The Trouble with Kosovo

The troubles in Kosovo demonstrate that not only has Europe failed thus far to develop effective mechanisms to address the complex issues stemming from intra-state conflict, but it may lead to the fundamental redefinition of many central tenets of public international law, international relations, and international security. If NATO intervention takes place it will open up legal questions regarding sovereignty and thus statehood and will also lead to a protracted debate about the role of the United Nations (UN). Perhaps the time is long overdue for a debate on these issues in the post-cold war world, but Kosovo may prove to be the unwitting catalyst.

Nearly all of the major armed conflicts in the international system at present, with the sole exception of the dispute over Kashmir between India and Pakistan, are intra state conflicts. While intra-state strife is obviously not a new phenomenon, it remains true that those security organisations that survived the cold war, of which there are very few, remain geared to the problems of addressing inter state conflict. NATO is one of the few organisations with effective military potential to survive the cold war. In spite of its efforts to emphasise the collective security aspects of its work it remains primarily a collective defence organisations, as laid down in its founding treaty. The WEU is also geared towards collective defence under the terms of the 1954 Modified Brussels Treaty. Both organisations were founded with the heavily armed nuclear camps of the cold war in mind and, accordingly, little thought was given to how to address intra-state conflict. The UN, with its collective security mandate, was paralysed by Security Council divisions for much of the cold war and the lack of any dedicated forces in the post-cold war period has hampered the UN's potential to address the political (through the lack of any definitive military threat to back up political efforts) and military dimensions of intra-state conflict. It is organisations such as the UN that illustrate the complexity of addressing intra-state conflict since the very element of rule and order in the international system, the state itself, is now the prime architect of instability.