The Foreign Service Journal, March 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2014 39 The people I met inMacedonia seemed to recognize that they have to live with one another. And somust we all. “‘How can you make an orderly state out of so many peoples?’ [Gerda] asked. ‘They should all be driven out.’” Then as now, it was extraordinarily compelling to see these people making the effort to organize themselves into an orderly state. As in a marriage, they were choosing to work together, to get along, to see past their differences and find their common humanity because they recognized a better future was only pos- sible in that choice. Their work was an individual act of politi- cal will, multiplied many times, to take themselves and their countries toward a world that they are imagining and creating for themselves. The Art of the Impossible Since that bus trip to Istanbul almost a decade ago, many of the Balkan states have been stunningly, even miraculously suc- cessful. Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Albania have all joined NATO, and the first three joined the European Union, as well. Macedonia qualified for NATOmembership, too, but was kept out of the alliance by Greece. Serbia joined the NATO Partnership for Peace, an extraordi- nary achievement. And with the arrests and extraditions of the war criminals Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic, Serbia is two steps closer to entering the European Union itself. For these dreamers, politics is—in Václav Havel’s words—truly the art of the impossible. None of that kept Aleksandr, pink and perspiring after rounds of rakia and song, from debating the Albanian parliamentarian about whether a particular Kosovar Albanian was a terrorist and trying to dragoon me into his argument. But he was arguing, not fighting. Watching these friends—Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, Albanians, Greeks, Macedonians—I thought they might just be in the pro- cess of loosening the bonds of history and tightening the bonds of fellowship at the same time. Is that possible? They seemed to recognize, perhaps as West did all those years ago, that there was simply no other way out. They were stuck. They’d have to live with one another. And so must we all. n