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Balkan lessons

I spoke at a European Council on Foreign Relations/Ministry of Foreign Affairs conference last week here in Pristina, Kosovo about lessons learned in the Balkans interventions.  Bosnia and Kosovo were by no means model efforts, and the first lesson of intervention is that context matters.   It would be a mistake to think what worked and did not would necessarily be the same in, say Syria, as in the Balkans.

But I do think there are some things worth thinking about when contemplating intervention in other parts of the world.  There are three at the top of my list:

1.  Act together.  When the United States and Europe, which are the major players in Balkans interventions, act together, things often go better.  Note that this is not a matter of shared values, which is what diplomats often emphasize, but rather common enterprise.

Europe and the U.S. in fact do not always share values that are relevant to the Balkans.  Europe believes in group (minority) rights that do not exist in the U.S. and are in fact antithetical to American (and French) thinking.  But this did not prevent the U.S. and Europe from cooperating in implementation of the Dayton agreements (based on group rights principles).  There was also good cooperation in negotiating the Ohrid agreement that saved Macedonia from an interethnic war in 2001.  Most recently, the joint trip of Lady Ashton and Secretary of State Clinton to the Balkans sent strong messages to Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo.

2.  Do the right things.  It is not enough to act together with other major intervenors.  You also have to be doing the right things.

The U.S. and Europe acted together to allow Greece to block Macedonia’s entry into NATO, which is a bad thing to have done together.  Likewise, the EU and the U.S. ganged up together to push badly formulated amendments to the Bosnian constitution (the Butmir process, as it was known) in 2009.  By the same token, if the five EU countries that have not recognized Kosovo would do so, thus joining the 22 that have (as well as the U.S.), it would make an enormous difference to eliminating the remaining risks to peace and stability in the Balkans.  The EU’s recent “progress report” on Bosnia’s accession prospects aligns the Union more closely with the U.S. view that the central government in Bosnia is not strong enough to implement the obligations of EU membership.  That could change the calculus of Bosnian politicians in important ways.

3.  Use all the instruments, civilian and military.  If you are going to bother intervening, it would seem natural to use all the instruments of national power pointing in the same directions, but that is in fact the exception rather than the rule.

This is where Dick Holbrooke made his real contribution in the Balkans, because he gained control of all the levers of American power and pointed them in the same direction.  The EU is particularly inept at this:  witness the distribution of its troops in militarily meaningless small units all over Bosnia, and the lackadaisical use of its massive rule of law mission in northern Kosovo, with European troops more interested preventing trouble than in clamping down on organized crime there.  Admittedly, getting 27 countries to agree to use civilian and military instruments with vigor to achieve clear and compelling goals is not easy.  But it is what is needed if Europe is to pretend to be a serious international intervenor in the future.  It isn’t easy to get the State Department and the Defense Department to point in the same direction at the same time either.

These to me are useful lessons for future international intervention, if there is to be any.  Both Europe and the U.S. are trying assiduously to avoid it if possible.  But every president of the United States since the fall of the Berlin wall has tried to avoid state-building missions.  Each has found he cannot without leaving behind a mess that is inimical to American interests.  I have no reason to believe the pattern will change, so a few lessons are in order.