Kosovo.

The name of this previously internationally insignificant province has been on every European nationalists’ mind since NATO, lead by the U.S., began its bombing campaign in the late 1990’s. Now, more than ever, Kosovo is at the forefront of geopolitical tension and development.

As the province declared independence, it signalled the beginning of a new era in field of international relations. First of all, the Albanian majority in the province is the result of ethnic cleansing. During the Second World War, Albanians, supported by Fascist Italy, purged the Serbian population. After the war, Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia refused Serb refugees the right to return. By the 1980’s, Albanian nationalists had become bold in their demands for recognition and autonomy - even independence. The maltreatment of the Serb minority in the province lead to the populist opportunist, Slobodan Milosevic, taking up the cause of the Serbs of that province, quickly making him a national hero. The rest, as they say, is history.

Ethnic cleansing of Serbs has persisted under the watch of NATO and the EU as well, making any claims that Kosovo is to be a “multi-ethnic state” absurd. Most interesting is the geopolitical tension surrounding the issue, with the Western powers being supportive of independence, and Russia and China and many others condemning it as a unilateral declaration, much like the declarations of independence of the ex-Yugoslav states in the early 1990’s, which lead to the bloodiest ethnic conflicts in recent European history.

From a nationalist perspective it sets a most dangerous precedent. Not that national self-determination is negative, quite the contrary, but this case, as I’ve shown, has a more complex background. Kosovo has been Serbian heartland since the Medieval Ages and the formation of the first Serbian political entities. It is a case of a foreign population of colonists annexing territory from the native inhabitants. Kosovo gives the Russians of the Baltic states, the Mexicans of the southern U.S.A and the Muslims of France a legitimate case for breaking away from their host countries.

Not only has the issue of Kosovo considerably deepened the rift between major global players, but also sown the seeds of a new conflict in the Balkans and perhaps a new Cold War between the major powers in this new, multipolar world that is gradually taking shape as American hegemony is undermined by foreign policy blunders and a declining economy as well as the rise of competetive rivals in the East.

I’m going to finish my short pondering with an article from the guardian, appropriately named “A postmodern declaration”.

A postmodern declaration

Kosovo’s sovereignty is a fiction: real power lies with EU officials backed by western firepower

• John Laughland
• The Guardian,
• Tuesday 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