Is Kosovo the most successful American state-building project?

Writing for Kosovo Online: Dragan Bisenic

Leading Kosovo politicians often claim that Kosovo is the most successful American project. In various variations and occasions, it is asserted that Kosovo is the most important and successful project of American and European foreign policy. There are announcements of presentations of studies that also claim Kosovo to be a "relatively successful example of state-building supported by the West". Starting from the unilateral declaration of Kosovo's independence and recognition by some states, and then relying on events in Ukraine, it is stated that the "security and political environment of Kosovo is changing in crucial ways", as Kosovo has "taken significant steps on its people-supported path towards joining Euro-Atlantic structures such as NATO and the EU and achieving its internal development goals".

Such assessments would not be very interesting, given that they are on the side of propagating one idea, if they did not shed an entirely new light on the Kosovo case that is not often visible. It is, in fact, emphasizing that Kosovo is a case of "state-building", which certainly indicates a new understanding of development in Kosovo and Metohija from 1999 to the present and the role of a part of the international community.

From today's positions, it seems that the initial assumptions about international state-building were the product of misfortune, arrogance, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of peace, politics, and unintended consequences of foreign policy interventions. This did not appear to be the case in the late 1990s when the political discourse of state-building was central to what was considered the "new liberal international order", emerging at the end of the Cold War divide. In the last years of the Cold War and the early 1990s, the UN began extending post-conflict missions and peacekeeping mandates in ways that started to be openly political, directly intervening in civil matters, including constitutional, judicial, and electoral reforms, for example, in missions led by the UN deployed in Namibia, Angola, El Salvador, Cambodia, and Mozambique.

The Western Balkans was the stage where "state-building" was developed, tested, and renegotiated, and the confidence of the late 1990s quickly dwindled with the overzealous spreading of faith in external responsibility for overseeing post-conflict political processes of reconstruction, lacking a coherent 'exit strategy' in the Balkans, followed by the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The stage for a twenty-five-year crisis was set the moment the Secretary-General's concept of state-building with the aim of constructing liberal institutions was fully implemented after the post-war elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina, when temporary international mandates were expanded, and international figures took civilian control over the peacebuilding process in February 1997. The arrogance of the late 1990s reached its peak when the UN formally endorsed the international protectorate in Kosovo in 1999 and when, under UN administration, the province unilaterally declared independence in 2008 on behalf of the Albanian majority. The process of creating Kosovo as an independent state, as far as the United States is concerned, bears the most similarity to the American creation of Panama at the beginning of the 20th century, but Kosovo is also far from being a contemporary Panama.

The aforementioned development of Kosovo shows us that the international community is still implementing one of the main conclusions of the report prepared by the International Commission for the Balkans in April 2005. The report suggested that the international community – especially the EU – initiate the process of "building member states", referring to Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Regarding this document, now incorrectly overlooked, the International Commission, led by Italian politician Giuliano Amato, created a "roadmap" for Kosovo's sovereignty, which simultaneously meant "state-building" in coordination with Kosovo's entry into the EU. The Commission presented the "transition in the evolution of Kosovo's sovereignty" in four phases. Kosovo's sovereignty should evolve from the "status quo" defined by Resolution 1244 (first phase) to "independence without full sovereignty" (second phase), allowing reserved powers for the international community in the areas of human rights and minority protection, to "guided sovereignty" in the third phase, which Kosovo would enjoy while negotiating with the EU, and finally to "shared sovereignty" in the fourth stage within the EU.

The recommendations of this commission are applied in other matters as well, including defining the position of the Serbs. It is stated that "the decentralization of power in Kosovo and guarantees for the normal life of Kosovo Serbs are a precondition for involving Belgrade in a constructive debate on the independence of Kosovo". It is recommended that "some of the minority quotas provided for by the Ohrid Agreement for the Albanians in Macedonia should also be allocated to the Serbs in Kosovo". It is stated that "decentralization should provide Serbian enclaves with a real opportunity for self-governance and development. It is necessary to understand that the Serbs believe that the social and economic difficulties they have experienced in the last five years constitute a deliberate policy of discrimination and ethnic cleansing devised by the Albanians, facilitated by the international community".

