Introduction
The Balkans form part of a greater Eurasian landmass that has been at the epicentre of imperialist conflict since the end of the Cold War. The dissolution of the Soviet Union reduced Russia to its pre-1700 borders, creating the potential for its competitors to move into that territory and enhance their standing in international relations. Arching from China, across Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, to Southeast Europe, this vast region had for over a millennium and a half (from the second century BCE to the fifteenth century CE) acted as the ‘Silk Road’, a network of transportation and trade routes, connecting the wealthy territories at its extremities. Its centrality to global energy routes in the era of late capitalism, or even ‘carbon capitalism’, ensured Eurasia would find itself at the centre of renewed Great Power contestation on the cusp of the twenty-first century.
This article will revisit the Balkan Wars — as the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s were referred to — in the interests of articulating a coherent left-wing approach to inter-imperialist rivalry in this era. The significance of the Balkan Wars lies in the fact that US involvement in them helped shape the worldview of both Washington and, by extension, that of its rivals, at the dawn of the unipolar moment after the end of the Cold War. A declining economic power, the US at that time developed a strategy of exploiting its position as an unrivalled military force to project power in the wider Eurasian region and prevent the emergence of competitors like the Soviet Union had been during the Cold War. Zbigniew Brzezinski, an important US foreign-policy strategist, referred to this wider region as the ‘Eurasian Balkans’, akin to the European Balkans in terms of religious and ethnic heterogeneity, and in terms of inviting the interest of rival powers like Russia, Turkey, Iran and China, but ‘infinitely more important as a potential economic prize’, on account of its energy reserves and mineral wealth. We may now be at the twilight of the unipolar moment. But the Balkan Wars should be seen as both an earlier stage of the conjuncture that we are still in, shaping the conjuncture in the present, and as relevant to understanding the Balkans themselves today in the light of inter-imperialist competition.
Ironically, however, the geopolitical significance of the Balkan Wars escaped the attention of most left-wing commentators in the 1990s. Tainted by their association with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the influence of classical Marxist concepts, like imperialism, which sees the world as being unified in an unstable way by competing economic-military powers, faded in the labour movement. Opposition to imperialism as a system, involving rival centres of competitive accumulation, weakened. It was replaced by more inchoate, piece-meal opposition to particular imperialist wars, which was informed by post-structuralist theory and which therefore underestimated geopolitical competition and overestimated the diffuse nature of power. That meant that opposition to imperialist war was then, and has continued to be, uneven.
A stark illustration of this unevenness is the contrasting response of the Western left to two contemporary wars. On the one hand, opposition to the West’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February 2022 has been muted. On the other hand, mass opposition has emerged to Western support for Israel’s onslaught on Gaza since October 2023. At least part of the explanation for this divergence is to be found in the simplistic rendering of the oppressor/victim dynamic, so diffuse in post-structuralist identity politics, in these two conflicts. According to this simplistic rendering, the Left must support the victim, either by pressing the West to provide the means of self-defence for the victim (as with Ukraine versus Russia), or by pressuring the West to deny the oppressor the means to attack (Israel in Gaza). The centring of the victim and its agency, however, comes at the expense of any systematic interrogation of the deeper causes and dynamics of the conflicts, and their entanglement in wider power imbalances in international relations. Saving the victim in fact becomes a moral imperative (‘the responsibility to protect’), which only the more powerful states have the means to achieve. Unwittingly, then, sections of the Left end up supporting the liberal case for humanitarian intervention, a doctrine first developed and applied in its contemporary form during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.
The Bosnian War and its Consequences
With the end of the Cold War, the US could no longer justify projecting its military power abroad on account of its alleged role as the defender of the free world from the Communist menace. That menace was now gone, and, famously, NATO had been conjured up to ‘keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’ in Europe after 1945. Much of this reasoning, obviously, applied even after the end of the Cold War, though that could not be openly stated. Keeping ‘Russia out’ of its former backyard, and getting the ‘US in’, by pushing NATO eastwards, was an opportunity politicians and policymakers in Washington proved unable to resist. Keeping ‘Germany down’ did not have the same meaning as in the aftermath of the two world wars, but it surely was a factor in decision-making insofar as the re-united Germany could play a decisive role in Europe. Many in Washington at the time in fact explicitly worried as much about successful European integration separate from the US as they did about potential instability. Europe remained economically central to the US and thereby vicariously remained central to Washington’s ability to project power more broadly. Keeping Europe tied and subordinate to the US therefore remained a key, and at times explicit, rationale for keeping and expanding NATO. Nevertheless, since the USSR and the Communist menace in Europe were gone, the US now needed a new doctrine that could help justify the existence, expansion, and unilateral freedom of action, out of theatre, of supposedly defensive alliances like NATO.
