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26 April 1999

A war to make us all grow up

Kosovo gives Europe a chance to escape from the American shadow, while Russia can once more play a s

By John Lloyd

It is difficult to see how Nato can lose the war in Kosovo. The cards are so stacked on its side that – given continued political resolve – it must eventually achieve a military victory. The questions are increasingly about what to do with the victory and how to manage the “peace”.

This is Europe’s war, in more senses than were immediately evident. It has given the main European leaders a common project more urgent and more binding than any other that the long process of European union has given them. The unity of Europe – and of Nato as a whole – has been remarkable, given the strains of the conflict and the disappointment that many felt that Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, did not crumble within a few days.

This is not just true of the large countries in Europe that are members of Nato (or part-members, in the case of France); it is also true of the former communist states of Central Europe, which have only just acceded to the alliance. They had thought they were joining an organisation that would seal their pro-western orientation and provide a deep protection against any resurgence of a threat to them from the east; instead they have, within weeks of becoming full members on 12 March, found themselves part of the first serious war fought by the western allies for half a century. Bronislaw Geremek, the historian and foreign minister of Poland, compared his country’s joining Nato to its Christianisation a millennium before. He must now be rethinking his hyperbole, the more so since Nato is engaged in a war to protect the rights of (largely) Muslim people against (largely) Orthodox cleansing.

Yet they are firm. Only the leadership of the Czech Republic has been publicly sceptical; Milos Zeman, the social democratic prime minister, has played to a nation in which the balance of opinion is slightly against the war. In Hungary – which has said it will accept refugees, both Serb and Kosovar – the prime minister, Viktor Orban, said in a speech that “not only arms, but also humane and historic justice is on the side of Nato”. Jerzy Buzek, the Polish prime minister, has admitted the war is a “hard test” for his country, but his government has approved the strikes on Serb forces.

The only threat to unity came when Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, at a meeting of European leaders in Brussels, called for a pause in the bombing if the Serbs began to withdraw. He also proposed putting a force into Kosovo that would be supplied by Nato but mandated by the UN, which has so far had no role in a conflict its Security Council would not sanction because of Russian and Chinese objections. The plan has been sidelined (though not quashed). British officials believe that Fischer pushed the plan to assuage stronger objections within his ruling coalitions (especially his own party, the Greens) that Nato was being seen as purely militaristic – and to hold out a hand to the Russians, who have insisted loudly that the UN has been flouted.

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The Russians are presently much in vogue: a good deal of comment has pointed to their marginalisation, and the carelessness of the west in pushing them out of the project when they could be critical in producing a settlement. There is some justice in this, but not much; for the marginalisation of Russia was largely its own doing and is now being reversed. If Russia comes to an understanding of where its longer-term interests lie, it will be able to play the role its geography and size demand.

Russia’s marginalisation happened last year, when the west became convinced that it must act. Throughout the summer, as the scale of the cleansing in Kosovo became evident, the Nato countries tried to make Milosevic understand that he must submit to a political solution in Kosovo, involving the UN and/or Nato, or face military action. In this effort Russia, with its strong links to the Yugoslav leader, would have been crucial; but, in part because it was preoccupied with what became a financial collapse, it did not respond.

The west changed gear from efforts at political compromise to preparation for military action in January, when a massacre of some 50 Albanian men was revealed in the village of Racak. It galvanised both the US government – which had been reluctant to commit to military action, in spite of urging by Madeleine Albright – and the European states, because it seemed such a cynical expression of insouciant brutality by the forces of a leader with whom they were trying to negotiate in good faith.

From then on, the debates within the foreign ministries and joint consultation chambers of Nato were bent towards war. From an early stage – even before the Racak massacre – there had been planning for air strikes, and for ground-troop intervention. Albright believed that a stand in Kosovo was necessary to stop fascism, and to compensate for weakness in Bosnia; the same view was taken by Tony Blair, by Gerhard Schroder, and by both Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin of France.

Russia was nowhere in this. Many of its leaders neither liked nor approved of Milosevic but they still saw him – as a British aide put it privately this week – as part of the family, “a bad uncle of whom you disapproved”. The Nato attack on Serb troops in Kosovo was seen by its political class – quite genuinely – as an affront to the principle of state sovereignty, and thus as a virtual attack on Russia.

The Russian prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, has been playing the Slav card too strongly; President Yeltsin, who has recovered from his latest bout of debilitating depression, is now seeking a way of cutting his over-mighty (as he sees him) prime minister down to size, and of bringing Russia round to a position from which it can influence, rather than simply rail at, developments in the Balkans.

Russia’s interests are with Europe; it has nowhere else to go, except into an autarchy so ruinous that only an irrational nationalist regime could contemplate it. The states of Europe, with the US and Japan, have been almost the sole funders of Russia’s (so far failed) transition to the market; they constitute its largest single market and largest single source of imports. Only in the atypical postwar Soviet period has Russia aspired to real world hegemony. The task of its leadership – any leadership – is to scale down these postwar expectations to accord with its present impoverishment, and gain proper public support for a strategy of modernisation, which can only be undertaken with European assistance.

The war gives it an opportunity which it may be preparing to take. That is, to use its interlocutor role with Belgrade to deliver a solution with which Nato can live and which gives Russia a boost. This could not be seen as simply delivering for Nato; it needs to be a statesmanlike outcome that will respect the rights of the displaced Kosovars, punish Milosevic, give some future to Yugoslavia within Europe and bring Russia back into serious international politics as a large regional power with interests and entrees denied the west.

The destructive quality of this war on international relations has been oversold. While it could go wrong, it could also go right. It has emphasised the unity of Europe and shown Russia a way to a better future. It has been a war fought for genuinely humanitarian reasons, and it has given some credibility to the battered notion of the “ethical dimension”. It has also given Europe a glimpse of a world in which it can be – must be – a more autonomous and responsible actor on the international stage than it has been during its over-supine tutelage to the US. By cutting Milosevic down, it could make us all grow up.

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