From War to Peace

Here are the notes I used for my presentation of From War to Peace in the Balkans, Middle East, and Ukraine yesterday at Johns Hopkins/SAIS, which has made it available free world-wide at that link. I am grateful to colleagues David Kanin and Majda Ruge for commenting and critiquing. 

1. It is a pleasure to present at this Faculty Research Forum, which will I think be a bit different from others. I’ll be concerned not only with analyzing what happened and is happening now in the Balkans but also with what should happen. I will try to fill the academic/practitioner gap.

2. I am particularly pleased as the event includes two of the best-informed people I know on the Balkans: David Kanin, whom I first met when he worked in the 1990s at the CIA Balkans Task Force, teaches the Balkans course here at SAIS; and Majda Ruge, who is both a native of the Balkans and a colleague at the Foreign Policy Institute.

3. Some of you will remember the Balkans in the 1990s: the US and Europe fumbling for years in search of peaceful solutions in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo only to find themselves conducting two air wars against Serb forces.

4. But most Americans have forgotten this history. Europeans often believe there were no positive results. In the Balkans, many are convinced things were better under Tito.

5. I beg to differ: the successes as well as the failures of international intervention in the Balkans should not be forgotten or go unappreciated.

6. That’s why I wrote my short book, which treats the origins, consequences, and aftermath of the 1995, 1999 and 2001 interventions that led to the end of the most recent Balkan wars.

7. As for the causes of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, my view is that there were three fundamental ingredients: the breakup of former Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević’s political ambitions and military capability, and ethnic nationalism, particularly in its territorial form.

8. Where all three were present in good measure, as in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, war was inevitable. Where Milosevic’s political ambitions were limited, as in Slovenia, war was short. Where his political ambitions and others’ ethnic nationalism were attenuated, as in Macedonia and Montenegro, war was mostly avoided.

9. The breakup of Yugoslavia is now a done deal, even if Serbia continues to resist acknowledging it. So too are Milosevic’s political ambition AND military capability. No one has inherited them. The third factor—ethnoterritorial nationalism—is still very much alive. All the Balkans peace agreements left it unscathed.

10. Conflict prevention and state-building efforts since the 1990s have been partly successful, though challenging problems remain in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia. My former SAIS colleague Michael Mandelbaum is wrong: the transformation mission in the Balkans is not a failed mission, but rather an incomplete one.

11. He thinks it failed because his explicit point of comparison is an ideal: the U.S. he says did not “succeed in installing well-run, widely accepted governments in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, or Kosovo.” I think Bosnia and Kosovo are works in progress because they are so obviously improved from their genocidal and homicidal wars. State capture is better than mass atrocity.

12. The book examines each of the Balkan countries on its own merits, as well as their prospects for entry into NATO and the EU, whose doors are in theory open to all the Balkan states.

13. {slide} Bottom line: all the states that emerged from Yugoslavia as well as Albania are closer to fulfilling their Euroatlantic ambitions than they are to the wars and collapse of the 1990s.

14. All can hope to be EU members, and NATO allies if they want, by 2030, if they focus their efforts.

15. {Slide} They were making decent progress when the financial crisis struck in 2007/8. The decade since then has been disappointing in many different respects:

• Growth slowed and even halted in some places.
• The Greek financial crisis cast a storm cloud over the EU and the euro.
• The flow of refugees, partly through the Balkans, from the Syrian and Afghanistan wars as well as from Africa soured the mood further.
• Brexit, a symptom of the much wider rise of mostly right-wing, anti-European populism, has made enlargement look extraordinarily difficult.

16. {Slide} The repercussions in the Balkans have been dire:

• Bosnia’s progress halted as it slid back into ethnic nationalist infighting.
• Macedonia’s reformist prime minister became a defiant would-be autocrat.
• Kosovo and Serbia are stalled in their difficult normalization process.
• Russia has taken advantage of the situation to slow progress towards NATO and the EU.