The alliance began to find its rationale during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s with the invention of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention. It was notable that German leadership in Europe first began to be (mis)used, from the US perspective, precisely in the Balkans. The crisis of Yugoslav unity in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War proved to be a challenge as different Western powers — principally Germany and the US — took different positions on the conflict. Their leverage in this country was significant, as Yugoslavia, though politically non-aligned during the Cold War, had relied on Western economic support to resist Soviet pressures. As the Cold War abated, the Western powers unwittingly accelerated the decomposition of the weak federal state and enflamed the national question in Yugoslavia by insisting on the repayment of outstanding loans and the implementation of a series of IMF-imposed austerity programmes in the 1980s. With the US distracted in the Middle East in 1990–91, with the crisis in the Gulf, a re-unified Germany symbolised a new era of national self-determination and exerted new power and influence in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Even as the US initially preferred the maintenance of a reformed, united Yugoslavia, Germany encouraged the separatism of the richer, but smaller, north-western republics of Slovenia and Croatia, who feared that the populist rise of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia would lead to the return of a centralised, Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.
If the re-unified Germany pushed for the recognition of the independence of Slovenia and Croatia in summer 1991, the US, UK and France initially worried that this could provoke war. Soon, however, Washington began to fear being outflanked by Germany, and began to push for the recognition of the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina as well. In a move that would foreshadow its later propensity to act unilaterally and wreck European efforts at peace-making, Washington scuppered the European Community-sponsored Lisbon Agreement to create a decentralised Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was signed by Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), Bosnian Croat, and Bosnian Serb representatives in March 1992. US officials encouraged the Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović to rescind the Bosniak signature in the days after the agreement had been reached — and offered to recognise the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This opened the way for a war that lasted for three-and-a-half years, and saw the US consistently work to block European attempts at mediation, until the conflict ended with the US-brokered Dayton Accords in late 1995, on terms not substantially different to the ones consistently proposed by the European Community and then the European Union.
What was notably different about the Dayton Accords, however, was that they had the imprint of Pax Americana. It was during the long war that the US under the Clinton administration overcame its initial reluctance to become militarily involved and ended up championing the use of US aerial firepower against Serb forces — through the mechanism of NATO — in 1994-95.
The shift occurred at the same time as Germany gave up on the notion of an independent European defence framework, and the US won the argument for NATO’s eastward enlargement. The realities of US military supremacy, and European struggles to impose strict fiscal rules emanating from the European Monetary Mechanism and the Maastricht Treaty, appeared to have been two important factors behind the shift. Simply put, Europe was in no position to grow its own military capacity to rival that of the US at a time of economic tightening. To sweeten the pill, the US quietly jettisoned its commitment to a unified Bosnia and Herzegovina, switching instead to a position closer to the German or European vision, in which a federal solution would become possible. Moreover, if the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had initially been a civil war including three principal sides, two directly supported by neighbouring Croatia and Serbia, it became a war in which a US-sponsored alliance emerged between Bosniak and Croat forces against Serb paramilitary separatists supported by Belgrade. Assisted by US-led NATO airstrikes, the former turned the tables on the latter, leading to peace negotiations and the Dayton Accords.
It was the sheer brutality of the fighting that provided the backdrop to the rise of the humanitarian case for NATO intervention. Originally the strongest side in the fighting, Serb forces in the conflict tended to commit the more gruesome crimes more often in a generally vicious war which gave birth to terms like ethnic cleansing. An estimated 100,000 died in the fighting, four-fifths of them Bosniak. War crimes on the scale of the Siege of Sarajevo, and the brutal massacre of 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica, by Serb paramilitaries, provided a convenient excuse for NATO to contrast its own decisiveness, in terms of military intervention to end the fighting, to the alleged shortcomings of the United Nations. The key example often cited is that of Dutch UN peacekeepers failing to stop General Ratko Mladić’s men from committing the Srebrenica massacre despite the town’s status as a UN ‘safe area’. The subsequent international infrastructure built around the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to prosecute war crimes from the region, the 2005 UN World Summit meeting committing member states to the ‘responsibility to protect’, and the International Court of Justice in the Hague ruling in 2007 that the Srebrenica massacre legally constituted genocide, was intended to provide an aura of legal legitimacy to the unipolar order’s foundational doctrine of humanitarian intervention.
Framing interventionist war abroad as fundamentally humanitarian, a course of action arising from the responsibility to protect innocents from imminent danger, made waging war a moral issue.
