Abstract
From NATO's point of view, Slobodan Milosevic's attempt to drive ethnic Albanians from Kosovo was a dangerous anachronism in a globalizing world.
Right on cue, just as the millennial midnight was about to strike, NATO entered a new legal and strategic world. The battle for K
Like most explorers in a new world, the NATO nations are making this one up as they go along.
The issue is sovereignty–what does it mean and who has it? Is it absolute? If not, when can it be violated, and by whom? Who decides?
Czech President Vaclav Havel, talking about the NATO bombing of Serbia in a speech to the Canadian parliament, said that “blind love for one's own country … has necessarily become a dangerous anachronism, a source of conflict, and, in extreme cases, of immense human suffering.” We live, Havel said, in a new world “in which all of us must begin to bear responsibility for everything that occurs.”
“In such a world,” he said, “the idol of state sovereignty must inevitably dissolve. With this transformation, the idea of noninterference–the notion that it is none of our business what happens in another country and whether human rights are violated in that country–should also vanish down the trapdoor of history.”
State sovereignty, enshrined at the Peace of Westphalia more than 350 years ago, became absolute in this century. We recognized foreign governments when they controlled their own territories, and we granted them the right to do anything within their own borders as long as they did not infringe the borders of their neighbors. Violations of frontiers were a cause of war; violations within frontiers were not.
Given the holocausts, pogroms, cultural revolutions, and gulags of the twentieth century, this doctrine of absolute sovereignty left a lot to be desired. But it was what we had, the basis of the international system and a useful tool. The Soviet Union rejected any Western criticism of its regime as “an impermissible interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign country.” Mostly, we went along with this, because the alternative could upset a nuclear balance that trumped all other issues, including human rights.
The effects of globalization
That era ended 10 years ago, and in the past decade the concept of sovereignty has changed, but the change has never been dramatized as starkly as last spring. The Balkan war was truly the last twentieth-century war.
On one side was Serbia, fighting for territory, frontiers, and sovereignty in a globalizing world where such concepts just weren't that important any more. The Serb cause was powered by the memories of 600-year-old defeats, of blood grievances against neighbors, of a conviction that ancestral lands were too important to be shared with tribes speaking a different language or professing a different religion.
On the other side was NATO, a multinational alliance of 19 nations that had agreed to share, to a greater or lesser degree, their defenses, which is one of the key attributes of national sovereignty. Nat o said it fought for human rights, or to excise an infection from the European body, or to protect its own credibility, or out of simple revulsion at the sight of Europeans being jammed into railway cars 55 years after that sort of thing was supposed to have ended forever.
What it was not fighting for was land, or conquest, or oil, or empire. That last empire, the Soviet one, is dead, and no one is building another. In a globalizing world, brains and communications are important, land is not.
The globalization of the world, in fact, is the key to what's going on in the Balkans. The war, in a way, was an atavism in a world of global markets and global cooperation, with money and jobs and ideas flying across frontiers as though they didn't exist. Of the 19 NATO nations, 11 are consciously submerging their sovereignty–even their currencies–into a new, borderless economic and political bloc, the European Union.
Even more important is the fact that all the Balkan countries except Serbia long to join the EU. This is astonishing, given the extreme nationalism for which the Balkans are notorious. But all the other Balkan nations–Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia, probably Montenegro if and when it breaks free of Serbia–have either applied for EU membership or say they will.
This desire is having amazing and positive consequences. For the first time in their history, many Balkan nations are behaving in a most un-Balkan way. Romania has agreed to stop persecuting its Hungarian minority. Macedonia and Greece have agreed to disagree on their dispute over Greece's challenge to Macedonia's name. Bulgaria and Macedonia have settled their argument over whether the Macedonian language is a separate language or is only a Bulgarian dialect. An Albanian political party is part of the governing coalition in Macedonia, as is a Turkish party in Bulgaria.
To much of the world, these concessions to sweet reason may seem marginal. In the Balkans, they are seminal. The Bulgarian-Macedonian language dispute, for instance, held up the signing of treaties between the two neighbors, because they could not agree which languages should be used. The solution: an agreement earlier this year to write the treaties in the languages of the two countries, which amounts to a Bulgarian recognition of Macedonian as a separate tongue. It's not that Bulgarians really believe that Macedonian is separate from Bulgarian. They don't. But they have agreed that the dispute–which has enormous psychological meaning for people in this area–will not stand in the way of progress.
