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Kosovo Crossing: American Ideals Meet Reality On The Balkan Battlefields

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What would a book with the title "Kosovo Crossing: American Ideals Meet Reality in the Balkan Battlefield" be about? You may think it will be about the 1999 Kosovo war and its aftermath - I certainly did. But you will be, as I was, mistaken.

The first one hundred pages of 'Kosovo Crossing' are a discussion of American foreign policy from Theodore Roosevelt to George Bush sr., with an emphasis about military intervention abroad.

The next 50 pages are a history of the Balkan, from Roman times and up to the end of Tito's regime, with a special focus on the Post WW1 era. It is a topic author David Fromkin clearly knows much about, as the author of the brilliant study of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

But it is not the Kosovo war, nor really its near history - that would only come in the last 50 pages, and even then, the discussion is less about the Kosovo war then about the power and limitation of American Interventions. It is telling when the line "Kosovo is a province of 4,200 square miles in southern Serbia, slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut" appears on page 158!

The two books of Fromkin I have previously read included the brilliant, carefully research and wonderfully written 'A Peace to End All Peace', an all time classic about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and its aftermath, and 'The Way of the World', a well written but unspectacular outline of human history. Unfortunately, Kosovo Crossing is much more like the latter then the former - indeed, it does not even reach the highlights of 'The Way of the World'.

That is not, however, for the lack of clear writing. Fromkin should serve as a model for most historians and columnists. See his description of the rational of American Interventions:

'It was FDR, and not John Donne, who was vindicated by history. "Any man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind", wrote the seventeenth century poet, and while it is true that sometimes another person's dying is like a bit of one's self dying, too, it isn't always like that. Most of the times it makes good sense to ask for whom the bell tolls.' (p. 167)

The bulk of Fromkin's book is calling against humanitarian interventions. Fromkin believes that America should intervene only when its vital interests are at risk (pp. 168-169). Fromkin is not sanguine about the suffering of the Albanians who have gone through "ethnic cleansing", but his solution is bizarre; Fromkin argues that the US and the EU should allow the refugees to settle in them. (pp. 182-182).

There are two immediate problems with this idea:

First, it is a political impossibility; As Peter Novick argues in The Holocaust in American Life, political obstacles are no less real then technical ones; No matter how high spirited or moral a President of the United States will be, accepting millions of refugees is bound to be beyond his powers.
Second, and no less important, is that this will of course only encourage ethnic cleansing - indeed, might paradoxically lead to a moral case in favor of ethnic cleansing! Indeed, why must Palestinian refugees live in poverty in Israel, Lebanon and Jordan? Why not send them to America? Indiscriminate acceptance of refugees is bound to make the world more hospitable to war, massacres and ethnic cleansing.

The Palestinian example reminds us of an even more basic fallacy in Fromkin's account: Ethnic cleansing does not always solve ethnic conflicts, despite his claim that "If the US and NATO had not intervened, the Serbs would have settled the Kosovo issue, by ethnic cleansing. The Kosovars would have been pushed into Albania and forcibly reunited with their own people. Kosovo would be owned and inhibited exclusively by Serbs. Monstrous though it would have been to let the Milosevic regime profit from its crimes, it would all be over." (p. 190). I'm afraid that I don't necessarily share Dr. Fromkin's belief in the assured success of ethnic cleansing.

As a book about American intervention in the world, Kosovo Crossing has been rendered somewhat obsolete by 9/11. His skepticism about NATO's role in Kosovo also looks, five years down the road, at least partially overstated. In comparison with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kosovo looks like the very model of American interventions.

David Fromkin wrote an interesting and well written book. At 5.99 U$, it is truly a catch. But I do wish that Fromkin's pen will turn again to something more ambitious.

I have just finished historian David Fromkin's Kosovo Crossing: The Reality of American Intervention in the Balkans. I've long been interested in Balkan history, particularly since reading Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in 1996.

So, I was pleased when this book began with a focus on West's book, her time in Yugoslavia before World War II, and the genuine attachment others who study and/or love this region have for her work and thoughts on the Balkans. Quoting Robert D. Kaplan, author of another well-known work on the region, Balkan Ghosts, Fromkin illustrates the influence West's work has had on writers following in her footsteps, when he writes that he would have rather lost his passport and his money than his copy of Black Lamb.

While all of West's information and her work on the subject is no longer accepted today, Fromkin's respect for this book that has so influenced me attracted to me to his work, and kept me very engaged in the few days it took me to read this 196-page book, which is really an extended essay on the ways in which World War I shaped the twentieth century in Europe, and how President Woodrow Wilson's response to "the Great War" has continued to shape American foreign policy in that same time period.

