A postmodern declaration
Kosovo's sovereignty is a fiction: real power lies with EU officials backed by western firepower
The Guardian,
- Tuesday February 19 2008
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This article appeared in the Guardian
on Tuesday February 19 2008 on p30 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:04 on February 19 2008.
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. The following year, the fait accompli was written into an
amended treaty. Six years later, however, 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 UN 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 postmodern state, an
entity that may be sovereign in name but is a US-EU protectorate in
practice.
The European Union plans to send some 2,000 officials
to Kosovo to take over from the United Nations, 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 UN 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 "postnational statehood" that we
already have in the EU welcome such arrangements as a respite from the
harsh decisionism of post-Westphalian statehood. 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.
Kosovo is also
home to the vast US military base Camp Bondsteel, near Urosevac - a
mini-Guantánamo that is only one in an archipelago of new US bases in
eastern Europe, the Balkans and central Asia. This is why the Serbian
prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, speaking on Sunday, specifically
attacked Washington for the Kosovo proclamation, saying that it showed
that the US was "ready to unscrupulously and violently jeopardise
international order for the sake of its own military interests".
In
order to symbolise its status as the newest Euro-Atlantic colony,
Kosovo has chosen a flag modelled on that of Bosnia-Herzegovina - the
same EU gold, the same arrangement of stars on a blue background. For
Bosnia, too, is governed by a foreign high representative, who has the
power to sack elected politicians and annul laws, all in the name of
preparing the country for EU integration.
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. The international
community has micro-managed every aspect of the break-up of Yugoslavia
since the EU brokered the Brioni agreement within days of the war in
Slovenia in July 1991. Yet it has always blamed the locals for the
results. Today, the new official government of Kosovo will be
controlled by its international patrons, but they will similarly never
accept accountability for its failings. They prefer instead to govern
behind the scenes, in the dangerous - and no doubt deliberate - gap
between appearance and reality.
· John Laughland is the author of Travesty: the Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/19/kosovo.eu
