Kosovo and International Society - Case Study Example

CHECHNYA AND KOSOVO Introduction With the collapse of communism 1991, many historians and political commentators suggested that the solid values of market capitalism were now the ones that would be directing history. Now countries around the world would be organizing themselves under the principles of liberal democracy. A new world order was sprouting up that would replace the Cold War with peace and stability. In his book “The End of History,” the political analyst Francis Fukuyama turned away from the philosophy of Hegel and ideological conflicts as the engine of history and started looking at the psychological insights brought to bear by Friedrich Nietzsche. He uses Nietzsche to show how empty and meaningless a world with opposing politics might become. The end of the history is a very unsatisfying place. We are always looking for values and something that is worth fighting for. The question then becomes how to fight for the values we believe in. For the international community two key tests would show how they dealt with the new world that had suddenly appeared after the Cold War. One, Kosovo, would indicate someone like Fukuyama was right: a new world order committed to promoting certain key values had indeed taken center stage. The other, Chechnya, indicated nothing much had changed and that might makes right. As Robert Kagan writes in his book Of Paradise and Power, the Balkan Wars were one of the first stumbling blocks to the concept of a peaceful new world order. It turned out that having the US as the lone power in the world was not a solution to problems around the world. There was simply too much to be responsible for. As was demonstrated in the Balkans in the 1990s, Europeans weren’t able to project a credible military force even within Europe. This was a painful time for Europe. Instead of solving global conflicts, they looked inward. The Europeans resorted to the only real talent they had at the time: endless diplomatic measure through international institutions such as the UN. The success of European integration and solving the "German problem" had led a lot of Europeans at the time, Kagan writes, to believe that they live in a Kantian paradise where international institutions could banish war forever. This illusion came crashing down with the Balkans, where the Europeans were powerless in the early 1990s, and Chechnya, where they chose to turn a blind eye, intimidated by an unstable and resurgent Russia, and unable to finding a compelling political reasons to engage. The truth is that Chechnya had very little strategic interest for the West. There are obviously interests but, in comparison with other problems of international relations, they do not enjoy a high priority on the foreign policy agendas in Washington and Brussels. The common Western interests are to assist the newly independent states in the process of state building, namely to enable them to develop good governance on the basis of democracy, the observation of human rights, and the development of a market economy, in correspondence with the Charter of Paris which was signed by all OSCE countries including all post-Soviet states (Muller). The compelling reason to engage would have been human rights, but the calculus was clearly not significant enough for the OSCE, the EU, the UN, or NATO to involve themselves. Things are not much different to this day. Chechnya is firmly under Russian control and access is limited to journalists and foreigner. The writ of the OSCE does not particularly run there. Part of this is because Russia has obvious and unargued jurisdiction over the area (maintained by force), but of course if the international community truly cared about the people of Caucasus they would speak up more loudly at the atrocious human right abuses that have occurred there. Kosovo is a more interesting situation, as the international community did act decisively there and has since worked hard (though perhaps not enough) to manage the post conflict situation in that country. Because the jurisdiction and legal status of the country was up for grabs, the international community—and especially the UN, which administered the country after the war of 1999—was able to move in and try to shape the institutions there. The OSCE has been very active on the ground monitoring human rights abuses and the uses and abuses of the media. This was a place where good work was done. It was messy and there were problems, but in the end hundreds of thousands of Kosovars were protected and allowed to take control of their own lives. This was to some extent a model of humanitarian intervention. However, it was not an example that has been followed since, as international relations took another turn. Terrorism raised its ugly head and distracted from the humanitarian intervention model that was shaping up. Analysis and Literature There are many questions to ask about these conflicts and the responses of the international community. Is there in fact a dissonance between the responses to the Chechen conflict and the