Sorry that there hasn’t been much blogging here recently. A sudden surge of work and a certain vivid domestic drama – about which I may write in due course (but don’t bank on it) – have been overwhelming me this week.

 

Anyway, here I am marooned in Vienna Airport yet again. I can’t blame Austrian Airlines for this one, even though I flew here thereon. Fog at Heathrow did for me, so I missed my connection to Podgorica. Armed with a €12 voucher for nourishment I am frittering away some eight hours here waiting for a flight to Belgrade and then on to Montenegro late tonight.

 

Remember that song ‘Vienna‘ by Ultravox? I think it was about the departure lounge here.

 

Sigh.

 

This is being typed on my new amazing MacBook Air laptop, by the way. So it may look a bit different when published. My attempt to use Dragon Voice Recognition software to dictate my work foundered immediately on the background noise here in the cafe. I could have tried using my iPhone as a microphone, but then I’d drain down what’s left of my battery.

 

The past couple of hours have been spent working on a letter to the FCO offering various ways in which the Foreign Secretary’s call for a new emphasis on Diplomatic Excellence might be prosecuted.

 

It’s one thing demanding Excellence – quite another finding ways to enable the FCO to identify then deliver it. Luckily help is at hand, in the form of www.adrgambassadors.com.

 

This, if I ever get there, will be my first visit back to Montenegro since 2003. As senior Montenegro officials have pointed out to me with some vim, it was more than unfortunate that various senior British diplomats (including myself) ended up not only with a doomed policy opposing Montenegro’s independence but also in effect siding with rumpen lumpen local Milosevicists in the process.

 

This is an interesting story with lots of lessons in Diplomatic Technique (though, it must be said, probably not Excellence) about which I need to write sometime.

 

In essence, after the fall of Milosevic in 2000 Robin Cook and almost all other Foreign Ministers round the planet took the view that the Balkans did not need a new round of instability and even more Balkanisation. It seemed more than perverse that clever Montenegro leader Milo Djukanovic had supported anti-Milosevic policies while within what was left of the former Yugoslavia framework, yet sought a divorce from democratic Belgrade as soon as Milosevic fell.

 

Plus up the road in Bosnia the ‘international community’ was grappling with the problems of managing a country when a sizeable proportion of its own citizens seemed unwilling to support or even respect it (a struggle still continuing 16 years after the Dayton Accords were signed). Might not the large Serbian minority in Montenegro actively resist Montenegro‘s proposed separation from Serbia? Where would all this leave Kosovo?

 

So the policy emerged of maintaining Serbia and Montenegro (and somehow or other Kosovo, or not) in a new sui generis ‘state union’. But in the coming years it crumbled under the weight of its own contradictions.

 

Tiny Montenegro became independent once again, much to the oppression of the English football team.

 

So back there I go, this time on a private business mission. It will be fascinating to see a bit more of how they are doing – the potential for such small countries in Europe is immense if they get the policy mix just right (not admittedly an easy task).

 

Luckily Vienna airport has free wifi (unlike the rubbish Boingo Hotspot at Heathrow) allowing me to download speedily to my iPad a truly awful Japanese mayhem movie about crazed robotic geisha girls and sundry monsters that stomp through Japanese cities smashing buildings and producing impossibly gushing fountains of fake blood when they do so. So that’s the next stop. Should put me in just the right frame of mind for Belgrade airport departure lounge later this evening…