In this book, I examine the failure of the international presence to build a civic nation in Kosova. There was no other entity in which the international presence was more welcomed and vested with more authority than it was in Kosova. Yet, its limitless powers notwithstanding, the international presence failed in its primary task of the formation of a civic multiethnic nation. By 2008, Kosova declared its independence. It is a newborn, yet stillborn, state divided in ethnic ghettoes and enclaves. If you fail in the best scenario possible, what are the chances that you will succeed in those cases where the indigenous ethnies or nations, still in conflict, are opposed to you and to your nation-building project? This particular puzzle, then, has immensely important theoretical and practical policy implications.
I argue that the project of nation-building in Kosova failed for two reasons. On the one hand, exogenously, the balance of power determined the exigencies of the project of nation-building in Kosova. In the effort to create an entity that would conform to the exigencies of the balance of power, the project aimed at keeping Kosova and the Albanians within Serbia, at some form or degree, against their expressed will. On the other hand, within Kosova, the Albanian and the Serb élites were able to turn the tables on the international presence by using democracy and by manipulating the perceptions of security of their respective existential entities. As a result of this élite-led mobilization, not only the nation-building project failed, but the political system that has emerged in Kosova is deeply marked by the virulent ethnic national cleavage.
Indigenous élites, therefore, have played a central role in this process. Serb and Albanian politicians have adopted very intense and extreme nationalist positions that are incompatible with the agenda of the international presence and the nation-building project of the great powers. The international administration was determined to weaken them to the point that they would no longer be a relevant and independent factor. Caught between the sea and a hard rock, the indigenous élites chose to rely on the source of their legitimate power: their existential entity and its security synthesis. They chose to fight for their entity, but they did so by exploiting its insecurities. This sinister handling of the security synthesis gave them centrality in the political process and bestowed on them undisputed legitimacy, taking the rug from under the feet of the international administration. However, the élite choices were limited and remain narrow because of the security synthesis of their respective existential entity, in this case, the Serb and the Albanian existential entities within Kosova functioning as national collectivities. The case shows the extent to which the nation itself is defined by the security synthesis. The nation is an existential entity that is held together by the security synthesis, the set of practices that identifies and serves to handle the deadly existential threat(s) to it and that aspires to attain a sovereign state of its own. Every action of the élites will be evaluated from the perspective of the security synthesis of their own existential entity. The actions of the élites had to conform to the perspective of the security synthesis of their existential entity. As long as they were and remain able to achieve this coherence between the security synthesis of the nation and their own political actions, they could count on the loyalty of their existential entity.
Nation-building theories have little to say about these processes. There are numerous theoretical concerns with the theories of nation-building that have to do with the stretched, unclear, confusing, and interchangeable definitions and assumptions. At the conceptual level, the civic nation-building project was fundamentally flawed because there was no clarity about what the nation-building entailed. Informed by strong prescriptive ideological convictions, the civic nation-building project assumed that the individual interests would prevail over collective concerns about the security of the entity. The international project ignored the nature of the nation as a collectivity, i.e., as an existential entity that provides security from the deadly existential threat. The nation-building project ignored the complex history of the existential entities in Kosova. It assumed that collective ethnic amnesia is not only desirable but that is inevitably manipulable by administrative fiat. More importantly, the nation-building project and the international presence refused to acknowledge that the nation is not just about identity, communication, or cultural markers that set boundaries which separate ethnies from one another. Without a proper understanding of these fundamental flaws at the conceptual level, any analysis of the failure of nation-building in this specific context would be remiss.
Therefore, even before we speak about nation-building, we need clarity about the concept of nation itself. One cannot explain the nation-building failure without explaining why the nation emerges in the first place, what a nation is, and why the nation, once formed, strives, inexorably, to attain its own state and to become a nation-state. This matter goes to the heart of the debates on nation-formation, the malleability of human nature, the plasticity of memory, and the shaping of the other elements of national identity. It is important to make the fine distinction on whether the identity is the essence of the nation or just its outer layer. I argue here that the security synthesis is the essence of the nation and that it constitutes its consciousness. Hence, to understand the collectivity we need to focus on the security synthesis and on the manner in which it shapes the behavior of existential entities. Any effort to reorganize a society and state that does not take into account the security synthesis of the particular ethnie and nation is bound to fail.
