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Kosovo
Moderator:
Henry A. Kissinger
Speakers:
Carl Bildt
Charles G. Boyd
Dominique Moïsi
Michael Zantovský
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THIS meeting took place as Slobodan Milosevic prepared to
surrender to NATO. Given these auspicious
circumstances, the mood in the meeting was surprisingly subdued.
Some participants declared the war a success. Some even called it
the first "post-nationalist war’’ - one that has solidified the
European Union and reconfigured foreign policy on the
basis of universal values rather than national interests. But most
of the speakers concentrated on the downside of the conflict.
Kosovo has left the Balkans devastated; it has
strained relations with both Russia and China;
and it has raised the possibility that Milosevic will be
succeeded by somebody who is even worse.
FIRST PANELLIST
The fundamental fact about Kosovo is that we won and
Milosevic lost. The victory was far from ideal, however. We
went in the right direction for the right reason but with the wrong
means. And it raises a troubling question: are there causes that are
worth killing for but not worth dying for?
The war marks our entry into a new world in which national
sovereignty is not the ultimate ratio of political life. It is
highly significant that the war broke out on the same day in March
that the House of Lords passed its verdict on General
Pinochet. The war also gave a new meaning to the term
Europe: much more so than the Euro which was launched
three months before the conflict was started. Part of what it means
to be a European is to refuse to accept ethnic cleansing.
The war raises questions about both the United States
and Russia. What price is the United States willing to
pay to remain the world’s only hyper-power? The answer given by
Kosovo is far from clear, with America willing to deploy
its "soft power’’ but
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much more reluctant about its "hard power’’. America
is strong in spite of what happens in Washington, not
because of it. As for Russia, it is coming out of an
age of interventionist imperialism at precisely the time when the
rest of the world is entering a new age of interest in humanitarian
causes. Russia is being told to exercise restraint at
exactly the same time that the rest of the world is embracing
intervention.
SECOND PANELLIST
Kosovo is a long-standing legacy of the Ottoman
and Habsburg Empires and their failure to install a
proper political system in the region. It will thus last for many
years to come. In the nineteenth century the Great Powers
devised the Concert of Europe to deal with the
problem; now we have the Contact Group. A century ago
people described it as a "powder keg’’; now it has an awful tendency
to explode.
The war was marred by three serious problems. NATO
used force as a substitute for diplomacy rather than a support for
it. It failed to understand the real nature of the conflict: this is
not a matter of quick fixes but of long-term management and
containment. And it used force in a way that minimized danger to
itself but maximized danger to the people it was trying to protect.
Kosovo is now a wasteland, a humanitarian disaster
comparable with Cambodia; the region around it has
been profoundly destabilized; and Serbia is in danger
of imploding. We cannot solve the Balkan problem
without the help of Serbia, which overshadows the
region in much the same way that Germany overshadows
Europe. But Serbia’s leaders have been
indicted as war criminals, and the country is likely to be racked
with social problems, fuelled by despair. We may be entering the
twenty-first century in calendar terms. But in political terms we
are much closer to the nineteenth.
THIRD PANELLIST
The war in Kosovo stems from the fact that the
"solution’’ to the Bosnia problem was
nothing of the sort. It failed to address the security concerns of
the major players and left two of the three ethnic groups that make
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up the new country wishing they were somewhere else. If we remove
troops from Bosnia, the conflict will reignite immediately.
In Kosovo, the West used NATO in a way
that the rest of the world thought was illegitimate: it intervened
in an area that was not its prime responsibility; and it did not
bother to get the endorsement of the United Nations.
From a military commander’s point of view, legitimacy is crucial: if
you are going to ask people to sacrifice their lives the operation
has to be thoroughly legitimate from the top down.
In the Gulf War, the president clearly defined both
the objective and the strategy, and then gave commanders great
freedom in controlling operations. In Kosovo there
were nineteen masters rather than one, and commanders were hamstrung
over operational details (something that war colleges and military
staff will be studying for years).
The problems with the peacekeeping operation will be huge. The war
is far from over in the minds of the participants. Disarming the
KLA could be impossible. The Serbs will
respond to any acts of terrorism. Building institutions that can
govern this area will be a nightmare. There will inevitably be a
conflict between military forces that have access to resources but
no enthusiasm for getting involved in civic reconstruction and civil
authorities that are desperately short of resources.
FOURTH PANELLIST
The new Europe is not being born in Brussels or Washington
but in Kosovo. Kosovo may mark the end of the
United Nations’ involvement in Europe so far as security issues
are concerned. The differences in priorities and values between
Europe and other states is just too great - and there is really no
reason why China should have a veto over Europe’s
involvement in Kosovo.
Kosovo is leading to a strengthening of Europe’s
identity at the expense of that of its sovereign states. Central and
Eastern Europe were not prepared for this development. They thought
they were buying an insurance policy by joining NATO - but just
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twelve days after they joined NATO started the
bombing. Only a few years after they regained their sovereignty with
the end of Communism, these states are being obliged to give it up
again.