The foundational myth for Western foreign policy was now that it was its alleged failure to intervene — whether at all, as in Rwanda in 1994, or on time and decisively, as in Bosnia and Herzegovina until 1994–95 — that morally obliged it never to repeat the mistake again. The myth was clearly designed to follow a similar narrative built around the legitimising memorialisation of World War II as the ‘Good War’ in the West. According to that narrative, Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany had allowed Adolf Hitler to start World War II and commit atrocities, like the Holocaust, before being finally stopped, but far too late to prevent genocide. This Western ‘truth regime’ was, of course, based in good part on a true reflection of events, but at the same time it systematically masked the fact that the British and French commitment to maintaining their overseas empires was an integral part of their war effort. The new narrative about the post-Cold War interventionism echoed the pre-existing ‘truth regime’ about World War II and built upon it, all the while seeking to prevent systematic interrogation of Western motivations. In this refreshed narrative, the West now had a moral obligation to act, before it was too late, against little Hitlers committing their own local genocides. Accordingly, when the ICTY was established in 1993, the US ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, told the UN Security Council: ‘There is an echo in this chamber today. The Nuremberg principles have been reaffirmed. The lesson that we are all accountable to international law may finally have taken hold in our collective memory.’ Similarly, the ICTY website still explicitly refers to its character as the first international tribunal set up to try war crimes since the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals in the aftermath of World War II at which German and Japanese war criminals were prosecuted.
Framing interventionist war abroad as fundamentally humanitarian, a course of action arising from the responsibility to protect innocents from imminent danger, made waging war a moral issue. Furthermore, it was designed to shield the West from responsibility before the law, contrary to Albright’s universalist claims. There is no time for discussion in emergencies, after all, and disbelief must be suspended. Even as the US and its allies argued that they were defending victims of genocide in the Balkans, principally the Bosniaks during the Bosnian War (1992-1995), they facilitated significant war crimes themselves. The single largest act of ethnic cleansing in the wars of the 1990s was operation ‘Storm’, which culminated with the expulsion of 200,000 Serbs from Croatia’s Krajina region during the Croatian War of Independence (1991-95) in August 1995, on the back of Western military aid. The ICTY, however, first convicted, but then upheld an appeal against conviction by the two Croatian generals charged with overseeing operation ‘Storm’, Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač. No Western politicians or soldiers, moreover, ever faced charges before the ICTY. In response to suggestions by the ICTY prosecutor that she was investigating NATO’s use of cluster munitions in the Kosovo War (1999), Dr Jamie Shea, the official NATO spokesman, responded that NATO was the ‘friend’ of the ICTY, that it was providing the ICTY with ‘finances’, and that he was ‘certain’ that only ‘people of Yugoslav nationality’ would be indicted. Shea was, of course, proven correct, and more than half of those indicted and convicted were in fact Serbs. Despite such glaring double standards, the very real war crimes being committed by Serb forces in the 1990s gave NATO’s arguments about humanitarian intervention, at least temporarily, an aura of plausibility.
The Kosovo War and its Aftermath
It was at the height of talk of humanitarian intervention, armed by arguments surrounding inaction in Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina, that the US drove hard for the assertion of NATO unilateralism outside the structures of the UN during the Kosovo crisis in 1998-99. Once again, it was the US that drove NATO policy, often against European reservations, and against the backdrop of Russian weakness following the financial crash of August 1998. The Balkan region had been undergoing significant turbulence following the collapse of financial pyramid schemes in Albania and the fall of the pro-Western authoritarian leader Sali Berisha. A period of state failure and armed civil unrest, which ensued between January and August 1997, indirectly fed into regional instability over the following years. This primarily occurred through the Albanian populations in neighbouring Kosovo and Macedonia, living as second-class citizens in states that denied them basic rights. Flush with arms that disappeared after the period of unrest ended, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) intensified a guerilla effort against the Serbian state from February 1998. Initially, the US and EU treated the KLA as a terrorist organisation, appearing to condone harsh Serbian policing of its restive province. By October 1998, however, Albright, now Secretary of State, signalled a shift in the US position. She indicated that only a NATO presence in Kosovo could provide a solution to the problem. Against the backdrop of Serbian security forces’ murder of 45 Kosovo Albanians, in what became known as the Račak massacre in January 1999, the US blatantly gave up on diplomacy. At the Rambouillet talks, named after the French town where negotiations were held, the Western representatives presented the Serbian delegation with a deal they must have known the Serbian delegation would find unacceptable, including an annex which would have given NATO free rein across the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (comprising Serbia and Montenegro). Given that the Russian delegation also refused to sign, it was obvious that the Western powers would never gain a UN Security Council resolution for intervention. In a precursor to the Iraq War in 2003, the NATO allies therefore resorted to conducting a pre-emptive, illegal war with no UN mandate.
