In Language and the Rise of the Algorithm, Jeffrey Binder weaves together the past five centuries of mathematics, computer science and linguistic thought to examine the development of algorithmic thinking. According to Juan M. del Nido, Binder’s nuanced interdisciplinary work illuminates attempts to maintain and bridge the boundary between technical knowledge and everyday language.

Language and the Rise of the Algorithm. Jeffrey Binder. The University of Chicago Press. 2023

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Arguably, the history of what we now call algorithmic thinking is also the history of the consolidation of algebra, mathematics, calculus and formal logic as tools for composing, enunciating, and thinking about abstractions such as “some flowers are red”. But in less obvious ways, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm shows, it is also the history of trying to compute with, and often in spite of, language, to convey a meaningful proposition about the world. In other words, it is the history of ensuring that “red” actually means red – that we are all clear on who sets what red means (for example, experts through definition or ordinary people through usage) and agree on it – and of whether agreeing about these things is what matters when we use language.

The history of what we now call algorithmic thinking […]is also the history of trying to compute with, and often in spite of, language, to convey a meaningful proposition about the world.

Harking back to the 1500s, the first of the book’s five chapters examines attempts to use symbols to free writing from words at a time when vernaculars where plentiful, grammars unstable and literacy rates low. Algebra was not then considered part of mathematics proper but its rules, expressed in spoken language, were used for practical purposes like calculating taxes and inheritance. From myriad writing experiments emerged algebraic symbols: uncertain and indeterminate, they enabled computational reasoning about unknown values, a revolution that peaked when Viète first used letters in equations in 1591 (33-36).

Algebra was not [In the 1500s] considered part of mathematics proper but its rules, expressed in spoken language, were used for practical purposes like calculating taxes and inheritance

Chapter Two explores Leibniz’s attempts to produce a philosophical language made of symbols and unburdened by words, such that morals, metaphysics, and experiences are all subject to calculation. This was not an exercise in spitting out numbers, but with the aim of demonstrating the reasoning behind every step of communication: a truth-producing machine (62-64). The messiness of communication struck back: how can one ensure that all terms and their nuances are understood in the same way by different people? Leibniz argued that knowledge was divinely installed in us, waiting to be unlocked by devices such as his, but Locke’s argument that knowledge comes from sensory experience and requires an agreement over what things mean won the day (79), paving the way towards an emphasis on concepts and form.

Leibniz argued that knowledge was divinely installed in us, waiting to be unlocked […] but Locke’s argument that knowledge comes from sensory experience and requires an agreement over what things mean won the day

Leibniz also sought to resolve political differences through that language. Chapter Three argues Condorcet shared this goal and the premise that vernaculars were a hindrance, but contrary to Leibniz, he believed universal ideas needed to be taught, not uncovered. Condillac’s and Stanhope’s experiments with other logical machines – actual, material devices designed to think in logical terms through objects  – epitomised two tensions framing the century after the French Revolution: first, the matter of whether the people, and their vernacular culture, or the learned, and their enlightened culture, should govern shared meanings – that is to say, give meaning – and second, whether algebra should focus on philosophical and conceptual explanations or on formal definitions and rules (121).

The latter drive would prevail, and as Chapter Four shows, rigour came to emanate not from verbal definitions or clarity of meanings, but from axiomatic systems judged on consistency: meanings are irrelevant to the formal rules by which the system operates (148). Developing this consistency would not require the complete replacement of vernaculars Leibniz and Condorcet argued for: rather, symbolic forms would work alongside vernaculars to produce truth values, as with Boolean logic – the one powering search engines, for example. The fifth and last chapter, “Mass Produced Software Components”, rise of programming languages, in particular ALGOL, and the consolidation of regardless of specifics: intelligible, actionable results within a given amount of time (166).

