’s university campus like a stranded remnant of another era. Construction began under Milosevic in the 1990s and stopped with the war, leaving behind a half-completed shell that is part church, part monument, part provocation. To Serbs, it represents the enduring continuity of Orthodox Christianity in Kosovo. To Albanians, it symbolizes political domination imposed during the final years of Serbian rule. Its meaning derives from the state of being unfinished.
