It is my firm belief that the leftovers from past conflicts provoke the next conflict – and there are far too many leftovers from past conflicts lying around to guarantee Europe’s future stability. I hope, for example, that ‘Mitrovica’ will not become as much a byword for Balkan instability in the months to come as Sarajevo became. I hope it does not become another Srebrenica, which many now equate with the very worst excesses.

Mitrovica is the main town of the small northern Serbian enclave of Kosovo, which will be left stranded should Kosovo declare independence. The Kosovo question is often presented as a matter of Serbs lording it over Kosovars. Yet for the Serbs of Mitrovica, the prospect of coming under Kosovar suzerainty is more than a matter of defending Serb tradition dating back centuries to battles lost in the mists of time, it is a matter of present day security. It is ironic that Kosovo wants independence because it feels oppressed by its overlords in Belgrade, yet equally, Kosovan Serbs will feel just the same with regard to Pristina. Such are the intricacies of Balkan politics – seemingly insoluble, with final reckonings always postponed to a future date when international statesmen hope to be out of office.

If Kosovo wins independence, it will increase the likeklihood of the fragile Bosnian Federation collapsing. A fiction in many ways already, since the Bosniak-Croat and Serbian constituent parts have very little cohesion, efforts in the Republika Srpska capital Banja Luka to declare independence will be stepped up. They would have little trouble winning a referendum.

Another knock-on effect of supporting Kosovan independence would be to upset the Republica Srpska-supporting Kremlin – not that this is difficult these days. Just today, we hear Putin has sent the Russian fleet into the Med and North Atlantic for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin’s stock with western leaders is falling almost vertically. The German government responded to last weekend’s elections by saying it no longer regarded Russia as a democracy. Putin’s theory of ‘sovereign democracy’ is little more than an euphemism for one-party rule. He claims to be seeking ‘respect’ for Russian, yet seems unable to grasp that if he were to govern Russia in a democratic manner, he might obtain the ‘respect’ he both wants and has lost in recent years. By behaving like a playground bully, he diminishes that respect with every passing day.

For a ‘great Russian’ like Putin, the demise of the Soviet Union was plainly a tragedy. A rump Russia looks, still, to the independence achieved by the ‘near abroad’ (as it terms the likes of Ukraine and Georgia) as mistakes that should never have happened. And on the fringes of this ‘near abroad’ lie many tiny statelets where instability is rife. Transdinistria, for example, is a tiny, caterpillar-shaped breakway republic on the banks of the Dnieper River within the internationally-recognised borders of Moldova. Russia has a significant military presence, and the political classes constantly campaign for reunification of some sort with Russia. It has also become a hub of illegal activities, money laundering, gun running and much else. There is a good profile at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/country_profiles/3641826.stm. This sliver of the Dniester’s left banks looks set to be a festering sore for decades to come – and posion any efforts by Moldova to enter the international mainstream.

If Kosovo gets functional independence, Russia will look to achieve the same for Transdinistria as well as the other statelets on the fringes of the Caucasus such as Abkhazia. Who knows what the future of the Crimea is – a gift from Khruschev to the Ukraine in 1954, when it just a Soviet Republic. Ethnically Russian, and never anything other than Russian until the port of Sevastopol remains home to Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet until 2017. It is, sadly, another flashpoint potentially waiting to happen.

The same could be said for Kaliningrad – another detached portion of Russia. Historically part of East Prussia (the old Hanseatic trading port of Königsberg) until the end of World War Two, it was absorbed into the old Soviet Union along with the Baltic States. Yet when the Soviet Union collapsed, it too was left ‘in the lurch’, separated from Mother Russia by thousands of miles, and with no ‘Russian history’ before 1945.

The lists could be endless. The problem is partly a function of the increasing tendency towards preferring monoethnic states, often by default. It is seen, if not officially recognised, that multi-ethnic states are becoming harder to govern peacefully. The diplomat’s solution is to create monoethnic stability, at the cost of future destabilisation elsewhere. The lessons of the Treaty of Versailles almost 90 years ago seem to have been only partially learnt. Croatia and Slovenia were recognised with great haste, perhaps even undue haste, in 1991, which then dragged multi-ethnic Bosnia into a debilitating war. Sarajevo may now be thought of as an oasis of peace and stability, but a decade out of the headlines is as nothing in this intemperate corner of Europe. Brcko is the only canton of Bosnia which is divided between the Republika Srpska and the Bosniak/Croat Federation as it remains ethnically mixed – a leftover from the peace process, and a problem yet again deferred. In the event of Kosovar independence, it is thought highly likely that the Republika Srpska will bid to reunite with Belgrade – and where will that leave Brcko, whose local government is barely functioning anyway?

No-one wishes to see any of the above examples descend into chaos. But the example given by the cartographic accidents created by the dismembering of the Austo-Hungarian empire post-Versailles should make us aware that the dismemberment of more recent empires – Yugoslav and Soviet – hold as many problems as did Versailles.