Binder’s rigorous dissection of debates over language, philosophy, geometry, algebra, history and culture spanning 500 years integrates debates that most disciplines today, aside from some strands of media studies and Science and Technology Studies, tend to treat separately

This book is a tightly packed, erudite contribution to the growing concern in the Humanities with algorithms. Binder’s rigorous dissection of debates over language, philosophy, geometry, algebra, history and culture spanning 500 years integrates debates that most disciplines today, aside from some strands of media studies and Science and Technology Studies, tend to treat separately or with a poor sense of their inbuilt connections. A welcome result of this exercise is the historicisation of certain critiques of technological interventions in politics that, generally lacking this kind of integrated, long-range view, we tend to treat as novel and cutting-edge. For example, an 1818 obituary for Charles Mahon, third Earl of Stanhope and inventor of the Demonstrator, a “reasoning machine”, already claimed that technical solutions for other-than-technical problems such as his tend to replicate the biases of their creators (113), and often the very problems they intended to solve. This critique of technoidealism is now commonplace in the social sciences.

A second benefit of the author’s mode of writing is not explicit in the book but is arguably more consequential. From Bacon’s dismissal of words as “idols of the market” in 1623 (15) to PageRank algorithm’s developers’ goal to remove human judgement by mechanisation in the 1990s (200), the book traces attempts across the centuries to free reason and knowledge from language and rhetoric. In doing this, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm effectively serves as a highly persuasive history of the affects, ethics and aspirations of technocratic reason and rule. The book cuts across the histories of bureaucracy and expertise and the birth of governmentality to tell us how an abstraction in how we make meaning work emerged – an abstraction we are asked to trust in, and argue for, partly because it is the kind of abstraction it ended up being.

The book traces attempts across the centuries to free reason and knowledge from language and rhetoric

This is a rich and nuanced book, at times encyclopaedic in scope, and except for a slight jump in complexity and some jargon in the fifth and last chapter, it will be accessible to readers lacking prior knowledge of algorithms, mathematics or language philosophy. It will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and humanities, from philosophy and history to sociology and anthropology, as well as readers in political science, government studies and economics for the reasons listed above. It could work as course material for very advanced students.

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Image Credit: Lettuce. on Flickr.

In Random Walk: Memoir of an Itinerant, economist Richard Dale reflects on his life and career, tracking his intellectual shift from a believer in free-market economics to a proponent of more stringent regulation. An accessible and engaging read, Dale’s autobiography shares significant insights for those interested in the complexities of financial markets, writes Nicholas Barr. 

Random Walk: Memoir of an Itinerant. Richard Dale. Tricorn Books. 2023.

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Richard Dale’s autobiography raises an interesting conundrum. He describes jobs in financial markets and academia (many, often multiple), homes (I lost count), properties contemplated (uncountable), academic disciplines explored (economics, law, finance), books authored (nine, including law and finance, and in retirement history and fiction).

The conundrum is whether the story is the “random walk” of the book’s title or something more deliberate. An early chapter describes Dale’s undergraduate days at LSE. Then, as now, LSE was about analytical training, aiming to give students broad, flexible skills applicable to problem solving in whichever areas they ended up. At the time, unlike now, there was relatively little teaching support – in some courses students were given a book list, ie, a list of books, in which they were encouraged to forage to complement lectures.

Dale used the resulting analytical self-sufficiency [from his undergraduate degree at LSE] to qualify as a barrister via self-study, posing the question of whether his account is less random than an early example of a portfolio career.

Dale used the resulting analytical self-sufficiency to qualify as a barrister via self-study, posing the question of whether his account is less random than an early example of a portfolio career. His early career was in financial markets, including working for the Moscow Narodny Bank, Cripps Warburg, and Rothschild’s, a combination of hard work and high living. Partly for health reasons, the second part was primarily academic, initially at the University of Kent, later at the University of Southampton. And threading throughout were entrepreneurial activities such as establishing the International Currency Review, setting up a credit rating service sponsored by the Financial Times, and suggesting and then editing the FT Financial Regulation Report – a life of career success and latterly of financial comfort.

