Norm Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention. How Bosnia Changed NATO

The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina began in April 1992 as the third in a series of wars during the collapse of Yugoslavia— following fighting in Slovenia and the outbreak of war in Croatia, and preceding the war in Kosovo and the conflict in what is now North Macedonia. It came at a liminal time for the European and the global political order. During that time, the rationale for maintaining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was widely questioned and the European Community was in the process of becoming the European Union—with the desire to develop a foreign policy of its own as well as its own security capacities. Beyond that, wide hopes were expressed that the United Nations would fulfil its role as the guardian of international peace and security. The war in Bosnia, which left 100,000 dead and saw the first act of genocide in Europe since World War Two—despite and partly even because of the deployment of UN forces—dulled the post-Cold War euphoria.

Yuki Abe’s aim is to demonstrate that none of the prevailing international relations theories fully explain the survival of NATO well beyond its original collective defence purpose to deter Soviet aggression. From a realist and neorealist perspective, which holds that states cooperate only when facing existential threats, NATO should have disbanded when its Soviet adversary ceased to be. While neoliberal institutionalists argue that NATO members perceived advantag‑es in maintaining the institutions (and reduced transaction costs) of collective defence, Abe notes that the former have no answers as to why members further developed the Alliance after the end of the Cold War. Finally, Abe looks at the constructivist school’s focus on common democratic values and human rights norms as the basis for collective action. Abe observes that while these elements were definitely in play during the Bosnian war, they did not lead to a common policy on behalf of those values until late 1995, enabling an end to the war.

Abe seeks to explain the persistence of NATO and its metamorphosis by observing the policy development of four major members—France, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States—that clashed over how to respond to the dissolution of Yugoslavia and war in Bosnia. Specifically, Abe asserts that ‘norm dilemmas’—that is, frictions among the three norms (standards) of internationally recognized human rights, the Westphalian system of state sovereignty, differences over the use of force (and the cost to life, including to the intervening forces)—explain NATO’s difficulties in arriving at a common policy on the war.

These ‘norm dilemmas’ generated considerable political friction and media attention in each of these four countries and numerous others. They also severely strained relations among the NATO members—particularly across the Atlantic. This protracted experience was so searing that none of the allies wished to repeat it. Indeed, Abe asserts that avoiding such frictions in future crises—by preventing them from reaching such a grim stage—became the unifying, overriding common denominator for the alliance in the aftermath of the Bosnian war.

In order to arrive at this conclusion, Abe documents the policy formation process in each of the above-mentioned NATO member states over the course of the war in Bosnia. Britain and France adopted policies which certainly in effect—and arguably even by design—gave advantage to the Belgrade-backed Bosnian Serb ‘Republika Srpska’, which by late 1992 dominated 70 % of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s territory following a wave of strategic ethnic cleansing. The participation of French and British forces (in that order of magnitude) in the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia for most of the war became a critical factor in the transatlantic frictions that developed. Although the United States was effectively disengaged from the wars in former Yugoslavia from the very outset, public reaction to the violence forced the issue into the 1992 presidential campaign and into the domestic policy debate. Germany, bound by its Second World War history and the resulting complete integration of its defence capacity into NATO, maintained a more ambiguous position—although Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher hoped to prevent the crisis from metastasis by recognizing the independence of Slovenia and Croatia. Abe adeptly dissects the domestic and international pressures on policymakers in London, Paris, Washington, and Bonn, and in particular examines how the war in Bosnia provided a crucible for the development of views on what a post-Cold War Europe, and the transatlantic relationship, should be.

Abe concludes convincingly that the preservation of NATO as a conflict prevention mechanism and insurance policy was compelling enough for these four major NATO members to all deviate from their institutional and historical comfort zones in the aftermath of the Bosnian war. France deemed it advantageous to return to the NATO fold in 1995, after nearly thirty years of arms-length relations. Germany grappled with deviation from NATO’s original territorial collective defence role, as demonstrated by its high-visibility political engagement in the Kosovo crisis and war just three years later. And NATO itself developed a doctrine for ‘non-Article 5’ operations, embracing those operations that fell outside the alliance’s foundational collective defence role.

There are gaps, however. The assertions in historian Taylor Branch’s The Clinton Tapes that French President François Mitterand and British officials found a Muslim-plurality Bosnia and Herzegovina incongruent with their conception of Europe is conspicuous in its absence from the book. Even more oddly, given that it would support his argument, Abe fails to include US Secretary of State James Baker’s infamous ‘we don’t have a dog in that fight’ quip to President George Bush in 1991 after returning from a tour of Yugoslavia’s republics—widely seen as a green light for the violent pursuit of nationalist agendas in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. Some more contextualization of Abe’s arguments concerning the history that followed would have been worthwhile as well—particularly when it comes to assessing NATO’s performance in confronting the war which erupted in Kosovo in 1998. This ultimately precipitated NATO’s Operation Allied Force, the 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia that began in March 1999.

Yuki Abe’s Norm Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention. How Bosnia Changed NATO is a welcome addition to the literature on the intra- and inter-governmental handling of the war in Bosnia by major NATO powers, as well as more generally on the post-Cold War development of NATO’s response policies and practices with regard to humanitarian crises and human rights emergencies. The book is a convincing analysis of international policy responses to conflicting normative pressures.