Seeking to fill an important gap in the debates on the nation, so that we can, then, shift our focus to nation-building, the book offers a theory of nation-formation based on the concept of security synthesis. The core assumption of this book is that the search for comprehensive security leads to the inevitable clash of existential entities that compete for territory, resources, and status. The underlying assumption of the theory of nation-formation sketched here is that the distinction friend/foe is enduring and the permanent trait of human existence. In our pursuit of security, we differentiate between our own and the other, that, in time and experientially, may become the deadly existential threat. Existential entities are historically formed because people collectively remember and try to counter the recurring moments when, individually and collectively, they were faced with a deadly existential threat. The set of practices on how to identify and handle the deadly existential threat is defined as a security synthesis. The security synthesis is the res verae, the essence of the existential entity that may be a tribe, an ethnie, or a nation. Out of the security synthesis an identity develops that distinguishes the existential entity from the other and that helps the existential entity maintain its cohesion and integrity. The security synthesis is based on the premise that the deadly existential threat lurks out there and permanently threatens the existence of the entity. Thus, because of the security synthesis, the past for an existential entity is not just the past, but it is the future as well. This dialectical pattern, I submit, is clearly discernible from the antiquity to modernity, both at the lower level of tribal and ethnic conflict, and at the higher level of civilizations. It reaches its apotheosis in the effort of the existential entities to become nations and then is clearly manifested in their striving to become the most potent and effective social organization in modernity, the nation-state. The fundamental formal attribute of the nation-state, sovereignty, makes it, for the time being, the most formidable and the most desirable political structure in the existential conflicts between existential entities of our era.
Conceptual, Theoretical, and Practical Concerns with the Dominant Theories of Nation-Building
A brief overview of the evolution of the concept of nation-building is more than necessary. All empires have built states, designed institutions, enforced peace, and, whenever it served their interests, have sought to build and even design specific ethnie, nationalities, or nations. They have done so within their core state, in their periphery, with the client states, and in their distant colonies. A cursory look at the history of ancient empires like Persia, Rome, China, or of the modern empires like the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States brings to the fore numerous interesting cases of state, ethnic, and nation-building. Nation-building is a permanent feature of the political in every existing state and nation-state.
It is not surprising, then that the study of nation-building is inseparable from the study of the concept of nation itself. Nation-building is a concept that is rooted in the path-breaking work of Hans Kohn regarding the civic nature and the political foundations of nationalism in Western Europe.1 In Western Europe, argued Kohn, nationalism was a political phenomenon, based on institutions and liberal civic values. The Eastern European nationalisms were different because these nationalisms were “organic,” ethnic, and relied on the intellectuals to form the national consciousness. The implication of Kohn’s dichotomy was that if one follows the Western European model, the institutions could shape the society and build the nations they designed as civic nations, top-down, and according to the liberal template and parameters. Hence, nation-building was desirable, progressive, and possible.
By the mid-1950s, Karl Deutsch further problematized and refined the concept of nation and offered a theory of nation-building. He defined the nation as an amalgamated security community and argued that nations emerge if the people interact and communicate better with one another than with outsiders.2 The core assumption was that the ruling élites could shape the identity of the subjects/citizens. This meant that the nation, and its ideology, nationalism, were dissociated from ethnicity. The nation was tied to an existing state that, in turn, was expected to foster a national identity. Deutsch applied his framework mostly to the Western European cases but, distinctly, also to the Eastern European case of the Polish-Lithuanian Jagellonian state. During the 1960s, Deutsch’s theory of nation-building was extensively applied to Africa and to the post-colonial states that were extremely heterogeneous and ethnically complex. The assumptions to the nation-building approach at the time, as seen in Deutsch and Foltz, were based on the Deutschian version of liberalism, that is, the communicative approach.3 They recognized the role that the culture and identity played in the political mobilization, but on the whole, the argument was not changed: language and core values became paramount and the role of ethnicity was significantly downplayed. Searching for order rather than nations, Huntington advocated the establishment of the strong, Leninist-type party systems.4 Others like Rokkan and Eisenstadt paid attention to cleavages and mobilization patterns but still, blindfolded by the modernization theory agenda, they continued to downplay ethnicity and ignored the primacy of security for the entity.5
Nation-building, according to modernization theory, had its opponents, of course. In 1970, Walker Connor wrote a remarkable and still valuable essay, in which he argued that instead of helping these states to become nation-states, by ignoring ethnicity, they were practically doomed to fail and destroy the state itself.6 Connor did not focus on the security either. Connor’s critique notwithstanding, for some 20 years, the concept of nation-building was used in the literature mainly as a codified ersatz concept for what was the concept of political development in the modernization theory.7 Most theories of nation used the concept of nation-building to refer to the processes of nation-formation initially in Western Europe and then in Eastern Europe and, ultimately, in the Balkans.
The concept of nation-building was revived after the Cold War. It still retained a remarkable similarity to the definitions of the 1960s. More specifically, the new approaches to nation-building, that became much more liberal in the social, economic, and the political model that they advocated, continued to shun away from the concept of élites and the ethnicity. Nation-building became synonymous with the integration of individual citizens in a modern developmental civic nation-state that, in turn, is integrated in a globalized economic and democratic liberal international system. As such, and mainly informed by this developmental liberal thrust, the concept of nation-building was applied to the fragile and weak states, for example, in Africa, that still are struggling to get out of the complex ethnic predicame...