one in Kosovo? What does this say about the impulses that guide the international community in action? Among questions like this one of the most interestingly discussed in much of the literature is the impact that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 had on the category of conflicts which Chechnya and Kosovo fall into. There was a time when the U.N. called for more humanitarian interventions like that in Kosovo. The Responsibility to Protect Doctrine which was published and promoted in the months prior to 9/11 laid out the groundwork and provided the intellectual and moral justification for such actions. As Sergei Kovalev writes, After Kosovo, it became clear that the concept of "state sovereignty" would have to undergo changes. For instance, mass and gross violations of human rights by a government on its own territory may no longer be considered as simply the internal affair of that state. Such limitations on state sovereignty are not new; they were expressed in the Nuremberg Tribunal. However, . . . [t]he Yugoslav crisis represents the first time in contemporary history that a group of states demanded that another state alter its internal policies and went to war when those demands were not met. But all of this impetus was lost in the re-ordering of the world that autumn. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq would not only dramatically preoccupy the international community in the years to come—giving much less airtime to Kosovo and Chechnya—but would also give intervention a bad name. There was even less money and staff for Kosovo and even less basic attention to the events unfolding in Chechnya, which by now is firmly in the iron grip of the Kremlin, with a puppet government installed. As has been stated in other proposals, the framework I prefer for conflict analysis is loosely based on the Actors Analysis. This will look at the different actors—in this case Kosovo, Chechnya, Russia, Europe, the United States, the UN, the OSCE, and various other institutions and international organizations, and what their stated and hidden agendas are or were. Because a number of these conflicts are historical, this framework will necessarily have to be finessed somewhat. However, I believe this framework is best suited to look at these complex situations and at the motives and responses of the various agents involved in these historical and ongoing conflicts. The international community is still reeling from the Invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. There is no clear policy looking forward. Issues such as the conflicts in Chechnya and Kosovo are no longer as intellectually interesting to policymakers and represent problems from a past era. Nevertheless, the lessons learned from these conflicts can still greatly inform our present geopolitics. Bibliography Amnesty International, Kosovo: The Evidence. London: Amnesty International, 1998. Auerswald, Philip E., David P. Auerswald and Christian Duttweiler (eds.), The Kosovo Conflict: A Diplomatic History Through Documents. The Hague; Cambridge MA: Kluwer Law International, 2000. Bellamy, Alex J., Kosovo and International Society. Houndmills; New York: Palgrave, 2002. Betts, Wendy S., Scott N. Carlson & Gregory Gisvold, “The Post-Conflict Transitional Administration of Kosovo and the Lessons-Learned in Efforts to Establish a Judiciary and Rule of Law”, 22 Michigan Journal of International Law 371 (2000-2001) Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 2006 Kagan, Robert. Of Paradise and Power. New York: Vintage, 2004. Babchenko, Arkady. One Soldiers War. London: Grove Press. 2008. Barron, Owen. Rivalry Renewed. Harvard International Review. p 11. Bennett, Vanora. (2001). Crying Wolf: the Return of War to Chechnya. Pan Macmillan, UK. Spring 2007 Bornstein, Yvonne and Mark Ribowsky. (2004). Eleven Days of Hell: My True Story Of Kidnapping, Terror, Torture And Historic FBI & KGB Rescue. New York: Random House. Coppieters, Bruno. Moral constraints on war: principles and cases. London: Lexington, 2002. Dunlop, John B. Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict. Cambridge University Press, UK, 1998. Gammer, Moshe. The Lone Wolf And the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Müller, Friedemann. “Events in and around Chechnya and the International Community.” In Lena Jonson and Murad Esenov, eds. Chechnya. The Swedish Institute of International Affairs: Stockholm, 2000. Kovalev, Sergei. “After Chechnya and Kosovo.” Perspective. Volume XI, Number 1 (September - October 2000). http://web.bu.edu/iscip/vol11/Kovalev.html Topic:  Comparison of how the international community (focusing here e.g. on the UN, OSCE and Council of Europe) is dealing with Chechnya and Kosovo (independence) Instructions: 1-2 pages summary of the work on thesis proposal. The summary should include: Theoretical framework; Method of analysis; Empirical results (if any) 3-4 following pages should include the research question and a review of the literature on the topic. You may also include a section on hypotheses, but this is not mandatory. Read More