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Kosovo can point to three major accomplishments—and one major failure—in its 17-month life so far.

The successes are recognition by more than 60 states of Kosovo's independence from Serbia; the negligible ethnic tension between majority Albanians and minority Serbs since independence; and the progressive taming of Kosovo north of the Ibar River.

Of course, 62 out of 192 United Nations members are not enough to win quick UN membership for Kosovo against the opposition of Russia. But recognition by the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and three-fourths of European Union members—and participation even by EU members that do not recognize Pristina in the Union's rule-of-law EULEX mission in Kosovo—confers legitimacy. So does Kosovo's new membership in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Equally important for Kosovars' peace of mind is Brussels' steady promise of future EU membership as the fledgling country qualifies for it. (No, there is no visible solution yet to the conundrum of how to admit more-developed Serbia to the club some years before Kosovo is ready but still not give Belgrade a veto on later Kosovo membership. A solution will be found, though.) The EU's commitment to Kosovo's "European perspective" is attested to by the intensive EULEX tutoring of local police, prosecutors, and judges this year under Kosovo's "supervised" independence.

The second attainment is adherence by the Pristina government to the promises it made under the original independence plan of Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari to construct a multiethnic, decentralized society. There has been sporadic low-level ethnic violence in Serb-majority northern Kosovo, but quiet cooperation between NATO, EULEX, Kosovar, and even Serbian intelligence and police officials has kept local confrontations from escalating. Moreover, most Kosovo Serb policemen, after a year of boycotting the Kosovo Police Service (KPS) under Belgrade's pressure, have finally accepted that their future lies with Kosovo and returned to their posts.

And while Pristina has given no incentives to Serbs who fled Kosovo after the 1999 war to return, it has tried to implement the decentralization that would give the remaining ethnic Serb communities substantial autonomy. Decentralization is sluggish not because of the government, but because of the reluctance of Kosovar Serbs so far to elect new officials under Kosovo laws and dump the local hierarchies set up two years ago by the old hardline government in Belgrade. The Kosovar Serb resistance is softening, however, as the NATO-led KFOR troops, EULEX, KPS, and Belgrade government too collaborate in squeezing out some of the old ultranationalist Serb bosses and smugglers in northern Kosovo. One hint of this process came with a Kosovo prosecutor's recent summons to long-time north Mitrovica boss Milan Ivanovic to answer questions about potential criminal charges.

Further harbingers are the leaks that EULEX (and not the vestigial UN Mission in Kosovo) is now the intermediary for cooperation between the Pristina and Belgrade governments—and that EULEX may soon upgrade its half-year-old passive monitoring of vehicle traffic at the fuel-smuggling paradise of Gates 1 and 31 on the north Kosovo-Serbian border and begin to collect the legal tariffs, in joint management with Serbian government tax officials. A final hint is the success of the EU in the condition it demanded for lifting the visa requirement by 2010 for Serbian (as well as Montenegrin and Macedonian) travelers in the Schengen area. Kosovar Serbs, even if they acquire computer-readable Serbian passports, will still require visas to travel to EU countries for as long as Kosovar Albanians do.

As for Kosovo's major failure, it is the conspicuous political interference with the media and with law enforcement by police and judges. One of the most hard-hitting Kosovar journalists, BIRN's Jeta Xharra, has recently received an apparent death threat for her blunt reporting; Western diplomats have warned Pristina officials that she must not be harmed. And EULEX's first-year assessment of rule of law in Kosovo in July, however delicately, clearly condemned official corruption and coverups and the anemic fight against organized crime.

The bottom line, then, is that Kosovo is doing better than many observers expected at its birth a year and a half ago—but that it still has a very long way to go to reach that grail of EU membership.

Elizabeth Pond, a Berlin-based American journalist, is the author of Endgame in the Balkans (Brookings) and "Serbia's Choice" in last spring's issue of Survival.

Previous Balkan Week articles on Atlantic Community:

• Balkan Week: Could Current Conflicts Spark a New Balkan War?
• Balkan Week: Daniel Korski: Solving Europe's Bosnia Crisis
  

Tomorrow: Tomislav Marsic: The Blocked Bloc