That said, Dale is open about the role of luck (on which see Robert Frank’s excellent book). He describes a childhood heavily financially constrained, but as the book makes clear, the family had solid social capital, so his early life was eased by advice from family contacts and financial help from relatives for school fees (like his father, he went to Marlborough College). Luck also included legendary teachers at LSE, notably the economist Richard Lipsey and political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. As it turned out, a further piece of luck was the departure of his sponsor at Kent University just after Dale arrived, leaving him with an unstructured two years of funding, which he used to write his first well-received book (a reminder of the famous golfer Gary Player’s dictum that “he harder you work, the luckier you get”). Also lucky was the new appointment at Kent University of the eminent lawyer, Rosalyn Higgins, who supported Dale’s attempt to start an academic career, and sponsored him for a two-year Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. A third view of Dale’s journey, therefore, is as a rolling stone (Mick Jagger was one of his fellow students).

Given my own work on the role of markets – when they work well, and when they don’t – I was particularly interested in Dale’s intellectual journey. In his words,

“Since LSE days I had always had a great admiration for Milton Friedman and the free-market economics of the Chicago School. However, over the years I became increasingly sceptical about the periodic boom-bust cycles of financial markets and the propensity of both equity and credit markets to succumb to bouts of euphoria and panic… I experienced for myself as a fund manager the mad boom-bust years of 1973/76 and I observed the absurd stock market valuations of dot.com and technology companies in the late 1990s which was followed by a spectacular collapse” (200).

That change of view, based on practical experience, was supported by academic research on market failures – imperfect information, behaviour different from narrow economic rationality, search frictions (eg, the fact that it takes time to find a new job) and incomplete contracts – recognised by multiple Nobel prizes this century.  Thus, over time Dale moved from a view based on what economists call a rational expectations model, to the more recent emphasis on behavioural finance.

A further reinforcement of Dale’s views is the distinction between risk (where the likelihood of different outcomes is well known, eg, the probability of breaking a leg during a skiing holiday) and uncertainty (where there is a clear risk but little knowledge of its likelihood, eg, future rates of inflation) or whether, when and how artificial intelligence will be beneficial or harmful.

A further reinforcement of Dale’s views is the distinction between risk (where the likelihood of different outcomes is well known, eg, the probability of breaking a leg during a skiing holiday) and uncertainty (where there is a clear risk but little knowledge of its likelihood, eg, future rates of inflation) or whether, when and how artificial intelligence will be beneficial or harmful. It is a fundamental error to conflate risk and uncertainty when analysing financial markets.

Dale became convinced of the need for more stringent regulation, and was prescient in predicting the 2008 financial and economic crisis.

Thus, Dale became convinced of the need for more stringent regulation, and was prescient in predicting the 2008 financial and economic crisis. In doing so, as one of very few experts to sound a warning, he faced considerable – at times personal – pushback, both from finance academics and from practitioners.

During his academic career, Dale straddled the worlds of scholarship and practice. He established a successful MSc in International Banking and Financial Studies at Southampton. In parallel was policy work, including talks at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, testifying before US Congressional Committees, membership of the European Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee, specialist adviser to the Treasury and Civil Service Committee, and writing books and policy papers (on the last – to my great envy – he developed an ability to write fast with no need for drafts, a skill he shared with his LSE mentor Alan Day who was his tutor and subsequently supported some of his policy activities).

Which brings the story to the third part of Dale’s career, so-called retirement, giving him freedom to pursue a long-standing interest in history, writing a series of books, including on Walter Raleigh, those writings being sufficiently acclaimed to bring him election to a Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society.

Running through the career narrative is Dale’s personal life: a pre-university spell on a kibbutz, influenced by his father, a man with strong socialist views (which made for interesting subsequent conversations with a son working in finance); a long first marriage with children, including “too many jobs [and] too many house moves” and a long, happy second marriage in which he had, “only one employer … and owned only one house (plus a share in another)” (246). He had a very active social life, including meeting friends abroad, sometimes for shared holidays, often with lifelong friends from his student days and early career.

So, a career straddling economics, law and finance, retirement as historian with considerable holiday travel, and a full personal and social life – what, if anything, might be missing?

