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Debated during the Bosnian War and endorsed during the Kosovo campaign, unilateral military intervention is the politically inopportune means to surely halt civil violence. Debate about American foreign policy, caught between the moral mandate to police humanitarian crises and the political cost of losing American lives abroad, typically oscillates, at least very generally, between interventionism and isolationism.
The latest in this line of debate concerning South Eastern Europe: Marko Attila Hoare fears that a dovish Obama would not, as President, stand up to an aggressive Russia in the Caucuses or an emboldened Serbia in the Balkans:
“…At the very moment when there is greatest need for US leadership, and for more US unilateralism to compensate for Europe’s retreat into short-sighted selfishness, a President Obama would defer to the West Europeans on issues relating to South East Europe, on account of his own inexperience and lack of interest in foreign affairs. This is precisely what Clinton did…”
Hoare must not have read Hans-Jürgen Schlamp’s piece in Der Spiegel, saying that turning from the negotiating table and confronting aggressive states in South Eastern Europe would be a move not only politically inadmissible to the US’s Western European allies, but strategically idiotic:
“Anyone who takes a clear-headed look at the situation must come to the conclusion that there really is no alternative to a dialogue with the Kremlin. What would be the alternative? Arming Georgia and Ukraine? Deploying NATO troops? Where would they be sent?”
The upshot: Unilateral military action can sometimes make sense in a humanitarian crisis, but never in a diplomatic one. The challenge is how to tell the difference between the two.
Serbian Foreign Minister, Spongebob Squarepants
Karadžić in the Hague, negotiations for Mladić’s arrest, a strong dinar and a resurgent economy have paved a fast track to the EU for Serbia. But there is one thorn in the nation’s side that Boris Tadić’s pro-European government cannot make go away: Kosovo.
When NATO bombed military and government targets in Belgrade and elsewhere in Serbia in 1999 to halt the fighting between Milošević’s forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army, the West registered decisively its support for an independent Kosovo. Bombing Belgrade for what was technically an internal conflict signaled Serbia’s loss of sovereignty in Kosovo. The position has effectively not been changed by the diplomatic and political equivocation of the past 9 years.
Muscled out of Kosovo (justly or unjustly), Serbia lost military and diplomatic avenues to challenge Kosovo’s recent declaration of independence. Which leaves the law. Vuk Jeremić, the Serbian Foreign Minister affectionately known as Spongebob Squarepants, left for New York the other day to seek support for his request that the ICJ review the legality of Kosovo’s independence. Serbia will need the backing of 96 UN nations for the ICJ to adopt Serbia’s resolution and review the Republic of Kosovo’s legality.
Russia, China, and India—all nations with separatist regions—have pledged support for the resolution. But with 45 EU nations recognizing Kosovo’s independence Serbia is unlikely to find the remaining 93. Nonetheless, experts told B92, the resolution carries “moral weight”. It also may incur a diplomatic cost, alienating Serbia from its potential peers in the EU.
If Serbia’s initiative fails to realize an ICJ review, it will remain to be seen how Serbia deals with the thorn of Kosovo, having exhausted the available resources to challenge the state’s independence. The broader question is how, if it can no longer remain on the government’s table, the issue will live on otherwise in Serbian political and social life.
From The New York Times:
“Many experts in foreign policy say that one reason Russia responded so forcefully to Georgia’s attempt to take back South Ossetia is that the United States and Europe had been asserting themselves in Russia’s backyard, alienating Moscow by supporting Kosovo’s bid for independence.”
And a riposte:
“Each country has its own specifics. Kosovo is a ’sui generis’ case,” the Deputy Prime Minister, Hajredin Kuci, told Balkan Insight. In support of this case he noted that Kosovo’s independence had been supported by a number of countries, which was not the case with South Ossetia…Any parallel between Kosovo and South Ossetia is false. Kosovo had been an international protectorate for eight years, with an open status that was to be resolved, which is not the case with South Ossetia.”
Another respondent:
“Russia is also utilizing the “loss of sovereignty” argument that was advanced against Serbia in 1999 — that Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia which seemed to target civilians has produced such a negative reaction among Ossetians who claim they can no longer live under Georgian rule. So, the argument is that Tbilisi has forfeited its right to exercise sovereignty over South Ossetia just as Serbia supposedly lost its sovereign rights over Kosovo.”
And finally, the argument of retaking sovereignty to guarantee humanitarian standards in practice:
A wounded Georgian woman in front of an apartment building damaged by a Russian airstrike in Gori. Taken from The New York Times.
More words on this can be paid for here.
Celebrants in Prishtinë on February 17, 2008
On February 17, 2008, Kosovo, a formerly autonomous region of Yugoslavia under UN administration and a NATO protectorate since 1999, declared itself an independent and sovereign state. The declaration was celebrated by the country’s Albanian majority and vehemently denounced by Belgrade, who backs Kosovo’s 100,000 Serbs (5.5% of the country’s population) and views the region as the birthplace of the Serbian nation. Afghanistan was the first country to formally recognize Kosovo as a sovereign state, followed quickly by the US and most European nations. Today 43 countries recognize Kosovo’s independence.
Stuck in a political deadlock with Belgrade, isolated from the region (only one of Kosovo’s neighbors, Albania, recognizes it as a state), and now at odds with the UN administration (UNMIK), Kosovo’s future looks anything but rosy. As the poorest nation in Europe, 45% of Kosovars live below the poverty line, 15% on less than one Euro a day. Unemployment is at 53%. Remittances from overseas make up 15.2% of the population’s total income. Once a breadbasket of Yugoslavia, agriculture only accounts for a quarter of Kosovo’s GDP. 90% of Kosovo’s legal cross-border trade are imports.
The economy is bad, and it doesn’t look to be getting any better. Kosovo’s education system is struggling.
The country’s infrastructure is outdated and in disrepair after the war. UNMIK spends most of its $200m annual budget on “institution building” initiatives—training officials and politicians in the philosophies of internationalism and the rigors of bureaucracy. Efforts to mold Kosovo into an EU statelet don’t appear to have much traction. Jeremy Harding wrote that “because of longstanding attitudes in Albanian society, there is only a dim sense of the purpose served by the state or public institutions”. Mentor Agani, an academic in Prishtinë, told Harding “We [Kosovars] lived outside the state for years and became very good at subsistence. Statehood is not a skill we’ve had”.
Statehood is an experiment for Kosovo, and for the international community involved there. Like Bosnia, Kosovo is a country faced with the legacy of a brutal ethnic conflict never resolved and the persistent specter of nationalism. And like Bosnia, Kosovo is a country that must manage the sudden appearance of capitalism’s social and political dimensions.
But unlike Bosnia, Kosovo is a country free of prohibitive power-sharing agreements that make any political future unrealistic. Nationalism, kept alive in Bosnia by a constitution which subordinates the state to the sovereignty of the country’s three constituent nations (Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats), may fade quietly from Kosovo, a country with one majority (Albanians) and one minority (Serbs).
Last week several internationals admitted to my editor that post-war Bosnia—Dayton Bosnia—was an experiment. After 13 years it is clear, they said, that the West’s experiment of a Dayton-style, multi-ethnic state in the Balkans has failed. In Kosovo, a new experiment has begun: how a state can proceed out from under the perceived yoke of Western administration, an administration that has “infantilised” and “depoliticized” the Kosovar population, and effectively disenfranchised the Bosnians.
