Survival

 

 

Summer 2001 (Vol. 43 No. 2)

• Greater Albania?

  Tim Judah, is a freelance journalist based in London, and author of Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

  The nightmare scenario of a violent push for a 'Greater Albania' has been much exaggerated. There is undoubtedly a nucleus of hardline nationalist whose goal is to unite a future independent Kosovo with Albania and carve off slices of Serbia proper, Montenegro and Macedonia. But no major Albanian political party in any of these places advocates a 'Greater Albanian' state. This would change only if Albanians felt that their rights were not being served in the countries in which they lived, or if they lost confidence that Kosovo would, one day, be independent. Of equal importance is that the region as a whole prosper, and that the borders which now divide the Albanians dissolve in the way they have dissolved between European Union states.

   

• Yugoslavia after Milosevic?

  Jacques Rupnik, is Director of Research at C.E.R.I., Foundation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. He was the executive director of the International Commission on the Balkans; its report, Unfinished Peace, was published in 1996 by the Carnegie Endowment for Internatinoal Peace, Washington. He was also a member and co-drafter of the report of the Independent International Commission on Kosove (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

  The wars of Yugoslavia's dissolution might not be over yet. There remains much unfinished business, including, most urgently, the question of Kosovo's future status. If left unresolved, this question could well trigger a new round of violence and instability. If an obvious and satisfactory solution existed, it would already be known. None of the available options - including a reconfigured Yugoslavia containing an autonomous Kosovo, an indefinite international protectorate, or Kosovo's partition - are appealing. The least problematic option is probably to prepare Kosovo for a form of 'conditional' independence, with heavy international supervision of minority rights and guarantees against further revisions of borders. This would require the new Serb leadership to make a clean break with the Milosevic era and the myth of Serbian 'reconquest' of Kosovo. It also would require a Kosovo Albanian leadership that is mature enough to embrace a twenty-first-century - rather than a nineteenth-century - concept of sovereignty.

   

• Kosovo under international administration

  Alexandros Yannis, was Political Advisor to Bernard Kouchner, the first Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Kosovo, in the period July 1999-Decembere 2000. He is currently a research fellow in the Programme for Strategic and International Studies of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva as well as in the Hellenic Foundation for European Policy in Athens.

  The destabilising potential of Kosovo remains largely intact. The underlying cause of the crisis has not yet been addressed. The Kosovo conflict is not a dispute over power or form of government. It is a dispute over control of territory: a contest between Yugoslavia's sovereignty and Kosovo's independence. The United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the NATO-led forces (KFOR) arrived in June 1999 to scenes of chaos. By October 2000, when the first-ever free and fair municipal elections were held in the territory, the UN administration had succeeded in establishing a modicum of stability. The unresolved problems remained daunting: the inherent ambiguities and contradictions of the UN mandate; the diametrically opposed aspirations of the Kosovo Albanians and Serbs; and continued vengeful violence by Albanians. But UNMIK and KFOR could point to one most critical - albeit fragile - accomplishment. They had finally won the confidence and cooperation of both Kosovo Albanians and Serbs. Maintaining that confidence will be a difficult challenge, requiring a close study of the lessons of the first 18 months of international administration.

   

• The new Near East

  Charles King is assistant Professor of Freign Service and Government at Georgetown University, where he also holds the university's Ion Ratiu Chair of Romanian Studies.

  A decade after the demise of communism, scholars, policy-makers and journalists still apply to Europe the same geographical descriptors that were born of the Cold War. Europe is usually sectioned into an integrating west, a reforming centre, and a struggling east. But along the eastern periphery of the continent, the most striking division is increasingly one between a stable and cooperative north-east and a fractious and troubled south-east that extends further south and east than just the former Yugoslavia. There has been no shortage of external involvement in this region. The Aegean and Black seas are an alphabet soup of American and European projects, programmes, processes and partnerships, all designed to encourage good neighbourly relations and prepare the way for entry into Euro-Atlantic institutions. Yet rarely has there been serious consideration of how these initiatives should fit together, or what the realistic strategic goals of regional cooperation should be. Understanding some of the common difficulties faced by the Balkans, Turkey, Ukraine and the Caucasus and identifying both the promise of and barriers to regional cooperation are crucial to dealing with a zone that is quickly becoming Europe's own 'near abroad'.

   

• A Saudi nuclear option?

  Richard L. Russell, is a Research Associate at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University, and the author of George F. Kennan's Strategic Thought: The Making of an American Political Realist (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999).

