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“War is Never Civilised”: Civilisation, Civil Society and the Kosovo War
Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen
Danish Institute of International Affairs
Abstract
The fact that the West invoked civilisation to justify the Kosovo war seems to prove Samuel Huntington’s assertion that the twenty-first century will be defined by the clash of civilisations. However, Huntington’s theory is not an explanation of international conflict. It is a manifestation of the Western construction of government in terms of civilisation. To investigate this governmentality the essay turns to the Scottish historian and philosopher Adam Ferguson who argued in 1767 that gradual pacification of civilised societies had create a new kind of society: civil society. Immanuel Kant developed this conception to the assertion that republican, civil, societies could produce ‘a cosmopolitan system of general political security’. In 1999 the West believed to have realised that system when the Milosevic government’s use of force threatened to show otherwise. The West found war was necessary to defend the advances of the civilising process after the end of the Cold War.
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