The Balkan carrot
Bulgaria, Macedonia, and the other Balkan nations are willing to take these steps–to put their Balkan past behind them, in effect–because they so desperately crave NATO and eu membership and know the only way to get it is to convince Brussels that they are modern nations. It is the same lure that persuaded other ex-communist nations like Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to break with their own pasts and adopt both democracy and market economies. The reward for the Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs has been acceptance into the Western family of nations. Now the Balkans want in, too, and they know what they have to do. NATO membership could be near for many of these Balkan nations although, given the state of their economies, eu membership is probably a generation away. But the promise of membership and progress toward that goal will be a powerful incentive.
In one of the hundreds of Western-style coffee shops in the Albanian capital of Tirana–tiny places with sometimes-misspelled English-language names like Mikrosoft and Love Birds that blare American pop music all day and all night, a young ethnic Albanian woman is telling how she escaped Pristina, the provincial capital of K
“Three days before the bombing began, I was in a club with some friends and some Serbs came in and began shooting. My best friend died in my arms. I got shot in the neck and an arm,” she said, showing her scars, “and they carried me across the border. I'm OK now–I'm on pain killers.”
Then she paused. “Whitney Houston,” she said.
What?
“That's Whitney Houston,” she said, nodding toward the loudspeaker. “She's my favorite. She rattled off the name of the movie that featured the song and who played in it. In 30 seconds, she had spanned six centuries and two surrealistically different worlds.
–R.C.L.
Sali Berisha, the former president of Albania, said “the EU is a model for us. It asks us to give up some of our sovereignty, but it works. It means integration and cooperation.”
“The Balkans today are not about borders but about what kinds of states are going to flourish in the region and about the chances of the region to be part of the new Europe,” said Ivan Krustev, director of the Center for Liberal Studies in Bulgaria.
But the war was precisely about borders. Was K
“It is precisely the fears of exclusion from Europe that command the behavior of governments and publics,” Krustev concluded.
The unpunishable crime
Slobodan Milosevic has committed many crimes. But he will not be tried in The Hague for one of the worst, the hurling of his explosive nationalism into this attempt by the other Balkan countries to turn themselves into mature European nations. Serbia stands, both geographically and politically, astride the routes connecting the Balkans to Brussels. No Balkan economy could thrive as long as Milosevic prosecuted his wars, scattered hundreds of thousands of refugees into countries that could barely support their own people, and continued to fertilize the ethnic rivalries that fueled the conflict.
The fear and hate spread by Milosevic has deeply affected a new generation of Kosovar Albanians, who are ready to retaliate and fight. “I never remember when I could go out and feel secure,” said 19-year-old Memli Krasniqi, a Kosovar refugee now in Tetovo, Macedonia. Locked in the idleness of exile during the war, he and his friends spent their days in a pizzeria on the main street of this western Macedonian city, drinking strong coffee, smoking, and talking about revenge.
“We tried to live a normal life,” said Krasniqi, “but it was a fake life. If I saw a policeman, I'd cross over so I wouldn't meet him. He'd stop me, beat me, take my money. This is not just the last year, it's the last 10 years.”
A state of mind
If and when Milosevic goes, the Serbian people themselves must come to terms with their own past and decide if they, too, want to be a normal European nation. Currently, Serbia has a foot in both worlds, the old one driven by nationalism and ethnic rivalries, and the modern European one of which so many Balkan people want to be part.
The Balkans, as a state of mind and geography, embrace Greece, the European portion of Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and the shards of Yugoslavia–not only Serbia and Montenegro, but the new ex-Yugoslav nations of Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, and the various pieces of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The region's history mixes long periods of oppression–500 years under the Ottomans, 50 years under the Soviets–with spasms of tribal wars, terrorism, refugee flows, shifting borders, mighty empires, misery, foreign intervention, all stored up in conflicting memories to be used as the excuse for the next battle.
