Peace and Security in the Postmodern World

The OSCE and Conflict Resolution

Dennis J.D. Sandole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134145706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Preface Acknowledgements Glossary Foreword Alice Ackermann, OSCE Conflict Prevention Centre 1. Violent Postmodern Conflict: A Need to Go Beyond Symptoms 2. A Framework for Analyzing Violent Postmodern Conflict3. A Model for Responding to Violent Postmodern Conflict4. Eliciting the Wisdom of CSCE/OSCE Negotiators: Research Design5. CSCE/OSCE Negotiators' Perceptions of Select Peace and Security Issues6. CSCE/OSCE Negotiators' Perceptions of Causes of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s7. CSCE/OSCE Negotiators' Perceptions of Lessons Learned from the Balkan Wars of the 1990s8. CSCE/OSCE Negotiators' Visions of Ideal Peace and Security in Postmodern Europe9. After 9/11: Peace and Security Issues Revisited10. Implications for Research, Theory, and Policy Appendix A Appendix B Bibliography Index

Chapter 1

Violent postmodern conflict

A need to go beyond symptoms

Introduction

The primary objective of the project reported in this volume is to discover or invent architecture that can enhance efforts to deal effectively with the complexities of the postmodern world, including genocidal ethnic conflicts such as those that plagued Southeastern Europe (the Balkans) during the 1990s (the new warfare) and incidents of “catastrophic terrorism” (Hamburg, 2002), such as the events of 9/11 (the new terrorism), which may be conceptually and/or epiphenomenally linked to the “new warfare.”

This introductory chapter articulates a vision of the entirety of the volume, including its value as a source of expert-generated insights and theory-based constructions about how to shape Europe and, by inference, other regions of the world into viable peace and security systems.

Linkage between the new warfare and the new terrorism

One reason why the new warfare and the new terrorism are linked conceptually in this study is that the means of warfare and of terrorist violence are distributed along a gradient of violence where neat lines of demarcation can easily become blurred. Further, these means are not monopolized by the state, but are instead possessed and used by nonstate actors as well (e.g., paramilitary participants in the ethnic warfare of Bosnia and suicide bombers assaulting persons and other symbols of Western “Civilization”). Indeed, whether an enraged individual is committing an act of “warfare” or “terrorism” against his or her perception of an Oppressor or Enemy may be largely a question of culturally based construction or, in general, semantics.

Nevertheless, clarity on this point has not been an issue for American policy makers who have been waging a “war on terror” in their response to the terrorism of 9/11: a war which has been expanded to include the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Similarly, the Israelis and Russians have been in no doubt about who their enemies are in their respective wars on terror in Occupied Palestine and Chechnya.

Clarity has also not been an issue for those who view terrorism as itself a form of warfare:

[Given] the ancient roots of terrorism . . . from the viewpoint of military theory, domestic and international terrorism can constitute a modern form of primitive warfare and stand in a fluid relationship with guerrilla warfare [emphasis added].

(Wheeler, 1991, p. 19)

Hence, the German magazine, Spiegel, has referred to terrorism as the warfare of the twenty-first century (Terror: Der Krieg des 21. Jahrhunderts) (Spiegel, 2004).

No matter what our particular views on the matter, under the still prevailing Westphalian system of international law, the use of force by majority group-based states (e.g., Israel) is considered a legitimate form of defense of, and by, the state; whereas the use of force by nonstate minority groups (e.g., Palestinians) to advance their “interests” in opposition to those of the majority group-based states, is criminal and/or terroristic.¹

The post–Cold War “transitioning” international system, therefore, contains a serious flaw, a structural basis for “frustration-aggression” (Dollard et al., 1939; Galtung, 1964, 1969; Gurr, 1970; Burton, 1979, 1990, 1997): a dynamic which can be expressed through acts of either the new terrorism or the new warfare – in general, postmodern warfare – depending upon the perspectives and motivations of perpetrators, “targets”, and observers.

Understanding and explanation

Implicit in this project is a distinction made by, among others, Max Weber (1922/78) between an inside actor’s sense of understanding (verstehen) and an outside observer’s sense of explanation (erklären) (see, e.g., Hollis, 1994, pp. 142–51). Similarly, Abraham Kaplan (1964, pp. 32–3, 139–44, 358–63) has distinguished between act meaning (the meaning of an act as defined by an inside actor) and action meaning (the meaning of the act as defined by an outside observer in light of certain theories).

Certain steps are involved in making meaningful use of the insider [understanding]–outsider [explanation] distinction:

First of all, we require access to relevant actors (e.g., CSCE/OSCE negotiators), either directly through interviews or observation and/or indirectly through their personal documents (e.g., dairies), in order to elicit or otherwise to have revealed their views of what certain events and behaviors mean to them.