If the US calculation was that a quick war would force Milošević to give in, and reinforce NATO’s cohesion, the move almost backfired. Indeed, as US intelligence had predicted, but US politicians kept hidden, the first days of NATO bombing gave the Serbian government cover for an operation to systematically expel Albanians from Kosovo into neighbouring states in an attempt at destabilising the wider region. After the start of the NATO bombing on 24 March, the number of internally displaced people in Kosovo doubled from 200,000 to 400,000, while the number of refugees abroad increased from 100,000 to 600,000, in just three weeks, according to estimates by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Meanwhile, in an indication that the US hoped for a quick win, the aerial military campaign moved from hitting Yugoslav air defence systems (Phase One) and troops in Kosovo itself (Phase Two) to hitting targets across Serbia (Phase Three) within just nine days. The full bombing campaign ultimately lasted 78 days and saw NATO extensively bomb targets with alleged dual civilian and military potential uses, including power stations, bridges, factories, TV stations, party political headquarters and so on. As the Washington Post reported: ‘NATO’s supreme commander, U.S. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, has insisted that his top priority now is to destroy the Yugoslav Third Army or chase it out of Kosovo, but senior allied military officials acknowledged that they also want to damage the quality of everyday life so that suffering citizens will start questioning the intransigence of their political leadership.’
Such dynamics inevitably led to tensions between and within NATO member states. Divisions were once again visible between the US and many European allies. The BBC later revealed that Germany, Italy and Greece expressed opposition to moving to Phase Three of the bombing campaign, and that Washington often had to override tactical objections from reluctant allies. According to Strobe Talbott, the American Deputy Secretary of State, ‘it was a good thing that the conflict ended it when it did’ on 3 June, since, in his estimation, keeping up ‘the resolve of the alliance’ would have proved difficult over the longer run. Moreover, public protest against NATO intervention during the Kosovo War took on greater proportions than during the Bosnian War when NATO faced practically no mass opposition. In the days after the bombing started, thousands or tens of thousands took to the streets of North American and West European cities, though numbers remained small compared with later anti-war marches in the 2000s. Opinion polls indicated that populations were initially supportive of military intervention in most NATO states, except Greece and Portugal, but support ebbed over time, while support for negotiations increased. That the centre-left was in power in many NATO countries also led to arguments that ‘social democracy is the new right’, which had long-term consequences, as alternatives to the left of social democracy slowly began to emerge.
In the event, though, despite negative effects from the humanitarian standpoint, NATO prevailed, as the Western powers succeeded in driving the Serbian state from Kosovo and setting up a UN-sanctioned NATO protectorate under UN Security Council resolution 1244. As in Bosnia and Herzegovina, many Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo under the watchful eye of NATO occupation. Ever since, both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo have been run as supervised democracies with limited sovereignty. In the former, the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, a neo-colonial governor, had wide-ranging rights, like the ability to sack democratically elected politicians. The British politician Paddy Ashdown, who held the position from 2002 to 2006, sacked 60 Bosnian Serb officials in 2004 as part of an effort to discipline the Republika Srpska, one of the two federal units in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Kosovo, declared independent in 2008, but still blocked from many international institutions by Russian veto, the rise of the socio-economically populist, hardline Albanian-nationalist Vetevendosje! movement in Kosovo has also caused friction with the US. Indeed, the US Special Presidential Envoy for Serbia and Kosovo Peace Negotiations, Richard Grenell, was even accused of engineering the removal in March 2020 of the democratically elected Prime Minister, Albin Kurti (though Kurti would later return to power). While there has been talk of transitional justice and reconciliation in both states, this has had limited success, as both polities remain deeply divided, with Serb minorities exhibiting a strong desire for self-rule. Moreover, socio-economic concerns have remained unaddressed by the transitional justice systems imposed by the West in both these impoverished countries. The neo-colonial governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Valentin Inzko, even threatened to use EU troops against demonstrators during the Bosnian Spring of 2014, when social protests, initially against mass unemployment, shook multiple cities like Tuzla, Sarajevo, Zenica, Mostar, Jajce and Brčko.
