Balkan specialists fear a nightmare scenario which would see the Albanian question emerge from the Kosovo crisis as a potentially greater and more disastrous conflict than that in Bosnia.
This is worth underlining as the Rambouillet conference on Kosovo gets under way this weekend and as NATO assembles a force of 20,000 to 30,000 troops to oversee whatever settlement emerges.
Their fear is based firmly on the region's history. Albanians have never been united within a single Albanian state. During the Ottoman period, there were four Albanian vilayet in what are today Albania, Kosovo, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and a part of northern Greece.
The Balkan wars of 1912 to 1913, involving Serb, Greek and Bulgarian attacks against the Turks and their remaining European territory, rehearsed many techniques used in the first World War, as the writer Misha Glenny pointed out in a recent talk in Dublin.
These regional forces were in each case backed up by the great imperial powers of Britain, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France and Italy. Their bank loans, arms salesmen, military trainers and firms underwrote what were the biggest wars to have been fought in Europe. Some 25 per cent of Bulgaria's male population was mobilised, 500,000 men in all; trench warfare, aeroplanes and searchlight fighting were inaugurated.
The imperial involvement was a central feature of Balkan conflict since the Congress of Vienna in 1878. The supposedly primordial nastiness of Balkan nationalism based on ethnic hatred is better understood as a function of competing imperial nationalisms imposed on Balkan clients in the competition to replace the last Ottoman outposts in Europe. Thus, they were European, rather than Balkan, wars.
In the same way, the origins of Kemalist nationalism in Turkey are to be found in Macedonia during the period of Ottoman retreat, including the mindset that led to the Armenian genocide in 1915 and the post-first World War mass transfers of people between Turkey and Greece, the first ethnic cleansing.
After the second World War, Albanians were located in Albania, the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and in Kosovo, where they were not recognised as a nationality but only as a national minority in Tito's constitution. There was, nonetheless, much local autonomy until 1989, when it was removed by Slobodan Milosevic as part of his mobilisation of Serb nationalism.
He justified that largely by the historic defeat of the Serb army in Kosovo in 1389, which led to Turkish domination of the Balkans for nearly 500 years (during which time its varied ethnic groups coexisted for the most part peacefully under the authoritarian but tolerant Turkish system of imperial rule). The passionate commitment to Kosovo was largely a function of 19th-century Serbian nationalism, revived opportunistically by Milosevic.
The question now is whether he is preparing to cede Serbian rule over the territory, which is 90 per cent Albanian and a constant security and economic burden. He could allow Kosovo to go by forcing NATO to intervene. According to this interpretation, such an outcome would allow him to blame outsiders and reduce the political price he had to pay, as in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia.
The West has gravely mishandled the Kosovo question in the past few years. It was simply not addressed at the Dayton conference which imposed an uneasy impasse in Bosnia. Nor was sufficient attention or support given to the important pacifist current among the Kosovar leadership, led by Ibrahim Rugova.
It took the resort to arms by the Kosovo Liberation Army last year, and the brutal Serb response, to alert the West's real attention. By then it was too late as mass sentiment had swung decisively towards the demand for independence, in circumstances reminiscent of 1916 in Ireland.
But an independent Kosovo could put the Albanian question back fully on the international agenda. It would raise expectations and, many assume, demands by the 25 per cent or so Albanians in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) to join that state.
An intransigent ethnic nationalism among the Kosovar diaspora would fuel the flames. If FYROM were so to disintegrate, Bulgaria and, perhaps, Greece would be tempted to intervene.
The West has, therefore, set its face against the prospect of independence; even, apparently, against the idea of an autonomy agreement to be followed by a referendum on independence. The proposals on which the Rambouillet talks are based are a complicated formula intended to protect minority groups and human rights.
The recent fighting and massacres have convinced France, Britain and the US that ground troops will be required to freeze the conflict for a period. They also coincide with a rearrangement of security and defence competences between Europe and the US.
If the conflict is to be resolved, and not simply contained, it will be necessary to invent more civilised methods of living together in the region, which would be much easier to do if Slobodan Milosevic departs the scene.
