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.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

https://medium.com/media/f2b333f1a74dd08742ae748eb91a8a26/href

The US and its allies have published a joint statement warning Yemen’s Houthis to cease the attacks they’ve been making on commercial vessels in the Red Sea. The Houthis, officially known as Ansarallah, have successfully slashed Israeli port activity by an extremely massive margin with their maritime tactics in response to Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza.

The statement asserts that the Yemeni attacks “are a direct threat to the freedom of navigation that serves as the bedrock of global trade in one of the world’s most critical waterways,” complaining that they are “adding significant cost and weeks of delay to the delivery of goods,” and ultimately threatens that the Houthis will “bear the responsibility of the consequences” should these attacks continue.

Many critics have been pointing out the irony of the western power alliance threatening military intervention to protect shipping containers and corporate profits while actual human beings are being butchered by Israeli airstrikes and starved by Israeli siege warfare with nothing but friendly support from these same powers.

“Palestinians would really love to get the same amount of attention and protection as shipping containers,” tweeted Palestinian-Canadian journalist Yasmine El-Sawabi.

Dave DeCamp on Twitter: "The US and some of its Allies just put out a joint statement threatening the Houthis over their Red Sea attacks on commercial shipping. Seems like they're preparing to bomb Yemen. pic.twitter.com/tV6VFdhybj / Twitter"

The US and some of its Allies just put out a joint statement threatening the Houthis over their Red Sea attacks on commercial shipping. Seems like they're preparing to bomb Yemen. pic.twitter.com/tV6VFdhybj

That the US and its allies would go to war against the people who are trying to stop an active genocide tells you everything you need to know about them. The fact that they’d do it for corporate profit margins tells you even more, and the fact that they’d do it to a nation they’ve already helped inflict unfathomable horrors upon in recent years tells you more still.

And that’s just one of the potential wars looming on the horizon in connection with the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. As Trita Parsi recently explained in The Nation, there are three other fronts along which wars could also erupt in the region apart from a western conflict with the Houthis: in Iraq and Syria where US forces have been repeatedly under attack by militants in response to the Gaza assault, in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, and the absolute nightmare scenario of a full-scale war with Iran.

“That risk exists on four fronts: Between Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah, in Syria and Iraq due to attacks on US troops by militias aligned with Iran, the Red Sea between the Houthis and the US Navy, and between Israel and Iran following both the assassination of an Iranian general in Syria and the explosion in Kerman today at the commemoration of the death of General Qassem Soleimani that has killed more than 100,” Parsi writes.

Katrina vandenHeuvel on Twitter: "Will Israel Drag the US Into Another Ruinous War? President Biden refuses to pursue the most obvious way of de-escalating tensions & avoid American deaths: a cease-fire in Gaza.@tritaparsi https://t.co/mHSj1bPDEt / Twitter"

Will Israel Drag the US Into Another Ruinous War? President Biden refuses to pursue the most obvious way of de-escalating tensions & avoid American deaths: a cease-fire in Gaza.@tritaparsi https://t.co/mHSj1bPDEt

It is a potentially ominous sign that Israel has begun focusing on ramping up aggressions against Iran and Hezbollah while simultaneously withdrawing thousands of troops from Gaza. Some analysts argue that we are seeing an attempt by Israel to pull the US into a direct war with Hezbollah, which is something US officials have reportedly been worried would happen ever since the Gaza assault began.

There are entirely too many fronts along which a new horrific war in the middle east could potentially erupt, and things are entirely too close to the brink on all of them. And all for land, money and geostrategic control, same as always. The sooner the US-centralized power structure crumbles, the better it will be for humanity.

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In Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Timothy Garton Ash reflects on European history and political transformation from the mid-20th century to the present. Deftly interweaving analysis with personal narratives, Garton Ash offers a compelling exploration of recent European history and how its lessons can help us navigate today’s challenges, writes Mario Clemens.

Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. Timothy Garton Ash. The Bodley Head. 2023.

Find this book: 

Almost ten years ago, I heard the then-German Foreign Minister (and current Federal President) Frank-Walter Steinmeier say that we have to prepare ourselves for the fact that in the near future, crises will become the norm. What sounded like a somewhat eccentric assessment now appears to be an apt description of our reality, including in Europe. How did we get here?

As Timothy Garton Ash argues in Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Western Liberals made the mistake of relying on the unfounded assumption that history would simply continue to go their way. Post-cold-war-liberals failed, for example, to care enough about economic equality (237) and thus allowed Liberalism to make way for its ugly twin, Neoliberalism.

Western Liberals made the mistake of relying on the unfounded assumption that history would simply continue to go their way.

Whether we want to understand Islamist Terrorism, the rise of European right-wing populism, or Russia’s revanchist turn, in each case we find helpful hints in recent European history. What makes Garton Ash the ideal guide through the “history of the present” is his three-dimensional experience: that of a historian, a widely travelled and prominent journalist and a politically active intellectual.

What makes Garton Ash the ideal guide through the “history of the present” is his three-dimensional experience: that of a historian, a widely travelled and prominent journalist and a politically active intellectual.

Garton Ash started travelling across Europe fresh out of school, “working on a converted troopship, the SS Nevada, carrying British schoolchildren around the Mediterranean” (27). Aged 18, he was already keeping a journal on what he saw, heard and read.

