International Affairs:
A Russian Journal

No. 4, 1999

 

Obvious Bias to the Use of Force
By B. Kazantsev

Throughout recent years Russian diplomacy has been concentrating on setting up a post-Cold War system of European security to ensure stability on the continent and adequate responses to new risks and challenges. This was prompted by a desire to set up a system that would be a product of concerted efforts of all European countries and the Unites States. NATO and the United States were regarded in Russia as an important factor of European politics; Russia was prepared to cooperate with the Alliance for the sake of European peace and stability. Today everything created by the years of talks and building-up of confidence is crumbling.

Before our eyes the post-World War II system of international relations is being destroyed. In the wider context we are witnessing how the world order based on international laws is being wiped off.

The West as a whole and the United States and Britain as the most active members spare no effort to set a new system based on the “right of force:” they are rejecting the principles of international relations registered in Helsinki in 1975 and repeatedly confirmed later. NATO is becoming the system’s center; the alliance is arrogating to itself the right to speak in the name of the entire international community bypassing UN.

It was at the jubilee meeting of the NATO heads of state and government held on 23–25 April in Washington and the events synchronized with it within CEAP that the NATO-centrist security model and the new political course were supplied with a theoretical substantiation.

NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia made it easier for the Americans to plant their ideas at the Washington summit. They called for solidarity at war time thus bending to their will the West European allies and nearly all East and Central European countries. Regretfully, some of the CIS countries demonstrated their disagreement with Russia’s approaches to many issues including the Kosovo crisis and succumbed to Washington. On top of this Baku announced its readiness to send its troops to help NATO while Tbilisi showed its eagerness to use the NATO force peace-making methods in Abkhazia.

The summit’s final documents spell, in fact, the Alliance’s ambition to dominate on the European and world political scenes. A narrow circle of the “chosen nations” are claiming the right to impose their ideas on the European and international communities by-passing such universal organizations as OSCE and UN. For a long time Russia has been warning about the fallacious and dangerous nature of such idea of the world. This became especially urgent when in Kosovo NATO demonstrated to the entire world its readiness to prove its right by using military force.

According to the documents of the Washington summit it was for the first time that NATO officially abandoned its purely defensive strategy by declaring its right to wage military operations outside its traditional responsibility zone. It stated that under certain conditions it would not even seek the UN Security Council’s sanctions.

This directly contradicts the corresponding propositions of its new strategic conception which confirmed that it was the UN Security Council that was responsible for peace and security across the world and in the Euroatlantic region.

There is a new thesis about the need to preserve NATO’s superiority in conventional weapons in Europe. This is an obvious retreat from the previous conception that was seeking a balance of forces.

Despite their rhetorics the Washington documents did not confirm that NATO is being transformed into a predominantly political organization. The new risks and new challenges will be responded with the use of force with no attempts to adjust to the new European context.

The developments in Kosovo have demonstrated how this will be applied in practice: a group of states will use force at their own will and without limitations to destroy the economic potentials and cultural values of any country. This will spell loss of life, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and huge material and financial expenses. This will be called an attempt “to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe,” “to defend democracy and human rights,” “to protect the rights of ethnic minorities,” and “to assert the lofty values.”

A group of states headed by the “center of force” that claims the role of the only world leader has appropriated the right to pass judgment and interfere into domestic affairs. This is what NATO-centrism looks like. It seems that it is expected to resolve all crises by force.

In Europe the UN Charter and the OSCE aims and principles were flagrantly violated. Seven out of ten basic principles of the Helsinki Final Act were pushed aside. The principles of the non-use of force and non-interference into the domestic affairs of states were toppled down. In fact, the conception of state sovereignty is being revised and eroded.

Life has shown that armed force is no political instrument to be applied to resolve European problems and settle crises. We need different approaches such as domination of international law and an adequate role for the UN Security Council.

There is much talk about European identity in the field of security and defense. The new strategic conception followed the American prescriptions when defining the “European defense component.” The Washington documents make no mention of Europe’s autonomy, its ability to make independent military decisions. Everything starts and ends with NATO and, in the final analysis, with the United States. This will negatively affect European integration processes.

It seems that in these conditions Europe will hardly be able to offer, in the nearest future, its own mechanisms of crisis settlement or to counterpoise the American guarantees and the “trans-Atlantic solidarity” within NATO. The task of increasing the role of the European Union will inevitably be pushed to the back burner together with the Amsterdam Treaty implementation. The Europeans’ original intention to acquire more weight on the continent was sacrificed to the Alliance’s aggressive policy and the need to demonstrate solidarity.

It was repeatedly stated at the summit that stronger partnership with Russia was desirable yet nearly all agreements on cooperation had been violated by one of the sides. The cooperation potential created in the recent years through much effort was pushed aside.

It was barely two years ago that Russia and NATO signed the Founding Act on mutual relationships—today, these ideas remained on paper only. The attacks against Yugoslavia flagrantly violated the document that envisaged a “refusal to use force and the threat of force against one another and any other state, its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” as well as “prevention of conflicts and settlement of disputes with peaceful means according to the UN and OSCE principles.”

