Kosovo between War and Peace

Nationalism, Peacebuilding and International Trusteeship

Tonny Brems Knudsen, Carsten Bagge Laustsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781135768263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

A major contribution to the debate about the reconstruction of Kosovo, and to the general discussion surrounding the revived 'trusteeship institution' model in the context of the UN internationalism of the 1990s and the War on Terror following 9/11.

Bringing together leading international scholars, this book presents the latest empirical research alongside detailed theoretical analysis. Examining the key questions local parties and the international community have encountered in Kosovo, including how to develop effective and inclusive local government, how to counter crime and the dysfunctional aspects of liberal economic reform, how to unite the partly opposed goals of reconstructing the province while avoiding renewed ethnic and international strife, and how to handle the specific challenge of Kosovo's future status. The contributors also re-examine the background factors that continue to influence and hamper the attempt to administrate and reconstruct the province, first of all the nationalist ideologies and the record of ethnic violence.

This book will be of great interest to all students of Balkan politics, peacekeeping, international relations and security studies in general.

1
The politics of international trusteeship

Tonny Brems Knudsen and Carsten Bagge Laustsen

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the practices of international intervention, peacebuilding and the reconstruction of war-torn societies have reached a stage of ambitious de facto trusteeship arrangements with the ongoing international administration of Kosovo as the primary, but by no means exclusive, example.¹ This book examines the obstacles to reconciliation and social reconstruction in Kosovo in the context of what is neither war nor substantial peace. It also discusses the potential and problems of the revived trusteeship institution more generally, as well as its ramifications for the institutional machinery of international society. The resultant collection of essays is thus an attempt to combine practical knowledge and theoretical analysis.

At the practical level, the book discusses a number of the major problems, challenges and dilemmas that the local parties and the international community have encountered in Kosovo including how to develop effective, inclusive and accountable local government; how to construct an educational system capable of stimulating integration and development instead of ethnic separation and exclusion; how to accomplish the partly opposed goals of reconstructing the province while avoiding renewed ethnic and international strife over its future; how to counter crime and the dysfunctional aspects of liberal economic reform, and how to handle the specific challenge of Kosovo’s future status. The book also re-examines the background factors that continue to influence and hamper the attempt to administrate and reconstruct the province, most importantly the nationalist ideologies, the myths and the record of ethnic violence.

At the more general and theoretical level, the book asks whether international trusteeship is the way forward for the international community, when faced with reconstruction challenges of the scale of Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq. In perspective, it also discusses the ramifications of the increasing securitization, militarization and great-power domination of international trusteeship arrangements indicated by the examples of Afghanistan and especially Iraq. The book thus contains discussions that span two markedly different periods and contexts of international trusteeship arrangements, namely the internationalism of the 1990s on the one hand, and the ‘war on terror’ following 11 September 2001 on the other.

Finally, the book asks how the institution of international trusteeship – a set of principles and practices which are highly interventionist and ambitious in their political nature and strongly solidarist in their moral aspiration – can be incorporated into the still predominantly Westphalian institutional foundations of international society. With its temporary transferral of authority from the national to the super-national level and with its almost inevitable opening of the question of self-rule, international trusteeship cannot be separated from difficult questions of state sovereignty and national self-determination. In the present collection of essays, these more fundamental and institutional aspects of the move from comprehensive peacebuilding to international trusteeship are addressed in terms of the specific problem regarding Kosovo’s future status, and the general question of trusteeship as a midway-station to independence for secessionist nations and territories.

These questions and ambitions are reflected in the structure of the book which includes: two chapters on the importance of nationalism, myths and atrocious conduct as the seemingly almost inescapable background and context of the peacebuilding endeavours of the UN-trusteeship in Kosovo; four chapters on key aspects of the ongoing reconstruction of the province including the performance of UNMIK, local governance and democracy, the educational system and crime and capitalism; and three chapters on key issues regarding the relationship between international trusteeship and international society including the regulation of sovereign membership of international society, national self-determination and future status and the role of liberal ideology in contemporary international trusteeship arrangements.

This introductory chapter opens with a general discussion of trusteeship as an emerging institution of international society before moving on to a brief presentation of the main themes covered by the contributors.

Trusteeship as an institution of international society

The tendency that agents acting in the name of international society – most notably the UN but also other international organizations like the EU, NATO and the OSCE, non-governmental organizations and states – take on a far-reaching responsibility for war-torn societies can be traced at least as far back as UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s ambitious plan for a comprehensive reconstruction of war-torn, starving and generally failed Somalia in his report to the UN Security Council of 3 March 1993, and the ensuing UN Security Council Resolution 814 of 26 March. In the latter, a number of tasks were defined for the UN operation including humanitarian relief, the maintenance of peace, stability, law and order, and assistance with respect to political reconciliation and the re-establishment of a national police force and civil administration throughout the country.²

Although the humanitarian intervention in Somalia has generally been seen as a failure,³ the UN was soon engaged in other comprehensive peacebuilding activities, some of them amounting to de facto international trusteeships. The clearest examples of such operations include Bosnia (1995) and Eastern Slavonia (1996) following the Balkan Wars; East Timor following the vote for independence in the 1999 referendum and the ensuing international intervention to bring an end to the anti-secessionist atrocities and ensure that the Indonesian government would stick to its promise regarding independence; and Kosovo following the uprising, the atrocities and the NATO intervention in 1998–9.⁴