So, a career straddling economics, law and finance, retirement as historian with considerable holiday travel, and a full personal and social life – what, if anything, might be missing? Some readers might wish to see more context around external events. Dale recounts childhood memories of the 1952 Great London Fog and 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, but makes little mention of other events relevant to the economy and financial markets such as the collapse of the communist economic system in the USSR and Central and Eastern Europe and the highly consequential Deng Xiaoping economic reforms in the 1970s that underpinned the economic rise of China.

Also relevant are the dramatic changes in technology. Around the time Dale was an undergraduate, LSE installed a new machine; it was called a photocopier. Staff were sent on training courses on how to use and maintain it; students were not allowed anywhere near it. The timeline from there to Facetime (or listening to Test Match Special on a transatlantic flight) is also directly relevant to the operation of financial markets, for example the possibility of high-speed trading.

An engaging and non-technical read, accessible to anyone with an interest in financial markets.

All in all, this is an engaging and non-technical read, accessible to anyone with an interest in financial markets. For me, the core message of the book, which comes through loud and clear, is that financial market regulation matters big time. With complex products, sellers are often better-informed than buyers, creating space for misselling (think 19th century snake-oil salesmen). Precisely for that reason, products like pharmaceutical drugs are heavily regulated. With analogous complexities, the case for regulating financial products is equally compelling.

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Image Credit: dgcampillo on Shutterstock.

Okay, so we’ve talked about Bosnia and how that set things up for the Kosovo War. Now, what happened in Kosovo that made NATO want to get involved there?

Back when Serbia was part of Yugoslavia, Kosovo was a “special autonomous province” of Serbia. This meant that it had limited self-rule and its own regional legislature. Since the majority of Kosovars were ethnic Albanians, this means that under Communist Yugoslavia, Kosovo’s politics and its economy came to be dominated by Albanians. The Serbs — who were a majority in Serbia as a whole, but a minority in Kosovo — came to resent this.

The situation got steadily worse through the 1970s and 1980s, because the Albanian majority kept growing. In broad numbers, in the years after WWII Kosovo was about 65 t0 70% Albanian, 25 to 30% Serbs, and 5% others. By the 1980s those numbers were more like 80% Albanian, 15% Serbs, and 5% others. Partly this was because the socially conservative Albanians had larger families. Partly it was because of differential emigration, with Serbs easily able to move to Serbia proper in search of better jobs and opportunities, while Albanians were more likely to stay in Kosovo. In any event, as the Serbs within Kosovo became more outnumbered, Kosovo became more and more of a rallying cry for Serb nationalism.

— Really, “rallying cry” doesn’t quite cover it.  The Serbs convinced themselves, not just that Serbs in Kosovo were losing political and economic power, but that they were being oppressed and persecuted by the Albanians.  As Yugoslavia collapsed, late 1980s Serbia went into an orgy of nationalist outrage and anti-Albanian hatred.  Every incident between Serbs and Albanians, however minor, was blown up and distorted into proof that the Serbs were “being beaten” by Albanian criminals and rapists.  It was this wave of outrage and hatred that Milosevic first rode to power.

This all came to a head in 1989, when Serbia revoked Kosovo’s autonomous status and took over direct rule from Belgrade.  I mentioned that Kosovo had an autonomous regional legislature; this was annulled by the simple expedient of surrounding the building with the Army and pointing guns and tank barrels at it until they voted to surrender all their powers to the Serbian national legislature in Belgrade.

Now, from 1988 to 2000, the utterly dominant figure in Serbia was Slobodan Milosevic.  He wasn’t a dictator, quite.  Rather, he was a relentlessly illiberal ethno-nationalist populist of a sort that seemed quite odd in the end-of-civilization 1990s, and has become depressingly more familiar since.

