Balkanalysis.com

By Jason Miko

Former US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, a Clinton Administration foreign policy ideologue, once prophesied: “within the next hundred years, nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority.” Regrettably, he may be right. We may be coming to that. But wherever there’s a will to force single-minded thinking and practices, there’s bound to be resistance. This is something to look forward to in an otherwise bleak landscape.

These days, it is our so-called elite – made up of politicians, academics, businessmen and religious leaders, think-tanks, yea-saying foundations and the big media – that are the ones pining for a global authority. Of course, they see themselves at the helm.What happened with Kosovo is just one example of this. At first, it might seem odd to make the argument that we are heading towards a world without borders, under a single global authority, precisely at the time when Kosovo seems to be heading for independence. But whimsical foreign intervention of the kind that got the ball rolling in Kosovo, at the behest of the powers-that-be, could well mean the end of the sovereignty of nation-states as they currently exist.

It looks all but inevitable that Kosovo will gain independence this year. That is not necessarily wrong. What is wrong, however, is the way in which Kosovo will have gained independence, namely, through a war it didn’t fight, in a world seemingly committed (at least rhetorically) to sweetness, peace and light eternal.

In order to acquiesce to the demands of Kosovo’s Albanians, however, the Great Powers are setting down some seemingly very firm rules. Among those is the demand that Kosovo cannot join up with another state, putting the kibosh, as it were, on the “Greater Albania” project. The most recent International Crisis Group report, among others, states this condition.

At the same time, the hopelessly naˆšÃ˜Â¬Ã¸Â¬Î©ve Project on Ethnic Relations believes that Macedonia has nothing to fear from an independent Kosovo and can rest assured that Kosovo will play nice-nice in the future by including “firm guarantees of the inviolability of Macedonia’s present borders,” said PER Director for the Western Balkans Alex GrigorˆšÃ˜Â¬Ã¸Â¬Î©ev, in a WSJ-Europe article on January 10.

PER also believes that “All the region’s capitals, with their neighbors and the major international powers as guarantors, must pledge that the resolution of the status of Kosovo and Montenegro represents the last remaining piece of the Yugoslav puzzle, [and] that no further border changes in the region will be acceptableˆšÂ¢Â¬Ã„¦”

And this time we mean it!

Really, what if a country like, say, the future Kosovo Republic decides to take a swipe at neighboring turf, or simply keeps on persecuting its minorities? Then what? Will a new UN resolution be sought in order to bomb again?

Forgive me for being a cynic, but the idea of the inviolability of borders ˆšÃ˜Â¬Ã¸Â¬Î© and the idea that any international “protective’ body is prepared to uphold them ˆšÃ˜Â¬Ã¸Â¬Î© is a fanciful, delightfully naˆšÃ˜Â¬Ã¸Â¬Î©ve myth. It is something which idiots of the type that Monty Python portrays might believe, but no one with any serious thoughts in their heads does. It is trotted out and touted by the powers only as a panacea, in the hope that the inattentive masses will swallow it hook, line and sinker, distracted as they are by trash TV and the more “important’ things of our modern consumer society. And if you are one these believers in the inviolability of borders, then I invite you to look at a map of the world 106 years ago and compare it with today. The Balkans is an especially interesting part of the map from which to start.

The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) is one of the most important groups you’ve probably never heard of before. I certainly hadn’t until I was reading a report on Kosovo produced by the irksome, aforementioned International Crisis Group, led by one Gareth Evans, a former Foreign Minister of Australia who my Australian friends tell me was not missed in Canberra when it became time for him to, er, move along. The ICISS’ December 2001 report, entitled “The Responsibility to Protect,” was co-chaired by Mr. Evans. The fact that this text was adopted by the UN Security Council at their General Assembly of September 2005 makes it clear that it is, at very least, an important document for the leaders of the global body.

The ICISS and its twelve wise and illustrious commissioners are housed in Canada and funded by various bigwigs including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Simons Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation- all groups committed to the ludicrous idea of world peace, sweetness and light everlasting. The Governments of Switzerland and the United Kingdom are also contributing their citizens’ hard-earned (but easily taken) tax-payer pounds and francs to this dubious endeavor. And the Canadian government has provided a small secretariat funded by their own citizens’ tax dollars.

