: An interesting editorial written by former Bosnian diplomat Vitomir Miles Raguz appeared in The Wall Street Journal Europe. Raguz critiqued Western policy in the Balkans as concentrating too much on individual rights. However, the Balkans fragile states are plagued by festering national-group questions that the local governments arent stable enough to resolve. Heres a long quote, but an example of a common Balkanite viewpoint. ...The current (Western) policy is based on the goal of ensuring that each person in the Balkans enjoys basic rights, as an individual. In the corridors of Western policy-making, meanwhile, the notion that these people see themselves also as members of a distinct cultural group has been ignored, and actually discouraged. Until that changes, and the issue of collective rights for the region's national groups is addressed, Macedonia and other fragile states in the region will remain perennially unstable and prone to humanitarian and economic disruptions...There still are three fragile states in the Balkans: Macedonia, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia...Each state grants a different status to what are effectively the same national groups. Thus, Serbs have a preferred status in BiH, but enjoy marginal rights as a group in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo -- where, for instance, the formation of new Serb-majority municipalities is discouraged. Albanians have great powers in Kosovo, but limited potential in Macedonia. BiH has three national groups that, while constitutional equals, are unequal in terms of access to state power structures, with the Croats short-changed....The West prides itself on a regional policy that treats all of the countries in the Balkans by the same standards. But Western powers have effectively created a One China Policy for the Balkans: one region -- different systems and different standards....The new policy in the region, therefore, will need to address national-group questions -- developing a consistent collective-rights architecture based on autonomy in an institutional and territorial sense...To be sure, creating new nation-states should not be the aim. Numerous poor mini-states in the Balkans would not be desirable. Instead, new forms of governance based on highly autonomous federal units should be pursued...