Love, anger, fascination, and boredom can alter perceptions of time, as can those uncanny experiences in which past and future seem to merge. When political disputes disrupt the technology that binds together distant parts of the world, unexpected dislocations in time can happen in far-flung places.
Historical ruptures and continuing dissention between Balkan nations in the former Yugoslavia have resulted in minor fluctuations in the electrical power grid that slowed time by six minutes in Spain and Portugal and 21 other countries across the European continent, The New York Times reports.
A story by Valerie Hopkins and Richard Perez-Pena explains the deep roots of the disruption. Kosovo, a former province of Serbia with a mostly Albanian and Muslin population, declared itself independent in 2008. The Kosovo War, a brutal ethnically enflamed armed conflict between Kosovo and Serbian forces in 1998-1999, ended only after NATO bombing forced Serbia to withdraw from Kosovo. The European Union has tried for years to broker relations between Kosovo and Serbia. But even today there are ethnic Serbs who don’t recognize the Kosovo government and won’t pay for electricity supplied by a Kosovo utility.
When a power plant in Kosovo was down for repairs in January, causing a shortfall in the power supply, The Times reports, Serbia, which still controls the Kosovo transmission system, refused to make up the difference despite an agreement to do so. Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, had even created companies to supply electricity to ethnic Serbs who wanted to pay their bills to a Serbian utility. But the new companies weren’t registered in Kosovo because of a paperwork dispute, and each country blamed the other.
Major systems such as train networks and nuclear reactors were not affected, and cell phones, which get time from a radio signal, ran as usual. Clocks that operate on electrical current, such as those on microwave ovens, heating systems, and radios, lost time.
A spokeswoman for the European Network of Transportation System Operators, the organization that runs the continental grid, told The Times nothing like this has been seen before. She said in mid-March continuous power had been restored for the time-being. But she added, “There are some ongoing conflicts that urgently need to be resolved so that we never face such a situation again. “
ComplexityCurrents 