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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.
bombing campaign against targets in Kosovo and all over Serbia. At times it seemed that these campaigns were taking place in separate dimensions. This was made particularly evident in daily television news reports. First, there would be a report on the arrival of thousands of new refugees at the Kosovo–Albania (or Macedonia or Montenegro) border. A correspondent in all-weather gear would be positioned
governments of the twentieth century.” 32 Working for Australian intelligence in the 1980s and early 1990s, mainly the DIO, like many others he was alarmed by the extensive WMD arsenal Saddam had built up by the time of the Gulf War. He formed the view that Iraq might have been only a year away from producing a nuclear bomb, although he also thought that the comprehensive allied bombing campaign had
destroyed by the never-ending demands of the Nazi war economy and the relentless Allied bombing campaigns, few German leftists were expecting – let alone hoping for – a rerun of November 1918. Instead the mood was summed up by Albert Schreiner in a book review published in The German American on 1 September 1944. Here the one-time War Minister in revolutionary Stuttgart in
devastated cityscape of the two Japanese cities, they did not provoke outrage or moral revulsion. In the immediate post-war period, the citizens of many German cities lived amidst the ruins that the Allied bombing campaign during the Second World War had produced. If anything, the firestorms produced by the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943 and of Dresden in February 1945 were for them more potent symbols of large-scale destruction. Memories of the bombing during the war strongly resonated among the West German population well into the 1950s and beyond.9 When the first more
same time, the Fulda gap linked the concerns of local citizens and peace activists with the modelling of nuclear war at US Army training facilities that were thousands of miles away. Despite specific national trajectories and concerns, the imaginary war linked distant communities via the mass media coverage of nuclear strategy. Another peculiarity of West German perceptions of the atomic bomb were the ways in which images of nuclear destruction were saturated with recollections of the Allied bombing campaign from 1939 to 1945, thus making the new scale of devastation
matched by a long historiographical silence. On the Allied bombing campaign, see Marco Gioannini and Giulio Massobrio, Bombardate l’Italia: storia della guerra di distruzione aerea (1940–1945) (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007), which estimates that the air raids left seventy thousand victims. An important international conference on this subject (‘I bombardamenti aerei e l’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale: politica, stato e società’) was held in Florence, 11–13 November 2010. It was organized by the Istituto storico
larger Osirak reactor, which was bombed by the Israelis while still under construction in 1981. This fuel was all in the form of highly enriched uranium (to about 84 per cent) and amounted to about 40 kg in total. The plan was to enrich it rapidly to weapons-grade using the centrifuges at Rashdiya, but it was overtaken by events. The allied bombing campaign of the first Gulf War and the freezing of relations between Iraq and the outside world put an end to the scheme. If lessons were to be looked for from the perspective of the NPT from the Iraqi example, there are