Milosevic’s government was generally corrupt and kleptocratic. However, for Albanians in Kosovo, it was also brutally oppressive.  From 1989 onwards, the Milosevic government embarked on a program of “re-Serbianization”.  Albanians were dismissed from all management positions in state-owned enterprises (which is to say, all businesses of any significance) and replaced with Serbs. Albanians were completely purged from the police, the judiciary, and the upper ranks of the civil service. The University of Pristina, which had been the center of Kosovar Albanian intellectual society, was turned into a Serbian university, with Serbian professors, administrators, and students replacing the Albanians.   All major media were under Serbian control; the public use of the Albanian language was dramatically curtailed.  Albanian towns ceased to receive money for things like road maintenance and fixing utilities, while Serbian towns got new community centers.  Protests and strikes were brutally suppressed, and strikers and union members were fired.

Unsurprisingly, all of this caused Kosovo’s economy to crash hard: unemployment surged and household income collapsed.  But almost all of this pain was felt by the Albanians, so it didn’t matter.

Two points about all this.  The first is that there was a strong element of performative cruelty to Serbian policy.  Milosevic’s government could — in theory — have established Serb dominance in Kosovo with a much gentler hand.  Having centralized political power out of the province, there wasn’t an overwhelming need for firing and purges.  But the goal was not just to “protect” the “threatened” Serb minority in Kosovo; it was to punish the Albanians.

Albanians refer to this period of Kosovo’s history as “the Serb Occupation”.  Nobody else calls it that, because legally Kosovo was still part of Serbia.  Here I’m calling it the “Serbian Ascendancy” as a deliberate callback to the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, particularly the high Ascendancy of the 18th century.  A province dominated ethnic and religious minority, supported by a much bigger and more powerful neighboring country; the majority locked out of political power and most paths to economic advancement, with limited access to education and de facto second class citizenship; a rubber-stamp Parliament / legislature that could do nothing but approve measures passed in Belgrade / London.  It’s a bit familiar.  Of course, the English were able to keep this going in Ireland for over a century.  The Serb Ascendancy in Kosovo lasted just over a decade, for reasons we’ll shortly discuss.

A second point: then and later, some observers tried to present this as a “clash of civilizations” between Christian Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Albanians. This was, by and large, nonsense. While religion made a comeback in post-Communist Serbia just as it did everywhere else in the Communist world, it wasn’t a significant driver of the Kosovo conflict. Neither group was particularly religious. Even at the time, a common joke was that “Kosovo is a fight between people who never go to church on Sunday and people who never go to mosque on Friday”. It’s also worth noting that a significant minority of Kosovar Albanians were Catholic, not Muslim. It made no difference; the Serbs treated them exactly the same.  It was an ethnic conflict, not a religious one.

Okay, so: it’s possible to divide the Ascendancy into two periods.  For the first few years, 1989-1995, Kosovo was oppressed but not particularly violent.  Bad as things were for the Kosovar Albanians, they could have been much worse. There was no war. The Serb police were notoriously brutal and corrupt, ordinary citizens were subject to arbitrary arrest and harassment, and troublemakers were likely to be beaten or tortured, but there were no mass murders or massacres. The Albanians saw mass unemployment, skyrocketing poverty, and dramatically decreased access to health care, education, and basic services, but there wasn’t mass famine. Albanians were mostly locked out of higher education, elected office, and the civil service, but nobody was being ethnically cleansed.

Through this period, the Albanians mostly relied on peaceful and non-violent resistance, under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova. Rugova is a controversial character, but he probably delayed the eventual spiral of resistance -> violent oppression -> more violent resistance by several years. Whether this was ultimately a good thing… well, as I said, he’s controversial. But anyway, from 1989 to 1995 Kosovo was miserable and oppressed, but relatively peaceful.

After 1995 things began to change. One reason was demographics.  Albanians continued to have more children than Serbs, and Serbs continued to emigrate.  Attempts by the Milosevic government to “correct the demographic imbalance” by encouraging Serbs to move to Kosovo went nowhere.  There’s a story about a busload of Serb refugees from Bosnia, realizing the bus was going to Kosovo: they mutinied, commandeered the bus and took it to Belgrade instead.  The Serb population of Kosovo continued to decline both in absolute and relative terms, leading to the sardonic joke that “The Serbs would do anything for Kosovo, except live there”.  In 1989 Albanians had outnumbered Serbs about five to one; by 1996 this was probably six to one, with eight or ten to one looking likely within another generation.  At some point there would simply not be enough Serbs to make minority rule feasible.  By 1996, the Milosevic government was openly considering the other side of the equation: “correcting the imbalance” by reducing the number of Albanians, either peacefully or otherwise.