Copyrighted in 1999, this work does not report a resolution on Kosovo. (In the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs initiated ethnic cleansing techniques to rid the Kosovo province of its majority of ethnic Albanians - of 2,000,000 residents of the region, only 200,000 were not ethnic Albanians.) But by the end of the book, this seemed secondary to the points raised and argued by Fromkin, and the reality of the situation today supports Fromkin's thesis. (The region is still being administered by the United Nations, or that human rights organizations are calling for continuing protection.)

In the line of this book, Kosovo (or Kosova, to its Albanian residents) is the latest iteration of Wilsonian foreign policy. The book begins with a retelling of West's experiences at Kosovo Polje (Field of the Blackbirds), at which she saw a sacrifice of a lamb by a father in thanks for the birth of his daughter. This place matters so much to the Serbs because it is the (mythical?) site of the 1389 decisive battle in which the Serbian leader, Tsar Lazar, bargained with heaven that he would lose the battle with the Ottomans and gain eternity in heaven. Such a sacrifice grated on West, who was looking in the late 1930s at another great war on the Continent. The lamb's sacrifice and Lazar's, whose personal aggrandizement for eternity left the Balkan peninsula submerged under Ottoman rule for nearly as long, was just wrong to West. She rejected the idea of sacrifice as necessary for good categorically.

And West wondered, pondering Kosovo, why the people who were good were reluctant to use their power to effect good in the world, while those willing to use power, rarely had good intentions. She wondered why the right would not impose their rightness through the use of their power.

Through his discussion of the twentieth century in Europe and America, including discussions of Vietnam, Iraq I and Korea, Fromkin frames his ideas under the Wilsonian doctrine of preserving existing national boundaries (even at the cost, it would seem, of his other overarching concept, self-determination for nations). My reading of Fromkin leads me to believe that George H.W. Bush didn't push on to Baghdad as part of this belief of preserving national boundaries, and using force to defend either the vital interests of the nation or the existing boundaries of another country. This seemed to structure the Americans' response in Korea, as well. The problem, Fromkin states, with this is that not only do you have to leave troops there to defend the borders once you fight to reinstate them, but also you end up subverting the natural flow of history by propping up nations who cannot do the thing that all self-sustaining nations do, which is protect their identity and boundaries successfully. (In Kosovo, a foreign power could conceivably have found itself fighting both sides of a civil war by disagreeing with the Kosovars about independence and disagreeing with the Serbs about allowing the Albanian Kosovars to live there.)

Studying the Balkans has taught me how fluid national boundaries are in our world, and that the region is a fascinating illustration of the forces of European politics and power in microcosm. Fromkin seems to share this view. But in his examination of what the answer to the Kosovo ethnic cleansing crisis might have been was where we parted ways, though I was absolutely enamored of his study of the century and the political realities and ideologies that shaped our responses to foreign aggression since World War I.

Fromkin writes that it is possible that if there had been no intervention, the Serbs would have banished and murdered the Kosovar Albanians, and though horrible, the issue would have been settled and "it would all be over."

Fromkin apparently advocates a "Red Cross" approach to human catastrophes, including genocide, by praising the organization for not taking sides, caring for the needy, resettling them where they are allowed to go (instead of where force has disallowed them). While he found Americans willing to send million-dollar bombs to crush $10,000 Serb tanks, he found them less willing to help individual Kosovar families. He says that it is "morally inconsistent" to use force on humanitarian grounds but not allow Kosovars to settle in our neighborhoods when what they most need is a place to live freely. However, I think, to stand aside and watch while a government machine displaces 90 percent of a region's long-time population through systematic murder and rape, is not humanitarian either. While I don't think Fromkin's solution would be successful in the world (it wouldn't be "over," would it?), he successfully illustrates a dark side of the problem, that we are more willing to use force for goodness than goodness for goodness. We are asserting our power for good, but we are not being really good doing it.

This book is a useful tool to understanding U.S. foreign policy around the globe, not just in Kosovo, and it is more about the twentieth century iterations of that policy (and its birth) than about Kosovo alone. I recommend it.

Kososvo Crossing was a cursory and listless stroll throughthree thousand years of history. The two hundred and two pagesrestrict the depth and understanding of the topics brushed upon. The book lists historical events and assumes political and moral positions with minimal substantiation. The position that the "population deportations of 1913-23, and in the population deportations in Eastern and Central Europe ordained by the Allies after WWII...These were tragedies on a massive scale: in terms of numbers, greater than Kosovo...Yet the point is it worked. It settled the issue." (pg. 190), along with " ...the Serbs would have settled the Kosovo issue, by ethnic cleansing." ( ibid.) betrays a dangerous simplicity that permeates the book.

Fromkin presents a very lucid portrayal of the vast history of the Balkans and its impact on contemporary political policies in the United States. He masterfully draws parallels between our involvement in Kosovo and our presence in Korea, Kuwait, Somalia, and other areas around the globe. Perhaps the most poignant point made by Fromkin is that too often we have failed to learn from foreign policy mistakes of the past. Indeed, these mistakes continue to haunt us today and frequently lead to continued poor decision making from our leaders. A must read for those interested in foreign policy and those who seek a deeper understanding of the turmoil in the Balkans.

This book argues that the foreign policy of the United States should be based on Realpolitic, and that the policies of the Wilson and Clinton administrations are misguided or at best selective, humanitarian attempts that were and will ultimately prove detrimental to U.S. interests. While general readers may find this book very readable, and the author mentions that widespread brutalities occurred during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, he does not fully represent or comprehensively counter, arguments supporting the Balkan policies of the Clinton administration and U.S. intervention. Furthermore, the lack of important details in this book, may suggest oversimplification to readers with familiarity on Balkan subjects.

I have read many similar books before.

The book itself has very little to do with Kososvo at all. Tito for example gets less then a page. The way he ruled maybe a line. That he ruled by killing over a million Yugoslavians is never even mentioned.

It is a study basically of the history of US foreign policy. Nothing very orginal or good either. Just some sweeping generalisations that would suggest that US foreign policy is purely a produce of the ideals of the current US president.

The writing style was disjointed, inconsistent and had the feel of a rough draft. Based upon the publication date, it appears to be a hastily prepared product to capitalize on the crisis in kosovo. There were some innaccuracies such as Illyrians came from Asia Minor (contrary to the majority of archeological and linguistic work done on the topic which theorizes Illyrians as indo-european and arriving from the North.
However the worst part of the book is the position that ethnically homogenous states are the solution to conflicts and that state borders should define ethnic borders in order to maintain stability. The end product of ethnocentricism and racism if effectively put in to practice justifies itself.
However the first part of the book is a decent overview of U.S. foreign policy.
Reads more like journalism then a scholarly work.

The book is a thought provoking analysis of the difficulties of intervening in a country where ethnic and religious passions are
involved. Although the analysis was pointed towards Kosovo, it applies equally well to Africa and most especially to Iraq. (Perhaps it should be assigned reading for the neo-cons).
It would appear that the negative reviews were written by people who did not understand the book or who wanted the author to write a different book. In the light of the current situation in Iraq (and Sri Lanka and Israel/Palestine, etc.) I suggest that those reviewers might profit by rereading the book.

For an informative and un biased read on the Kosovo and balkan issue, there are much better books out there than this one. For one, you're well more than half way through the book before the author even gets to the Kosovo issue, although the first part is a fairly unbiased quick refresher of the last century's wars. Once the author finally does get to the Kosovo topic, it is a quick and uninformative heavily biased review that hardly reflects on the true issues of Kosovo, Serbia and the former republics of Yugoslavia. To save you the time of reading it i'll lay out the most ignorant statement in the book: from page 190: "If the US and NATO had not intervened, the Serbs would have settled the Kosovo issue, by ethnic cleansing. The Kosovars would have been pushed into Albania and forcibly reunited with their own people. Kosovo would be owned and inhabited exclusively by Serbs. Monstrous though it would have been to let the Milosevic regime profit from its crimes, it would all be over." Right. And the humanitarian disasters in Macedonia and Albania which hardly have the means to support their own people? The Turkish-Kurd, Spanish-Basque, Albanian-Greek issues that may be affected by such an outcome? It would be over according to this author. Common ignorance from people that weren't there or don't really know. For a good read on Balkan topics i suggest 'Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation', KOSOVO or BOSNIA by Noel Malcholm. For a good read on the atrocities of what goes on in that part of the world how about any chronology of Srebrenica.

I found Fromkin's writing style to be unorganized. He has a lot of information to give (not all of which is dependable, by the way), but he skips around from the 20th century to the Middle Ages to all the time periods in-between, and quite frankly, I found it a bit hard to follow at times.
Fromkin is very confident about his information, and seems to think he's a definitive source on the subject. The book left me with a feeling that I was learning from an expert in Balkan politics--but beware. As a soldier stationed in the Balkans I can tell you, that if you're basing your knowledge of this region off of this book--or any one book--you've only really scratched the surface.