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Botching the Balkans: Germany's Recognition of Slovenia and Croatia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Carl Cavanagh Hodge
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Extract

On December 23, 1991, the Federal Republic of Germany announced its intention to proceed with unilateral diplomatic recognition of the secessionist Yugoslav states of Croatia and Slovenia, unquestionably one of the most precipitous acts in post-Cold War Europe. With it the Bonn government in effect renounced the legitimacy of the existing Yugoslav state and pressured other European governments to do the same. Within weeks the Yugoslav federation came apart at every seam, while its civil affairs degenerated into an anarchy of armed violence as convoluted in many respects as the Thirty Years' War.

In Germany's defense, it should be conceded at the outset that an alternative approach to recognition would not necessarily have produced a fundamentally more peaceful transformation of Yugoslavia. In light of the deepening political and economic cleavages with which the multinational state had been wrestling since the 1970s, the reasonable question is not whether the serial wars of the Yugoslav succession could have been avoided altogether, but whether Germany's action offered Yugoslavia and its populace the best chance for a more peaceful course of change given the circumstances. Did Bonn apply the best of its diplomatic and political brains to the issues of sovereignty, self-determination, and human rights? Were its actions morally responsible with regard to Balkan, German, and European history?

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 12 , March 1998 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1998

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References

1 Maull, Hanns, “Zivilmacht Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Vierzehn Thesen fur eine deutsche Aussenpolitik,” Europa Archiv 47 (May 1992), pp. 269–78Google Scholar. Also, Katzenstein, Peter, “United Germany in an Integrating Europe,” Current History 116 (March 1997), pp. 116–23Google Scholar, in which the author refines the interpretation of preunification Germany he made in his West Germany: The Growth of a Semisovereign State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). More thorough treatments of German foreign policy are available from Wolfram Hanrieder, Germany, Europe, America: Forty Years of German Foreign Policy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), and Christian Hacke, Weltmacht wider Willen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988).

2 Ash, Timothy Garton, “Germany's Choice,” Foreign Affairs 73 (1994), p. 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ash deals with these themes more thoroughly and critically in his In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993).

3 Helmut Schmidt, Die Deutschen und ihre Nachbarn (Berlin: Siedler, 1990), p. 640.

4 See Thomas G. Weiss and Kurt C. Campbell, “The United Nations and Eastern Europe,”World Policy Journal 7 (Summer 1990), 575–92.

5 For a discussion, see Robert W. Gregg, About Face: The United States and the United Nations (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1993).

6 Kenneth Dyson, The State Tradition in Western Europe (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1980), pp. 122–27, 268.

7 Quoted in Lutz R. Reuter, “Constitutional Developments in Germany Since 1945,”Beiträge aus dem Fachbereich Pädagogik der Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg (1994), p. 43.

8 Hans-Peter Schwarz, Die gezahmten Deutschen: Von der Machtbessenheit zur Machtvergessenheit (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1985), p. 149.

9 Zelikow is dealing specifically with the gap between NATO institutionalism over future European security and existing security crises, but his observations have more general application. See “The Masque of Institutions,” in NATO's Transformation: The Changing Shape of the Atlantic Alliance, edited by Phillip Gordon (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), pp. 77–89. Also Schwarz, Die gezahmten Deutschen, pp. 155–75.

10 Philip Zelikow and Condoleeza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 366–68.

11 See Horsley, William, “United Germany's Seven Cardinal Sins: A Critique of German Foreign Policy,” Millennium 21, no. 2 (1992), pp. 225–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 EC throughout refers to the European Community, whose member states formed the European Union in November 1993.

13 The Croatian independence/fascist movement, the Ustashe, collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces in Yugoslavia during World War II and established a Croatian puppet state. It then pursued genocide against Jews, Muslims, Gypsies, and Serbs, possibly killing as many as 350,000 people.

14 Das Parlament, November 15, 1991, pp. 5, 7.

15 Robin Alison Remington, “Yugoslavia and the Internationalization of the Balkan Conflict,” in The South Slav Conflict: History, Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, edited by Raju G. C. Thomas and H. Richard Friman (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 238–39.

16 Beverly Crawford points out that the very act of Slovenian and Croatian secession split Germany from the EC. Whereas Bonn and Brussels were essentially of one voice on Yugoslavia until the late spring of 1991, within two weeks of the republics' declarations of independence all the major German parties favored recognition. Crawford, , “Explaining Defection from International Cooperation: Germany's Unilateral Recognition of Croatia,” World Politics 48 (July 1996), pp. 482–521CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Nicely summarized by James Gow in “Shared Sovereignty, Enhanced Security: Lesson from the Yugoslav War,” in State Sovereignty: Change and Persistence in International Relations, edited by Sohail H. Hashmi (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), pp. 159–66.

l8 Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), p. 278.

19 Jacques Attali, Verbatim, 3 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1995), vol. 3, pp. 368–70.

20 On the background and impact of both events, see Craig, Gordon, “Die Chequers-Affare von 1990: Beobachtungen zum Thema Presse und international Beziehungen,” Vierteljahresheft für Zeitgeschichte 39 (October 1991), p. 623Google Scholar.

21 Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965), p. 28. Zelikow and Rice have noted Bush's unease with the attitude of the British and French governments and his gentle suggestion to Thatcher that she and Mitterrand “ought to get together” with Kohl. See Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, pp. 206–7.

22 Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 185.

23 Bush's secretary of state, James Baker III, confesses that at the time there existed a degree of resentment in Washington over express European ambitions to develop a defense and security identity relatively independent of the United States despite the administration's protests that the EC was not yet equal to the task. He notes further that “there was an undercurrent in Washington, often felt but seldom spoken, that it was time to make the Europeans step up to the plate and show that they could act as a unified power. Yugoslavia was as good a first test as any.” James Baker III, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1995), p. 637.

24 In essence the argument fielded by Egon Bahr in “Die Verfassung steht über dem Bündnis,” in Deutsche Soldaten weltweit? Blauhelme, Eingreiftruppen “out of area”: Der Streit um unsere sicherheit-spolitische Zukunft, edited by Dieter S. Lutz (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993), pp. 53–61.

25 Frankfurter Allgemeine, January 23, 1993, p. 1.

26 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 63–106, at p. 70.

27 Franck, Thomas M., “The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance,” American Journal of International Law 86, no. 46 (1992), pp. 46–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 189.

29 Franck, “The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance,” pp. 79–80.

30 Lee C. Buchheit, Secession: The Legitimacy of Self-Determination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 222.

31 Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, pp. 482–83.

32 Buchheit, Secession, p. 222.

33 Gow, “Shared Sovereignty, Enhanced Security,” p. 161.

34 Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 147.

35 Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 186.

36 Michael Stürmer, Die Grenzen der Macht: Begegnung der Deutschen mit der Geschichte (Berlin: Siedler, 1990), p. 246.

37 Hurst Hannum, Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination: The Accommodation of Conflicting Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 474. Also Zakaria, Fareed, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76 (1997), pp. 22–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, wherein the author argues that in the post-Cold War context too many civilized states have equated democracy with the advance of human rights when too frequently democracy is a vehicle for “a spreading virus of illiberalism.”

38 Hans-Peter Schwarz, Die Zentralmacht Europas: Deutschlands Rückkehr auf die Weltbühne (Berlin: Siedler, 1994), p. 184.