Opinion: Dealing With Serbia; Kosovo may soon become Europe's newest independent nation. But it will be a painful birth, especially in Belgrade.

Byline: Michael Meyer

Serbia is crafting a new constitution, and a troubling document it is. The preamble establishes Cyrillic as the nation's official alphabet, notwithstanding substantial minorities of Albanians, Hungarians and Muslims. It declares that "Serbia is the homeland of the Serbs," an eerie echo of the ethnic nationalism that brought the former Yugoslavia to grief. Most unsettling, it claims Kosovo as a "constituent part of Serbia's territory," never to be relinquished.

And yet, Belgrade clearly does not want most of the people living there. The electoral list of citizens eligible to vote in a popular referendum on the document, last weekend, excluded all the province's majority Albanians. Meanwhile, the otherwise relatively liberal government in Belgrade has been indulging in some veiled military swagger, darkly asserting its right to "defend its borders," presumably with force, wherever they might lie--even as it professed no desire to actually control Kosovo itself.

Is another Balkan crisis brewing? Will Serbia trip yet again on its long, slow slog toward Europe? No. What's playing out is a delicate political game, complicated by an explosion of classic Serbian schizophrenia. U.N. negotiations on the future of Kosovo, wrapping up in Vienna, will soon recommend some form of independence. It's not "if" but "when," says Daniel Serwer at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. "The big question is how to get the Serbs to accept it." Insiders at the talks originally expected the U.N. Security Council to seal their verdict by the end of the year, despite Russian resistance. But last week, top U.S. and European diplomats were in Pristina, the Kosovar capital, telling Albanians that they might have to wait a bit. Serbia, they explained, needs more time to get its collective head around the divorce.

A recent poll by the Center for Free Elections and Democracy in Belgrade tells why. According to its numbers, 58 percent of Serbs want to hold on to Kosovo--even though only 12 percent believe they can. Political leaders also see the handwriting on the wall. Rationally, they ...