Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T02:37:30.087Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The long intervention: continuity in the Balkan theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2013

SUSAN L. WOODWARD
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Great Power intervention in the Balkans since the late nineteenth century shows a striking continuity in motivations, methods, and consequences. The article proposes that current intervention practices are largely a response to the Balkan theatre in the 1990s and thus institutionalise this continuity more than arguments about normative and institutional change since 1990 suggest. Three continuities are emphasised: the concept of a ‘turbulent frontier’ to explain an unintended dynamic of nearly continuous intervention, the importance of local actors' interests (the pull of intervention) alongside those of major power interests (the push), and the primary influence on domestic orders and cause of the ‘turbulence’ of economic relations.

Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 5: Intervention and the Ordering of the Modern World , December 2013 , pp. 1169 - 1187
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 In response to the debate on the legality of the NATO bombing of Serbia, the Canadian government established a commission on ‘international intervention and state sovereignty’. It recommended a new doctrine of R2P, which the UN General Assembly adopted in 2005: World Summit Outcome Document (25 October 2005), in particular pp. 138–9.

2 See, for example, Kozul-Wright, Richard and Rayment, Paul, ‘Post-Conflict Recovery: Lessons from the Marshall Plan for the 21st Century’, in Kozul-Wright, Richard and Fortunato, Piergiuseppe (eds), Securing Peace: State-Building and Economic Development in Post-Conflict Countries (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, in association with the United Nations, 2011), pp. 189–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Susan Pedersen's review of recent reassessments has many examples: ‘Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review (October 2007), pp. 1091–117.

4 John MacMillan, ‘Intervention and the ordering of the modern world’, introduction to this Special Issue.

5 Barkey, Karen, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 8, pp. 264–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is particularly insightful on this process.

6 For a detailed analysis, see Woodward, Susan L., Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–1990 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

7 Glenny, Misha, The Balkans 1804–1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (London: Granta Books, 1999), p. 139Google Scholar.

8 Cited in Woodward, Susan L., Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1995), p. 307Google Scholar.

9 Glenny, The Balkans, p. 143.

10 Galbraith, John S., ‘The “Turbulent Frontier” as a Factor in British Expansion’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2:2 (January 1960), pp. 150–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Ghoukassian, Khatchik Der, ‘Instability in the New Imperial Periphery: A Conceptual Perspective of the “Turbulent Frontiers” in the Caucasus and Central Asia’, Caucasian Review of International Affairs, 2:3 (Summer 2008), p. 149Google Scholar.

12 Galbraith, ‘The “Turbulent Frontier”’, pp. 151, 168.

13 Der Ghoukassian, ‘Instability’, p. 151.

14 Jelavich, Barbara, History of the Balkans: Twentieth Century, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Glenny, The Balkans, p. 149.

16 Ibid., p. 105.

17 Ibid., p. 124.

18 Fazal, Tanisha M., State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

19 Stavrianos, Leften S., The Balkans since 1453 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1958), p. 199Google Scholar.

20 Yugoslavia had been a Cold-War client of the US and of great strategic consequence for NATO, but with the change of Soviet policies under Gorbachev beginning in 1985, the US changed its policy toward Yugoslavia (and even its corresponding classification and bureaucratic location within the Department of State) as just another southeast European (peripheral) country, no longer of significance.

21 Conversations with Yelena Guskova, Russian specialist on the Balkans and member of my Analysis and Assessment Unit for UNPROFOR, in Zagreb, February–June 1994.

22 Glenny, The Balkans, p. 142.

23 Ibid., p. 139.

24 Jelavich, History of the Balkans, p. 122.

25 This incident exemplifies the complex global-local dynamic: seeking greater French support when Germany and Italy are becoming more assertive and French influence was waning, the King is assassinated by a Macedonian revolutionary under the instigation and pay of the fascist (pro-independence) movement in Croatia under Pavelic and of Mussolini in Italy.

26 Most notably by the letters written in November 1991 to German foreign minister Genscher from UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar, UN negotiator and former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and EC negotiator Lord Peter Carrington; see Balkan Tragedy, pp. 183–4.

27 Lederer, Ivo J., Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference: A Study in Frontiermaking (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 239Google Scholar.

28 Finnemore, Martha, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 58–66, 83Google Scholar. Her argument that ‘massacring Christians was a humanitarian disaster; massacring Muslims was not’ (p. 59) also requires a surprising limitation on who counts as intervening actors in the nineteenth century, for example that Russia in Bulgaria counts but the Ottomans there do not, or that intellectual and religious agitation in Britain or Russia for intervention counts but not that in Istanbul.

29 Stoianovich, Traian, ‘The Social Foundations of Balkan Politics, 1750–1941’, in Charles, and Jelavich, Barbara (eds), The Balkans in Transition: Essays on the Development of Balkan Life and Politics since the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 326–7Google Scholar.

30 Pedersen, ‘Back to the League’, p. 1102. See also Krasner, Stephen D., Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 93Google Scholar, that the prime motivation for the international protection of minority rights was peace and collective security.

31 Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference, p. 239.

32 Ibid., p. 239.

33 Ibid., p. 247.

34 It did not help for Serbia and Romania that the obligation of minorities protection applied not only to the postwar areas but also those acquired before 1914, even though, as Lederer writes, ‘minority treatment in Macedonia was already regulated by the Treaty of Berlin (1878) and Bucharest (1913)’ and ‘all [the Allies] agreed that Serbia had “fully carried out both the letter and the spirit” of the Treaty of Berlin’. (Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference, pp. 239–40.)

