CHAPTER 8
WISHING TO BE ONE WITH EUROPE: KOSOVO 2008
Kosovo's present anthem is a tune entitled ‘Europe’, composed by Mendi Mengjiqi, chosen by a public competition and deliberately created to stand without lyrics. Mengjiqi's music was adopted as the state anthem at a special session of the Assembly of Kosovo on 11 June 2008, four months after the declaration of Kosovo's independence. Prior to this, Kosovo did not have an official anthem. Within the SFRY, Kosovo (established in 1946 under the Serbian name ‘Kosovo and Metohija’) was one of the two sub-federal units or provinces within the Socialist Republic of Serbia, neither of which had official anthems. From 1968 the Albanian state flag was openly displayed in Kosovo as the province's flag. An attempt was made, without much success, to suppress its use following the Milošević regime's 1989 revocation of the wide autonomous powers of the province. Since 1968 Kosovo Albanians have, on public occasions, sung the Albanian national song ‘Hymn to the Flag’, which is the state anthem of Albania.
After the NATO air bombing of Serbia forced the Milošević government to agree, in May 1999, to withdraw from Kosovo, Kosovo Albanian insurgent military forces, the KLA and its allies, took control of all Kosovo except a northern enclave that was mostly populated by Serbs and other non-Albanians (see below for a brief account of this war). At that point the ‘Hymn to the Flag’ became an unofficial anthem of the new Kosovo Albanian authorities. Under a UN Security Council resolution, NATO-led forces also entered the province and Kosovo was put under temporary UN administration. On 17 February 2008, the Kosovo Albanian members of the Assembly of Kosovo declared its independence. This was not Kosovo's first independence declaration: Kosovo Albanian deputies of its provincial assembly (elected under the Communist one-party system) declared independence first in 1990 from Serbia and then in 1991 from the disintegrating SFRY. At that time only Albania recognised Kosovo. At the time of writing, in 2014, most UN member states recognise Kosovo's independence. Since two permanent UN Security Council members, Russia and China (as well as Serbia) refuse to do so, Kosovo is not (as yet) a member of the UN. At present, the EU Rule of Law Mission (EULEX) acting under the UN mandate ‘supports and assists’ the judicial, police and customs institutions of Kosovo while the Kosovo Force (KFOR), a NATO-commanded military force (of around 4,000 personnel) assists in the provision of security. Unlike Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo has no international administrator with the powers impose anthems, overrule its legal acts or dismiss its elected officials. However, in their declaration of independence in 2008, Kosovo Albanian representatives and their government pledged to ‘fully accept the obligations for Kosovo’ contained in the ‘Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement’, put forward by the UN Special Envoy Marti Ahtisaari (called the ‘Ahtisaari Plan’) and endorsed by the UN Security Council in 2007 (BBC 2008). The Plan outlines both the main principles and the contents of Kosovo's Constitution and legislation and, as we shall see, also defines the content of its state symbols, including the anthem (Comprehensive Proposal 2007). In contrast to the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the wordless anthem of Kosovo was not imposed by an act of an international administration; nonetheless, its choice was guided by the restrictions that the UN-endorsed Comprehensive Proposal, the Ahtisaari Plan, imposed on the content of the anthem.
It is not surprising that the Albanian national song ‘Himni i Flamurit’ (‘Hymn to the Flag’), which is also the state anthem of Albania, served as an unofficial anthem of Kosovo for so long. Since 1999, 93 per cent the inhabitants of Kosovo are Albanians and the country's non-Albanian inhabitants now mostly live in separate enclaves. In the song, the singers give a pledge of loyalty to the national flag and express their readiness to fight for the fatherland. The song also proclaims that those who are not ready to fight – who ‘abstain from war’ – are traitors. Those who are ready to fight and who die fighting are martyrs and saints. This fighting song, by a Romantic Albanian poet, was first published in April 1912 in an Albanian magazine in Bulgaria. In November 1912, an Albanian national assembly in Vlore proclaimed the independence of Albania and declared this song to be its anthem. Although the song does not mention Albania or Albanians by name, it is generally regarded (and sung) as the principal national song of all Albanians and not only of the Republic of Albania.
Although this song is still sung at public occasions in Kosovo as a competitor to or replacement for the official wordless anthem (BIRN 2013), the ‘Hymn to the Flag’ was not the only candidate for a Kosovo anthem. The leader of the largest pro-independence party, the League for Democratic Kosovo, and the literary critic Dr Ibrahim Rugova (1944–2006), proposed another anthem in 2000, while he was the first president of the Republic of Kosovo. The English title of the song is given as ‘When the War-Cry Descends on Kosovo’ (Garton Ash 2008). The song was apparently about the martyrs who fell during the liberation of Kosovo and, like the ‘Hymn to the Flag’, it appears to be a fighting song.1 President Rugova also designed a flag with the name of Dardania on it, the name of the kingdom of Illyrians, which purportedly existed in the territory of Kosovo prior to its conquest by the Romans in the second century BC.2 These were obvious attempts to disassociate, at least at the level of state symbols, Kosovo, as a state, from Albania; Rugova's party, unlike its main competitor, consistently aimed at securing Kosovo's independence and not its unification with Albania. Rugova's proposals as well as the preparation for the declaration of independence, led to a prolonged public debate about state symbols in which ordinary citizens, politicians and scholars vigorously took part (Kohavision TV 2005). Rugova's proposed anthem appears not to have been widely accepted (Reuters 2007), with most Kosovo Albanians preferring the ‘Hymn to the Flag’.