17. Moscow tried to murder Montenegro’s President to block NATO membership, finances Bosnia’s Serb secessionist entity, campaigned against resolving the Macedonia name issue, and undermines free media throughout the Balkans.

18. Now the question is whether the West, demoralized and divided by Donald Trump and other populists, can still muster the courage to resolve the remaining problems in the Balkans and complete the process of EU and, for those who want it, NATO accession.

19. Plan A is still viable. I also don’t see a Plan B that comes even close to the benefits of completing Plan A.

20. When I wrote the book, three big obstacles remained. Now there are only two.

21. The first obstacle was the Macedonia “name” issue. For those who may not follow the Balkans, the Greeks claim the name “Macedonia” belongs exclusively to the Hellenic tradition and would like the modern, majority Slavic country that uses that name to stop using it.

22. Skopje and Athens have now resolved this issue. New leadership was key to making it happen.

23. For those who claim the West is prepared to tolerate corruption and state capture in order to ensure stability in the Balkans, I suggest a chat with Nikola Gruevski.

24. Washington and Brussels helped chase him from office in 2017, once his malfeasance was well-publicized and a popular alternative appeared on the horizon. If there is a viable liberal democratic option, the West has been willing to support it.

25. The solution to the name issue is deceptively simple: now ratified in both parliaments, the Republic of Macedonia will become the Republic of North Macedonia, which most of its inhabitants and most of us will continue to call just Macedonia.

26. The Republic of North Macedonia can now hope to join NATO, perhaps by the end of this year, and become a candidate for EU accession.

27. There is a lot more to it, but that is all that will matter to you and me. The rest is for the Greeks and Macedonians.

28. The second big obstacle is normalization between Belgrade and Pristina, which will require mutual recognition and exchange of diplomatic representatives at the ambassadorial level.

29. This is closer than most think. Serbia has already abandoned its claim to sovereignty over all of Kosovo, in an April 2013 Brussels agreement that established the validity of the Kosovo constitution on its whole territory and foresaw Kosovo and Serbia entering the EU separately and without hindering each other. Only sovereign states can enter the EU.

30. {Slide} Belgrade has also implicitly acknowledged Kosovo’s sovereignty in opening the question of partition along ethnic lines. Serbia would like to absorb the 3.5 or 4 (depending on how you count) municipalities in northern Kosovo, three of which were majority Serb before the war.

31. But only a sovereign state can exchange territory. The proposal thus confirms that Belgrade has no intention of ever again governing the Kosovo Albanians.

32. But I hope the land and people swap isn’t going anywhere.

33. {Slide} First, because there is no there there. I don’t know who told Kosovo President Thaci that he could get what he wants in southern Serbia without giving up vital interests in northern Kosovo. I also don’t know who told Serbian President Vucic that he could get what he wants in northern Kosovo without giving up vital interests in southern Serbia.

34. Each was willing to take, but not to give.

35. I’m fine with that, because however apparently rational to two ethnic nationalist presidents, the exchange of territories based on the ethnic affiliation of their populations is a bad idea.

36. It would be an admission by both that neither can offer equal protection of the law to all his citizens. That is the essence of what they need to do to become EU, and if they want, NATO members.

37. A land swap would also destabilize Macedonia and Bosnia, and strengthen Vladimir Putin both there and in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.

38. It was foolhardy for both the EU and the US to entertain the proposition of land and people swaps, which are antithetical not only to EU and NATO membership but also to the Badinter principles laid down in the early 1990s that governed the dissolution of former Yugoslavia.

39. With or without land swaps, there is one issue that will still bedevil normalization of relations between Belgrade and Pristina no matter what: UN membership. Why would Russia agree to it for Kosovo, without an unacceptable quid pro quo for Crimea if not also Donbas?