35 Ibid., pp. 244–5.

36 Ibid., p. 249.

37 Once the Europeans applied the right to national self-determination to justify recognising Slovene and then Croatian independence, they viewed citizens in those new states who were not Slovene or Croatian ethnically (and eventually, Albanians in Serbia by the same logic) as minorities even though the constitutional status of these Serbs and Croats were as nations with equal rights to all nations in Yugoslavia, regardless of their local numbers, and Albanians as nationalities who had political rights to autonomy, if not equality. Most of the war in all three places was to prevent becoming a minority (losing one's equal legal status) in someone else's nation-state. This faulty numerical principle created particular havoc in Bosnia-Herzegovina where all three of the constituent nations were fewer than 50 per cent. Pedersen (‘Back to the League’, p. 1100) writes in her review of the newest literature on the League of Nations, after its failure in the 1930s in protecting the minorities regime, ‘it was assumed, protection of individual human rights would make minority rights irrelevant. The Balkan crises of the 1990s showed how wrong that assumption was.’ Acknowledging this flaw in the major-power approach to the Balkans, she does not, however, appear to recognise the very thorny problem of national, not minority, rights in a regime based on national self-determination.

38 Glenny, The Balkans, pp. 160–2.

39 Data collected for me by Jason Harle in 2007 from multiple UN documents, primarily Secretary-Generals’ reports, all available online.

40 Hozic, Aida A., ‘The Paradox of Sovereignty in the Balkans’, in Howland, Douglas and White, Luise (eds), The State of Sovereignty: Territories, Laws, Populations (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 243Google Scholar.

41 Hozic, ‘The Paradox’, p. 243.

42 Stoianovich, ‘The Social Foundations’, pp. 314–15.

43 Ibid., p. 327.

44 Knaus, Gerald and Martin, Felix, ‘Travails of the European Raj’, Journal of Democracy, 14:3 (July 2003), p. 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Hozic, ‘The Paradox’, pp. 244, 252.

46 The deployment was reduced to 39,000 in 2002, then 26,000 by June 2003, 17,500 at the end of 2003, and in December 2012, numbered 5,565. Available at: {http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_48818.htm} accessed 15 January 2013.

47 Krasner, Sovereignty, pp. 93, 96.

48 Lampe, John R. and Jackson, Marvin R., Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 639Google Scholar, fn. 24.

49 Glenny, The Balkans, p. 184; Barkey, Empire of Difference, pp. 275–6.

50 Glenny, The Balkans, p. 195.

51 Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1493, pp. 449–50.

52 Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, p. 208.

53 Ibid., pp. 211, 230, 233.

54 Nicolas Spulber, ‘Changes in the Economic Structures of the Balkans, 1860–1960’, in Jelavich and Jelavich (eds), The Balkans in Transition, p. 356, fn. 11.

55 Glenny, The Balkans, p. 425.

56 Spulber, ‘Changes’, p. 359.

57 Glenny, The Balkans, p. 428. The German use of foreign trade for political domination in south-east Europe was so compelling to the later renowned economist and economic historian, Hirschman, A. O., that he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1945)Google Scholar.

58 Stoianovich, ‘The Social Foundations’, p. 319.

59 Glenny, The Balkans, pp. 149–50.

60 Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 175–6; also Glenny, The Balkans, pp. 149–50.

61 Stavrianos, ‘The Influence of the West on the Balkans’, in Jelavich and Jelavich (eds), The Balkans in Transition, p. 199.

62 Glenny, The Balkans, p. 396.

63 Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, p. 388.

64 Barkey, Empire, pp. 226–63, on the significance of this tax farming policy and why it failed under the Ottomans in contrast to similar policies in Britain and France.

65 Stavrianos, ‘The Influence of the West’, p. 415.

66 Stoianovich, ‘The Social Foundations’, p. 319.

67 Ibid., pp. 324–5.

68 Glenny, The Balkans, p. 295.

69 Jelavich, History of the Balkans, pp. 22–3.

70 Not all became communists; some, such as Rudolf Bicanic, the important postwar Croatian economist, became a radical populist after discovering the effect of the depression beginning in 1925 on the lives of the peasantry; the pamphlet of this political awakening is Kako Živi Narod: Život u pasivnim krajevima (How the People Live: Life in the Less-developed Areas) (Zagreb: Tipografije, 1936; reissued, Globus, 1996).

71 Meznaric, Silva, ‘A Neo-Marxist Approach to the Sociology of Nationalism, Doomed Nations, and Doomed Schemes’, Praxis International, 7:1 (1987), pp. 84–6Google Scholar.

72 Woodward, Socialist Unemployment, pp. 80–3.

73 Spulber, ‘Changes’, p. 357; Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, pp. 330, 376, 382.

74 Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, p. 376.

75 Kristin E. Boon,‘“Open for Business”: International Financial Institutions, Post- Conflict Economic Reform, and the Rule of Law’, International Law and Politics (2007), pp. 39, 515. In East Timor, for example, the World Bank ‘assisted in reforming “laws governing land ownership, conflict resolution, investment, business transactions, and commercial arbitration as well as civil and criminal laws”’, p. 528.

76 Jervis, Robert, ‘Theories of War in an Era of Leading-Power Peace’, Presidential Address, American Political Science Association, 2001, American Political Science Review, 96:1 (March 2002), p. 2Google Scholar.

77 MacFarlane, S. Neil, Intervention in Contemporary World Politics, Adelphi Paper no. 350 (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2002), p. 11Google Scholar.