According to the ICISS website, “reconciling the international community’s responsibility to act in the face of massive violations of humanitarian norms while respecting the sovereign rights of states poses a unique challenge. The Commission was an independent international body designed to help bridge the two concepts. Its one year mandate was to build a broader understanding of these issues and to foster a global political consensus on how to move towards action within the UN system.”

In light of the wars of the 1990s, most notably in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Commission was tasked within its one-year mandate to produce a report addressing the issues of if and when humanitarian intervention should happen, how and by whom, as well as what effect it would all have on the sovereignty of states, that last part being key to you and me, as our whole world order is (at least for now) built around the recognition of the sovereignty of states.

At the UN General Assembly of 1999 and again in 2000, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan got to the heart of the question, posing it to his esteemed colleagues thus: “if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica ˆšÃ˜Â¬Ã¸Â¬Î© to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?”

Rising to this most urgent of challenges, the government of Canada took it upon themselves, along with the aforementioned foundations and states, to create a commission and fund its much-needed work. But what were the results? These we find in their December 2001 report.

The synopsis of the report provides the first frightening attack on sovereignty in its Basic Principles, which state:

(1) State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the prime responsibility for the protection of its people lies within the state itself.

(2) Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.

In other words: we have given ourselves the green light to invade, overthrow and take over.

I shan’t bore you with the rest of the 108-page report (though it is fascinating in its own right), but let me leave you with this little gem, before moving on. On the issue of the future sovereignty of states, the report notes, “the conditions under which sovereignty is exercised ˆšÃ˜Â¬Ã¸Â¬Î© and intervention practised ˆšÃ˜Â¬Ã¸Â¬Î© have changed dramatically since 1945. Many new states have emerged and are still in the process of consolidating their identity. Evolving international law has set many constraints on what states can do, and not only in the realm of human rights. The emerging concept of human security has created additional demands and expectations in relation to the way states treat their own people. And many new actors are playing international roles previously more or less the exclusive preserve of states.”

I don’t have space here to get into the related subject of the Iraqi quagmire, but we can return to the specter of Kosovo, as it is now, in 2006, more relevant than ever. The looming, almost assured independence of the occupied Serbian province is opening up a Pandora’s Box of questions concerning its potential as an exemplar for other, wanna-be states and restive ethnic groups the world over.

Particularly keen on this issue right now are those living in, or intervening in, the Caucasus, where numerous ethnic and religious conflicts remain on the back burner. The fearful Azeri government declared a few weeks ago that Kosovo could not be used as a precedent for the similar independence of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous border area populated and controlled by Armenians but hypothetically part of Azerbaijan.

Then, Russian President Vladimir Putin on the 1^st of February mischievously threw in the possibility that any solution reached in Kosovo should have universal applications- in other words, that we should decide between intervention for defense of an oppressed group’s self-determination, or else a healthy respect for state sovereignty, and live with the consequences. Russia controls two frozen conflicts in the Caucasus, the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, nominally parts of Georgia, and itself suffers from Muslim separatism in Chechnya and elsewhere. It will take whatever decision is handed to it in Kosovo- and apply it somewhere else.

No doubt, our trusty Canadian commission and others like it will be asking for more funds in the years to come because it sure doesn’t seem that the sovereignty “problem’ and world peace puzzle are getting any closer to being solved.

Nevertheless, in 2006, the incessant and well-funded crusade for intervention in principle as well as in actual implementation seems to be gathering strength. And the more that the colossal failure of their policies is criticized, the louder they have to shout to drown out dissent. The elite that condone and control when, where and how said intervention will be made manifest are steering this world toward the end of sovereignty and the imposition of a hegemonic global authority such as the Clinton-era Talbott predicted. But it’s going to be messy and chaotic as the world lurches into ever more unpredictable wars, terrorist attacks, unfrozen conflicts and the infinite fragmentation of regions, states and even cities, areas once considered “healthy’ parts of the body politic.

Will the future be brief? I can’t answer this, though one has to remain optimistic, even if it sometimes seems that the future will be nasty, brutish and lengthy.

But we can take consolation in the fact that the pro-interventionists, while they will certainly try, will never actually see their vision realized exactly as they had hoped. That’s just what happens when ideological obsessions grind up against reality.