The United Nations will vote this week whether to grant “supervised” independence to Kosovo. It is a good time to review the developments in Kosovo since 1999, which highlight the dire consequences of excessively ambitious long-distance social engineering and centralism in name of nation-building and the pitfalls of imported regime designs.

The most important fact about Kosovo is the split between the Serbs and the Albanians. The main failing of foreign forces has been their desire to foster, impose or otherwise bring about a multi-ethnic society in Kosovo in which Serbs and Albanians would enjoy equal status. Five days before his assassination in March 2003, the reformist Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic put it this way: “Serbs and Albanians have never lived together in Kosovo and Metohija. They have always lived next to each other. A multiethnic Kosovo society is a great illusion. It has never existed. It has always been a society of ethnic co-existence.” Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations echoed these sentiments: “In spirit as well as fact, multiethnic society is nowhere to be found. Pretending otherwise and denying or delaying independence risks a return to disorder and bloodshed.”

Despite their long residence in a province of Serbia, most Albanian Kosovars do not identify with Serbia, nor do they share a sense of loyalty to the Serbian state. Even before the beginning of Milosevic’s 1998 campaign to kill or expel large numbers of Albanians from Kosovo, the Serbian government had instituted a policy of wide-ranging discrimination. Milosevic oversaw policies that sought to replace Albanian workers with Serbs, to close Albanian-run schools and universities, and to shut down Albanian language television, radio and newspapers. At same time, the Albanian Kosovars hardly turned the other cheek; the Kosovo Liberation Army engaged in terroristic brutalities of its ownmainly against Serbs, such as the massacre at a bar in Pec. Hence, when the main armed conflict ended in 1999, the two groups remained extremely hostile to each other. It was into this climate of historical segregation and mutual hostility that the United States, its NATO allies, Russia and the United Nations stepped in, with their designs.

The exercise in nation-building in Kosovo began immediately after the end of the NATO bombing campaign, when the United Nations assumed governance of the province. The attempt at social engineering in Kosovo is of special interest because it resembles in many ways other unrealistic, grandiose plans crafted by superpowers to democratize and develop one nation after another. The plans for Kosovo were laid out in the several documents that were endorsed by the United Nations, NATO and Russia.

These documents, especially UN Security Council Resolution 1244 and the UN Mission in Kosovo’s “Standards for Kosovo”, call for the introduction of democratic institutions, a competitive market economy, and the rule of law and protection of minority rights, among other lofty goals. The documents that lay out Kosovo’s fate display an almost instinctive aversion to partitions and population exchanges on the part of the United States and its allies. Although they affirm a belief in pluralism, this is to be achieved only in the context of a single national community. They hence set out to form “a sustainable, multi-ethnic, democratic society, in which members of all communities can live in dignity and security.” America adamantly opposed suggestions of partition, cantonization or ethnic separation. U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns stated at one point, “It’s a perilous exercise to begin drawingfor foreigners to begin to draw lines and redefine other people’s reality, their borders.” He may not have noted that he was himself not exactly a native son of Kosovo and that he too was drawing bordersonly those that suited the lofty goal of nation-building, which conflicts starkly with the assessments of those who truly know Kosovo and who are acquainted with the facts on the ground.

To this a critic might respond: “You could argue that any international effort to induce domestic change of any kind is by nature an attempt to ‘disregard facts on the ground’, because the facts on the ground are deplorable. The reason for the international community’s interest in statebuilding in Kosovo wasn’t a response to a whim but, as you write above, a moral imperative to end ethnic cleansingyou can’t fault the international community for seeming to ‘disregard facts on the ground’ when there is a moral imperative to change those facts.” I readily grant that the US and UN plans were not drafted on a whim, but they were nevertheless predicated on mistaken assumptions. Surely the ethnic cleansing had to be stopped; however, the plans for a sustainable, multi-ethnic and democratic Kosovo were hatched for the most part after the ethnic cleansing had already been halted. No one is denying the extremely deplorable character of what transpired between Serbs and Albanians; but historical facts do not vanish because of good intentions. Nor were these intentions morally justifiedfor instance, trying to prevent Kosovo from breaking away from Serbia does not have the kind of a moral imperative attached to halting ethnic cleansing.