Neither Rugova's proposed anthem, nor any other Albanian national song, had any chance of attaining official anthemhood in Kosovo: the principal obstacle was the Ahtisaari Plan which, in its General Principles article 1.7 states:
1.7 Kosovo shall have its own, distinct, national symbols; including a flag, seal and anthem, reflecting its multi-ethnic character.
This is in line with article 1.1 which states that ‘Kosovo shall be a multi-ethnic society’ and article 1.8 which states that ‘Kosovo … shall seek no union with any State or part of any State’ (Comprehensive Proposal 2007). As Kosovo was obliged not to seek union with Albania, it stands to reason that it could not have the same state symbols as Albania. And as Kosovo was to be a multi-ethnic society, its state symbols could not privilege any one ethnic group over others. Rugova's proposed flag and anthem, although distinctly Kosovar, privileged one group, Kosovo Albanians.
On 17 February 2008, following its declaration of independence, Kosovo's Assembly agreed on a flag that reflected its multi-ethnic character. The flag has the EU blue as a background colour (also favoured by Bosnia and Herzegovina) and, above a map of Kosovo, six golden stars, each representing one ethnic group or community of Kosovo (and resembling the stars of the EU flag). The public competition for both the flag and the anthem began on 13 June and closed on 27 June 2007. The Commission on State Symbols presented the three finalists of the flag proposal to the Assembly before the vote on 17 February 2008 and the Assembly selected the winner (Flags of the World – Kosovo 2008).
The Kosovo Assembly held another competition for the anthem almost a year later, in March 2008. Prefacing the rules of the competition was a curious disclaimer:
This announcement is mainly related with music composition and not with the text of the hymn. Nevertheless, texts can be included as well in the application, in any official language of Republic of Kosovo.
This clearly indicated that the anthem to be adopted at that time was to have no lyrics. There were two further related rules or conditions:
3. Any proposal should comprise the content of overall proposal for Republic of Kosovo Status Settlement.
4. In order of including the overall proposal in selecting the specific manner, all proposals:
– Shouldn't present or be similar to the hymn or popular song of any country, or hymn of any political party, movement or Institution of Republic of Kosovo, or to implicate any faithfulness towards any ethnic community of Republic of Kosovo (Announcement 2008).
In order to avoid privileging (or showing ‘faithfulness’ to) any ethnic community, there had to be no lyrics in any one of the official languages of Kosovo (which were also set by the Ahtisaari Plan, mentioned in rule 3 above). Using any one of these languages, according to this unstated view, would privilege the community whose native language it was. Apart from these conditions regarding the ethnic ‘orientation’ of the anthem, there was also a severe restriction on its length: it had to be less than 60 seconds long. There is no explanation for why the anthem had to be so brief. The Ahtisaari Plan made no mention of the length of the anthem. One can only assume that the designers of the competition had in mind the use of the anthem on the international stage. As a symbol, the competition designers wanted the anthem to be brief in duration and not to be associated in any way with a national or ethnic group or political movement or institution in Kosovo or abroad. In short, it was to be a brief and nationally empty symbol of an independent state.
Unlike the adoption of the flag, the adoption of the anthem was delayed for a few months following the declaration of independence. This might suggest a lack of initial consensus among the Kosovo Albanian parties about the terms on which the anthem was being sought. However, by 15 June 2008 a state anthem was urgently needed because the Kosovo Constitution was about to come into force. Such a momentous event could not pass without a state anthem. In the absence of a state anthem at the time of the declaration of independence in February 2008, Beethoven's ‘Ode of Joy’, once again without lyrics, as the official song of the EU, had been used. Ordinary Kosovo Albanians (unofficially and enthusiastically) celebrated independence by singing the Albanian ‘Hymn to the Flag’ and waving Albanian flags (France Press 2008). To ensure that the coming into force of Kosovo's Constitution was greeted with an official anthem, the Assembly representatives attended a special secession on 11 June 2008 to adopt the anthem. There were 15 votes against and five abstentions. The representatives of the Alliance New Kosovo voted against the anthem because their coalition was excluded from the Committee for State Symbols, which assessed the anthem proposals and the representatives of the Serb parties boycotted the vote (Slobodna Evropa 2008). While the anthem passed with a comfortable majority of 72 votes, the absence of consensus was obvious, as was the anthem's rejection by the largest non-Albanian group, the Serbs.
The absence of lyrics in Kosovo's state anthem begs a comparison with Bosnia and Herzegovina (Chapter 7). In either case considerations of pragmatism are to the fore. A state needs to be able to put on a musical performance for the purposes of international recognition or state rituals, or to state the case negatively, so as to avoid the embarrassment of appearing to lack this symbolic sine qua non of nationhood and statehood.3 In the case of both Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the solution of the lyric-less anthem has satisfied the international sponsors of a new regime. In this way the problem of plurinationality is also solved for the purposes of state symbolism.
