Mapping European security after Kosovo

Book abstract:

Kosovo is claimed by many to have heralded a new era of humanitarian and ethical politics within Europe, and is therefore of greater significance than just another territorial scrap by the tribes of the Balkans. Kosovo may have been the birth pangs of a new European political order but most of the contributors to this work question whether or not the infant order will survive to maturity.

The Book is organised over ten chapters. The first two present a conceptual overview of the Kosovo debate, placing the events in the context of globalisation, European integration and the discourse of modernity and its aftermath. The following three chapters examine Kosovo's impact on the idea of war. It is argued that war is no longer a question of sovereignty and territory but more a matter of behaviours which question the 'norm' of an imagined 'international community'. That this 'international community' is essentially a creation of the West is challenged and argument offered regarding the legitimacy of war and the marginalisation of the United Nations (UN) by the United States. The foreign policy motivators of the United States are subjected to close scrutiny and some pessimistic conclusions reached regarding the rejuvenation of the UN and the US hegemony. Chapters six, seven, and eight explore the symbolic economy of 'Kosovo' and offer the argument that the 'reality of Kosovo' was constructed from Western concepts of European identities, and that the real facts of Kosovo (such as ethnic cleansing and genocide which served as the reasons for Operation Allied Force) soon became supplemented by this idea of constructing a Western 'European' identity, and goals such as upholding the credibility of NATO and cohesion of the Alliance. Piercing insights are made describing the 'virtual' nature of the war arising from the high-tech nature of the campaign and the high moral ground that NATO claims to represent. War as a necessary evil by which civilisation is upheld is the opening theme of chapter nine, and the writer goes on to suggest that we can better understand the notion of civilisation as the manifestation, rather than the explanation, of the West's construction of appropriate government in post-Cold War Europe. The final chapter provides a comparison of Kosovo with Chechnya and consequently NATO with Russia, and identifies three types of interdependent actors: nation states, identity groups and international regimes. Discussion then continues surrounding the claims, rights and capacities of these three players.

The book will be useful to final year undergraduates, postgraduates and academics in the field of security studies and international politics.

Peter van Hamm is Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations 'Clingendael' in The Hague.

Sergei Medvedev is Professor at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.