40. President Putin has met with Kosovo President Thaci, but we shouldn’t read into that more than was intended: a hint that if there is a deal between Belgrade and Pristina, Moscow might be prepared to make a deal with Washington.

41. The third issue that needs to be resolved in the Balkans is the dysfunctional state structure that the Americans imposed on Bosnia and Herzegovina at Dayton.

42. It has kept the peace for close to 25 years, but needs reconfiguration to enable Sarajevo to negotiate and implement the acquis communautaire. That is the vital reform required. Bosnia’s constitution should make the central government’s responsibility and authority clear.

43. These three are serious problems, but not insoluble ones. The road ahead is shorter than the road already traveled. Doubling back is a bad idea.

44. My book proceeds after the Balkans to apply lessons learned to the Middle East and Ukraine, which also face identity-based conflicts challenging sovereignty and territorial integrity, lie close to the Balkans, and share more Ottoman history than is generally acknowledged.

45. {Slide} The lessons I draw from the Balkans are these:

• leadership is key to starting, preventing, and ending wars;
• early prevention can work, with adequate resources;
• ethnic partition will not;
• international contributions can be vital;
• neighborhood counts;
• power sharing and decentralization can help.

46. A few words about how to apply these ideas in the Middle East and Ukraine.

47. We see all too clearly in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya how leadership started wars, mainly by governing in ways that weren’t inclusive.

48. Assad’s crackdown on peaceful demonstrators in 2011, Maliki’s brutality towards Sunnis after the Americans departed Iraq, Yemen’s failure to take seriously Houthi concerns about the structure of the state in 2014, and Qaddafi’s threatened cruelty towards Benghazi all illustrate the point. Inclusive governance would not have made these errors.

49. Conflict prevention has known few successes in the Middle East. The Gulf Cooperation Council did try in Yemen. The UN and Arab League tried in Syria, but without the resources required.

50. What about partition?

51. Iraq’s Kurds were looking for their own ethnically-defined, even if relatively tolerant, state when they went to a referendum on independence in 2017. It didn’t work. Nor has the partition of Palestine brought peace to the Levant.

52. People will often agree on the need to separate, but they rarely agree on the lines of separation, which are too often decided by war.

53. The international contributions in the Middle East have far more often brought more war rather than peace. That said, only some sort of international concert can put Syria and Libya back together.

54. The American effort to withdraw from Washington’s over-commitment to the region and hesitation to commit new resources left vacuums in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. So it is not only intervention that brings problems, it can also be withdrawal.

55. Part of the problem is the neighborhood. Bordering countries have vital interests in their neighbors’ business. When they see a weak or collapsing neighbor, they seize opportunity. But those interests can also work in favor of stability and peace. That is what happened at Dayton.

56. We haven’t seen that happening yet in the Middle East however, though Russia, Iran, and Turkey are trying in their own fashion.

57. Powersharing and decentralization, while difficult to imagine and even more difficult to operationalize, are as vital in the Middle East as they were in the Balkans. Iraqis have begun to understand this: all the political parties in the last election were looking for cross-sectarian and cross-ethnic alliances. Enhancing the powers of Iraq’s provinces and asymmetric Federalism for Iraqi Kurdistan count as two positive accomplishments of the American intervention.

58. A quick word about Ukraine: it is far more soluble than the Middle East, if only because there are only two prime movers in the conflict there: Moscow first of all, and Kiev. With political will, it is far easier to solve a two-party conflict than the kind of multi-sided affair we see in Syria.

59. In fact, the never-implemented Minsk 2 agreement provides for ample decentralization and powersharing, at least for Donbas. But there is no mutually hurting stalemate between Moscow and Kiev to give both the incentive to settle.

60. With that, let me return to the book: it is intended to be an accessible treatment of what makes war and how to make peace that will appeal to both scholarly and lay readers interested in how violent international conflicts can be managed.

61. It is available free, worldwide, courtesy of my generous employer, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. To get it, click on the book cover at www.peacefare.net