In February 2006, talks began in Vienna to decide the status of Kosovo. The solution was forecast in several statements: instead of officially remaining a province of Serbia, considering that 90% of the population of the area is Albanian, mostly Muslim, and want independence, independent statehood might be granted to Kosovo. Kosovo enjoyed an autonomous status under Tito (abolished by Milošević) and thus has the legal right to decide on independence.

Serbia wants to keep its authority over the province, which is considered to be the ‘cradle of Serbia,’ a sacrosanct place in Serbian history. However, the Serb population has gradually decreased and become a small minority. This happened due to a huge Serb emigration after the Ottoman conquest of the region, a spontaneous, sometimes forced emigration, which gained special impetus during the Second World War, when the region became part of ‘Great Albania,’ and Serbs were killed and chased out of the province. The tension and violence of the post-war decades made emigration advisable for Serbs. Milošević's Kosovo war-and-rape campaign made the Kosovars victims of exalted Serb nationalism in the late 1990s. The NATO bombing stopped this but the Serb minority declined into an unbearable situation. The Kosovo Liberation Army's violent actions, killing Serbs, burning their houses, shooting at school buses, continued until recently and led to the flight of half of the remaining Serb population, and ‘cleansed’ Kosovo of 80% of the Roma population.

International trials of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are currently a matter of considerable interest – legal, political and human. The work of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda (ICTY and ICTR), set up respectively in 1993 and 1994, and the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague in 2002, have focused attention on the practice and value of such juridical processes both as forms of law and in terms of the events they address. The unexpected death of Slobodan Milosevic during his trial at the ICTY has only intensified the controversy aroused by such proceedings. Politics, history, memory, mourning, reparation and even reconciliation are inescapably part of the legal process, often in an explicit and even formal manner. This means that scholars in disciplines other than legal science and people from many backgrounds are interested in the work of such international tribunals and in the types of ‘truth’ that they seek to establish.

Such trials are not new. The idea stems directly from the intersection of military violence and humanitarian impulses in the 19th century. Geneva law, emanating from the International Red Cross (founded after the main war of Italian unification), dealt with the humane treatment of wounded and prisoners. Hague law, which codified the conduct of belligerents towards non-combatants, grew from the Lieber Code devised by the Union during the American Civil War and from the attempts by European powers to regulate military conduct after the Franco-Prussian War, culminating in the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907.

International criminal justice really began at Nuremberg in 1945, after an inauspicious start at Versailles in 1919. But little happened during the Cold War, and only in the 1990s, driven by a human rights movement that had refocused its energy on the rights of victims and concerns about impunity and accountability, did the efforts revive. The United Nations pioneered the activity, with three ad hoc tribunals. In 2002, a permanent institution, the International Criminal Court, began its operations. Concerns about the fairness of such proceedings have featured since the earliest days. In balance, both Nuremberg and its modern-day successors deliver acceptable judgments from a due process standpoint, although problems remain. Also troubling is an emphasis on convictions based upon paradigms that approach vicarious liability. This enhances the probability of conviction, but weakens the stigma of guilt and ultimately compromises the historical legacy. There is also a recent tendency to focus upon non-state actors, prosecuting rebels and terrorists rather than crimes of state.

The Nuremberg tribunal following the Second World War is universally considered as the foundation stone of international law with regard to war crimes and crimes against humanity. It may come as a surprise, however, to learn that the first international attempts to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity came at the end of the First World War, with trials held at Allied prompting in Turkey and Germany.

There are powerful limits to international humanitarian law. With reference to theories of international relations and to empirically observable patterns, this article shows the inability of legal norms and structures to influence the behaviour of the world's most powerful states and their allies. There are also restrictions on the capacity of trials conducted according to humanitarian law to fulfil the social functions increasingly attributed to them, including the re-education of populations complicit in mass crimes, some measure of catharsis for the victims of such crimes, and the reintegration of erstwhile ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ communities.

It is a popular view that international war crimes tribunals are a tool for social transformation and reconciliation after conflicts. According to advocates, one of their strengths in this regard is the individual punishment of criminals, which is said to achieve justice for victims while avoiding the collectivization of guilt. This is also said to have the effect of endorsing the transformation of the nation by freeing it from the burden of collective guilt while detaching those responsible for war crimes from the society concerned and eliminating their political influence. Does individual criminal punishment achieve these? And is the de-collectivization of guilt through international trials desirable for post-conflict social transformation and reconciliation? This article addresses these questions by focusing on the impact of the Tokyo International Military Tribunal, which is analyzed through the ways in which it has been perceived in post-war Japan. It argues that the Tribunal's punishment of wartime leaders produced an ambiguous effect on the Japanese people's sense of war guilt and responsibility, which in turn became an obstacle for the nation to achieve reconciliation not only with its former victims but also with its own past. The article questions the assumption that international criminal justice can promote social transformation and reconciliation.