International law is of little help in making sense of the post-Kosovo
world. Three fundamental principles are in conflict. The principle
of self-determination that was established by Versailles; the
principle of national sovereignty that flourished after the Second
World War; and the principle of universal human rights. At the
Congress of Berlin somebody pointed out that the new dividing
line in Europe ran through Bulgaria. Bismarck
replied that we are here for the peace of Europe rather than the
happiness of Bulgarians. A hundred-and-thirty years later "the
happiness of the Bulgarians’’ is still crucial to the peace of
Europe.
MODERATOR
There are two ways to conduct foreign policy. The first takes the
view of the prophet, who believes in fighting crusades for absolute
values; the second that of the statesman, who believes that
objectives should be achieved in stages. More lives have been lost
in crusades, with their excessive self-righteousness, than in
statesman’s wars. The notion of sovereignty was created in reaction
to the Thirty Years War, which saw 30% of Europe’s population
killed with the most elementary weapons.
It was a mistake to let the war in Kosovo happen
(though we had no choice but to win once war had been declared). We
devastated the region that we were trying to save purely in order to
avoid suffering casualties ourselves. We allowed the agenda to be
set by domestic pressure groups, thus making it difficult to end the
war. And we established a principle that the rest of the world does
not accept. A war that leads to the destruction of the region that
it was designed to save cannot be considered a triumph of diplomacy.
It would have been better to build on last September’s accord
between the negotiators and Milosevic.
American politics fragmented on this issue. Kosovo
could be this generation’s equivalent of Vietnam - a
conflict that could
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split society and convulse us with self-righteousness. Meanwhile,
the Balkans looks far from stable. Macedonia
is combustible. The only thing that is preventing Bosnia
from falling apart in our presence. NATO is in danger
of replacing the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in a series of
permanent protectorates.
DISCUSSION
Several participants thought that the panel was too gloomy. A Dane
pointed out that the operation was a major success by the Alliance’s
own criteria, and that it had also garnered considerable legitimacy
in the eyes of the public. It seemed perverse to complain that its
soldiers were not killed in sufficient quantities. A British
politician also thought the victory was worth celebrating. It was
right to take on people like Saddam Hussein and Milosevic
in order to deter others. Kosovo involved questions of
national interest as well as humanitarianism. And he insisted that
getting rid of Milosevic should remain one of the clear aims
of the alliance. The second panellist agreed with the idea of trying
to force Milosevic to go to The Hague, but
pointed out that other indicted war criminals from Bosnia
remained at large.
Others thought that a little gloom was indeed in order. A Greek
warned of the depopulation of the region. An Austrian urged the
international community to step in to deal with the problem of
refugees. More than two-thirds of the refugees were with host
families in Albania. But a combination of "family fatigue’’ and lack
of compensation could make this situation explosive. A Russian
warned that, well meaning though it might have been, NATO’s
intervention would leave behind a huge number of long-term problems.
These included resentment in Russia - combined with a
feeling that Russia now has a carte blanche to
intervene in Chechyna - and the possibility that the
next regime in Serbia will be even worse. One
panellist noted that, back in 1995, the American people had been
promised that their troops would only stay in Bosnia
for a year - and they are still there five years later. They could
easily be in Kosovo for a quarter of a century.
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The cost of rebuilding Kosovo and Serbia
worried several people. One of the panellists pointed out that 70%
of the targets had been infrastructure: that meant that the cost of
reconstruction would be gigantic. Another panellist doubted whether
stability could be restored to the region without considerable
investment - perhaps as much as $50 billion. A British politician
wondered whether the alliance could hang together after the end of
the war. He warned that there would be little popular enthusiasm for
putting lots of resources into solving the region’s gigantic
problems
The idea that Kosovo had been the first
"post-nationalist war’’ - and one that gave a huge boost to the
ideal of European unification - came in for some heavy fire. A
German argued that it was much too early to celebrate the birth of a
new Europe: had the war gone on, the decision about whether to send
in ground troops would have torn NATO apart. A
Canadian pointed out that nothing would have been achieved without
the United States. Is this a new sort of ``soft left
war’’, he wondered, one based neither on national interest nor on
the safety of the people who are supposedly being saved? A
Portuguese worried about "selective solidarity’’. There was little
worry about outrages in East Timor, for example. A
Russian argued that what we are witnessing is not so much the birth
of the new world order as the collapse of the old one. What is
emerging is a world without consistent standards. NATO
will not bomb Moscow if Russia invades Chechnya.
The first panellist defended his position. He argued against the
realpolitik school: that it is sometimes realistic to be moral
and naive to be over-cynical. And he pointed out that, for all their
complexities, the Balkans was an area of brutal
simplicities. The moderator implied that this was an
oversimplification. Everybody disapproved of massacres; the question
was how to prevent them in the first place. The concept of strategic
interest had been turned on its head when NATO was
only prepared to bomb for three days in Iraq but 70 days in Kosovo.
How did one
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persuade countries like China, Russia
and India that NATO’s new mandate was
not just a new version of "the white man’s burden’’ - colonialism?
There were, indeed, new dimensions to foreign policy but they had to
be looked at in a traditional framework.
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