Listening to the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” while sitting in a restaurant in Pristina, the capital of the disputed Republic of Kosovo, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it hit me that Kosovo is an underplayed success story of nation-building. From an oppressed corner of Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Kosovo has turned into a vibrant society. It has its share of problems, like all the other countries in the Balkans, but it has established itself as a case study for how Western democracies can work with a Muslim-majority country.

The fruits of this engagement were seen in the local elections held in Kosovo on November 15, the first held by Kosovo since it declared independence in February 2008. With the help of the Kosovo Democratic Institute (KDI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), I was able to participate as an observer of the elections, up in the northern part of Kosovo. We were able to watch the elections from both sides of the Ibar River, the de facto dividing line between the Serb- and Albanian-controlled parts of Kosovo.

At the polling centers we went to in Mitrovica south of the river and in the town of Vushtrria, staffers conscious of the historic nature of the vote were more than eager to show us around. The major (Albanian) parties all had representatives at just about every station, who followed the election closely. And the aftermath of the election was like it is for most elections around the world — political negotiating behind closed doors. Like elsewhere, democracy works as far as it goes.

Still a House Divided

The key words in Kosovo, however, are “as far as it goes.” It doesn’t go up to the Serb-majority area in the north. As dusk started to gather in Mitrovica, we headed north of the Ibar into the Serb-majority areas. Polling stations were supposed to open, but the Kosovo Election Commission had left them closed in most locations out of safety concerns. Gangs of “Bridge Watchers” milled around election sites — Serbians who watched who crossed the bridges across the Ibar and pelted rocks on those with Kosovo plates. (Hence our choice of a rental Land Rover with neutral Macedonian plates.) A temporary polling center was run literally out of the trunk of a car at the “invisible border” between Serb and Albanian areas by a Brit and an Aussie – but no one showed up.

We drove up to Bistricë e Shalës, an enclave of 200 Albanians in the otherwise exclusively Serb Leposavić municipality. The last part of the drive to Bistricë was a five-mile ordeal on a dirt road over a mountain and down into a nestled valley. You could see why Serbs had failed to drive Albanians out of the location during the 1999 war — which made it all the more impressive that the Election Commission had a polling station set up, complete with party and NGO observers. But with Serbs in the north boycotting the election, all 146 votes for mayor cast in the nearly 20,000-person municipality came from that station. The most immediate issue the Mayor-elect of Leposavić faces is the fact that over 99 percent of his electorate doesn’t recognize his mandate.

The government of Kosovo has made strides towards solving this problem. A big step in the process is redistricting, creating new, Serb-majority municipalities to give the Serb minority more clout and buy-in to the process. While that has yet to make headway in parts of Kosovo that border Serbia, like Leposavić, it has worked in enclaves like Gračanica, home of a famous Orthodox monastery and over 10,000 Serbs. Despite Belgrade’s entreaties to boycott the Kosovo election, turnout in these enclaves was reputed to be around 30 percent, which compares favorably with Serb turnout for Belgrade-organized parallel elections last year. Mitrovica is scheduled to have similar, Pristina-organized elections next summer after a Serb-majority municipality is established there.

But the solution to Kosovo’s relationship with Serbia is a tough one. Over the local Peja beer the night before the election, one observer familiar with both Serbia and Kosovo asked: “Why would the Serbs want it?” noting that Kosovo’s GDP per capita was less than one-third the rest of Yugoslavia’s 20 years ago. Certainly the beauty and cultural heritage of the Serb monasteries of Gračanica, Dečan, and Peć pull at Serbian heartstrings. But Belgrade’s lament that Kosovo is the heart of Serbia is met with the rejoinder that that heart beats in a foreign body. With Albanians numbering over 80 percent of Kosovo’s population a decade ago, and outnumbering Serbs in the country 10-to-1 now, Serbian claims need to be measured against the reality on the ground.

From a cynical perspective, Kosovo is an opportunity for Serbia — a small, poor Eastern European country — to get the focused attention of the U.S. and the EU. The foreign minister of Serbia, the young Vuk Jeremić, would be an unknown back-bencher if not for boosting his career by insisting on the indivisibility of Serbia and Kosovo. Both the president and prime minister of Serbia, considered strongly in favor of Serbian membership of the EU, would be tarred and feathered were they to publicly consider Kosovo anything short of an integral part of Serbia. As such, normalized relations will not come as long as this generation of politicians is in office in Belgrade.

Small Steps

A solution will have to come with the next generation. After visiting Bistricë, we went into the Serb part of Leposavić and met with an example of what that solution to the Kosovo problem will be. Savo is a Kosovo Serb who grew up in Leposavić and commutes into Mitrovica every day to go to school. A talented musician who, like most 18-year-old guys, has a fondness for Metallica and Green Day, Savo hopes to study music at the local university in Mitrovica. Over peach slivovica he and his brother home-brew, Savo explained that his parents consider themselves strictly Serbs. But, when asked, Savo conceded that he considered himself both Serbian and Kosovar. He was in fact dating an Albanian girl he met through a political awareness program NDI is sponsoring to integrate teens from both ethnic groups in Mitrovica. It’s this kind of incremental embrace of the opportunities in Kosovo — the opportunities that 30 percent of Serbs in smaller enclaves grasped when they went out to vote — that will lead to a solution that both Serbia and Kosovo can live with.

But it’s a long road to get there. Helping both sides get down that road will be the carrot of accession to the EU. Both Serbia and Kosovo are part of the Western Balkan vacuum that exists within the European Union’s sphere. While Serbia is a full-on participant in the Stabilization and Association Process (SAA) that precedes EU accession, Kosovo has been part of the Stabilization Tracking Mechanism (which seems to be all the steps of the SAA, without the promise of EU candidacy at the end), with five of the 27 EU members, notably Greece and Spain, not recognizing its independence yet. Getting Serbia to the bargaining table with Kosovo as a prerequisite for EU accession would be a powerful motivator, much as the Greek Cypriot government in Nicosia was willing to talk to its Turkish counterpart before Cyprus’ EU accession in 2004.

For its part, Kosovo has so far been be willing to adhere to diplomatic niceties to assuage Serbia. The government in Pristina might want to consider another step of suggesting the exchange of “High Commissioners” with Belgrade. Taking a cue from the United Kingdom’s decolonization process in the 1950s and 1960s, such a move would acknowledge the special relationship between Serbia and Kosovo, allow Serbia to save face by not having to immediately accept a Kosovar ambassador, and — most importantly — give both countries a formal channel of communication to address their mutual concerns.

After dusk we went back to the Albanian part of Mitrovica to a school on the west side housing the biggest polling station in the city. As the clock ticked past seven o’clock and the polls closed, the polling station chairman asked for the door to the spartan classroom closed. I watched as polling officials, party representatives, and an observer from a local NGO gathered around the teacher’s desk. Opening the Election Commission’s booklet of directives, the chair began reading out loud the instructions.

As they went through the process the chair ordered one of the polling officials to retrieve the box of sealed disputed ballots to begin counting. A party official objected, saying that he interpreted the rules differently, and counting should proceed in a slightly different manner. After a couple of minutes of discussion, in which all had their say, the polling chair conceded the point, and ballots began to be counted. In that little corner of Kosovo, 500 miles behind the Iron Curtain that had lifted 20 years earlier, democracy slowly went to work.