Predictions of the legacies of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals reflect far greater expectations for the impact of justice than earlier historical war crimes prosecutions. The most ambitious of these is the promise of peace and reconciliation. Its formal inclusion in the Security Council's mandate for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda converged with a modern discourse on war crimes prosecutions that infuses the ideals of Nuremberg with the revolutionary aspirations of the human rights movement in a new world order. Contemporary trends invest international justice with powerful assumptions about its capacity to transform post-conflict societies, as is reflected in the Tribunal's own presentation of its role for the future of Rwanda. Alongside the general assumptions regarding the political powers of international justice, are contesting perspectives that make specific allegations of the effects of its failings. Neither rigorously address causality, highlighting the absence of empirical research on international prosecutions and their impact on national communities. It is argued that ambitious expectations have generated ambiguous-and unrealistic- benchmarks for effectively assessing the record of a nascent international justice system. Viable benchmarks are necessary to ground external expectations, and to strengthen and focus institutional performance. To achieve this, expectations should adjust to the modest realities of delivering international justice.

On 11 March 2006 the former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was found dead in his prison cell in The Hague, where the case against him at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was nearing its end. Many people voiced their disappointment about the fact that Milosevic would never receive his verdict. Although this disillusionment is understandable, Milosevic's death also saved the prosecutors and the Tribunal from delivering a judgment that would probably have contributed little to reconciliation in former Yugoslavia. This was particularly so in relation to that part of the indictment that concerned Milosevic's alleged responsibility for the massacre by the Bosnian Serb army of 7500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys following the fall of Srebrenica in July 2005.

The principle that perpetrators of atrocity should be brought to justice before courts of criminal law enjoys near total acceptance. However, because of the nature of the transgressions adjudicated, the major trials of perpetrators have also served a didactic and moral function in redefining and re-imposing rule-based legality. As a consequence, these trials address history and memory in the course of trying the accused. This essay examines three particular filters that affect the way the memory and history of the events concerned enter the trial process: first, the nature of the evidence admitted; second, the substantive incriminations directed at the accused; and third, the principle of criminal accountability deployed by the prosecution. The essay also considers how the timing and place of the trial influence its didactic value. Ultimately, the didactic and moral effectiveness of such trials is beyond the control of the courts and can only be evaluated over the longer term.

Since the Enlightenment, the history of science has been enlisted to show the unity and distinctiveness of Europe. This paper, written on the occasion of the award of the 2005 Erasmus Prize to historians of science Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, traces the intertwined narratives of the history of science and European modernity from the 18th century to the present. Whether understood as triumph or tragedy (and there have been eloquent proponents of both views), the Scientific Revolution has been portrayed as Europe's decisive break with tradition – the first such break in world history and the model for all subsequent epics of modernization in other cultures. The paper concludes with reflections on how a new history of science, exemplified in the work of Shapin and Schaffer, may transform the self-image of Europe and conceptions of truth itself.

Beginning with a discussion of current debate in France about its own ‘social model’, this articles analyses French interpretations of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model in both a contemporary and historical context. It argues specifically that present-day criticisms of what is taken to be Britain's liberal, free-market model are nothing new and find distinct echoes in a literature that dates back to the late 17th century. Even for its French admirers, England was seen as a country of inequality, whilst for its critics inequality was a reflection of a broader system of poverty and misery inflicted upon the mass of the population. In brief, the parameters of the debate – inequality compared with the virtues of equality, commerce against the claims of justice, individual liberty contrasted with solidarity, the market versus the State – have not changed significantly for over two centuries. The article concludes by referring to current misconceptions in France of policies pursued by the current Labour government.

In memory of Andre Prochasson

The UN commitment to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 poses a major challenge. It is, first and foremost, a political challenge to wealthy countries, to provide the necessary transfer of resources, and to developing countries, to make effective use of these transfers. But it is also an intellectual challenge, to economists and other scientists, to better understand the processes by which the MDGs can be achieved. This article focuses on two aspects. On the substantive side, it examines how we can achieve increased funding for development, particularly via new methods of finance, such as global taxes. On the intellectual side, it describes how a new branch of economics is developing – global public finance – that can contribute to the analysis of new sources of funding for the MDGs and of the working of the global economy.

‘No taxation without representation!’ It was the British Crown's attempt to tax tea that laid the groundwork for the American Revolution in the 18th century and, ultimately, the Declaration of Independence. This was neither the first nor the last example in history, but perhaps the most famous one to demonstrate the close connection between tax sovereignty and the civil nation state. Today, sovereignty in matters of taxation is still regarded as one of the core functions of the nation state. But is it still the nation state's own domain? This essay argues that, at least with respect to the European Union, the answer is no. It shows that the EU tax regime influences national policies in important ways, and imposes significant constraints on national tax sovereignty. It will also show that the lost sovereignty at the national level can be found again at the European level. Is it time to advocate a European Declaration of Dependence?

The fast rate of the globalisation process and huge technological changes are leading to increased uncertainty. Risk (considered either as a threat or as an opportunity) is correlated to uncertainty. That means that the socio-economic environment may be considered as ambiguous, and the reaction of players complex, unforeseeable and difficult to handle. In such conditions one looks for simple formulae or tricks to manage the necessary change in human behaviour, institutional structures, production and trade methods. ‘Flexibility’ seems to be a magic keyword – both a performance driver and an expression of freedom. Labour market flexibility is currently the focus of ideological and political debate. This paper aims to clarify some points in the debate, especially in the European Union context. First, we give some brief information about the EU framework with regard to the labour market flexibility and its performance. Second, we try to understand how labour market flexibility is dependent on decisions of enterprises (in search of competitiveness). But this point of view needs to be enlarged to a more systemic approach; flexibility is only one of the socio-economic performance variables. A flexibility paradigm is related to a new political and humanistic project, and is a serious consideration for a number of industrial and financial companies, scientific associations and bodies.