In accordance with the plans drawn up after the bombing ended, the foreign powers sought to impose their conception of nation-building on the province. I say “impose” because, as of 1999, United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) has maintained de facto trusteeship of the province, with powers to shape the civil and political society of Kosovo as it deems fit. Established by the UN Security Council in the aftermath of the war, UNMIK styles itself as an interim civilian administration, with all the powers and authority due a normal government. The administrator of UNMIK, under whose authority Kosovo is run, acts as “proconsul of an imperial exercise in pacification and nation-building.” This arrogance is well captured in the following passage from a 2006 report by the International Crisis Group: “Although it will move the process closer to arbitration and imposition as the year deepens, the international community still risks deciding Kosovo by the wrong process. A negotiated settlement is the ideal, but by setting this as the target the international community implies that cutting a deal is a higher priority than ensuring lasting stability and development for Kosovo and the region. Imposition of an independence backing, if it should come to that, would be a better bet than attempting to finesse Pristinë and Belgrade’s differences.”

Bernard Kushner, the former head administrator in Kosovo, acted very much the part of the proconsul. To “create democracy where none has ever taken root before”, he banned newspapers from printing divisive information, appointed specific judges to attain multi-ethnicity on judicial councils and even declared the Deutsche Mark the official Kosovo currency. UNMIK tried to form an ethnically mixed Kosovo Police Service; the judiciary and criminal justice system were to be reconstituted similarly with a mix of ethnicities, and the United Nations has labored to appoint multiethnic municipal councils in mixed communities.

Eight years later, the futility of seeking to impose such plans on people who suffered as much as the Albanian Kosovars did, and who yearn as strongly as they do for independence, and who are mostly of one ethnicity, stands out. Many Serbian civilians have also suffered greatly, to the point that they too have become more favorable to separation in one form or another. Serbs, who mainly live in their own segregated enclaves, often even fear to travel to other parts of Kosovo or non-Serbian areas of the cities in which they are concentrated. Inter-ethnic crime remains high. Collaboration between the two groups in many matters ranges from minimal to nonexistent.

It is time for various foreign powers plan to greatly scale down their forces from the area. It is time to acknowledge that UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which lays out UNMIK’s mission and role, is “political science fiction” written without regard to the realities of life and ethnic interactions in Kosovo.

For the last few years Kosovo has remained a part of Serbia essentially as a technicality, as most forms of Serbian power and control have been removed from the province. The United Nations kept pretending otherwise because it was reluctant to set a precedent that would encourage the right of self-determination to be realized through violent means especially in other parts of the Balkans, such as Macedonia. In particular, Russia and Spain feared such a precedent would encourage breakaway communities within those states to intensify their violence in order to achieve their own state.

In contrast to the nation-building that has enjoyed such limited success in Kosovo, independence would not only take into account the history and current reality of the ethno-religious divide in Kosovo, but also largely replace U.S. and UN imposition from outside with decisions by the people of Kosovo themselves. Most remaining Serbs after the conflict are concentrated in the north, in a region that abuts Serbia. That part could have been annexed to Serbia, or these Serbs could have traded places with a similar number of Albanian Kosovars who live in Serbia proper. For those few Serbs who would choose to remain in an independent Kosovo, such as those around Pristina and in other areas not adjacent to Serbia, their rights and privileges must be secured as part of the breakup agreement, and special protection must be given to Kosovo’s medieval Orthodox Christian monuments.

Far from destabilizing the region, the 2006 secession of Montenegro from Serbia was affected peacefully, legitimately and in accord with the wishes of the majority of the Montenegrin population. If Kosovo were to follow a similar path, there is no reason to expect that it would destabilize the Balkans any more than Montenegro has.

Next, one should apply this lesson to Iraq and elsewhere, if not by granting ethnic and confessional groups full independence, then a high level of autonomy, including in matters concerning regional security.

Amitai Etzioni is a professor of sociology and international relations at The George Washington University. This text draws on his book Security First: For A Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy to be published by Yale University Press this spring.

(This piece originally appeared in the National Interest Online)

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