One winning concept emerging out of all the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 and following was privatization. More than forty years of Communism had demonstrated how state-owned businesses meant low productivity, low quality, and basically “selling” output only to “customers” who had nowhere else to turn. A key task for each post-revolutionary government – Russia’s as well – was getting state economic assets back into private hands, subject to private-sector incentives, as soon as possible.

At least one state company fell through the cracks, however – and it is doing rather well, thank you! Recently one of the three national German radio stations, Deutschlandfunk, in the form of its excellent week-daily morning program Europa heute (“Europe Today”), devoted a week’s series of programs to Slavonia, which is basically that third-part of Croatia situated farthest away from the coastline. There on its eastern border (which happens to be the Danube; Serbia starts on the other river-bank) is located the Borovo shoe-factory complex, now fully in the hands of the Croatian State after a colorful and turbulent history.

Things looked promising way back at the start of that history, in 1932, for the factory installations were an extension of Bat’a Shoes, the company out of Zlín, Czechoslovakia, that had pioneered in developing shoe-manufacturing equipment and would go on to conquer markets in Europe and much of the rest of the world before World War II called a halt. There was no production during the war, indeed the facilities suffered damage, but then the Yugoslav state took them as its own, dusted them off a bit, incorporated them in a socialist-style “Kombinat” organization and labeled the products made there with the “Borovo” name. Thereafter, if you were a Yugoslav, that was likely where your shoes ultimately came from, including soldiers’ military boots. (In fact, vehicle-tires and machine-parts were also fabricated there at the time.)

Production also took a break – and there was again damage – during the civil wars that broke up former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. The Borovo facility ended up in what turned out to be Croatian territory. From the visit Deutschlandfunk reporter Grit Eggerichs paid there, it seems little was ever done about that latest bout of military damage: many of the buildings on the premises still sit abandoned, with open holes where windows are supposed to be, foliage growing from the roofs and birds and animals wandering freely in and out.

Pare Down to Success!

But those buildings are simply unneeded, as the shoe-works have shrunk considerably from what they once were: around 600 work there now, when it was once it was 23,000. (They’re still not paid so well: Eggerichs’ report speaks of one master-sewer – female – who has worked there since 1982 and still earns only the equivalent of €400 per month.) Rest assured, though, there are no more tires manufactured, and in fact the company has narrowed down the range of shoes that it makes.

In particular, these days it is known for the stylish canvas sneakers (Completely “vegan”! No animal products used! Woke, man!) that it sells under the “Startas” brand (which itself traces back to Yugoslav times). Slate has called Borovo “Croatia’s hippest shoe company”; there’s an e-commerce site (“original non-aligned sneakers”) where you can order a pair of your own, as well as an Instagram account; and, in what is taken by the underpaid Borovo employees as a totemic cultural achievement, their pink-with-white-unicorns Startas sneakers were once featured in Vogue (scroll way down).

Things are going well for the company, then (although they could pay people better). Meanwhile, it is fighting against the very “finders-keepers” principle that made it Croatian in the first place by bringing lawsuits to try to regain ownership of the former Borovo sales outlets scattered throughout the other states that once collectively made up Yugoslavia. (So far only the Serbs are being recalcitrant about giving them back.) It seems state ownership does not preclude devoted experts putting out a good, stylish product – who knew?

In her new commentary on the EU and Serbia in Die Zeit (Europe threatened by Humiliation), Andrea Böhm posits the sort of counterfactual you would expect:

Suppose there were relevant indications that the leader of an Islamic terror-group, responsible for the murder of several thousand people, were hiding himself in a high-rise apartment in a European capital. How long would it take before a multinational army of secret services and investigators would come swarming to observe every garbage-dumpster, illuminate every floor, and if necessary evacuate half the building? Two months? Three weeks? Ten days?

But what is really at issue is not Islamic terrorists at all, it’s rather the high Serbian government officials responsible for war crimes in the Yugoslav Wars of some 15 years ago, in particular General Ratko Mladic. According to Ms. Böhm, he’s clearly somewhere in Belgrade and it shouldn’t be too difficult to find out exactly where. Yet not only is no one going after him (nor after the other wanted Serbian official, one Goran Hadzic, former leader of Serbs in Croatia – him I did not know about), but there has just been alarming signs of weakening in what had been the EU’s insistence that Serbia would be allowed no further progress along the road to becoming an EU member-state until these two fugitives were delivered up to the UN Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague.

