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As history would have it, Kosovo won its independence from Serbia in the short window in which intractable ultranationalists in Belgrade drove the exasperated EU to approve Kosovar secession as the least worst solution in the Balkans and before an EU-friendly government in Belgrade would have
On a hot day in early June 1999, I was participating in a conference on European security in Berlin. The talk of the day was obviously the war in Kosovo. At the same time, at Unter den Linden, a few blocks away from the conference venue, a messy and joyful event was taking place – the Christopher Street Gay Parade, a prelude to the Berlin Love Parade held a couple of weeks
Introduction: Europe faces a crisis In May 1998, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) pressured Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to enhance self-determination for repressed ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. When peace talks in Rambouillet broke down early in 1999, NATO chose to carry out air strikes. The vast majority of the EU member states
The focus of this chapter is Operation Allied Force, the Nato air campaign against Yugoslavia from 24 March to 10 June 1999. Nato’s intervention was in response to ongoing conflict in the Serbian province of Kosovo and was triggered by the Yugoslav government’s failure to sign a peace agreement with representatives of Kosovo’s ethnic-Albanian majority. Nato’s declared aim
Kosovo. From 24 March until 3 June, the images of aircraft taking off from airfields in the UK and Italy, and returning home after the completion of their missions become a regular part of TV news programmes. They will gradually replace the images of Kosovar refugees trying to escape the Serbian assaults. Now the former refugees are shown mainly as a cheerful crowd, applauding NATO’s decisive actions
In the story of post-Cold War conceptual confusion, the war in and over Kosovo stands out as a particularly interesting episode. This book provides new and stimulating perspectives on how Kosovo has shaped the new Europe. It breaks down traditional assumptions in the field of security studies by sidelining the theoretical worldview that underlies mainstream strategic thinking on recent events in Kosovo. The book offers a conceptual overview of the Kosovo debate, placing these events in the context of globalisation, European integration and the discourse of modernity and its aftermath. It then examines Kosovo's impact on the idea of war. One of the great paradoxes of the war in Kosovo was that it was not just one campaign but two: there was the ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo and the allied bombing campaign against targets in Kosovo and all over Serbia. Serbia's killing of Kosovo has set the parameters of the Balkanisation-integration nexus, offering 'Europe' (and the West in general) a unique opportunity to suggest itself as the strong centre that keeps the margins from running away. Next, it investigates 'Kosovo' as a product of the decay of modern institutions and discourses like sovereignty, statehood, the warring state or the United Nations system. 'Kosovo' has introduced new overtones into the European Weltanschauung and the ways in which 'Europe' asserts itself as an independent power discourse in a globalising world: increasingly diffident, looking for firm foundations in the conceptual void of the turn of the century.
In the eyes of some observers, the Kosovo crisis posed the greatest threat to relations between Russia and NATO since the end of the Cold War. It also, according to some, seemingly demonstrated the impotence and marginalisation of Russia as an actor in European security affairs. In order to test and explore the validity of these propositions the discussions in this chapter first chart the course of
NATO’s employment of military power against the government of Slobodan Milosevic over Kosovo has been among the most controversial aspects of the Alliance’s involvement in South East Europe since the end of the Cold War. The air operations between March and June 1999 have been variously described as war, ‘humanitarian war’, ‘virtual war’, intervention and ‘humanitarian intervention’ by the conflict
The reconstruction of Kosovo after 1999 was one of the largest and most ambitious international interventions in a post conflict country. Kosovo was seen by many international actors as a ‘green fields’ site on which to construct the government institutions and practices they considered necessary for future peace and prosperity. For a while Kosovo was close to being a laboratory for the practice of institution building and capacity development. This book looks beyond the apparently united and generally self congratulatory statements of international organisations and donors to examine what actually happened when they tried to work together in Kosovo to construct a new public administration. It considers the interests and motivations and the strengths and weaknesses of each of the major players and how these affected what they did, how they did it, and how successful they were in achieving their goals. Although in general the international exercise in Kosovo can be seen as a success, the results have been uneven. Some public administration institutions perform well while others face ongoing challenges. The book argues that to a significant extent the current day performance of the Kosovo government can be traced to the steps taken, or sometimes not taken, by various international actors in the early years of the international intervention.
2 Kosovo and Chechnya/Kosova and Ichkeria This chapter will introduce Kosovo and Chechnya as examples of contemporary conflict. Delving into the history and geopolitics of Kosovo and Chechnya will help, insofar as it draws attention to a range of features, as well as a range of similar and dissimilar trends which inscribed the character of violence. These trends and features may be discernible in mythic stories of war and identity. In this way, analysis of geopolitical legacies and historical narratives provides valuable and often neglected insight into both