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Albania will have a lot of competition, of course. The arrival of so many Kosovar refugees in Macedonia, for instance, has destabilized the fragile ethnic and political balance there. The destruction of the economic infrastructure of Serbia and the interdiction of vital commerce along the Danube river is already having a disastrous effect on Bulgaria and a considerable one on Romania, Greece and, as if they needed further economic bad news, Russia and Ukraine. The sense that the whole area is unsafe will gravely harm the tourist revenues expected by Croatia, whose fragile economic recovery depends on them, and even affect Greece.

As for the political effects, at a minimum the conflict will produce a radical reconfiguration of national budgets, from the United States through Western Europe to the Balkans. New moneys will certainly have to be appropriated for defense. Vast sums will have to be found for the so-called new Marshall Plan that the great powers and the international financial institutions agree will be necessary if the region is ever to recover either its political equilibrium or its economic health.

The estimates now run between $30 billion and $50 billion, but it is a foregone conclusion that the cost of stability will be far higher than that. The damage to Serbia alone runs into the hundreds of billions, and while it is unlikely that the great powers will want to repair the infrastructure they have just devoted so much time and effort to destroying, in the long run they will be obliged to do so -- if only because the health of Serbia's neighbors, including Croatia and NATO member Hungary, depends on their doing so. But after the fighting ends and the refugees begin to return to Kosovo, the first priority will be the neighboring countries that have suffered the most in the crisis and expect the most from its aftermath: Macedonia and Albania.

By comparison with Albania, the problems in Macedonia may actually prove to be manageable. Macedonia's distress is chiefly political, and the removal of the ethnic Albania refugees, whether back to Kosovo or to third countries, combined with a sizable aid package, would probably restore at least a fragile equilibrium. The case of Albania is very different. Where Macedonia has good roads, a functioning infrastructure, and at least the first shoots of a consumer society, Albania is a pre-modern country that socially and economically resembles the poorer parts of North Africa and politically resembles those parts of the Russian Federation in which the dead hand of communism gave way, almost overnight, to the post-modern poisons of Mafia and crony capitalism. It is a country in which there is not an honest policeman to be found, a country in which even in villages that lack running water, people have satellite dishes that let them stare at Italian quiz shows.

In the course of only a few years, Albanians made the transition from the smothering totalitarianism of a state in which the Communist Party assigned everything from apartments to university places, and in which ownership of private cars was banned, to a country in which the principal engines of economic growth were financial pyramid schemes, smuggling immigrants to the West and, during the Bosnian war, sneaking banned goods into Yugoslavia. What little development aid came from Europe was badly administered and usually squandered -- an outcome for which officials of the European Union, rather than the Albanians themselves, bear the brunt of the blame. The scandals that rocked the European Commission over the past year have many of their roots in these Albanian programs.

Next page | "We come from Europe. They come from Albania"