Second, through introspection and empathy resulting from our identification with those relevant actors, “We [need to] look within [ourselves] to arrive at the act meanings of the behavior of [CSCE/OSCE negotiators], assuming that the act has for them the meaning it would have for us if we were to perform it” [emphasis added] (Kaplan, 1964, p. 142). And

Third, while verstehen (understanding) “is the apprehension of an act meaning, the significance of which attaches to an act in the light of the goals and purposes of those performing it,” erklären (explanation) “is the apprehension of an action meaning, the significance of which attaches to an action in the light of some appropriate theory” (ibid.).

So, translating this complex epistemology into terms appropriate for the study reported here:

1. I have interviewed senior CSCE/OSCE negotiators at four points in time over an 11-year period to elicit their views of issues (“act meaning”) associated with violent conflict in the postmodern world.
2. I have attempted to understand their views in terms of their own goals, motivations, agendas; that is, to ascertain what they themselves meant with their views and actions, in order to get at their “insider” understanding. Then
3. When I thought I knew what the negotiators meant, I took that information and compared it to corresponding, theory-based, “outsider” knowledge (“action meaning”) or explanation of the same subject matter.

In other words, complementing my survey of relevant literature on peace and security in the postmodern world, I have interviewed senior negotiators involved in the “Helsinki Process”: initially the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), subsequently reframed as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

The results of those interviews feature in this volume as a basis for helping us to navigate our way through the turbulent “brave new world” of the postmodern era, to discover or invent appropriate mechanisms for preventing or otherwise responding to postmodern warfare: future “Yugoslavias” and future acts of 9/11-type terrorism.

The results of those interviews also allow us to explore the long-standing cultural/communications gap between academics and policy makers which tend to impede the effective application of theory to practice (see O’Leary et al., 1974; Ezekiel and Post, 1991). As Leatherman and Väyrynen (1995, p. 54) frame the problem, there is a gap, not only

between academics and national foreign policy-makers, but also between academics and international civil servants, diplomats and other international policy-makers [such as CSCE/OSCE negotiators] involved in multilateral decision-making.

Why this particular effort, especially given the burgeoning number of publications on postmodern warfare? Many years ago, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau commented that “Wars occur because there is nothing to prevent them” (cited in Waltz, 1959, p. 232). The same situation exists at present: we are faced with the new warfare and the (possibly related) new terrorism – not to mention global environmental degradation and natural disasters that may exacerbate factors making for postmodern warfare – but with woefully inadequate conceptual and operational mechanisms for dealing with either, or their interconnections.

The new warfare

During the 1990s, Europe was shaken by genocidal ethno-religious warfare in the Balkans, the likes of which in intensity of death, destruction, and displacement of people, had not been seen since the end of the Second World War.

The implosion of former Yugoslavia seems to have taken everyone by surprise, rendering the “international community” – especially the trans-Atlantic security and European communities – incapable of acting effectively. Beginning with the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from the former Yugoslav Socialist Republic on June 25, 1991, warfare ensued in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and then, by the spring of 2001, in Macedonia.

The NATO-led peace mission operating in Bosnia, Implementation Force/Stabilization Force (IFOR/SFOR) for nearly a decade was replaced by an EU-led force (EUFOR) on December 2, 2004 (see AP, 2004a,b; Dempsey, 2004a,b). A North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) mission is still operating in Kosovo, Kosovo Force (KFOR), plus an European Union (EU) mission is in Macedonia. In each case, the mission is maintaining negative peace (i.e., the absence of hostilities) while providing a necessary (but not a sufficient) basis for positive peace (i.e., elimination of the deep-rooted causes and conditions of the conflict) (see Galtung, 1969, 1996).

As of this writing, the “positive peace” efforts of the international community are lagging far behind the “negative peace” efforts, necessitating the continued presence of peacekeepers in the region for some time to come: the ghosts of Vukovar, Srebrenica, and Racak, among others, still stir the imagination and soul.

The resurrection of violent ethno-religious conflict in the Balkans during the 1990s reflected a global trend that was already underway during the Cold War: the progressive increase in domestic major armed conflicts as a proportion of total (domestic and foreign) major armed conflicts worldwide. ² According to figures reported by Peter Wallensteen and his associates at Uppsala University (see Table 1.1), not only was the number of domestic much larger than the number of foreign major armed conflicts between 1986 (1 year following Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in the former Soviet Union) and 1991 (the year in which the wars in former Yugoslavia began), but the number of domestic as a proportion of total (domestic and foreign) major armed conflicts basically increased during that period as well.

