Opinion - News Analysis   

A post-modern declaration

There seemed to be no immediate consequences when, in 1908, Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. Vienna was in clear violation of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which it had signed and kept Bosnia in Turkey, yet the protests of Russia and Serbia were in vain. Six years later, a Russian-backed Serbian gunman exacted revenge by assassinating the heir to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo in June 1914. The rest is history.

Parallels between Kosovo in 2008 and Bosnia in 1908 are relevant, but not only because, whatever legal trickery the West uses to override United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 — which kept Kosovo in Serbia — the proclamation of the new state will have incalculable long-term consequences: on secessionist movements from Belgium to the Black Sea via Bosnia, on relations with China and Russia, and on the international system as a whole. They are also relevant because the last thing the new state proclaimed in Pristina on Sunday will be is independent. Instead, what has now emerged south of the Ibar river is a post-modern state, an entity that may be sovereign in name but is a U.S.-EU protectorate in practice.

The European Union plans to send some 2,000 officials to Kosovo to take over from the U.N., which has governed the province since 1999. It wants to appoint an International Civilian Representative who — according to the plan drawn up last year by Martti Ahtisaari, the U.N. envoy — will be the “final authority” in Kosovo with the power to “correct or annul decisions by the Kosovo public authorities.” Kosovo would have had more real independence under the terms Belgrade offered it than it will now.

Those who support the sort of “polyvalent sovereignty” and “post-national statehood” that we already have in the EU welcome such arrangements. But such fictions are in fact always underpinned by the timeless realities of brute power. There are 16,000 NATO troops in Kosovo and they have no intention of coming home: indeed, they are even now being reinforced with 1,000 extra troops from Britain. They, not the Kosovo army, are responsible for the province’s internal and external security.

As in Bosnia, billions have been poured into Kosovo to pay for the international administration but not to improve the lives of ordinary people. Kosovo is a sump of poverty and corruption, both of which have exploded since 1999, and its inhabitants have eked out their lives for nine years now in a mafia state where there are no jobs and not even a proper electricity supply: every few hours there are power cuts, and the streets of Kosovo’s towns explode in a whirring din as every shop and home switches on its generator.

This tragic situation is made possible only because there is a fatal disconnect in all interventionism between power and responsibility.

(John Laughland is the author of Travesty: the Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice

Stories in this Section

Balkan shadow
Books unlimited
Archbishop’s Opening is more than a gambit
Cuba’s future depends on next U.S. President
A post-modern declaration
Potential power of Palestinian non-violent movement
Tackling the horror of Abu Ghraib in a documentary
Well done
Pat for Musharraf
U.S.’ role

Copyright © 2008, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu