The Operational Role of the OSCE in South-Eastern Europe: Contributing to Regional Stability in the Balkans by Victor-Yves Ghebali & Daniel Warner

Author:Victor-Yves Ghebali & Daniel Warner [Ghebali, Victor-Yves & Warner, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351749893
Google: oPhKDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 38506388
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

The Co-operation between International Organisations in the Management of the Third Yugoslav War

Eric Remacle

Rather than the perilous exercise of drawing up an exhaustive list of the eight and a half years of war in the Balkans, this contribution will be more modest, presenting ten propositions on the lessons of the involvement of international organisations in what can be called ‘the third Balkan war’.

I

It seems necessary to resituate the conflicts which have bloodied the territory of former Yugoslavia since 1991 in a longer context, as proposed by the method of the historian Fernand Braudel. We can consider the recent conflict as the extension of the two previous Balkan wars of this century: that of the 1940s and that of the 1910s, or even from as far back as the birth of the Balkan Nation States after the carving up of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. In the same vein as Eric Hobsbawm, who in his work The Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century invites us to understand the period 1914-45 as a single world war interrupted by a twenty-year truce, one can indeed, with the passage of time, remark that the wars of South-Eastern Europe constitute a long conflict of nearly a century interrupted by a few periods of peace. The similarities are indeed striking. The same projection of identity into the territories, the same confrontation between competing nationalist tendencies, the same ferocity of combat, the same alliances between belligerents and Great Powers, the same sort of external intervention, the same mobilisation of multiple forms of propaganda by the two camps, the same type of international settlement involving types of protectorates. To remark this is not to attempt to condemn the region and its people to a sort of war fatalism, as certain paternalist commentators have tried to do in Western Europe these last eight years. It is more a question of identifying the deeply rooted double-sided nature of this conflict. On one hand at a local level the struggle for the creation of mono-ethnic Nation States; on the other the geopolitical reorganisation of the European order by Cold War’s victorious powers.

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