For a number of reasons, it is useful to dwell a moment on other less obvious cases, which can and should be considered in the debate over the revival of international trusteeship as well: Afghanistan following the US-sponsored toppling of the Taleban regime in 2001 and, more controversially and problematically, Iraq following the US-led attack on and occupation of the country in 2003.⁵ As for the international involvement in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, it seems to be more correct to say that this has taken the character of a strong ‘helping hand’ rather than an international trusteeship or protectorate. This distinction was made by the International Crisis Group (ICG) at an early point in the debate, but with reference to Bosnia and Kosovo respectively.⁶ However, given the far-reaching powers of the UN High Representative in Bosnia not only to guide, but also to overrule the Bosnian authorities, and considering also the increasing will of the High Representative to use these powers from 1998 onwards, it is more correct to characterize Bosnia following the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement as a de facto trusteeship, although Kosovo remains the clearest example along with East Timor. In contrast, the UN-sponsored peacebuilding assistance to post-Taleban Afghanistan, following the December 2002 Bonn meeting, with respect to security, the formation of a new government, and technical, humanitarian and financial assistance could adequately be seen as a helping hand, or as something in between ‘partnership’ and ‘control’ to use the categories that have been proposed by Jarat Chopra.⁷

This restricted level of engagement compared to cases like Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor have prompted writers like Roland Paris and Richard Caplan to ask whether the UN involvement in the reconstruction of Afghanistan should in fact be interpreted as a retreat to the model of a ‘light footprint’.⁸ However, as also indicated by these writers, the main reason for the less ambitious and more cautious UN approach in Afghanistan (as well as in Iraq) might very well be found in the colossal operational challenges involved and in the internationally controversial backgrounds of full-scale war in these two cases rather than in a retreat from the trusteeship model as such. It should be added, in any case, that neither Paris nor Caplan seem to believe that the light UN footprint and the associated great-power unilateralism is the way forward for international society in complex peacebuilding.

Turning to the administration of Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein, this has a background of full-scale war and a highly doubtful legal justification as evident from the widespread resistance to the resort to force in and beyond the UN Security Council in the winter and spring of 2003.⁹ Since the post-war administration of Iraq has, on top of that, involved great-power dictate, occupation (which formally ended 30 June 2004)¹⁰ and the temporary rule of a US governor, it might preferably be referred to as a ‘military trusteeship’ or a ‘military governorship’ to underline the differences compared to trusteeship arrangements authorized, orchestrated and run by the UN.

Given the relatively modest involvement of the UN and other representatives of the international community in Iraq, there is also a justification for arguing that such cases are not examples of any kind of international trusteeship or protectorate at all.¹¹ The preamble of UN Security Council resolution 1483 of 22 May 2003 formally and expressively stipulated that the US and the UK had the status of occupying powers under international law (formulated as a statement of a fact and not as an authorization), and the role, or anticipated role, of the UN since then has been one of supporting the occupying authorities and the new Iraqi authorities rather than one of administrating the country on a mandate from the international community.

On the other hand, UN Security Council resolution 1483 (paragraphs 8 and 9) also envisaged a potentially far-reaching UN-organized assistance to the reconstruction of Iraq (and so did resolution 1511 of 16 October 2003) including civilian administration, police and law. As argued by the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative to Iraq at the time, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed in the terrorist attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad on 19 August 2003, resolution 1483 was sufficiently unclear to allow the UN’s role in Iraq to develop with the situation.¹² Although de Mello added that the UN could not replace the Coalition Provisional Authority it is not inconceivable that the UN could have assumed administrative functions and authorities approximating a de facto international trusteeship for a transitional period, if the position of the Authority (meaning essentially the US) and the security conditions in the country had been more conducive.

It did not turn out this way, but there is a point in reserving the terms of a military trusteeship or a military governorship to describe Iraq following the war in 2003 (at least until the formal end of occupation on 30 June 2004)¹³ in order to bring attention to the risk that the revived trusteeship institution associated with UN-sponsored examples like especially Kosovo and East Timor will increasingly be taken over and run by great powers: actors who will be motivated more by security concerns than by humanitarian concerns, who will be thinking and acting more along unilateral than along collective lines, and who will be organizing their presence more as an occupation preparing the society in question for the ‘right’ kind of rule than as a transitional administration preparing a people for self-rule or self-determination. In the present volume, this actual and potential development in the contemporary revival of international trusteeship is put into critical perspective by Michael Pugh (Chapter 7), who sees some of these tendencies already in the case of Kosovo as for the economic and the ideological aspects, and Chris Freeman (Chapter 10), who discusses the securitizat...

Table of contents

• The Cass Series on Peacekeeping
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• 1 The politics of international trusteeship
• 2 The Kosovo myth
• 3 The logic of genocide and the prospects of reconciliation
• 4 The Kosovo experiment
• 5 Local governance in Kosovo
• 6 Foundations and fractures of Kosovo’s educational system
• 7 Crime and capitalism in Kosovo’s transformation
• 8 Administering membership of international society
• 9 From UNMIK to self-determination?
• 10 Liberal trusteeship
• 11 The future of international trusteeship
• Index