Politics
Kosovo: a rich and comfortable war
Published 14 June 1999
The west has been fighting for universal values; other countries see those values as a new threat
The war in Kosovo has been fought for universal values. It has shone a light on these values and demonstrated to us that they are not shared universally - indeed that they are regarded with detestation in most of the world.
Opposition to the war in Kosovo has come most vociferously from those states that see universal values not as an expression of human freedom or rights but as a threat. And now they see them as an even greater threat because, for the first time, values have been used as the explicit basis for waging war. To be sure, values have been invoked in almost every serious conflict and were in the foreground in, for example, the crusades and the American civil war. But the crusades were fought, in reality, for religious (or cultural) dominance and for booty, while the American civil war began as an attempt to prevent secession. Kosovo, from the beginning, was largely defined by values, with only a very general strategic reason in the background.
Values are much talked about in politics and international diplomacy. But hitherto they were confined to a box labelled, "For rhetorical purposes only: not to be acted upon on any account". Now they have moved into the military sphere. The rich and comfortable countries think that they are doing right; other countries see only a new threat to their own security.
From the foundation of the International Bureau against the Slave Trade in 1890, the number and scope of the conventions, treaties and agreements underpinning human rights - and increasingly giving individuals rights under international law - have grown enormously. The landmarks were the charters of the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals in 1945, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950 and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1966. Most states have signed these; their import is quite clear. As the political scientist David Held puts it in a recent book, "they entrench in international law the notion that a legitimate political power must be, on the one hand . . . accountable to the members of the political community in which it is embedded and, on the other, a promoter of fundamental human rights".
Surrounding these treaties, and increasingly powerful in promoting new ones, are the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the human rights and ecological spheres. The NGOs that operate across frontiers have grown from a handful at the beginning of the century to over 5,000 now. Once they were seen simply as troublemakers; now they are regarded with a kind of reverence and can achieve constant dialogue with ministers and officials (notably in Britain), especially if they seem to represent the oppressed. For example, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo played a leading role in creating international concern over the "disappeared" of Argentina. Its leaders testified, at various stages, to the Organisation of American States, the UN and the US Congress and were nominated for three Nobel prizes in 1980. When they toured Europe they were received by the prime minister of Spain, the president of France and the Pope. As another example, the US-based Human Rights Watch lobbied successfully for the establishment of the International Criminal Court.
It is against this background that we should consider two further developments. First, the rich and comfortable countries have accepted the responsibility to address the collapse of the bipolar world. The funds that have been pledged to support the transition from communism may or may not have been enough (the arguments still rage); but they all came from the North American and European states together with Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. As the US poured in Marshall Plan aid to western Europe after 1945, so the wealthy states, largely through the IMF, tried to assist central and eastern Europe to join their world of high incomes, high productivity and liberal politics. Remarkably we, the rich western states, have become locked into a long-term donor relationship with states that are often suspicious of our motives if not actually hostile to our actions.
Second, globalisation. The rich and comfortable countries do not control it - not even the US can do that - but they are able to guide and shape it. They profit from it not only because they have sophisticated financial systems and technology but also because they set the terms under which globalisation spreads through the rest of the world. Those outside the rich and comfortable circle, however, experience globalisation either as victims or as colonies responding to the commands of the imperial centre.
These movements reinforce each other. Wealth and technological prowess have given the advanced states polities that are liberal in a global sense: they accept that they have a duty to sustain poorer states and they increasingly feel impelled to put humanitarian ideals into practice. There are limits to this, sometimes quite close limits; the electorates of these countries want to stay rich and (especially in Britain) do not want to support legions of poverty- stricken refugees. But the electorates have supported - indeed they have been enthusiastic about - the humanitarian war in Kosovo, rewarding their leaders with high poll ratings, especially in Britain.
This is partly because of the application of advanced technologies to weapons systems. Their accuracy is such that an air war can be almost as effective in damaging an opposing army as a hugely superior force in a ground war. At the same time, the civilian population's standard of living can be dramatically reduced through the bombing of utilities and supply routes. So the rich and comfortable countries can successfully fight rich and comfortable wars that require them to take few or no casualties; that is the great revelation of Kosovo, which will have profound effects on diplomacy and on war itself.
Very little of this applies to the other states, including major ones such as China and Russia. Where they have signed up to human rights treaties, they did so for largely declaratory effect. Russia is susceptible to human rights pressure - it said it would abolish its death penalty earlier this month, after sustained pressure from the EU - but China is much less so. Both, however, regard a humanitarian war as an oxymoron. Russian elite opinion sees Nato's attack on Kosovo as explicable only in aggressive terms - at the mildest, the alliance has been showing the world it can zap whom it wishes. Neither China nor Russia has the range of very smart weapons the west now has - and neither can afford to develop them.
Both states have direct interests in the war. China has suppressed religion and dissidence in Tibet and has thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of political prisoners, many of whom are treated appallingly. Russia asks what would have happened had Nato applied its humanitarian principles to the breakaway province of Chechnya in 1994-95. At the time, the west treated Russia's intervention as a purely internal affair, but would it do so in future? Russia has not accepted the de facto independence of Chechnya and may wish to return to subduing it later. Furthermore its political elites have not, for the most part, accepted that the former Soviet states, especially Belarus and Ukraine, should be independent of it. Nor have they accepted that largely Russian- populated areas such as Crimea (in Ukraine), the Narva area (in Estonia) and northern Kazakhstan should be permanently severed from the motherland. They can envisage future actions that might look like Kosovo.
Two other substantial powers - India and Pakistan - are engaged in low-level hostilities over Kashmir. Both countries fear that, if universal values are applied, the Kashmir conflict could one day put them in the humanitarian dock.
These countries see wars as they have been seen for centuries - instruments for aggrandisement or protection. They have not undergone the changes that the rich states have experienced over the past five decades - or only vestigially. Their electorates do not respond to the protection of abstract principles and would find it inexplicable if, say, India went to war for persecuted Roman Catholics. They have not the leisure nor the wealth nor the political framework within which to respond to a new world order based on the active protection of human rights.
The curtain of ideology that separates rich and liberal from the rest is no longer an iron one. But the world is still divided by a view of how it should be run; and while that is so, agreement on a world order will be as elusive as ever. The war has at least shown us that, and stripped away some illusions.
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