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5.0 out of 5 stars
useful and mind-stretching, May 24, 2003
By A Customer
_Mapping European Security After Kosovo_is a collection of ten essays by Scandinavian, German, and British scholars about the ways in which the conflict in Kosovo has shaped post-Cold War European security. The preliminary two chapters provide an overview of the Kosovo conflict, placing it in the context of globalization. Peter Van Ham (Netherlands Institute of International Relations "Clingendael") argues that, by not accepting the rationales of European integration and European security, Milosevic's Serbia "posed itself as the main challenge to the emerging new European order (NEO), and, by ignoring the logic of NEO realism, raised the key question that European policy makers and theorists have tried to ignore: on what stable foundations can European security be constructed?" (p. 6). He concludes that Kosovo has been `both the pretext and ultimate context in which the contemporary reading of `European security' is taking place. Chapters three, four, and five then probe Kosovo's impact on the idea of war itself. Was NATO's involvement all-out war, a military intervention, or merely an "air operation? asks Pertti Joenniemi of the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (p. 6). To describe NATO's bombing as "war" - at least from a NATO perspective - would be a "misnomer" and would even "undermine NATO's effort to construct itself as a new transatlantic community," he states (p.60). Joenniemi concludes that, in Kosovo, war has "transcended its modern meaning without becoming an integral part of the new and incoming, and without altogether leaving behind the old ideas of war (p. 63). In the next chapter, Iver Neumann (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Oslo) explores the concept of legitimacy in war, namely who can wage war, by which means, and over which issues. NATO was able to "pose as the representative of humanity," he avers, because "liberal globalization is left as the only political program with any global appeal" (p. 7). In the following chapter "Kosovo and the End of the United Nations?" Heikki Patomaki (Nottingham Trent University, England) takes a pessimistic view. He believes that the "domestication" of the UN by the United States has "severely damaged" both the moral basis of UN pluralism and the legal procedures and rules on which the UN has been based. A product of the "Hegelian fallacy of identifying success with being right," the US elite might not "learn to listen to others" until it suffers a major economic collapse, he posits (p. 97). In contrast to the chapters by Joenniemi, Neumann, and Patomaki, which view Kosovo as a product of the decay of modern institutions, the next three chapters by Maja Zehfuss (University of Warwick, England), Andreas Behnke (Stockholm University), and Mika Aaltola (University of Tampere, Finland) investigate the symbolic nature of the Kosovo crisis, the "virtualization"of politics, and the language games involved in enemy creation and identity construction. Mikkel Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) discusses the use of the concept of "civilization" to justify the bombings in Kosovo when the West realized that the campaign had only the flimsiest foundations in international law. In the final chapter, Christoph Zürcher (Free University of Berlin) shows how the Kosovo and Chechen conflicts resemble each other: both are post-socialist, post-imperialist conflicts not easily explained by realist approaches. Both conflicts were also largely influenced by domestic considerations and by the need of Russia and NATO respectively to "send messages" (p. 193).
Mapping European Security After Kosovo has many strengths. For example, it challenges traditional assumptions about war, sovereignty, and hegemony. It also provides fresh, provocative views by non-American authors. Unfortunately, it lacks an analytical summary at the end, as well as an index and bibliography. The essays largely draw on published secondary sources. Although some of the theoretical essays are too abstract for undergraduates, graduates and specialists will find this book stimulating and useful. Dr. Johanna Granville,
Stanford University
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