Kosovo in Retrospect: Rise and Fall of the ‘Rules-Based Order’
NATO expansion, Western leaders vaunting wars for values, international judges ruling on accusations of genocide, calls to defend civilisation against barbarism — it sometimes feels as if we are still in the 1990s. Yet looking back to the 1999 Kosovo conflict reveals how much has changed in the past quarter century. Then, the West’s post-Cold War ‘rules-based order’ was at its height. Today, it is slowly, violently collapsing as a new, multipolar world emerges.
Dawn of the rules-based order
The Kosovo conflict was the key event in establishing the ‘rules-based order’. The term sounds like it might just be a synonym for ‘international law’, but is in fact its antithesis — as legal scholars have belatedly begun to notice. Specifically, the ‘rules-based order’ entails a break from the post-1945 UN system, which was premised on the principles of sovereign equality and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states.
In 1999 the UN was bypassed, to avoid a Security Council veto by Russia, and the bombing of Yugoslavia was instead carried out by NATO. Even its supporters admitted this was illegal under international law, but argued it was nevertheless ‘justified on moral grounds’. This was the era of what in Britain was called ‘ethical foreign policy’, when conscience was said to compel military action in defence of universal moral values.
In a famous April 1999 speech, Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed NATO was waging a ‘just war’ which laid the basis for a ‘new doctrine of international community’. The doctrine essentially consisted of a globalist perspective on the economy, the environment and ‘international security’: Blair said the ‘most pressing foreign policy problem’ was to ‘identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts’.
This was a vision of a ‘community’ that would be policed by the dominant military states since, as Blair explained, ‘nations which have the power, have the responsibility’. This is the essence of the rules-based order: in line with their own self-proclaimed ‘values’, the powerful decide where and how to ‘get actively involved’ in the affairs of the less powerful.
A ‘right to intervene’
Less than a fortnight before it started bombing Yugoslavia, NATO completed its first wave of eastward enlargement, admitting Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Already it appeared that, as Secretary of State Anthony Blinken put it recently, ‘if you’re not at the table in the international system, you’re going to be on the menu’.
The same month as Blair was preaching his ‘doctrine’, Czech president Vaclav Havel similarly envisaged a future world governed by ‘cooperation between larger, mostly supranational, entities’, in which ‘the notion that it is none of our business what happens in another country’ would ‘vanish down the trapdoor of history’. Conceding that Yugoslavia was being ‘attacked … without a direct mandate from the UN’, Havel maintained that this was because of NATO’s ‘respect … for a law that ranks higher than the law which protects the sovereignty of states’ — the ‘higher value’ of universal human rights.
The logic was drawn out by Bernard Kouchner, the first governor of post-war Kosovo. He claimed it was time for a ‘decisive evolution in international consciousness’, whereby a ‘new morality’ would be ‘codified in the “right to intervention” against abuses of national sovereignty’. Mere humanitarianism was not enough: ‘we need to establish a forward-looking right of the world community to actively interfere in the affairs of sovereign nations’.
After 9/11, ethical justifications for war were incorporated into the ‘war on terror’, despite occasional incongruities of tone. Washington reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring public relations consultants to ‘humanise the war’ in Afghanistan, where US planes dropped aid as well as cluster bombs (both in yellow packaging) in an effort to save some Afghans while killing others. According to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, the bombing was ‘a triumph for human rights’. Similarly, in Iraq president George Bush Jr. promised ‘liberation’ while Blair emphasised the ‘moral case for removing Saddam’.
‘Benign’ dictatorship
Many observers criticised what they saw as the cynical, instrumental use of humanitarianism in the war on terror, yet the problem is not simply that interventions are selective, poorly implemented or undermined by ulterior motives. Rather, the core problem is that the best one can hope for under such a system is a benign global dictatorship. The rules-based order returns us to a neo-colonial world where the powerful decide which people need to be ‘helped’ and abrogate to themselves the right to do so.
It is the polar opposite of sovereign equality, a world of international protectorates (in Bosnia and Kosovo) and regime-change wars (in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya). The latter have produced nothing but bloody chaos; the former have merely frozen conflicts rather than resolving them. In Kosovo, a quarter century of Western state-building has produced a ‘failed state’ where the Serbian minority still endures daily harassment and violence.
None of this is to idealise the UN, where real power has always resided in the Security Council. Before Kosovo, interventions under the UN banner were launched against Iraq, Somalia and Haiti, and Western powers took it upon themselves to decide where to draw the borders of new states in the former Yugoslavia, knowingly exacerbating conflict as they did so. For much of the 1990s it looked like a retooled UN might provide the framework for the ‘new world order’ proclaimed by George Bush Snr. at the start of the decade, but the logic of a unipolar world pointed in the opposite direction.
During the Cold War, although the post-1945 conventions of sovereign equality and non-interference were often infringed, they were nevertheless important in delegitimising aggressive foreign policy, and represented an historic gain for states which were previously mere colonial possessions. The ‘Illegal yet legitimate’ formula used for Kosovo showed how far this had unravelled in the 1990s.
The propaganda war
Critics of Western policy in the 1990s tended to argue that it was not forceful enough; that terrible things were allowed to happen while the Western powers were constrained by the unwieldy UN system. In 1999, NATO leaders were largely successful in presenting themselves as the solution to this problem, thanks to the extreme subservience (with a few honourable exceptions) of Western journalists.
