Coming up on a year...

From The Economist

ON FEBRUARY 17th Kosovo will mark the first anniversary of its unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. Doubtless Kosovo’s mostly ethnic-Albanian population will celebrate happily and noisily. Yet thanks to Russian obstruction of any new United Nations resolution on Kosovo’s status, its independence remains highly controversial. The new country has so far been recognised by only 54 of the UN’s 192 countries—and five of the 27 members in the European Union are among the refuseniks.

Even so, the many critics who predicted gloomily that Kosovo’s unilateral independence would inevitably trigger fresh outbreaks of violence and ethnic cleansing, a wave of uncontrolled emigration, drug- and people-smuggling, a nasty upsurge in Serb nationalism and perhaps even a renewal of war in the Balkans have been proved wrong.