On a hot day in early June 1999, I was participating in a conference on European security in Berlin. The talk of the day was obviously the war in Kosovo. At the same time, at Unter den Linden, a few blocks away from the conference venue, a messy and joyful event was taking place – the Christopher Street Gay Parade, a prelude to the Berlin Love Parade held a couple of weeks later. As I left the conference hall and joined the crowds at Unter den Linden, it occurred to me that Kosovo and the Love Parade have a great...

Security is among the most debated and contested concepts in the study of international relations (IR). ‘Security’ commands a unique metaphysical and disciplinary power which involves the drawing of imaginary lines, the consolidated resentment of difference (vis-à-vis the ‘other’), as well as the constitution of self-reflective collectivities (‘identity’). Although it has become slightly embarrassing to make yet another effort to reconceptualise ‘security’, I argue in this chapter that a critical approach is required, mainly because ‘security’ is a fundamental point of reference and an essential modifier for a state that is gradually losing its pre-eminence within Europe and the wider...

NATO’s bombing campaign in Kosovo and the refusal of most Western leaders to regard it as war have prompted numerous questions about the nature of this episode in recent European history. How should ‘Kosovo’ be categorised? Can it be covered by the usual linguistic repertoire, or does ‘Kosovo’ testify to the fact that ‘war’ has become conceptually inapplicable?

For most observers the term ‘war’ remains good enough. In their view, war is well and alive. The bombing campaign in Kosovo may not correspond to the Clausewitzian definition of war, but war antedates the modern state by a good number of...

One of the starting-points of this volume is that the Weberian principle of the state as possessing a legitimate monopoly on violence is fading. Sovereigns no longer hold this monopoly; it now belongs to the international community. This chapter investigates the effects of this fading of legitimacy. If war is seen as the extension of politics by other means, then there are three crucial questions to be asked about its legitimacy. First, which actors are seen as legitimate wagers of war, and by whom? Second, over what kinds of issues is it legitimate to intensify politics by going to war...

Kosovo is not a security issue for Europe only: it must be seen in the context of global political processes. In this chapter, I argue that Kosovo was an episode in the long-term process of the domestication and marginalisation of the United Nations (UN) by the United States. These relations of domination are underpinned by Manichean dichotomous myths of good and evil and by rituals of enemy construction. Yugoslavia (Serbia) assumed the role of evil enemy, allegedly committing grave human rights’ violations and, in Kosovo, even genocide. The complicity of Kofi Annan’s UN appears to give the US the sovereign...

On 24 March 1999, NATO started a bombing campaign against targets on the territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in order to stop, or so it was claimed, alleged human rights’ violations by armed forces in what, in Serbian, is called ‘Kosovo’. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), with a coalition of parties in government, which had previously been opposed to any use of force beyond its borders, especially in the absence of a UN mandate, deployed forces to participate in this operation. Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder insisted that there was no alternative.¹ Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer asserted that...

The Kosovo war did not take place. Jean Baudrillard’s diagnosis of the Gulf War also applies to this latest expression of organised violence in contemporary politics.² This is not to deny that death and destruction defined the reality in Kosovo and Serbia in the first half of 1999. After all, NATO planes delivered large amounts of ordnance upon targets in this area, destroying both military and civilian infrastructure; killing civilians as well as soldiers. And on the ground, Serb forces engaged in the mass expulsion and murder of the Albanian population in the province. To deny that a war took...

The oddity of ‘humanitarian bombing’; the demonic Slobodan Milosevic; the violence of genocide; the darkness of Serb nationalism; the anguish of uprooted Kosovars; the hatred of ethnic cleansing. What took place in Kosovo fascinates us, both because of its many monsters and because of the opportunity it has offered ‘the West’ to portray itself as a model of altruism and morality. The war over Kosovo is now far enough in the past to view Kosovo as a ‘sign’, an emblem for things to come. Much as was the case in ancient Rome, where omens and portents were always odd and...

‘War is never civilised’, British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared on 10 June 1999, ‘but war can be necessary to uphold civilisation.’¹ On that day, seventy-eight days of war were brought to an end by the assertion that they had secured the principles on which the post-Cold War European order was founded. For that reason the Kosovo war provides an opportunity to study what the West believes to be the foundation of a new European order.² This opportunity should be used because the reflexive confusion which followed the end of the Cold War finally seems to have settled into a...

This is not a text about who was wrong and who was right; neither is it a text which aims to establish the true figures of those killed and displaced by Russian or NATO bombs. It is a tale of two conflicts that share some remarkable similarities and which are to some extent archetypal for our globalised post-Cold War world. It is, above all, an essay about two conflicts which are,nolens volens, tied like twins, because they became the focal point of three fundamental, at times competing, principles of how to organise the world. These are: the claims, rights...