Kosovo Seen as Global Watershed

Beyond the bombs and missiles, the defiant Serbs and the ethnic Albanian rebels, the crisis in Kosovo exposes some of the most profound issues facing the post-Cold War world.

The outcome may well define the pattern of global politics, diplomacy and warfare over the next decade in the way that the showdowns with Iraq--both the decisive 1991 Persian Gulf War and its messy aftermath--defined the 1990s, according to top U.S. foreign policy analysts and former policymakers.

“The real stakes have little to do with what’s happening on the ground,” said Ivo Daalder, an expert on Kosovo at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

The biggest of several precedents in Kosovo involves a new standard for international intervention that extends beyond the U.N. Charter, as well as beyond a principle sacrosanct for half a century: nonintervention in the domestic affairs of other states.

The U.N. Charter restricts the use of force to two broad categories: cases of individual or collective self-defense and flash points that the Security Council concurs are a threat to international peace and security. Neither strictly applies in Kosovo, experts say.

Intervention Carries Sweeping Implications

NATO intervention in the conflict between the Yugoslav government and restive ethnic Albanians in its Kosovo province effectively declares that a nation’s performance on human rights supersedes its right to sovereignty and noninterference. This precedent could have sweeping implications in virtually any form of disorder in any part of the world.

The terms of intervention have evolved over the last decade due to the changing political environment, formal acceptance of new treaties and the challenges of other ethnic crises in a globalizing world.

At the top of the list is the Anti-Genocide Convention, originally accepted by President Truman in 1948 but blocked by congressional conservatives for four decades. The treaty declares genocide to be an international crime and obligates treaty signers to prevent and punish the crime. The United States finally ratified it in 1986, and a law making genocide a crime was signed by President Reagan in 1988.

The humanitarian principles embodied in the convention provided the backdrop during the last decade for U.S. military intervention in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina and on behalf of Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq.

“We are building toward a world legal order,” said Jane Holl, executive director of the Carnegie Commission on the Prevention of Deadly Violence.

“We now accept that economic growth depends on a fundamental legal order--the norms, values and rules we promulgate among ourselves,” she said. “People have to obey the rules and broad outlines of tolerable behavior. When you have unchecked violence with genocidal overtones at the throat of Europe, you have a threat to that world legal order--and the sensibilities of the human race.”

The Kosovo conflict also challenges the convention that a government is accountable for domestic policies only to its own people. By intervening, the world’s mightiest military alliance is establishing the principle that a country is responsible to the broader region and even to the international community for its behavior at home.

On that basis, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization could argue for intervention in many countries much farther afield, experts say. But Europe is a unique test case--for now at least--because building an undivided Europe has been the Western goal in a century-long process.

“It represents a long-term effort by the United States through World Wars I and II and the Cold War. With the end of those wars, the expansion of Europe, the enlargement of NATO and the strategic partnership with Russia, we’re coming closer to that goal every day,” said Daalder of the Brookings Institution.

“We’re on the cusp of achieving this for the 21st century. So the use of force by the Serbs to settle a dispute is not what one expects in the new Europe. It’s going against the forces of history,” said Daalder, a former National Security Council official.

The stakes in the relatively small Kosovo conflict are thus global because ultimately the United States hopes its relationship with Europe--reflected in the shared values of democracy, free speech and right to worship, free enterprise and human rights--will be a model for the rest of the world.

Minorities’ Rights an Issue in Europe

Among a host of other larger issues at stake in Kosovo, where a large Muslim population is dominated by Serbian Christians, is whether minority religious and ethnic groups on the move in a globalizing world have a right to political participation in Europe, a continent of Judeo-Christian values.

“The crises in Bosnia and Kosovo both said that Muslims have no right to political life in Europe, and that’s not a message we want to be associated with,” Holl said.

But experts and former policymakers disagree about whether Kosovo is the appropriate arena in which to resolve these and other issues.

“We have far more important interests elsewhere in the world,” said Lee H. Hamilton, former chairman of the House International Relations Committee and now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, a think tank attached to the Smithsonian Institution. “The costs and dangers of prolonged involvement in Kosovo are too high--beyond what our national interests dictate.”

More important for U.S. interests in the post-Cold War world are China, Russia, Iraq and North Korea, he said.

Precedents Carry Future Dangers

Hamilton, who supports a short-term military operation but not a long-term U.S. involvement in the Balkans, also expressed concern that the Kosovo conflict could spawn greater disorder rather than resolve the Kosovo problem or contribute to new global standards of behavior.

“This is a very volatile part of the world with lots of ethnic groups and lots of moves toward self-determination,” he said. “You begin a war with massive refugees and there’s a high degree of instability. There are risks here of spreading the conflict and chaos.”

Others argue that the precedents carry future dangers.

“There are huge implications if we support the Kosovars and they get independence. It has implications for every country in the world that has different ethnic groups inside it,” said Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor during the Bush administration. Scowcroft orchestrated U.S. policy after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and is a former military attache in Yugoslavia.

Alliance Could Be at Risk

Nearby, for example, the United States supports the government of Turkey against a strong Kurdish movement for autonomy or independence.

A major danger is that, rather than bring the United States and Europe closer, the Kosovo conflict has the potential to disrupt the world’s strongest alliance.

“Over the past decade, Europe and the United States have been drifting apart on a lot of issues,” said Francis Fukuyama, former deputy director of the State Department policy-planning staff. “Some were inconsequential, like [a trade conflict over] bananas, but the accumulative impact is dangerous. In Kosovo, the United States is likely to want to keep up the campaign longer than the Europeans, and this could further erode relations.

“There are a lot of tensions building up in the NATO alliance that could become real frictions if, as I fear, this conflict proves not to be resolvable,” said Fukuyama, author of “The End of History.”

Finally, despite the massive assemblage of air power, NATO may find it difficult in Kosovo to either get a decisive outcome or send a strong signal that aggression is unacceptable in the post-Cold War world, an extension of the principle established during the Gulf War.

“The notion that you can change people’s minds and do it by sanitary bombing has yet to be proven right,” Scowcroft added. “We didn’t get [Iraqi President Saddam Hussein] out of Kuwait by bombing. It took ground forces--and that’s not what we want to do here.”