Meanwhile, the Dayton Agreement had come and gone. As noted in the previous post, Dayton solved the problem of the war in Bosnia.  But it completely ignored Kosovo. The Kosovar Albanians felt, not unreasonably, that they’d been ignored and abandoned by the West. Rugova’s prestige took a hit; nonviolent resistance had accomplished nothing. Voices favoring more violent methods began to be heard. In 1996, the embryonic Kosovo Liberation Army made its first moves, with a handful of attacks on Serb policemen and particularly oppressive and unpopular Serb officials. These attacks were not particularly well planned or coordinated, but they alarmed the Serbs and provoked a crackdown — which of course gave the KLA even more credibility with ordinary Albanians.

I’ll pause and note here that, in this as in so many other instances, the Serbs had pickled a rod for their own back.  By locking Albanians out of higher education and most non-menial jobs, they had created a huge pool of unemployed and angry young men.  By restricting police jobs to Serbs, they had made sure that large areas of the province were under- or un-policed.  (And most Albanians spoke Serbian, while very few Serbs spoke Albanian, so much of Albanian society was opaque to Serb law enforcement anyway.)  And by their punitive all-stick-no-carrot approach to inter-community relations, they’d prevented the emergence of a class of evolues or collaborators with a vested interested in the status quo.  So the preconditions for a guerrilla movement were there from day one.  In retrospect, it’s mildly surprising that it took six or seven years to emerge.

A second driver of violence came in 1997 when the government of neighboring Albania, just over the border, suddenly collapsed.  “Collapse” here does not mean in the parliamentary sense.  For reasons beyond the scope of this blog post, Albania was thrown into complete anarchy for several weeks. During this period, the local armories were all looted. Albania was full of these armories, because the Communist dictator Enver Hoxha had believed that in the event of invasion, the people would need to be armed quickly. When they were looted, tens of thousands of weapons suddenly came available — rifles, pistols, submachine guns and light machine guns, grenades. For a while, you could walk into any village market in rural northern Albania and buy grenades for a dollar apiece, a pistol for ten dollars or a rifle for twenty. Since the border between Albania and Kosovo was fairly porous, thousands of Kosovars did just that. Suddenly Kosovo was awash in guns.

So the security situation in Kosovo began to slide rapidly downhill. The Serbs became more paranoid and oppressive; human rights violations got worse; the economy slumped; and the Albanians became ever more resentful and more inclined to ignore Rugova and support violent action against Serb rule.

But up to early 1998, two and a half years after Dayton, Kosovo still was /relatively/ peaceful. And — up until early 1998 — the rest of the world wasn’t really paying much attention to Kosovo.

And then in the spring of 1998 the Serbs decided to eliminate a local KLA leader named Adem Jasheri.

We’re just a few weeks away from the 25th anniversary of the Kosovo War, which started in March 1999. So, I’d like to do a retrospective on the war’s causes.

This is a long story! It’s going to take at least three posts, and they won’t be short. I think it’s interesting, but it may not be to everyone’s taste, so the rest is below the cut.

To understand Kosovo, you have to start with Bosnia.

When Yugoslavia collapsed, six countries took its place. One of the successor states was Bosnia, where a three-cornered war erupted between ethnic Serbs (supported by Bosnia’s neighbor Serbia), ethnic Croats (supported by Bosnias’s neighbor Croatia), and Bosniaks.

Over three years of war, 1992-1995, about 80,000 people had died in Bosnia, most of them civilians. The Bosnian war had also seen the protracted siege of Sarajevo, a peaceful small European city that had hosted the Winter Olympics just a few years earlier, with gruesome scenes of destruction and suffering beamed directly into European media. And then of course the conflict had also included mass ethnic cleansing by all sides; the institution of “detainment” camps that were unpleasantly reminiscent of the concentration camps of WWII; and several horrific massacres, most notably at Srebrenica. From a prewar population of just 4.2 million or so, about 600,000 Bosnians were refugees; of these, about half were spread across Europe, with another 10% or so going to the United States and Canada. At the time, these were the largest refugee flows Europe had seen since the 1940s.

