When Serbs and Macedonians, just like the Israelis, say that their borders are not negotiable, they are following normal human behavior, based on territorial instinct. The job of western diplomacy should be to convince them that a territorial compromise is in their interest, that a rational demographic policy would support partition, that the economic advantages of partition would be great, and that economic integration would soon make the new borders much less important. Today European borders are open. Usually you do not have to stop at the border, usually you just slow down. The oppression of minorities which was normal in Europe 40 years ago is today unthinkable.
People change country without difficulty.
Such is a future which western diplomats should be offering to the Balkan countries. Thus it supports Albanian nationalism in Kosovo but denies it in Macedonia while it simply ignores Slav nationalism anywhere. It is as if these western rulers had received their training on video games, where nothing can happen which is not in the program. They wrote the program, thus only what they expect to happen can happen. Just as some young people can become lost in Dungeons and Dragons or in a computer game and actually come to accept directions for the real world from a fantasy, so have western rulers come to believe the fantasy world they have created.