That process of pacifying the Balkans was integral to the US-led drive to expand NATO eastwards. It had in effect started with German re-unification in 1990, but it was in 1999, on the eve of the Kosovo War, that NATO admitted the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In successive waves of enlargement, almost the whole of the Balkans was shoehorned into NATO. The democratic character of this process was highly questionable, as it became clear that political elites often feared putting the question directly to the public. No referendum was held in Montenegro in 2016 when parliament voted to join, even though polls showed the country was deeply divided about membership at the time, and indeed wanted a referendum. No referendum was held on the matter in Macedonia either. A referendum to change the name of the country from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) to The Republic of North Macedonia, as demanded by its neighbour Greece, explicitly linking acceptance of the name change as a route to EU and NATO membership, failed because of low turnout in 2018. Nevertheless, parliament voted through the name change and subsequently approved accession to NATO, which officially took place in March 2020. After that, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia remain the only Balkan countries which are not officially members, though the first two have Western troops stationed on their soil. Serbia therefore remains the only country in the region which officially does not seek NATO membership and maintains its military neutrality. It continues to be exposed to serious pressures to align itself more with the Western powers, with the EU increasingly explicitly demanding that Serbia adapt its foreign policy in line with that of the EU and recognise the independence of Kosovo in exchange for fast-track accession to the bloc.
The dogged determination to expand NATO eastwards, regardless of the humanitarian cost; over the head of the local populations, if need be; and against the misgivings of allies or foes alike, can only be understood against the background of the US geopolitical drive to place the greater Eurasian Balkans under its control. Since the 1990s, the European Balkans could be understood as the gateway to the Eurasian Balkans. A key route for oil and gas from the Caspian Sea, which was not under Russian or German/EU control, the European Balkans represented a potentially key US prize and a springboard for further moves eastward. That also accounts for the importance accorded to the otherwise poor and unstable region by Mosco. Indeed, the Kosovo War contributed to a significant re-assessment of Russian defence doctrine in 1999. The war underlined just how far behind Russia was in terms of high-technology warfare, leading to a massive rise in funding for strategic forces R&D and procurement and a simultaneous emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons. The Kosovo War also helped legitimise the Russian establishment’s explicit move to allowing the use of military force in domestic conflicts, unleashing the Second Chechen War in the autumn of 1999, and heralding the rise of Vladimir Putin. Recalibrating its domestic system around an extractivist model that would allow Moscow to use its rising status as an energy superpower abroad, Putin’s Russia in the 2000s and 2010s increasingly sought to project power in areas which it sought to preclude from US encroachment. In fact, Russia repeatedly stated that it viewed NATO expansion as a threat, drawing precise red lines in 2008, launching a war against Georgia in that year, and engaging in a long soft power struggle with the West over Ukraine, which spilled over into military conflict in 2014-15 and again in 2022. That Putin used the precedent of Kosovo’s independence to justify Russia’s annexation of Crimea as part of this process was not a mistake or a random choice of words. It was an open reference to his desire to have Russia treated as a Great Power on a par with its Western rivals, in a nod to NATO’s actions in the Balkans.
A quarter-century later
In the almost quarter-century that elapsed between the Kosovo War in 1999 and the start of the Ukraine War in 2022, the Western case for military intervention abroad suffered severe setbacks in Central Asia and the Middle East. Under the guise not just of humanitarian intervention, but the ‘War on Terror’, the failed twenty-year US occupation of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, the turning of Libya into a failed state after NATO intervention in 2011, the unsuccessful attempt at regime-change through military intervention in Syria since 2014, and the unstinting support for the maintenance of Israeli apartheid throughout this time, created significant problems in domestic and foreign policy for Washington and its allies. With each disastrous military adventure, the possibility has increased in the West for a generalisation from opposition to particular imperialist wars to opposition to the imperialist system as a whole. Nevertheless, for each of the ‘bad wars’, Washington and its apologists point to the supposed ‘good wars’, like NATO’s involvement in the Kosovo War in 1999 and its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine since 2022.
It is important for the Left to argue the opposite: that all these wars have been not just to a greater or lesser degree destructive, but that they are also fundamentally connected. They were all part and parcel of a failing US strategy after 1989 to use the unipolar moment to forestall the rise of potential rivals. Even as NATO has further expanded to include Finland in 2023, the West’s failure to contain the economic rise of China suggests that geopolitical competition in the twenty-first century promises to be even more destructive than it has been hitherto. Whether in the Pacific or somewhere along the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ across the Eurasian Balkans, the West will encounter an ever more assertive Chinese challenge. Given that Serbia is at the centre of Chinese BRI investments in the region, more competition and instability in the European Balkans itself should not be discounted. As the world enters a new, dangerous multipolar period, the ruling classes of the imperialist states will try to convince their populations of the righteousness of their own state’s cause. The left has a special duty to resist such pressures and point out that, in the words of Karl Liebknecht, the main enemy is at home.