NATO’s policy in Yugoslavia dramatically changed the attitude to the Alliance in Russia. Obviously, it will be very difficult to restore the lost confidence and the image of a responsible partner.

Great harm was done to the peacekeeping conception: in Yugoslavia the world witnessed peacekeeping a la NATO which completely ignored the UN Charter, put Europe on the brink of the most serious military-political crisis it has experienced in the last decades. The recent events have demonstrated that NATO and Russia are exercising opposite approaches.

It was for the first time in Washington that the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary participated as the Alliance’s full-fledged members. Significantly, their final adoption into the Alliance coincided with the attack against Yugoslavia. This made them directly involved into a military operation against a European sovereign state and confirmed our opinion that NATO’s eastward extension was the most deplorable political mistake of the post-war period.

The attack on Yugoslavia completely destroyed NATO’s image of a stabilizing factor and the corner-stone of European security in the post-Cold War period that had been painstakingly created by its members. NATO has been and remains a military alliance. Europe is facing a new situation with unpredictable results created by the Polish, Czech, and Hungarian membership. The “Alliance’s openness without geographical limitations” proclaimed in Washington will hardly contribute to setting up a united and stable Europe “without dividing lines.”

The entire system of international organizations suffered under the blows dealt by the Washington summit and NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia. It seems that their activity will be adjusted to new realities.

The Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe suffered most. Obviously, the Alliance is out to destroy OSCE’s efficiency and to prevent the effective use of its mechanisms. In fact, its place and role in the European system of the twenty-first century has been questioned.

Under the new NATO conception OSCE is acquiring the function of promoting NATO’s goals across the post-Soviet territory to the detriment of Russia’s interests. The Americans and their allies tried to push the OSCE into the preventive diplomacy niche, make it a biased mediator, a vehicle of the Western ideas of democracy and unified political and social systems applied to all states irrespective of their historical, cultural, and social features.

Russian diplomacy proceeds from the idea that it is OSCE that should be developed into a full-blooded regional organization in full accordance with Art. VIII of the UN Charter. Its potentials in preventive diplomacy and crisis settlement should be efficiently employed. We can never agree on the functions designed for it by the NATO countries.

What we all need is a well-founded and efficient code of conduct for states and organizations based on the principles of international law and OSCE. The European Security Charter may serve such a document. The NATO line in Kosovo impeded the work on this document; the allies were obviously trying to make it a sort of a supplement to the NATO strategic conception adopted in Washington.

The document should take into account the interests of all member-states especially those outside the closed military alliances; it should ensure equal security for all. The fundamental principles of international law should be clearly stated: non-use of force and threat of force, peaceful settlement of conflicts, territorial integrity of states and non-interference in their domestic affairs, protection of human rights, etc. The failure to do this will endanger security and the future of the present and coming generations.

The Kosovo crisis has imparted special importance to the next OSCE summit in Istanbul.

We should continue working towards adjusting the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty to the recently achieved agreements on the key issues.

There is another burning issue that should be urgently addressed through OSCE: neutralization of the negative results of the NATO countries’ efforts to realize their geopolitical interests in Europe and on the post-Soviet territory.

The present situation is fraught with a real danger of a lower military and political security for Russia.

The new strategic conception of NATO requires answers to difficult questions. How can Russia oppose NATO’s desire to realize the ideas of NATO-centrism in Europe and the world as a whole, its claims to act everywhere across the world, up to the use of force, ignoring international law?

The United States and NATO are out to limit Russia’s involvement in Europe. They are offering an alternative of contributing to the European structure built according to NATO designs.

Obviously, Russia cannot go back to a confrontation with the West: this would have pushed her to the margins of the European and world processes with no possibility to influence them. Yet, one can hardly expect that in the post-Kosovo times the Russia-NATO relationships will return to the former level all by themselves.

One thing is clear: Russia is dissatisfied with the way the Founding Russia-NATO Act worked during the acute stage of the Kosovo crisis. We can hardly encourage a revision of the document that required a lot of concerted efforts to be approved yet we cannot accept the situation when the sides just state their positions and exchange information in a non-binding way within the Permanent Joint Council.

At the same time the dialogue with the West should not be slowed down especially with those of the Western countries that do not accept American claims on supremacy in Europe. There are other problems expecting developments: “European defense identity,” the Western European Union, the European Union’s peace-keeping potentials. Russia and Europe can discuss this.

Russian diplomacy will continue to support at the corresponding level our principled position on NATO’s eastward movement and point out that in any case we are correlating the results of such expansion with our national interests and reserve the right to make corresponding conclusions within the framework of ensuring these interests. Russia will also demand that the new NATO members stick to the obligations under the Founding Act: no considerable combat forces and nuclear armaments on a permanent basis on their territories.

Boris Kazantsev is Deputy Director of the European Cooperation Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia.