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The long intervention: continuity in the Balkan theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2013

SUSAN L. WOODWARD
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Abstract

Great Power intervention in the Balkans since the late nineteenth century shows a striking continuity in motivations, methods, and consequences. The article proposes that current intervention practices are largely a response to the Balkan theatre in the 1990s and thus institutionalise this continuity more than arguments about normative and institutional change since 1990 suggest. Three continuities are emphasised: the concept of a ‘turbulent frontier’ to explain an unintended dynamic of nearly continuous intervention, the importance of local actors' interests (the pull of intervention) alongside those of major power interests (the push), and the primary influence on domestic orders and cause of the ‘turbulence’ of economic relations.

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Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 5: Intervention and the Ordering of the Modern World , December 2013 , pp. 1169 - 1187
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2013 

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References

1 In response to the debate on the legality of the NATO bombing of Serbia, the Canadian government established a commission on ‘international intervention and state sovereignty’. It recommended a new doctrine of R2P, which the UN General Assembly adopted in 2005: World Summit Outcome Document (25 October 2005), in particular pp. 138–9.

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25 This incident exemplifies the complex global-local dynamic: seeking greater French support when Germany and Italy are becoming more assertive and French influence was waning, the King is assassinated by a Macedonian revolutionary under the instigation and pay of the fascist (pro-independence) movement in Croatia under Pavelic and of Mussolini in Italy.

26 Most notably by the letters written in November 1991 to German foreign minister Genscher from UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar, UN negotiator and former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and EC negotiator Lord Peter Carrington; see Balkan Tragedy, pp. 183–4.

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34 It did not help for Serbia and Romania that the obligation of minorities protection applied not only to the postwar areas but also those acquired before 1914, even though, as Lederer writes, ‘minority treatment in Macedonia was already regulated by the Treaty of Berlin (1878) and Bucharest (1913)’ and ‘all [the Allies] agreed that Serbia had “fully carried out both the letter and the spirit” of the Treaty of Berlin’. (Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference, pp. 239–40.)

35 Ibid., pp. 244–5.

36 Ibid., p. 249.

37 Once the Europeans applied the right to national self-determination to justify recognising Slovene and then Croatian independence, they viewed citizens in those new states who were not Slovene or Croatian ethnically (and eventually, Albanians in Serbia by the same logic) as minorities even though the constitutional status of these Serbs and Croats were as nations with equal rights to all nations in Yugoslavia, regardless of their local numbers, and Albanians as nationalities who had political rights to autonomy, if not equality. Most of the war in all three places was to prevent becoming a minority (losing one's equal legal status) in someone else's nation-state. This faulty numerical principle created particular havoc in Bosnia-Herzegovina where all three of the constituent nations were fewer than 50 per cent. Pedersen (‘Back to the League’, p. 1100) writes in her review of the newest literature on the League of Nations, after its failure in the 1930s in protecting the minorities regime, ‘it was assumed, protection of individual human rights would make minority rights irrelevant. The Balkan crises of the 1990s showed how wrong that assumption was.’ Acknowledging this flaw in the major-power approach to the Balkans, she does not, however, appear to recognise the very thorny problem of national, not minority, rights in a regime based on national self-determination.

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65 Stavrianos, ‘The Influence of the West’, p. 415.

66 Stoianovich, ‘The Social Foundations’, p. 319.

67 Ibid., pp. 324–5.

68 Glenny, The Balkans, p. 295.

69 Jelavich, History of the Balkans, pp. 22–3.

70 Not all became communists; some, such as Rudolf Bicanic, the important postwar Croatian economist, became a radical populist after discovering the effect of the depression beginning in 1925 on the lives of the peasantry; the pamphlet of this political awakening is Kako Živi Narod: Život u pasivnim krajevima (How the People Live: Life in the Less-developed Areas) (Zagreb: Tipografije, 1936; reissued, Globus, 1996).

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75 Kristin E. Boon,‘“Open for Business”: International Financial Institutions, Post- Conflict Economic Reform, and the Rule of Law’, International Law and Politics (2007), pp. 39, 515. In East Timor, for example, the World Bank ‘assisted in reforming “laws governing land ownership, conflict resolution, investment, business transactions, and commercial arbitration as well as civil and criminal laws”’, p. 528.

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