He nurtured that journalistic impulse and soon merged it with a more active political one, eventually becoming the “engaged observer” (Raymond Aron) that he desired to be. In the early 1980s, he sat with workers and intellectuals in the Gdańsk Shipyard, where the Polish Solidarity movement (Solidarność) emerged. Later in the 1980s, he befriended Václav Havel, the Czech intellectual dissident and eventual President. Garton Ash chronicled and participated in the movement led by Havel, which successfully achieved the peaceful transition of Czechoslovakia from one-party communist rule to democracy. Since then, Garton Ash has consistently enjoyed privileged access to key political figures, such as Helmut Kohl, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair and Aung San Suu Kyi. Simultaneously, he has maintained contact with so-called ordinary people. All the while, he has preserved the necessary distance intellectuals require to do their job, which in his view “is to seek the truth, and to speak truth to power” (173). His training as a historian, provides him with a broader perspective, which, in Homelands, allows him to arrange individual scenes and observations into an encompassing, convincing narrative.

Garton Ash has published several books focusing on particular themes, such as free speech, and events, such as the peaceful revolutions of 1989. In addition, he has published two books containing collected articles that cover a decade each. History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s and Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name, which covers the timespan between 2000 and 2010. Homelands now not only covers a larger timespan, the “overlapping timeframes of post-war and post-wall” (xi) – 1945 and 1989 to the present – but the chapters are also more tightly linked as had been possible in books that were based on previous publications.

By the second decade of the twenty-first century we had, for the first time ever, a generation of Europeans who had known nothing but a peaceful, free Europe consisting mainly of liberal democracies.

“Freedom and Europe” says Garton Ash, are “the two political causes closest to my heart” (xi), and he had the good fortune to witness a period where freedom was expanding within Europe. Now that history seems to be running in reverse gear, he worries that this new generation don’t quite realise what’s at stake: “By the second decade of the twenty-first century we had, for the first time ever, a generation of Europeans who had known nothing but a peaceful, free Europe consisting mainly of liberal democracies. Unsurprisingly, they tend to take it for granted’ (23-24).

Thus, one critical aim motivating Homelands is to convey to a younger generation what has been achieved by the “Europe-builders,” men and women who have been motivated by what Garton Ash calls the “memory machine,” the vivid memory of the hell Europe had turned itself into during its modern-day Thirty Years War (21-22). While nothing can equal this “direct personal memory,” he argues that there are other ways “in which knowledge of things past can be transmitted” – via literature, for instance, but also through history (24), especially when written well.

A gifted stylist, Garton Ash makes history come alive by telling the stories of individuals

A gifted stylist, Garton Ash makes history come alive by telling the stories of individuals, for instance, that of his East German friend, the pastor Werner Krätschell. On Thursday evening, 9 November 1989, Werner had just come home from the evening church service in East Berlin. When his elder daughter Tanja and her friend Astrid confirmed the rumour that the frontier to West Berlin was apparently open, Werner decided to see for himself. Taking Tanja and Astrid with him, he drove to the border crossing at Bornholmer Strasse. Like in a trance, he saw the frontier guard opening the first barrier. Next, he got a stamp on his passport – “invalid”. “‘But I can come back?’ – ‘No, you have to emigrate and are not allowed to re-enter,’” the border guard replied. Horrified because his two younger children were sleeping in the vicarage, “Werner did a U-turn inside the frontier crossing and prepared to head home. Then he heard another frontier guard tell a colleague that the order had changed: ‘They’re allowed back.’ So he did another U-turn, to point his yellow Wartburg again towards the West” (146).

History, written in this way, “as experienced by individual people and exemplified by their stories” (xiii), may indeed help us to “learn from the past without having to go through it all again ourselves” (24).

Though he emphasises the wealth, freedom and peace in late 20th-century Europe, Garton Ash also reminds us that post-war European history, even its “post-wall” period, is not an unqualified success story.

Though he emphasises the wealth, freedom and peace in late 20th-century Europe, Garton Ash also reminds us that post-war European history, even its “post-wall” period, is not an unqualified success story. Notably, right after the Cold War, there were the hot wars accompanying the dissolution of Yugoslavia. He regards the fact that the rest of Europe “permitted this ten-year return to hell” as “a terrible stain on what was otherwise one of the most hopeful periods of European history” (187).

Garton Ash is equally alert to the danger of letting one’s enthusiasm for Europe’s post-war achievements turn into self-righteousness. “That post-war Europe abjured and abhorred war would have been surprising news to the many parts of the world, from Vietnam to Kenya and Angola to Algeria, where European states continued to fight brutal wars in an attempt to hang on to their colonies” (327).

While such warnings qualify and differentiate Homelands’ central message – that today’s Europeans have much to lose – they do not reverse it. But knowing that one is bound to lose a lot can also have a paralysing effect, as many of my generation currently experience. Here again, history can help: to understand our present, we need to know what brought us here. Garton Ash is convinced that we can learn from history; he, for instance, claims that the rest of Europe should “learn the lessons of Brexit” (279).

Those who seek orientation through a better understanding of the past should turn to this extraordinary, eminently readable exploration of recent European history.

Homelands: A Personal History of Europe perfectly complements Tony Judt’s extensive Postwar (published in 2005). While Judt’s work offers a detailed and systematic account of European history after 1945, Garton Ash’s book seamlessly blends personal narratives, insightful analysis, and astute critique. Those who seek orientation through a better understanding of the past should turn to this extraordinary, eminently readable exploration of recent European history.

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: struvictory on Shutterstock.

I am far less concerned for the status of university presidents than I am for the safety and welfare of university faculty and, above all, students; there is more than academic freedom at stake.