From then until today, very important changes have occurred. Today, "state-building" is no longer a term on the international agenda. Even the United Nations has moved away from using this terminology. The shift from the UN's "state-building" to much more flexible and pragmatic approaches stems from the rejection of interventionist approaches developed and popularized in the 1990s, now considered based on "template-driven offers and an overly technocratic focus on capitals and elites", and counterproductively increasing the "risk of unintentionally worsening divisions". In fact, the report of the UN Advisory Group of Experts on the Review of the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture in 2015 went so far as to state that mistakes are a result of nothing less than "a general misunderstanding of the nature of peacebuilding itself". Instead, pragmatism is increasingly becoming the order of the day, calling for "more realistic and contextualized political strategies".

State-building has been removed from the agenda because there is no longer an assumption of clarity regarding the problem or the solution, as the review of the UN Independent High-Level Panel on Peace Operations stated that "there is no linear path to peace": the "complex linkages" and interconnections between actors and agencies intervening mean that the UN should focus less on "mandate and mission templates" and instead place more emphasis on fluid and flexible "context-specific" strategies. The idea that external actors can develop solutions or implement them on the ground is undermined by the reality that "conflicts have become more complex, increasingly fragmented, and intractable".

Direct participants in the process of building "Kosovo's statehood" have written quite different testimonies that do not support exalted views of Kosovo's statehood. Andrea Lorenzo Capussela, who worked in Kosovo from 2008 to 2011, presented a completely different, much darker analysis of how Kosovo became a part of the dark side of modern Balkan history from 1999 onwards in his book "State-building in Kosovo".

All of this is connected to the activities of the United Nations, not regional or separatist organizations. Kosovo is not a member of the United Nations. Its status in the UN is defined by UN Security Council Resolution 1244, according to which it is an integral part of Serbia. However, a new idea is now being resorted to – Kosovo's quasi-statehood within "Euro-Atlantic integrations". This means that NATO countries if they manage to overcome the remaining four members that do not recognize it, will accept Kosovo into membership outside the UN system. Due to changes in the world regarding unilateral declarations of independence and the forced imposition of sovereignty changes, as is the case with Kosovo, there is no longer support or understanding in the world for breaking up recognized states by military means. The escalation of this issue and the entry into contradictions have also been contributed to by Russia's military actions in Ukraine, to which the EU, the US, and NATO countries have taken a stance in favor of preserving state sovereignty. If, by any chance, Kosovo applied for membership in the UN, it is quite clear that not only would it not receive the necessary number of votes, but it is likely that the support would be much lower than expected. Therefore, Serbia is asked to "recommend" Kosovo's membership in international organizations by agreeing to it through its silence and passivity.

The attitude towards the results of Kosovo's "state-building" underwent a significant turnaround in the second half of this year. Now it is being talked about affirmatively, but let's take, for example, what US Senator Chris Murphy said about the violent takeover of municipal buildings in northern Kosovo in an interview for the Atlantic Council last summer. There were many other statements, but let's focus on what the senator said as it provides a good illustration of the assessment of "state-building" in Kosovo. He stated that decisions by Pristina "unnecessarily jeopardize NATO forces". Murphy concluded that this was something "Congress will never be interested in funding — putting American and NATO troops at unnecessary risk. Murphy reiterated that his constituents would not be as willing to send money to the region unless they saw leaders taking reasonable steps necessary to maintain peace".

Here, the US senator used the term "peace-building", not "state-building". Therefore, regime change by foreign intervention and border changes should be distinguished from state-building. When withdrawing from Afghanistan, US President Biden said that America had never had a plan for "state-building".

This is particularly important now when Serbia is explicitly asked to recognize Kosovo's "state-building" and give up its sovereignty over this territory, thus legalizing Kosovo's becoming a state, even at the cost, as history shows, of potential new Balkan conflicts in the future. Unless, of course, the US intends to permanently stay in the Balkans and simultaneously play the role of the disappeared Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and establish its protectorate in the Balkans.