The claim that NATO bombing was morally justified, even if illegal, meant the media presentation of the war was crucial. Yet virtually everything NATO said about Kosovo was either misleading or outright false. NATO supposedly went to war reluctantly, after diplomatic efforts had been exhausted, but the so-called ‘peace agreement’ was designed to be rejected. A US official explicitly told reporters at the time that ‘We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.’ To keep this information from the public, journalists were simply told not to report it, and they complied.
The other key claim in the build-up to war was that Yugoslav forces were massacring ethnic-Albanian civilians, notably at the village of Račak on 15 January 1999. William Walker, the American head of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission in Kosovo, visited the scene and immediately declared it an ‘unspeakable atrocity’ and a ‘crime against humanity’. The New York Times ran a front-page story about ‘mutilated bodies’ with ‘eyes gouged out’ and ‘heads smashed in’. President Bill Clinton described‘innocent men, women and children taken from their homes to a gully, forced to kneel in the dirt, sprayed with gunfire’.
These accounts bore little relation to what actually happened at Račak — a firefight between Yugoslav security services and Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas — but most Western journalists just repeated them. One of the few who did contest the official version of events, French reporter Renaud Girard, said he was rounded on by British and American colleagues who complained ‘You’re killing our story’. As one study of this and other episodes in the propaganda war notes, the media created an ‘illusion of multiple sources’ as different outlets reproduced the same distorted accounts, and an ‘illusion of independent confirmation’ as officials cited news reports as corroboration of stories they had fed to journalists in the first place.
NATO also repeatedly claimed it had to start bombing to prevent a refugee crisis. State Department spokesman James Rubin, for example, said on 25 March 1999 that if NATO had not acted, ‘you would have had hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border’. Privately, however, they knew they were about to cause just such a crisis. A US diplomat with the OSCE, Norma Brown, later said that ‘everyone knew there would be a humanitarian crisis of massive proportions if NATO bombed. It was discussed in NATO; it was discussed in the OSCE’. Yet as the crisis unfolded, journalists treated it as confirmation that the airstrikes were necessary and right, ‘forgetting’ that preventing it had ever been a justification for bombing. One British TV journalist claimed afterwards: ‘This is why NATO went to war: so the refugees could come back to Kosovo’.
NATO of course denied any responsibility, insisting the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Kosovo Albanians was the result of a premeditated policy and would have happened anyway. On cue, secret documents outlining just such a Serbian plan – ‘Operation Horseshoe’ – were revealed by the German government. This supposed ‘blueprint for genocide’ was exposed as a fake concocted by the German intelligence services – but only months after the war ended.
Germany was also among the first Western states to start arming and training the KLA from the mid-1990s. In addition to building a guerrilla army, NATO powers also undermined what remained of the Yugoslav state by funding political opponents of the regime, leading to the overthrow of President Slobodan Milošević in 2000 — a blueprint for subsequent ‘colour revolutions’.
The fall
The propaganda surrounding the current wars in Ukraine and Israel can sometimes make it seem as if little has changed politically in the West, but of course much has. We are long past the messianic zeal of liberal interventionism or the hubris of war-on-terror attempts to remake reality. The West is even more risk-averse than in 1999, when NATO did its own high-altitude bombing. Now it sends weapons and celebrates what a ‘good deal’ this is for arms manufacturers.
Blair’s description of the Kosovo war as ‘a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship’ was an attempt to sell NATO bombing as an epic struggle for values. Now, just beneath the surface of the values-talk, commentators promote the West’s proxy war against Russia on the grounds that it is ‘cheap’ and that it is somebody else’s sons who are being killed.
Some have taken up Israel’s claim to be waging an ‘existential struggle between civilisation and barbarism’ in Gaza, but Israeli actions — killing more than 30,000, injuring twice as many again, and displacing most of the population — present an even less attractive advertisement for ‘civilisation’ than NATO’s 78-day bombing of Serbia. As one assessmentputs it, whatever the outcome of current conflicts, ‘the West seems to have already lost on the normative and narrative front’.
In part, this is due to the affordances of social media and the increasing irrelevance of the ‘legacy’ gatekeepers, though of course governments are seeking new means of control. But there are two more fundamental changes. The first is the underlying shift in geopolitical power and a growing willingness to challenge Western hegemony. The second is the rise of populism and the rejection of globalist elites within Western countries. When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, one of the elite’s greatest worries was that this would be a setback for globalism. The influential writer (and husband of Victoria Nuland) Robert Kagan, for example, said he feared that ‘America may once again start behaving like a normal nation’, pursuing its own interests but not taking ‘responsibility for global order’.
There is no room for complacency. As a new, multipolar order begins to take shape, it sometimes seems that we are entering a period of heightened danger with little to look forward to but a choice between different kinds of authoritarianism. And populist leaders have mostly so far failed to live up to their promises — in Britain, for example, the post-Brexit political class has done everything possible to reinforce the UK’s involvement in trans-national institutions, particularly NATO.
Yet the decline of Western dominance and the rise of multipolarity are inherently positive insofar as they represent a challenge to globalism and offer new possibilities for smaller states to reassert their sovereign independence. Today there is new hope that Kagan’s nightmare — that the US and its allies will get ‘out of the world order business’ — may yet come true.
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