Of course Bosnia was not the only conflict in the former Yugoslavia. The early 1990s had a brief shooting war as Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia; the creation of two breakaway Serb “republics” on the territory of Croatia; the near complete destruction of the city of Vukovar; and massive damage to the coastal town of Dubrovnik, a cultural landmark that had also been a popular vacation destination for many Europeans. However, by early 1995 Bosnia had been the main center of violence in the former Yugoslavia for some time. And it was Bosnia that focused Europe’s attention, with non-stop coverage by European print and broadcast media, and a great deal of public attention and indignation.

Rightly or wrongly, the government of Serbia — at that time, dominated by populist strongman Slobodan Milosevic — was widely perceived as the main driver of the conflict. Certainly Milosevic’s government was supporting the breakaway Serb regions in Croatia, and also supporting and subsidizing the Bosnian Serbs in their efforts to seize as much as possible of Bosnia. There are lengthy “whose fault” arguments on these points which I won’t reprise here.  My own take is, all sides were morally sketchy, all sides committed atrocities, but the Serbs were the worst if only because they had more guns and more resources.

The key point is that by early 1995, the Bosnian war was entering its fourth year, and most European governments were under heavy pressure from public opinion to do something about it. The US government felt less pressure from public opinion, but the Clinton administration had come to realize that two years of attempted diplomacy had accomplished exactly nothing.

At that point — mid 1995 — the Bosnian Serbs were, very broadly speaking, winning the war. Although they were only about 35 to 40 percent of the population, they had managed to seize and control over half of Bosnia’s land area. They had failed to take Sarajevo, but they had control of most of Bosnia’s agriculture and industry. They were the most numerous single group; they had been disproportionately dominant in the army and police before the war; and they were strongly supported by Serbia, which gave them arms, supplies, and financial and logistical support.  Their “Republika Srpska” breakaway state was de facto independent from what remained of the Bosnian government.  So the Bosnian Serbs had no compelling reason to stop fighting.  And by the summer of 1995 they were threatening some of the “safe areas” that had been set up for Bosniak refugees. Given their track record, there was a reasonable fear that this could lead to another round of ethnic cleansing and massacres.

So NATO decided to intervene. In August 1995, NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force, a series of air strikes against the Bosnian Serb military. Operation Deliberate Force has been mostly forgotten, but it was this — not the Kosovo conflict a few years later — that was the first intervention by NATO in the former Yugoslavia. Indeed, as far as I know it was the first significant use of offensive force by NATO anywhere, ever.

Operation Deliberate Force was a pretty complete success.  (This may be why it has gone completely down the memory hole.)  The Bosnian Serbs couldn’t continue their offensive against opponents backed by NATO airpower. Indeed, it soon became clear that they would be forced back and would lose ground. So they appealed to Milosevic for more assistance. But Milosevic had no interest in spending more money and effort to support the Bosnian Serbs in an impossible fight against NATO. After all, they had already achieved their major war goals: they had seized half of Bosnia, driven out all of the non-Serb populations, secured all the border with Serbia, and set up an effectively independent government. Capturing Sarajevo would be nice but was hardly necessary; the “Republika Srpska”, the ethnic Serb state within Bosnia, was already a going concern. So, Milosevic refused any further help.

Meanwhile, there were two additional factors in play: Croatia and the Bosnian Croats. In August 1995 the Croatian army launched the extremely successful Operation Storm, wiping the breakaway “Republic of Serb Krajina” off the map in less than a week. Operation Storm had been prepared long in advance, with tacit technical and logistical support from several NATO members, including Britain, the USA, and France. Nevertheless, the Croatian army achieved complete strategic and tactical surprise. The Serb parastate collapsed and over 100,000 ethnic Serb refugees fled into Serbian Bosnia and Serbia itself.

