There she is, Miss Montenegro

HOW MANY COUNTRIES are there in Europe?

Well, it depends on what you mean by Europe -- and what you mean by a country. The European Union has 25 member states. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has 55 “participating states,” but they include Andorra, the Holy See, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino, which are all within the bounds of the EU without being members of it.

The Council of Europe, which claims on its website to represent “800 million Europeans,” has 46 member states. The Eurovision Song Contest has a variable lineup, but this year’s 24 entries included hopeful crooners from Turkey, Armenia, Moldova and Israel. The Miss Europe beauty pageant has had contestants from Turkey, Israel and Lebanon.

However you tally it, there’s no question that Europe has more countries per capita than any other continent. China is one country for 1.3 billion people; Europe is somewhere between 45 and 55 countries for (at most) 800 million people. And this week, we’ll get one more. Step forward, Miss Montenegro!

On May 21, 86% of the 484,720 people on the newly cleansed Montenegrin electoral register turned out to vote in a referendum -- and 55.53% of those voters chose independence. According to rules embraced by Montenegro under pressure from the EU, a majority of 55% in a turnout exceeding 50% was needed for the independence vote to be valid. So they just scraped through.

You might well ask by what right the EU, whose founding document, the Maastricht Treaty, passed by just 51% in a referendum in France, imposed this 55% hurdle on Montenegro. But in the end, the requirement had a positive effect because it meant that the mainly Serbian opponents of independence participated fully in the voting, believing they could win. It will now be harder for Serbs to question the legitimacy of the result.

The Montenegrin parliament has to formalize the claim to independence, and the knotty details of a velvet divorce from Serbia must be negotiated, but there’s no doubt that a country called Montenegro will soon appear on the political map of Europe. Or rather, reappear -- Montenegro was there before, for 40 years between 1878 and 1918.

The original Montenegro, a kingdom created after an armed struggle for independence against the Ottoman Turks, was the model for the comic Ruritanian-style kingdom of Pontevedro in Franz Lehar’s operetta “The Merry Widow” (provoking an angry demonstration by Montenegrin students at its premiere in Vienna). Montenegro was extinguished with the help of the Western allies after World War I and replaced by Yugoslavia.

Its reappearance today is, in the first place, a shattering defeat for the nationalist project of a Greater Serbia opportunistically embraced by the post-communist Slobodan Milosevic. When Kosovo follows Montenegro to independence, as it surely will, then Serbia will be a landlocked rump state -- a bruised loser of European history.

Yet the Montenegrin pole vault over the high bar set by the EU is also a defeat for a certain West European approach that kept trying to urge the ex-Yugoslavs to stay together when they obviously wanted to part. In the region, people referred to the Union of Serbia and Montenegro (the ramshackle state structure that Montenegro has now voted to leave) as “Solania” -- an ironic reference to the EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, who was its main architect. Solana’s fear was that a Montenegrin dash to independence might encourage Kosovar Albanians and Bosnian Serbs to demand the same, undermining the fragile peace that the EU was working to preserve.

Though the fear was understandable, the approach was misguided. If people really want to divorce, and if it is possible within the frontiers of viable states, they should be allowed to do so. What matters is that they do it by peaceful, constitutional and democratic means.

To be sure, the resulting patchwork of little states has elements of absurdity. (Once upon a time, there was a language called Serbo-Croat. Officially, there are now four different national languages: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin.)

Having so many small states certainly increases the EU’s transaction costs of diversity. But the costs of diversity within a dysfunctional, multi-ethnic state are even higher. The unresolved issues of sovereignty and constitutional status have crippled attempts at economic and social reform in Serbia and Montenegro and Kosovo for the last five years. Sometimes it’s better to cut the Gordian knot. Now the citizens of Montenegro and Serbia know that they have to make their own way to prosperity, democracy and the rule of law.

The end of Solania need not mean a return to Ruritania.