The Balkans Keeping Kosovo : The costs of liberal imperialism

National Review, Sept 27, 1999 by Fareed Zakaria

Remember Kosovo? That war has disappeared from television screens with remarkable speed. In fact, Americans seemed to lose interest in this high- tech war even before it had drawn to a formal close--truly a virtual victory. In Europe, the social-democratic parties got no electoral bounce out of it in the recent European Union elections. Most people in the West saw Kosovo as a good cause (which it was) and were willing to help put things right, but now want to "move on," as a certain Western leader would say. This is Kosovo, after all--not Germany or Japan.

But that is not how wars work. Kosovo and its surroundings have become our problem--and will be so for decades and decades to come. Military interventions are not one-shot deals, particularly if you win. After we had launched the war, winning was important. (Consider the alternative.) There may be no substitute for victory, but victory is no substitute for strategy. Our political goals in the Balkans remain confused and contradictory. The cruise missiles have done their work. It is time for the Clinton administration to follow suit.

Have we achieved our war aims? That depends on what our aims were. If the purpose of our intervention was to avert a humanitarian crisis in Kosovo, in fact we exacerbated it. In the year before the bombing, 2,500 people (mostly KLA partisans and Serb soldiers) died in Kosovo; in the eleven weeks after the bombing began, 10,000 people (most of them Albanian civilians) were killed. At the start of the war, 230,000 Kosovars were estimated to have been displaced; by its end, 1.4 million Albanians had been displaced, 860,000 of them outside Kosovo. Most of the latter have returned, but now over 150,000 Serbs have fled the province. Kosovo has been physically laid to waste; without international aid, mass starvation would soon set in. Yugoslavia itself is estimated by the European Union to have been bombed back 50 years. It will take decades--and over $50 billion--to rebuild the civilian infrastructure of that country when Milosevic exits the stage. For a war waged with humanitarian intentions, these are troubling consequences.

If the purpose of the war was to bring political stability to the Balkans, the results are even more unsettling. Yugoslavia has been turned into a Third World country, which will probably mean that the next wave of refugees into Western Europe will be impoverished Serbs fleeing a desperate land. Kosovo has been liberated from Yugoslavia, but has not been granted independence, which is what 90 percent of Kosovars sorely want. Thus NATO is now the primary obstacle to the fulfillment of Kosovar popular aspirations--an odd role for an alliance that has made the promotion of democracy one of its new goals.

Finally, if the purpose of the war was to affirm the concept of ethnic harmony, that is now also in ruins. The NATO occupation has coincided with a wave of reverse ethnic cleansing so that soon Kosovo will be Serb-free. An emboldened Montenegro is likely to declare independence from Yugoslavia. Macedonia, reeling under the war's impact, is sensing new tensions with its Albanian minority. Albania itself is quietly encouraging the Kosovars to join with it and, after attracting the Albanians in Macedonia, to create a greater Albania. This last outcome is unlikely, but all these trends are hardly conducive to religious harmony and regional stability.

NATO is now a colonial power in the Balkans--inheritor of the Ottoman and Habsburg roles there. It will have to grapple with the problems of being an outsider in an area that has been consumed by virulent nationalism for years. Of course, NATO does not see itself as a colonial power; it sees itself as an enlightened trustee, helping Kosovo along until it can become a "functioning and viable member of the community of nations." These words do not come from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in reference to Kosovo, 1999; they come from U.N. Ambassador Albright, in reference to Somalia, 1993. No doubt one could find similar phrases about Haiti, Bosnia, and Cambodia.

The mission we have undertaken in the Balkans can best be described as liberal imperialism--the use of our enormous power to civilize some region of the world. It was tried, and referred to as such, by Great Britain in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. Britain won spectacular victories in places like Omdurman, conquering the Sudan with 500 casualties--compared with 20,000 on the other side. Men like Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain urged the extension of the British Empire wherever it could bring order. In many ways, it worked; much of what was once the British Empire is remarkably peaceful and democratic. But it cannot work today.

The case against liberal imperialism now is not that the United States is a bully, that it will choose the wrong side, that it will mess things up, that it has no moral right to impose its will on others. We are a genuinely benign superpower--probably the first and last such power. (Why else would we have gone to war for the Kosovars?) No, the case against liberal imperialism is that we live in an age of nationalism, and no external power, however well-intentioned, can reshape foreign lands without a massive commitment of power and resources. Washington will be able to occupy these lands fairly cheaply--as it has in Bosnia and Kosovo- -but the moment the occupation ends, the problems that led to that intervention will resume. Absent an occupying force, Bosnia would split into three separate, ethnically uniform states, and the civil war between Serbs and Kosovars would begin anew. Alternatively, as in Haiti and Somalia, we could leave and wash our hands of the situation. But if we peek back at what is going on in those countries, we see that things have returned to their unhappy norm. Little is gained by half-hearted attempts at nation-building and democratization.