Can we blame all of Serbia's present problems, however, on Milosevic? The Serbian people were given a choice 10 years ago between the Balkan past and a European future. Three times, by voting for a Milosevic government, they chose the past. Nothing good will happen in the Balkans until the Serbs accept the enormity of their nation's crimes and, like the Germans after World War II, opt for the new world, born from the end of the Cold War and the rise of the global economy.
Crumbling sovereignty
Much has been said about how the global economy saps national sovereignty by taking control of currencies and economies from national governments and giving it to global markets and traders. The financial crises in Asia, Brazil, and Russia portrayed this loss of economic sovereignty.
Less discussed is the way that political sovereignty–the right and ability of governments to run their own countries their own way, without outside interference–also is crumbling.
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed and died, the global economy was already nibbling at economic sovereignty. Erosion of political sovereignty swiftly followed.
The United Nations, led by Russia and the United States, began authorizing interventions in other countries to settle civil wars or cure ethnic outrages. Sometimes, as in El Salvador or Cambodia, the countries agreed. Sometimes, as in Somalia, there was no government to agree.
In 1991, after the Gulf War, the victorious powers, using U.N. authority, set aside no-fly zones in Iraq where planes belonging to that nation's government could not fly. This was the international community ignoring national sovereignty for humanitarian reasons: in this case, the persecution of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein.
Other interventions followed, in places like Rwanda and Bosnia. International monitors began passing judgment on whether Third World elections met democratic standards. A former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, was jailed in Britain on the basis of charges filed in Spain for acts committed in his own country, Chile; British courts have ruled he must be extradited to Spain. An international court, the very one that has now indicted Milosevic and his aides, was set up in The Hague to judge accused Yugoslav war criminals.
The U.N. contradiction
Clearly, the old idea of absolute sovereignty was giving way to a new world where concern for human rights limited sovereignty and made it conditional on the good opinion of the world community. Kofi Annan, now the U.N. secretary general, told me in 1993 that “sovereignty cannot be absolute. … There are very few issues that one can really say are internal. … The suffering of [oppressed minorities] is so much more important than sovereignty.”
These earlier incursions into sovereignty took place under U.N. authority. But the U.N. itself is based on “the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states.” Its charter says that members “shall refrain … from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
But the charter also pledges members “to take joint and separate actions” to uphold “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all.”
So what if the only way to protect human rights and freedoms is to use force against the territory of another nation?
That was the K
This is what happened in Iraq, with Security Council approval. But Russia and China threatened to veto any repeat of that precedent, especially in K
In the past, nations went to war to defend their “vital national interests.” In this case, NATO went to war not because of the national interests of any of its 19 members but to defend the civilization of the West.
Philip Stephens, writing in the Financial Times of London, said that “this war has marked out with awkward clarity the irresistible tension between two distinct forms of international law. The first, and most familiar, of these is that of the United Nations Charter designed to preserve the territorial integrity of sovereign states. The second, born at Nuremberg and developed subsequently in international conventions against genocide and torture, hold that there are some crimes which transcend the inviolability of national states.”
The Nuremberg standard, established by the Nazi war crimes trials in 1946, lay dormant through the Cold Wa r. Now it rules international affairs.
Humanitarian precedents
This is a new world. The Greek newspaper, Kathimerini, wrote that “today's policy is a legitimizing precedent for the future.” In the future, if some NATO allies like Greece refuse to go along with a U.S.-led humanitarian intervention, would the United States and a few allies have the right to act? Or the United States alone? And, if so, would this right also belong to, say, China?
Greece belongs to NATO, but Kathimerini, like most Greeks, disapproved of this NATO intervention because it has its own border problems–a dispute with Turkey over ownership of 200 Aegean islands–and worried that any NATO-sponsored border changes in K
In K
Havel, in his speech in Canada, also saw an “important precedent for the future” in the NATO intervention. But, unlike Kathimerini, he found the philosophical and humanitarian justification overwhelming:
“It has been clearly said that it is simply not permissible to murder people, to drive them from their homes, to torture them, and to confiscate their property. What has been demonstrated here is the fact that human rights are indivisible and that, if injustice is done to one, it is done to all.”