By William Pfaff Los Angeles Times Syndicate,

International Herald Tribune p.10 19 NOV 1998

PARIS - The United States now is engaged in

nation-building in the Balkans, attempting to fulfill

Woodrow Wilson's ambition to do away with the ''jealousies

and rivalries of the complicated politics of Europe'' and

teach backward nations ''to elect good men.''

In 1919, Wilson offered the principles of Balkan reform,

but he left the practice to others. Today in Kosovo, as

earlier in Bosnia, the United States is imposing structures

which assume that ethnic nationalism can in time be

overcome, and that people can be taught to be reasonable

and also to be content with being reasonable - a formidable

ambition.

The American draft plan for Kosovo, as reported by The

Washington Post, would restore autonomy to the province

and allow it to elect its own president and control its own

police and courts. The plan postpones negotiations on the

hardest problems, including who is going to control

Kosovo's substantial mineral resources.

It would give a fifth of the seats in the Yugoslav Federal

Republic's National Assembly to the Kosovo Albanians, put

Albanian representatives on the Yugoslav supreme court

and the supreme defense council, and provide human rights

guarantees. Kosovo elections would take place next

summer.

Christopher Hill, the American ambassador in Macedonia

and a leader in implementing U.S. Balkan policy, says that

it is ''indeed a hard job'' to build up a new Kosovo

government with a new relationship to Belgrade, but that

the latest U.S. draft plan goes ''pretty far in getting Serbia

out of the institutions of Kosovo.''

Neither Albanians nor the government of Slobodan

Milosevic are happy with this, but the momentum now is

with the United States, which disposes of the threat of

NATO bombing and is putting into Kosovo a U.S.-directed

international team of ''verifiers'' from the Organization for

Security and Cooperation in Europe. They in turn are to be

protected by an American-directed but French-led NATO

commando and helicopter force based in Macedonia.

The European allies are complaining that they hardly have

been consulted, although the European Union is paying

more for the Kosovo effort (and for Bosnia) than the United

States, and committing more men and women.

But the Europeans dealt themselves out of leadership in the

Balkan crisis in 1994 and 1995, and have since confirmed

that choice by making no effort to preempt the Kosovo

crisis, which everyone has known was due to erupt.

A French commentator, Philippe Grasset, has drawn

attention to the fact that in the summer of 1995, when

France initiated a French-British-Dutch rapid reaction force

for Bosnia (after UN troops were taken hostage by the

Serbs), with heavy weapons and armor, which with close

air support could have imposed its will on Bosnian Serb

forces, it was nonetheless France which insisted that the

United States and NATO take over leadership. There can be

no complaints now.

The Kosovo plan roughly resembles what has been done in

Bosnia, where NATO occupies the country. Outsiders are

imposing what they think is best for Bosnians and Croats.

They believe that their solutions, reasonable by

international liberal standards, are best for the Serbs as

well, and that the Serbs will eventually realize this.

Nation-building is an ambitious, not to say rash,

undertaking in a region where the existing nations or

proto-nations are recent, weak and divided internally. Even

their national movements are divided. There is a real risk in

these countries of national disintegration rather than

construction.

Nation-building demands a long-term human, institutional

and monetary investment, which the United States is

unlikely to sustain in a region as distant as the Balkans. It is

Europe whose interests are primarily involved.

The logical thrust of this neo-Wilsonian policy would be

creation of a greater Albania, with a greater Serbia and

greater Croatia as well, and an independent Bosnia enjoying

international guarantees. This upsets assumptions about

international law and the inviolability of existing

sovereignties. But, as the Balkan specialist Xavier Bougarel

has written: ''What is the coherence of an international law

which keeps inside [Serbian-dominated] Yugoslavia the one

territorial entity which ... doesn't belong there?''

The Dayton federation of Bosnia and Croatia, and a new

semi-autonomous Kosovo, are artificial political entities

almost certainly incapable of sustaining themselves once

foreign troops and observers leave. The former served to

halt a war, and the latter may do as much, but the serious

question is what comes after them.