Thank you for this Sirrocco. It looks like pretty fair writing for now.

Thanks, glad to hear you say that.

The fact that Kosovo was underdeveloped does not come from "underinvestment" of others. Actually Kosovo was helped by all others like no other republic or area has been. Poverty there came from as you mentioned "demographic bomb" and "highest birth rate in Europe" and that did not just come because of "poverty and low education levels"...It was a policy...and very successful one as we see it.

These are tough questions. First of all, you are right that the underdevelopment did not result from federal underinvestment and that Kosovo received transfers like no other republic or province from the Federal gov't. I think it got something like 30 percent of the transfers with 8 percent of the population, for decades.

So why the socioeconomic inertia? Well, for one thing there was a classic dependency effect at play: the carte blanche transfers encouraged wasteful largesse and corruption rather than sound investment by the provincial authorities, as is also seen with bilateral development aid. As long as good results might threaten the cash flow, receiving gov't weak has incentives to get them.

While that helps explain the lack of growth despite massive transfers, a root cause of Kosovo's problem is, I think, that it was Ottoman territory - peripheral such, at that - into the 20th century. The Ottoman empire stagnated economically and politically as early as the 17th century and eventually collapsed, Soviet Union style. Serbia "escaped" in the early 19th century; Slovenia and Croatia were in the more dynamic Habsburg empire. Thus Kosovo emerged as comparatively backward in terms of urbanization, cultural capital and industrial infrastructure.

Within this agrarian society, the Albanian population had a more rural settlement distribution than the Serbs and thus underwent less of a demographic transition. The nature of clan societies may also have something to do with it. But I don't think one needs suppose that the high birth rate was a function of official policy. In that case one would also need to show how this worked (e.g. schools in Albanian areas deliberately failed to teach about family planning, etc.), since after all, people don't tend to reproduce as a matter of policy.

As to the Greater Albania project and the ultimatum to Slobo, I'll get back to that in Part II.

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