The choice of ‘Europe’ as a solution to Kosovo's problem of a need for a unique but inoffensive anthem may be seen as in several ways mirroring the EU's choice of ‘Ode to Joy’. As we have seen, Kosovo Albanian political leaders, in the absence of their own official anthem, used the ‘Ode to Joy’ to celebrate the declaration of Kosovo's independence. The difference of course is that whereas Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy’ was written to accompany Schiller's existing lyrics (and will therefore always, with or without the words, connote Schiller's cosmopolitan spirit), Kosovo authorities set out deliberately to create a song with no connotations at all, beyond those suggested by the title and the music itself.
Mengjiqi's music can be described as slow, majestic, and at 55 seconds, quickly over (as required by the rules of the competition). The feel of the composition is very nineteenth century, almost Christmas-like, a new tune calculated to fit in with anthems generally, as if it were one the listener had always already known. Mengjiqi's composition asserts that a place for Kosovo on the world stage should be neither problematic nor taxing for the listener. This anthem may be regarded as a small, new nation's token of gratitude to the larger state-transcendent entity (the EU), which by virtue of that parental entity's cosmopolitan pretensions, takes the newcomer into the fold. And ‘Europe’ asserts a symbolic parity with Europe; an ancient people appeals for renewal through statehood to the likewise ancient polity-writ-large of Western civilisation, as lately renewed in the political idea of Europe. The manner of that appeal is perhaps more poignantly expressed in the Kosovo flag's mirroring that of the EU.
Kosovo, in its anthem choice, has deliberately identified itself – on a miniature scale – with the problem writ large in European identity politics. Surely, as a miniature of Europe with its continuing existence owing much to Europe, Kosovo should be entitled to membership in the larger polity it symbolically mirrors? In choosing Mengjiqi's music for its anthem entitled ‘Europe’ and in the choice of accompanying flag, Kosovo Albanian political leaders have attempted symbolically to assert a rightful place for Kosovo under what appears to be the only acceptable and available aegis, that of the EU.
In contrast with the situation with the Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and the province of Macedonia in Greece, Albania and Kosovo share the same linguistic and ethnic identity in spite of being at present separate states (although Albania does not have the non-Albanian inhabitants that Kosovo still has). Moreover, Albania has consistently supported the independence of its ‘brotherly’ neighbour' both diplomatically and by providing training, logistics and weapons to the Kosova Liberation Army during the 1998–9 war for independence.
As in the case of all other anthems (except the Macedonian one) discussed in this book, the war is not mentioned and is, indeed, unmentionable. As happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1998 an insurgent military force – the Kosovo Liberation Army – fought the much larger and better equipped forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), the state that ‘inherited’ the province of Kosovo from the SFRY. Also, as in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the war involved civilian massacres, large-scale expulsion of populations and a large-scale intervention of NATO forces. At the start of NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in March 1999, over 800,000 Kosovo Albanians were expelled or left Kosovo for neighbouring countries. Once the Yugoslav/Serb forces withdrew and NATO ground troops entered the province in May 1999, the Kosovo Albanians returned home, while over 150,000 Kosovo Serbs and other non-Albanians left (or were expelled) to Serbia. The great majority of them have never returned, making Kosovo a much more nationally homogenous state than it was before the war.4
The only other two states from SFR Yugoslavia that have achieved a similar level of national homogeneity are Slovenia and Croatia and there was no international requirement for them to declare themselves as multi-ethnic societies. Despite this, in the aftermath of the war, the UN and the EU, through the Ahtisaari Plan, required Kosovo to declare itself a multi-ethnic society and to reflect this through its institutions and legislation, including state symbols. It appears then that the Ahtisaari Plan was devised to negate the nationally homogenising effects of the war for Kosovo's independence. The Plan and its adoption prevents the Kosovo Albanians from having an official national anthem with lyrics but, of course, it does not prevent them from singing, at public celebrations and sporting matches, their preferred national song, the anthem of Albania, and waving its flag.5
State anthems have a purpose and in the case of Kosovo this purpose is explicitly stated in the conditions that were set for the 2008 state anthem competition. Mendi Mengjiqi’s anthem is a wordless tribute to EU's role in Kosovo since 2000. In choosing a state anthem with no words the Kosovo Albanians have gone one step further than the Slovenes in their effort to become part of Europe: they called their national song ‘Europe’, have described it as a gesture of thanks, and have left absolutely nothing to discuss about what it might mean. The Kosovo anthem is a clear expression of a straightforward desire – to have within Europe the kind of autonomy that frees a nation from past associations, the kind of autonomy that appears, thus far, to have worked for Slovenia. Kosovo's state anthem deliberately discloses nothing concerning national identity, so as not to offend the non-Albanian inhabitants who question the existence of the state and to satisfy the constitutional requirements that the EU and UN made in return for recognition of independence. What this minimalist anthem does declare to the world, and especially to Europe, is an intention to minimally fulfil the ritual requirements of statehood, so as to argue Kosovo's place, as an independent entity, on the international stage.