The downsides of the “ruse”-based international order

Written for Kosovo Online by Srdjan Garcevic, founder of The Nutshell Times

Trickery has been part of politics, and especially international politics, since the dawn of time. Indeed, one of the most memorable stories in history – that of the Trojan horse -  revolves around an ostensible peace offering, which ended up being an extremely effective and deadly ruse. Not only did the Ancient Greeks celebrate their trickery which helped them finally get the upper hand against the Trojans, but they also held the man who devised it – Odysseus – in high regard precisely for his cunning which saved his life multiple times.  

It is probably no coincidence that the famous quip, “all is fair in love and war”, attributed to the English writer John Lyly, was penned during the expansion of the English power in the Elizabethan times, which was brought about in no small part due to many diplomatic and military feints, ultimately making  “Albion” notorious for disrespecting agreements. 

While it is fashionable to bemoan trickery and hypocrisy in international relations, it is also somewhat tired and ultimately blind to the realities of politics. 

In truth, the stakes are often too high, sometimes existential, for parties to really commit to letting go of some benefit they have. Thus history is full of agreements that were never intended to be honoured and instead served to buy time, soften a certain inevitable process, or simply deceive. 

Recently, Angela Merkel blurted out that the Minsk agreements between Ukraine and Russia were never meant to be respected, as she and other Western leaders thought that any foothold Russia may have in Ukraine is an existential threat to the Western order. 

Similarly, many agreements between Belgrade and Priština, or rather the Serbian government and various supporters of Priština’s secession, have a similar flexible nature to them.

The United Nations Security Council resolution 1244 which brought an end to the NATO aggression on Serbia in 1999, for example, foresees that Serbian forces should be able to return to the territory of Kosovo and Metohija something that was recently treated as completely outrageous by the Western press and diplomats. More pressingly at this moment, the Association of Serbian Municipalities stipulated ten years ago in the Brussels agreement, has not yet been established. This is despite of many pronouncements from the Western powers, de facto sponsors of the Priština government, how they are pressuring Priština authorities for a solution. 

While certainly unfair, it was to be expected: why give concessions which hurt you and are greatly unpopular among the Albanian population (whose main cause of rebelling against Serbia in the 1990s was precisely the reduction of minority rights, but I digress), especially when there is no major cost to reneging on the agreement? 

Intentional lawfare – or pursuit of conflict through ostensibly legalistic means – has long been a topic in intentional politics and even economics, where Ha-Joon Chang, a Korean economist,  famously accused the wealthy nations of “kicking away the ladder” for poor nations to develop. More infamously, in “The Concept of the Political”, the German jurist Karl Schmitt, was very distrustful of any global political arrangements, and even ideas of “just war”, as he saw them as a way for the most powerful to protect themselves against the upstart forces. This idea is a natural follow-up to his view of politics as being driven by the “friend-enemy distinction”: the point is that one side of the existential conflict ends up winning and the other side loses. 

However, there does seem to be a point in tying one’s own hands when you are powerful. Firstly, the world has both grown increasingly interdependent and the ways of annihilating the enemy have become less safe, not just from the times of Homer and Lyle, but also since the time Karl Schmitt’s and even Ha-Joon Chang’s most famous works were published. Major powers have various ways of making their rival’s populations suffer, not just through the threat of nuclear destruction, but also through disrupting supply chains and even key infrastructure. These realisations motivated the Cold War order, and seem to be back in the spotlight with the war in Ukraine threatening to make the world more chaotic, or indeed, non-existent. 

Moreover, it makes sense for a major power to be seen as a credible counterparty to agreements. In a recent piece for the Foreign Policy, Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, warned that the US may be shooting itself in the foot by shunning the role of neutral broker in global disputes and being overly supportive of its traditional allies. He sees the recent China-brokered talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran, as an example of the US being side-lined from major global developments due to its partiality in global matters. 

A more general nudge for power towards maintaining some order over chaos comes from “Out of the mountains” a 2013 book by David Kilcullen which analyses the successes of urban guerrillas against more established, and powerful state forces. While a large chunk of the book focuses on military matters, the most important take away is that anyone who wants to control a certain organisation – whether it is a street gang or the community of states – needs to not only be sufficiently threatening, even brutal, against rivals, but also offer stability to those who respect their rule and rules. Erratic, self-centred behaviour of the hegemon, whether a crime boss or a super-power opens up space for competitors to create and offer a more stable order. 

Extrapolating from this, one of the sources of the Wester soft power after the fall of the Warsaw pact was the ability to project the image of a predictable and stable “rules-based international order” (albeit with many glaring omissions, such in the case of the dissolution of Yugoslavia). 

Indeed, the practical benefit of enforcing rules even when they are against your interest is probably the motivation behind the Serbian concept of “čojstvo”. Roughly defined as the ability to defend others against oneself, having the virtue of “čojstvo” has been considered crucial for any prominent personality and especially a ruler. This concept is present in some of the most famous Serbian epic poems, such as “Uroš and the Mrnjavchevićs,” in which the mythical Marko Kraljević, an ideal hero, decides not to help his own father and uncles (and ultimately himself) in the dispute against a weakened rival, but uphold justice even though it may hurt him. 

At the end of the poem, Marko Kraljević is both cursed and blessed by the opposing sides in the dispute. Nevertheless he is recognised as being on the side of divine justice. In that sense, he ends up as a sort of anti-Odysseus, who may have been lauded by his own kin, but ended up woefully cursed by the divine powers for his ruses.