Word: kosovo
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...economic embargo is concerned, Kosovo looks like an easy target. With a territory some seven times larger than Kosovo's and with a population five times as big, Serbia looms heavily over the province. Furthermore, some 70% of Kosovo's consumer goods come from Serbia, and so does much of its electricity supply. In theory, the embargo would cripple Kosovo's already troubled economy, especially if it includes cuts in electricity...
...effective would these measures be in real life? An embargo was already tried, in 1999, after NATO forced Slobodan Milosevic to pull his security forces from the province. It was never enforced: bypassing controls and ethnic barriers, truckloads of smuggled Serbian goods still flowed into Kosovo, their passage greased by bribery. If Serbia does attempt to close the border with Kosovo, the trade would not stop: it would simply go underground, through the old and well-developed smuggling networks. The prices would rise slightly, but that would...
...Shutting down the power would be easier to enforce, but apart from ethnic Albanians, it would also hit tens of thousands of Kosovo Serbs who live south of the ethnic divide. Also, Serbia's economy depends heavily on natural gas that flows through Hungary, thus making it vulnerable to retaliation measures from the European Union...
...Serbia's ultimate threat is that the secession of Kosovo would topple moderate nationalists in the government and replace them with ultra-nationalists from the Serbian Radical Party, thus ending democracy in Serbia and turning it, again, into a rogue state. Western endorsement of Kosovo's independence, Serbian officials say, would turn a vast majority of Serbs against the U.S. and the E.U. and bring it closer to Russia, the only major power that backs Serbia over Kosovo...
...that the majority of Serbs do not share the government's views. Although recent opinion polls do show a slight increase in anti-Western sentiments, more than half of the electorate strongly supports Serbia's prospective membership in the E.U., even if the price of that means losing Kosovo...