Table 1.1 Domestic as a proportion of total major armed conflicts worldwide, 1986–91^a

Wallensteen’s figures overlap with conclusions reached by Ted Robert Gurr (1993) in his study of 233 minority groups at risk of oppression in 93 countries, for example,

• “Since the end of the Cold War, conflicts between communal groups and states have come to be recognized as the major challenge to domestic and international security in most parts of the world” (p. 314).
• “Every form of ethnopolitical conflict has increased sharply since the 1950s” (p. 316). And
• “Ethnonationalist civil wars are the most protracted deadly conflicts of the late twentieth century” (p. 319).

Overlapping further with, but going beyond the data presented in Table 1.1, Wallensteen and Axell (1993, pp. 332–3) reported that for the period 1989–92

a total of 82 armed conflicts were recorded . . . 35 [of which] were . . . wars, resulting in at least 1000 battle-related deaths in a single year . . . . very few of the armed conflicts were “classic” inter-state conflicts. Only [4 conflicts] pitted two internationally and mutually recognized states against each other [emphasis added].

Regarding the nature of armed conflicts closer to the present time, in a meeting on November 23, 1999, with some 40 United Nations (UN) practitioners and academics at UN headquarters in New York City, Wallensteen reported that

there were 108 armed conflicts between 1989 and 1998, and . . . there were more conflicts toward the end of the decade. The number of interstate conflicts remained low, and most conflicts were found inside states [emphasis added].

(ACUNS, 2000; also see Wallensteen, 2002, pp. 76–9)

Clearly, despite some improvements in the status of minorities and reductions in major armed conflicts worldwide during the period 1989–2004 (see Sollenberg, 1996; Gurr, 2000a,b; Gurr et al., 2000; and Marshall and Gurr, 2003, 2005), ethnic-based violent conflict within states seems to be one discernible wave of the postmodern future – among the “low intensity conflicts” that, for Martin van Creveld (1991), have been replacing conventional interstate war as the dominant mode of warfare in the international system (also see Holsti, 1996; Gantzel and Schwinghammer, 1999; Kaldor, 1999; World Bank Institute, 1999).

Among these “new” wars, those involving acts of violence against Muslims in the Balkans have fueled the motivation and justification of some (even outside the region) to attack Western Civilization which they have defined as being responsible for the destruction and atrocities committed at Srebrenica, Racak, and elsewhere in former Yugoslavia.

In addition to this potential spillover to terrorism, these new wars could (as indicated below) spill over or escalate into “old” wars as well.

Spillover: a typology³

Spillover could mean different things to different people, including:

• conflict spreading within a given area;
• conflict spreading between a given area and contiguous areas; or
• conflict spreading anywhere, even far from its origins.

Spillover, then, suggests various kinds of conflict escalation or expansion of conflict-as-process; for instance, what I have labeled as (1) functional spillover; (2) external intervention; and (3) multiplier-effect systemic contagion.

Functional spillover

Functional spillover encompasses scapegoating (conscious or otherwise) and role defense (see Burton, 1979, p. 73 and ch. 7). It involves finding or “inventing” enemies in order to reintegrate or reunify a group which is collapsing (“failing”), or is likely to collapse in some meaningful sense, so that otherwise threatened elites can remain in power. This is the functions-ofconflict thesis of Simmel (1955) and Coser (1956), or conflict-cohesion hypothesis, which “has been so widely accepted among social scientists . . . that Dahrendorf (1964, p. 58) has remarked that . . . ‘It appears to be a general law’ ” [emphasis added] (Levy, 1989b, p. 261).

“Functional spillover” is, perhaps, the oldest hypothesis (and principle) in the study (and practice) of politics: “when the natives are restless, find an enemy and go to war!” For example, former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic manipulated for many Serbs the meaning of Kosovo in order to hold on to power. Kosovo is the “Jerusalem” of the Serbian people, their “holy ground . . . where [their] most historic and religious monuments are located” (Dragnich and Todorovich, 1984, p. 1). Kosovo is the Serbs’ medieval kingdom, the “cradle of their nationhood, when they were virtually its sole occupants . . . the center of [their] empire of the middle ages, at one time the strongest empire in the Balkans” (ibid.; also see Dragnich, 1992, ch. 9).

On June 28, 1987, Milosevic made a speech in “a field in Kosovo called Kosovo Polje, the Field of Black Birds, on the anniversary of [a major Serb] defeat there” (Rosenberg, 1993, p. 1):

“They’ll never do this to you again,” he pledged to the crowd. “Never again will anyone defeat you.” . . . The defeat on that field took place in 1389.

A year later, the coffin of the defeated Serb commander began a yearlong pi...