Then just a few weeks later, in September, the Bosnian Croats inside Bosnia launched Operation Mistral. While much smaller than Operation Storm (the Bosnian Croats were much fewer in number and less well equipped than the Croatian army), Operation Mistral was also a modest success, and the Bosnian Croats seized several towns that had been held by the Bosnian Serbs. From a Serb POV, this raised the possibility of Bosnian Croat and Bosniak ground troops moving forward with the direct support of NATO airpower — or, even more alarming, the possibility of direct intervention by the newly invigorated Croatian army on the ground in Bosnia.

The Bosnian Serbs had some modest air defenses: they did manage to shoot down one or two NATO planes. But they really had nothing that could counter the multiple threat of NATO bombing, Croat/Bosniak attacks under NATO air cover, and the possibility of intervention by the Croatian army. So, almost overnight, the Serbs went from pushing forward and winning the war to falling backwards and losing the war. Also, they now had the alarming fate of the “Republic of Serb Krajina” in front of them: their brother ethnic Serb parastate had been wiped right out of existence in a week. Their only option now was to beg for help from Milosevic in Belgrade — and, if he refused, to quickly negotiate a deal before they lost even more ground.

So when Milosevic did indeed refuse to help, that forced the Bosnian Serbs to accept a cease-fire and, ultimately, a negotiated peace. The bombing started in August 1995; it ended less than a month later, in September, with a cease-fire. By December 1995 a peace treaty had been signed, the famous Dayton Accords. The Accords have been heavily criticized, then and since — but they ended the war in Bosnia, full stop.

So Operation Deliberate Force was a success by any reasonable standard. Unfortunately, the nature of that success was misunderstood. American and European political and military leaders saw that after three and a half years of bloodshed, ethnic cleansing, and massacre, a firm stand and three weeks of bombing had solved the problem, or anyway had at least ended the war and stopped the killing. This gave everyone the idea that problems in the former Yugoslavia could be solved by a quick bombing campaign. When confronted with the power of NATO, the Bosnian Serbs had quickly backed down. So, if confronted with similar overwhelming force in Kosovo, Milosevic and Serbia would probably back down in much the same way.

There were two problems with this analysis. The first problem was that while Milosevic didn’t care that much about Bosnia, he cared very much about Kosovo. In Bosnia, it was a question of whether ethnic Serbs would control 52% or 49% of the country, and whether they would have complete de facto independence or whether they might have to give insincere lip service to a very weak Bosnian central government. From Milosevic’s POV, these issues were pretty secondary — almost trivial, really. He had most of what he wanted in Bosnia: a large ethnically cleansed pure-Serbian buffer state along his western border, de facto mostly independent, beholden to him and his government and effectively controlled by Belgrade. The precise details of that state’s borders and authority were minor and negotiable.

But Kosovo, on the other hand, was existential. Kosovo was, in the opinion of every Serb, a province of Serbia.  The fact that Kosovo was mostly populated by ethnic Albanians who didn’t want to be part of Serbia was completely irrelevant.  Serb rule over Kosovo was a core interest to multiple actors — the Serbian public generally, Milosevic’s party and supporters particularly, and Milosevic himself. Milosevic could let his Bosnian Serb clients give up some scraps of land in Bosnia and accept the nominal sovereignty of a toothless Bosnian government. That was really no big deal. But losing Kosovo?  Kosovo, an integral part of Serbia?  That, he could not afford and would not accept.

The second problem was that Europe’s leadership forgot that Operation Deliberate Force was just one part of a three-pronged strategy. It happened alongside Operation Mistral (offensive by Bosnian Croats, boots on the ground inside Bosnia) and Operation Storm (highly successful offensive by Croatian army, threatened massive invasion by ground forces). In Kosovo, one of those prongs (threat of invasion) would be completely absent, while another (local combatants in theater) would be much weaker. So while in 1995 in Bosnia the Serbs had folded quickly in the face of a brief air campaign, in 1999 in Kosovo things would be rather different.