David Chandler
Reviving the idea of the ‘good war’
The French and British governments are cynically using and abusing the
situation in Kosovo to try to resurrect support for liberal imperialism.
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The foreign secretaries of France and the UK, Bernard Kouchner and David
Miliband, went on the propaganda offensive last week over Kosovo, with a joint
opinion piece published in Le Monde and on the Guardian website (1).
The new foreign secretaries, appointed under the incoming governments of Gordon
Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, aim to restore the moral gloss of campaigning
liberal interventionism. In August, they led the call for the creation of the
world’s largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in Sudan (2). Now they are
talking up the need for tough action over Kosovo.
The language is authoritative. Kouchner and Miliband state that Kosovo’s status
must be resolved. The UN’s special envoy, Martti Ahtisaari, has drawn up
detailed plans for the province’s future, a sort of halfway house between the
current protectorate and independence, breaking the formal ties with Belgrade
and transferring oversight to the European Union. These plans have met with
resistance by both Kosovo Albanians and from Belgrade. Nevertheless, Kouchner
and Miliband state: ‘The parties must approach this new phase of negotiations
in a constructive and bold manner. The parties must understand that it is in
their common interests to work… to ensure progress.’
The Serbian government in Belgrade is told in no uncertain terms either to
accept Kosovo’s independence or ‘to come up with alternatives that have some
chance of acceptance in Kosovo’. The stern judgement of Kouchner and Miliband
is that ‘Serbia can rapidly join the EU, as soon as the last obstacles have
been lifted… it is difficult to envisage Serbia being able to enter the EU
without the question of Kosovo having been resolved. This is not blackmail, but
a statement of fact.’
Reading the opinion piece, written as the latest shot in the joint diplomatic
offensive apparently being waged by the new French and UK governments, you
might assume: Kosovo is in a state of crisis; that the international community
is currently impotent in the face of Albanian and especially Serb resistance;
and that Kouchner and Miliband are Kosovo’s budding saviours. None of these
assumptions would be right.
Firstly, Kosovo is not in crisis but in stasis. The United Nations-run
protectorate is going nowhere slowly, with the international bureaucracy
overseeing a stagnant economy and divided society. The demand for change, the
‘crisis’ which drives successive deadlines behind negotiations, has little to
do with the needs of Kosovo Albanians and Serbs, and a lot to do with external
demands to regularise the status of Kosovo and to bring Kosovo under the direct
administration of the European Union (mirroring similar changes in the
administration of Bosnia) (3).
Secondly, the international community is not powerless to act over Kosovo. The
handover of administrative responsibilities from the United Nations to the
European Union has been planned down to the smallest detail, with the EU
preparing to launch the largest mission in its history to take over law
enforcement and supervisory duties in the province. Kosovo may be formally part
of Serbia, but its dependency on external powers was a fact from the end of the
1999 war when it was granted ‘autonomy’ under the UN. The EU holds all the
cards in the ‘negotiations’ with Belgrade despite Serbia’s rights of
sovereignty. Serbia’s dependency on EU financial support and on the process of
integration effectively means that Belgrade’s protests are more to assuage
domestic opinion than any substantial opposition to acceptance of the EU terms.
Thirdly, the problem that Kouchner and Miliband face is not in Kosovo but much
closer to home. They want to ensure that the ideals of liberal interventionism
can survive the disaster of Iraq because the governments they represent want to
use their clout on the world stage to enhance their reputation domestically.
Both governments are keen to bathe in the moral glow from the Kosovo
intervention, seen as a success (at least from the point of view of the
intervening states): ‘No European can forget the atrocities that took place in
the Balkans during the 1990s. No European can forget the scenes of brutality,
murder and mass deportation… no European should forget the tragic events that
motivated the international community to intervene.’
Despite Kouchner and Miliband’s desire to build their careers on global moral
grandstanding, they demonstrate the weakness of the British and French
governments, rather than their strength. It is difficult to recapture the
confidence of liberal interventionism of the last decade. In 1999, Médecins
Sans Frontières, the activist humanitarian NGO which Kouchner founded in 1971,
won the Nobel Peace Prize and Kouchner was appointed as the first head of the
UN Mission to Kosovo after a lifetime’s advocacy for international meddling in
other countries (4). But the Kosovo war marked the high point for the overt
‘right of intervention’ and the extension of international protectorates
claimed by Kouchner.
Even before the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan, international attempts to
directly run statelets like Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor were creating as many
problems as they were solving. Today’s moral grandstanders have few causes they
are willing to commit to. The British and French governments may have made much
of their support for the UN resolution on Darfur in August, but they were
committing other countries’ troops to Sudan rather than their own. Similarly,
going to war over Kosovo, eight years after the event, and urging their readers
not to forget the ‘good wars’ of the 1990s, is no substitute for finding a
genuine cause of their own.
David Chandler <http://www.davidchandler.org/> is professor of international
relations at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster
and editor of the
<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7Econtent=t741771150%7Edb=all> Journal
of Intervention and Statebuilding.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3818/
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