Volume 8 Number 3

Summer 1999

Feature

Eastern Europe After Kosovo
     Introduction
     Stephen Holmes

The bombs have ceased falling, and Serb forces have now withdrawn. NATO troops have occupied Kosovo, those expelled are streaming home, and more atrocities are being discovered every day. But the long-term consequences of the West's intervention in Yugoslavia remain obscure. Will NATO be able to tame the KLA? Will the United Nations be able to create an effective (non-KLA) civilian authority among the Kosovar Albanians? Will Macedonia be able to maintain its territorial integrity? Can Milosevic be sidelined and Serbia placed on a path toward democracy? Will US-Russian relations recover or is the next Russian president bound to adopt an aggressively anti-Western foreign policy? Has the NATO action strengthened or weakened the case for armed intervention in the name of human rights?

Among the other important questions being asked today are these: What effect did the war have on the new democracies of central and eastern Europe? How was the intervention perceived in the region? How did East Europeans interpret NATO's zero-risk strategy of bombing from enormous heights, which put Serb and Kosovar Albanian civilians on the ground at greater risk than would have been otherwise necessary? And how did East Europeans interpret NATO's commitment to a multiethnic Yugoslavia given the unquestionable power of anti-immigration politics in Western Europe?

The following symposium is intended, first of all, as a report on the Kosovo crisis as seen from central and eastern Europe. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi shows how the war in Yugoslavia was reflected and distorted in much of the Romanian press and how anti-NATO feelings in Romania have played into the weakening of President Constantinescu's political stature. Milan Znoj explores the mystery of Vaclav Klaus's outspoken opposition to the NATO attack, despite Klaus's usually adamant pro-Western stance. Znoj also reflects on how memories of territorial amputation could lie behind some Czech sympathy for the Serb cause (the way Kosovo has been lost to the Albanians reminds certain Czechs of the way Sudetenland was lost to the Germans). Pavel Kandel argues that Russian attitudes toward the crisis were determined not by the pull of the traditional Slav brotherhood but by irritation at the weakening of Russian clout in world politics and by NATOÕs inability to articulate a coherent principle to explain exactly when its humanitarian concerns will lead it to support territorial separatism and partition. Konstanty Gebert, for his part, speculates that the strong Polish support for the bombing reflected not so much sympathy with the Kosovars as the felt need of Poles to be good allies to the West. Drinko Gojkovic explores the way the bombing allowed Milosevic to repress even more thoroughly than before his domestic opponents. Srdjan Darmanovic explains how the war affected Montenegro. And Laszlo Nemenyi shows how the Vojvodina issue was far and away the major factor shaping Hungarian responses to the war. (A few weeks after joining a defensive alliance, Hungarians found themselves members of an offensive alliance bombing a country where 300,000 Hungarians live.) In an attempt to convey the flavor of East European debate on the war, we are also publishing here translations of two pieces of Gyorgy Konrad, against the NATO campaign, and one by Peter Nadas, criticizing Konrad and defending the NATO action.

Finally, we conclude this symposium with four general pieces. Shlomo Avineri explains why, in his view, Kosovo should never again fall under Serb political authority. Ivan Krastev and his colleagues speculate on the long-term consequences of the Kosovo crisis for the region as a whole. Robert Hayden delivers a scorching attack on the humanitarian justification of the war. And Dimitrina Petrova explains why, in her view, a war that was originally justified in the name of human rights was not conducted in accord with the human-rights system of values.

First drafts of most of these essays were written while the NATO action was still in progress. They have been updated to varying degrees. Given the speed of developments on the ground, we could not hope to do more here than add a regional perspective to a debate that is already raging and that has only just begun.

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