  The debate over missile and nuclear proliferation has been clouded by some misplaced liberal assumptions. To focus on 'rogue' states with malignant designs is to misdiagnose nuclear proliferation as a 'disease'. Nuclear proliferation is much more a 'symptom' of the struggle for power that characterises international relations, with or without superpower conflict. One such area of proliferation may be right under our noses, not in a so-called rogue state, but in a key American ally in the Persian Gulf - Saudi Arabia. There is no direct evidence that Saudi Arabia has already chosen a nuclear deterrent. They could work clandestinely to develop a nuclear capability, much as they did to procure ballistic missiles. Washington should not assume that a close regional ally such as Saudi Arabia would be loath to jeopardise that relationship by working at cross-purposes with declared American policy against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. Such an assumption would profoundly overestimate the Saudi confidence in US protection, and would fail to recognise that security interests - not in any sense an innate friendship - are the driving forces behind policy in international politics.

   

• Moving away from MAD

  Michael Krepon, is President Emeritus of the Henry L. Stimson center and co-editor of Global Confidence Building: New Tools for Troubled Regions (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000)

  Treaties governing nuclear-arms reduction and missile defences are languishing for political and more fundamental strategic reasons. START and the ABM Treaty reflect the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, the central organising principle of strategic-arms control during the Cold War. MAD's two basic tenets, as practised by the United States and the Soviet Union, were nuclear overkill and vulnerability to missile attack. Now that the Cold War is over, these tenets no longer command widespread public or congressional support in the United States. A sustainable and bipartisan basis for future US policies geared toward the reduction of nuclear dangers must be built on different ground. While nuclear deterrence will remain important in the twenty-first century, Cold War conceptions of MAD can no longer guide future US decisions regarding nuclear weapons and missile defences. The time has come to replace MAD with a new principle, one that embodies a cooperative approach to reducing nuclear threats.

   

• Uncertain partners: NGOs and the military

  Daniel L. Byman, is an analyst at RAND Corporation

  The 1990s witnessed an explosion of Western military involvement in complex emergency operations requiring cooperation with relief agencies. Recent operations include a failed attempt to reconstitute viable central government in Somalia, return of democratically elected government to Haiti, alleviation of human suffering in Rwanda and Zaire, operations to end conflict and to support multi-ethnic government in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and an effort to stop ethnic terror in Kosovo. In these operations US and allied militaries, UN agencies and various non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have worked together to ameliorate the suffering caused by war and poor governance. Yet, despite this mounting experience, the military has failed to take adequate advantage of the skills and capabilities of relief agencies. As a result, operations are often needlessly chaotic. At best, this chaos leads to a waste of time and effort; at worst, the cost is measured in lives and suffering.

   

• The globalisation of defence industries

  Keith Hayward, is Head of Economic and Political Affairs at the Soceity of British Aerospace Companies & Vising Professor, Staffordshire University. The views expressed herein are the author's own and do not necessarily represent those of SBAC.

  Since the end of the nineteenth century, defence industries have been regarded as clearly defined national assets, supported by national governments. But the globalisation process is creating or accelerating the emergence of transnational defence markets and corporate structures. 'National' defence industries, especially in Europe, have already been diluted by international collaboration to develop specific projects. And the operation of international supply chains and foreign direct investment in national-defence companies is increasing the level, depth and complexity of global industrial integration. The globalisation process in defence is also driven by governments trying to maintain competition in national markets by soliciting bids for key contracts from international suppliers. Finally, in order to meet the demands of emerging technologies associated with the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), governments and specialist defence companies alike will have to tap a wider global stream of innovation that will probably force both to change the way they do business. Moreover, the cumulative impact of all of these changes will require governments and politicians in the core stages of the West to find new policies and attitudes that can reconcile national security with transnational industrial operation.

   

• Russia, energy and the West

  Amy M. Jaffe and Robert A. Manning. Amy Myerrs Jaffe is a Senior Energy Advisor at the Baker Institute for Public Policty at Rice University and co-editor of a forthcoming volume Energy in the Caspain Basin: Present and Future, to be published by Macmillan. Robert A. Manning is Senior Fellow and Director of Asian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Asian Energy Factor: Mythigs and Dilemmas of Energy, Security and the Pacific Future (New York, Palgrave/St. Martins, 2000). An earlier version of this article was presented at a December 2000 conference on Russian National Security Perceptions, US Army War College, Carlyle, Pennsylvania.

  The fate of the Russian economy, the dynamics of the new Russian élite and the outcome of the country's still-uncertain post-communist transition are related in no small measure to Russia's vast oil and gas resources. Energy is a key factor in President Vladmir Putin's diplomacy - whether with Iran and Iraq, former Soviet republics or the EU. Energy is also an important subtext in US-Russian relations, both as a source of cooperation and, in some respects, of tension. The West needs to recognise Russia's real strategic concerns, and to distinguish between Russia working to protect the transport of a vital export commodity and Russia refusing to renounce its 'imperial past'. The challenge to Western diplomacy is how to accommodate legitimate Russian interests without jeopardising US and NATO interests.