Granted, the Serbs are still far from EU membership, just as they seem equally far from agreeing to do anything to deliver up Mladic and Hadzic. Nonetheless, EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg last Monday did agree to at least open Serbia’s formal application process. And that is the “humiliation” Ms. Böhm speaks of in her piece’s title – Europe once again exposing itself as a softy on the world stage by unilaterally climbing down from what had been it’s ironclad insistence on seeing the two fugitives in jail at The Hague (actually, at Scheveningen, if you want to be technical about it) before the Serb government would even be allowed inside the door. What happened to the Dutch? she wonders – they were the ones single-handedly (well, with occasional Belgian support) holding out on this insistence. She speculates that it all began to seem too much like some sort of Dutch “obsession” – an irrational thirst for revenge against the Serbs for the humiliation suffered by the “Dutchbat” troops who had been assigned to protect the civilians who were massacred at Srebrenica in 1995, so that the Netherlands government finally became self-conscious and too embarrassed to insist anymore.

In point of fact, the situation seems quite a bit more subtle than all that, as explained in a recent entry on the Economist’s “Charlemagne” weblog (in English, of course). Why did the EU foreign ministers budge in the first place? Because they wanted to reward the Serbian government for recently agreeing to meet with leaders of Kosovo, which ordinarily Serbia regards as a renegade break-away province (much as the People’s Republic of China views Taiwan). More to the point, it seems that they made that concession yet at the same time they didn’t: at least according to the Economist analysis, unanimity among governments (meaning the renewed potential for a Dutch veto) will be necessary again soon for Serbia to make any further forward progress.

EU officials are skillful at this sort of sleigh-of-hand, whereby they seem to give something away while in reality doing nothing of the sort (while still retaining the option of giving it away again sometime in the future, should that be viewed as necessary). But all this is hardly to Ms. Böhm’s taste. The EU needs to remember, she writes, that it bears a share of the blame for the horrors of the Yugoslav War; it happened in its own backyard, it was Europe’s big geopolitical test – and, of course, it failed it, having to rely in the end on American diplomacy and military power to rein in both Serb depredations in Bosnia and Croatia and the Milosevic government’s attempt to ethnically cleanse Kosovo. So fancy procedural games for her won’t cut it – much better a full-court military/police press, as if tracking down some Islamic terrorist-leader were what was at issue.

(Footnote out of the way first: * As opposed to doin’ the Foggy Mountain Breakdown, by Earl Scruggs – and folks, that link there actually takes you to a webpage showing the guitar fingerings for playing this timeless bluegrass classic!)

Prospects for a “Yes” vote on the proposed EU Constitutional Treaty are under pressure these days not only in France but also here in the Netherlands. Well, at least “Yes” is currently ahead of “No” by only about ten percentage points in the polls, which is taken to be a worrying sign. So cabinet ministers are swinging into action to tout the Constitution, including Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner who, as reported in the newspaper Trouw (registration required) has warned against the danger of war if the Constitution is not adopted.

War? Yes, war: Because without the more authoritative and more effective EU institutions that the Constitution will supposedly bring into being, Europe’s inherent “irritation, suspicion, and distrust” threatens to escalate out of control. Just like happened in the mid-1990s in the Balkans: “Yugoslavia was more integrated than the [European] Union is now, but bad will and the inability to stifle hidden irritations and rivalry led in a short time to war.” (more…)

Belgian Lt. General Francis Briquemont: Ever heard of him? Quite probably not, for although he did emerge onto the international stage in the early 1990s, his appearance there was brief – in fact, briefer than anyone could have expected. He was placed in command in July, 1993, of 12,000 multinational troops constituting UN forces in the former Yugoslavia – in the middle of the period of inter-ethnic conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina – for a tour of duty of one year. Yet he resigned this command after only six months, in early January of 1994, claiming that his job was impossible in view of the “fantastic” gap between UN rhetoric about Bosnia and what it was actually prepared to commit manpower and resources to accomplish.

So General Briquemont speaks his mind, and backs it up with action. Now retired, he is back again, “thinking outside the box” – to put things mildly – in a pair of thoughtful articles in Belgium’s La Libre Belgique that step back and examine the implications – and the fall-out – from the Anglo-American drive last spring to go to war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the divisions exposed by the EU’s (failed) attempt to formulate a unified response. (more…)