Spent an hour this afternoon delivering anti-spam missives to MEPs with the help of Herman Beun, Lousewies van der Laan’s assistant, who I met for the first time. Last week’s open letter to Solana on Montenegro has certainly increassed our profile on the question, though the entire issue is somewhat cast into the shade by the Milosevic trial. Various calls with colleagues, and with numerous journalists.

The Ant-Men of Tibet and Bridge of Birds both turned out to be excellent buys. Also really enjoyed a novella by Fritz Leiber in the Lovecraft vein that I picked up in Leuven on Saturday. And have been preparing website for inclusion into QUB. Laborious but rewarding.

Met this morning with President Djukanovic, in the Plaza Hotel downtown. He seemed in good form, though understandably harassed. He gave me an hour of one-on-one conversation over coffee, with the only others present being his translator, and Slavica and his foreign affairs advisor Milan Rocen on the edges, and some bodyguards. His main concerns were 1) the internal dynamics of the EU encouraging nationalists in CG and Serbia; 2) safeguarding his own economic autonomy and the existing reforms; 3) the unworkability of the institutions of any federation and 4) the sheer cost of Montenegro’s contribution to keeping the Yugoslav army afloat. His determination seemed undiminished.

I told him that his weak spots were the budget deficit, the perception that they were weak on crime, and their lousy press strategy. On the budget he was a bit complacent (as was his Prime Minister when we met in January), on crime he was quite defensive, but claimed they had done a big clean-up and that the EU and Washington had declined his invitations for them to take a stronger role in policing. He took my point on their press strategy. Generally rather thrilling to be able to say this kind of thing to an actual head of an almost-internationally recognised state.

Also Elizabeth Meehan offers me the choice of “Honorary Senior Research fellow” or “Honorary Reader” at her Institute in Belfast, once I transfer the website to their keeping. So that is nice too.

On my way back up the hill from town I picked up “Bridge of Birds”, “The Ant-Men of Tibet” and “Ship of Fools” from Sterling Books. They all three look promising…

Spent yesterday in Paris as guest of the WEU Institute of Strategic Studies, who were holding a conference about Albania. Considerable drama in the morning as James Pettifer, well-known Albania expert, walked out rather than share a platform with Misha Glenny. Misha told me about this at breakfast in the hotel; I then bumped into James who said to me that he was leaving, that he and Miranda Vickers and Noel Malcolm all had the policy that would not share a platform with Misha because of his “racialist and chauvinistic views”. Since James Pettifer is the most rabidly pro-Albanian writer I have come across, including any Albanian or Kosovar, it seemed to me completely unjustifiable. Misha of course has his biases, but so do we all, and he certainly doesn’t have Pettifer’s fanatical devotion to one particular ethnic group. As I said to him later, some people – especially those who believe in the myth of a multi-ethnic paradise in pre-war Bosnia – cannot forgive him for writing about the faults of all sides in the Yugoslav war. Nicole Gnesotto, the president of the institute, impressed me by inviting Misha to replace James in making the keynote speech at the conference. Which he did extremely well, though clearly upset by the affair.

Rebecca West wrote sconfully of the late nineteenth century that “English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacres and never the massacrer”. She was right. Of course Rebecca West herself then broke her own rules and formed an unbalanced attachment to the Serbs.

Meanwhile the Montenegro story rolls on and on. I found I was getting nowhere with drafting the statement by concerned citizens, and finally Michael got interested and did it for me. We shall therefore try and go somewhere with it next week. A journalist called me on Thursday to say that he had seen a draft constitution for a reformed federation comling out of Solana’s office. I called Solana’s office and found that this was not quite true, but they had been “helping” Belgrade write their proposals. Hmm; secretariat to the Council of Ministers to the European Union, or legal consultants to dodgy Balkan governments?

Great fun this morning as we met with Petar, Veselin and Slavica from Montenegro. It seems the EU, or to be precise Solana, has really overreached themselves on this one, to the extent that a journalist tells me the Dutch and Belgians are beginning to doubt if they have taken the right tack. So I am finally drafting a public statement to be signed by various concerned citizens. Tired now though, time to go home.

Long time no post. But I should record my visit to Croatia at the weekend for a conference of the European Movement. In a lot of ways I felt like I was returning to the beginning of the cycle of my interest in the Balkans. The Europe House was where Michael Emerson and I gave our first public presentation of CEPS’ work on the Balkans, back in May 1999 (and that was the week that Milosevic was indicted for war crimes, and his trial is now going ahead). I was staying in the Astoria, whose Chinese restaurant was where I went for my first NDI meal with Francesca Binda, after I had arrived to work in Banja Luka in January 1997. And to cap it all as I was leaving I got a lift to the airport, quite unexpectedly, with Koraljka Tomasic, who had first got me interested in the Balkans when we met at a LYMEC conference on using the internet in November 1995.

But the conference itself was a very good event. The headline attractions for the organisers were the Euro-federalist enthusiasts of various European Movement national branches, including Willy de Clercq from Belgium, and Alan Dukes from Ireland. I found the latter very easy to get on with, if anything rather shy, but also friendly in contrast to when I had last encountered him at a British Irish Association conference in 1989, when he was still leader of Fine Gael and I paranoiacally suspected him of chatting up my girlfriend. I was able to bring him greetings from John Cushnahan who I had bumped into on Wednesday night at the opening of the Northern Ireland Executive’s office in Brussels.

I also renewed contact with Erhard Busek and Janez Potocnik, and met for the first time Jacques Paul Kein. But I particularly got on with Andrew Hardie and Kate Lane, a British couple on the verge of getting married; Andrew perhaps in his mid forties, Kate in her mid twenties, but obviously devoted to each other and very sweet.

Read Kissing the Beehive by Jonathan Carroll, and Impakto by Richard Calder, and to be honest not especially impressed by either. Things Unborn by Eugene Byrne a different matter though, an audacious alternate history where the Cuban Missile Crisis became a nuclear war and the dead are returning to life.

Meanwhile in Montenegro the expert teams were in Brussels yesterday to meet with the EU, and after some manoeuvring my colleague was able to get in on one of the meetings. They will give me their debriefings first thing this morning (Tuesday). But it is very late now and I must go back to bed.