Bear in the Balkans Sniffing at Macedonia

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

Jun 08, 2015

 

Could a scandal in Macedonia push the Balkan state towards Russia? An alleged whistleblower recently dropped “information bombs” on the country’s political scene that show near-total government corruption. Hundreds of thousands of leaked recordings paint a picture of bribery, purges of members of the political opposition from government jobs, the buying and selling of the judiciary, and so on. Foreign Affairs lays out the whole grimly unfolding story in this article, which we encourage you to read in full. Russia, for its part, is seizing the moment:

 

(Snip)

 

From Russia, it must sometimes appear as if the West’s position in the eastern Mediterranean is falling apart. Even given this weekend’s election news, Erdogan’s Turkey is a less and less likely leader for a NATO country, Greece is in the hands of a pro-Russia, anti-EU party, and a number of other countries in and around the Balkans seem to be drifting away from European bureaucratic democracy and toward something like Putinism.

 

The counter to this would be an engaged western policy in the Balkans and elsewhere. But both the U.S. and the EU seem to be suffering from Balkan fatigue. It remains to be seen whether the Russian threat can accomplish what common sense and prudence failed to do: to energize Europeans and also Americans to work harder at the intractable and frustrating problems that the region contains.