It may be hard to notice, but it is there: the anxiety that the future of Kosovo and Montenegro, two slabs of land on their way to a possible chip-off from Serbia, might affect other countries and open a Pandora's box of separatism, as Ukrainian prime minister Boris Tarasyuk put it.

Hungarians in Vojvodina, Moldova's Transdniestria, Caucasus republics, European Muslims, Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina and, why not, Bulgaria's Turks in the Rhodope Mountains are all examples of potential provocateurs. Even if most of those are in the sphere of speculation, however, when the ghost of separatism in Southern Europe and the Caucasus is awake, it seems that anxiety and caution is "the game of the rule", to quote Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco, or helpful to those temporary glitches in logic so terribly reminiscent of the Balkans and the wider Eastern European region, not just of Ionesco's dramas about discordant families.

When the Contact Group for Kosovo issued hints in January that Kosovo may become independent by the end of the year, too few were those convinced that a Kosovo status solved like this would be timely or enhance regional stability. That uncertainty was recently expressed by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov at a conference on NATO expansion held in Sofia, the above-mentioned Tarasyuk, and Serbian foreign minister Vuk Draskovic. Draskovic said on May 3 in an interview with Greek news agency ANA-MPA that a change of the existing borders of his country would be an omen of "a new Balkan catastrophe", and Lavrov told Bulgarian newspaper Standart that "Kosovo's independence is a dangerous road that could not only lead to many dangerous consequences in the region, but set a precedent to other conflict situations".

A quick peek at Caucasus reveals what he means. Тhe predominantly Muslim Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan, Russia's separatist republics, might ask for independence, and so might the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and the Armenian-occupied Azerbaijan region Nagorno-Karabakh, UK-based analyst Oksana Antonenko told the EU Observer in February. All of that makes Russia quite sour about the prospects for independence, with China the only other country supporting Serbia's territorial claim to Kosovo.

Moldova's Transdniestria and Bosnia and Herzegovina's Republika Srpska have also said that they would call for independence if Kosovo gets it.

What the European Union should worry about is Nagorno-Karabakh because a conflict there would spell trouble for the EU's Caspian Sea gas link and ambitions to move away from Russian gas dependency, the EU Observer said. The EU has promised peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh but refuses to recognise it, just as it wouldn't recognise Abkhazia or South Ossetia. Since it would, seemingly, recognise Kosovo, discussion on that obvious discrepancy appears to be what the EU should have on its to do list.
At the moment, however, a international community priority is avoiding disunity on the issue of Kosovo before the next stage of negotiations, as UN special envoy for Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari said in Sofia on May 8.

So, as to whether independence is a timely and inevitable move or a United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) move out of its inability to solve the province's problems, as the International Crisis Group said last year, is of secondary importance. And that makes debate on how status talks would promote a multi-ethnic society, enhance regional stability and Serbia's Euro-Atlantic perspectives a bit vague.

While the EU prospect helped in the case of Romania's Hungarian minority in Vovodina (in 1995, Hungary renounced all territorial claims to Vojvodina and Romania reiterated its respect for the rights of its Hungarian minority), it would take a while to help Serbia, especially since accession negotiations were stopped on May 3.

What's a more serious problem, however, is that the international community itself fails to discuss its own principles on the issue of sovereignty. Even to some European observers, diplomats and experts, certain dilemmas of the western Balkans look unsolvable without a change of borders, as a Bulgarian European Community Studies Association report said in 2004.

Still, the discourse on Kosovo seems to stop at saying that there shouldn't be a change of borders, period. A decision on what to do about borders should be reached through a consensus both within the EU and the region itself, the report says. The latter, however, would be quite difficult.

From the inside, it looks like Kosovo would be a time bomb if it remains a UN protectorate for long. From the outside, though, an independent Kosovo looks a bit scary.

Macedonia, for one, might be a bit ruffled about its dubious border with the province, although a visit by Kosovar prime minister Agim Ceku to Macedonia seemed to settle the issue with a friendly handshake: Ceku and Macedonian foreign minister Vlado Buckovski agreed that the problem should be treated as a technical, rather than a political, one and that its settlement should only be a matter of time and US cartographic co-operation. Previously, Ceku had said he would push for a renegotiation of the 2001-set and UN-approved border (then quite porous and a route for smugglers and rebels).

As to the wider Muslim community in the Balkans, and the potential for further country splits, the problems that seem to arise come from the lack of deep knowledge about the Muslim community as a whole. During a debate on the the Muslim community in Bulgaria and the global challenges it faces, Bulgarian journalist Georgi Koritarov said that his impressions from a study on media coverage of Muslim topics in Bulgaria was that media coverage showed a negative approach and lack of deep understanding of Bulgarian Muslims' problems.

However, he also expressed concern about the conflict potential of Muslim societies, which he said had still not been exhausted because of the unsolved Kosovo status.

"I am not sure that things are moving toward a stable formula," he said. Bulgaria was, so far, successful in painting itself as an island of stability to a backdrop of war, he said. It also did well in promoting its Bulgarian ethnic model. What it will do from then on, however, is another issue.

The Muslim community in Bulgaria, Koritarov said, has the potential to become the representative of Balkan Muslims in the EU as an integral party of a future multicultural Europe. However, at the moment Bulgaria lacks the civil and intellectual resources to capitalise on this potential. Moreover, whoever pronounces such an idea in Bulgaria automatically gets shoved to the sphere of so-called corruption rings of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, he said.

If Bulgaria can use its Muslim minority as part of a successful EU diplomacy, choices and decisions for Serbia are much harder: it is either Kosovo, or the EU, as former US ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke told Serbian television. At least at the moment, however, gazes seem turned toward Montenegro and its May 21 Montenegrin referendum on independence. If Montenegro and then Kosovo become independent, that would be the end of Balkan and Eastern European disintegration, or would it?