Securitising the Present through the Prism of the Past: State-Building and the Legacy of Interventions in Kosovo and Serbia

Werner Distler

doi:10.1515/soeu-2022-0009

Article Open Access

Securitising the Present through the Prism of the Past: State-Building and the Legacy of Interventions in Kosovo and Serbia

Werner Distler
Werner Distler is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Collaborative Research Center SFB/TRR 138 “Dynamics of Security” and the Center for Conflict Studies at Phillips University of Marburg (Germany). In his work, he engages empirically with cases of international intervention and state-building, also from a historical and comparative perspective, with a theoretical perspective of critical security studies.

Published/Copyright: July 13, 2022

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From the journal Comparative Southeast European Studies Volume 70 Issue 2

Abstract

In this article, the author argues that political actors in Kosovo and Serbia, together with international actors from the UN, NATO, and the EU, have developed strategies of political communication in which the threat or promise of external intervention in Southeast European processes of state-building and state consolidation have been deeply inscribed. Based on a critical security studies theoretical framework, especially pragmatist securitisation, the author illustrates such “securitised state-building” with speech acts on interethnic violence, the Kosovo army, and NATO intervention commemorations. While securitised language does not necessarily lead to violence, actors with communicative strategies of segregation, confrontation, and even violence have proven more likely to be favoured by the governing mode of “securitised state-building”. Such a mode thereby may shape regional processes of de- and re-territorialisation in the future, too.

Keywords: NATO; statehood; securitisation; normalisation; Western Balkans

Introduction

The NATO intervention in Yugoslavia from March to June 1999 is just one, albeit decisive chapter in the long-standing and complex conflict between various groups and forms of nationalism in and about the territory of contemporary Kosovo (Riedel 2005; Vickers 1998). The intervention marked the start of the internationally supervised, large-scale state-building process in Kosovo and enforced a reconfiguration of Serbian territory and statehood. In order to better understand the legacy of the NATO intervention for this process of de- and re-territorialisation, tracing the references to and perceptions of this intervention in the discourse of political actors since 1999 provides valuable insights.

While state-building as such is closely connected to questions of security, protection, and the construction of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, previous research has shown that it makes a difference which specific threats (groups, ideas, practices, incidents) are considered politically relevant in the process and how actors use references to security and protection in institution-making and territorialisation (Bonacker, Distler, and Ketzmerick 2018). Based on a framework of pragmatist securitisation studies, this article explores references to the threat or promise of interventions that have permeated the creation of political institutions and statehood in Kosovo.

Building on previous work on the role of securitisation in state-building (Bonacker 2018; Distler and Heise 2022), the article operationalises its empirical analysis methodologically as follows. To exemplify “securitised state-building”, I have identified representative speech acts (references) containing a language of threat, danger, or risk of a particular political issue, and I interpret their specific communicative meaning and the potential strategic intentions of the actors using them for the context of state-building and state consolidation (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 26). I identify speech acts by Kosovar, Serbian, and international political actors, such as presidents, prime ministers, and various ministers, as well as UN and EU officials, from press releases or media reports with direct quotes on four political issues: interethnic relations in Kosovo between 1999 and 2008; the EU-facilitated dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo after 2011; the Kosovar army; and commemorations of the NATO campaign of 1999. Altogether, I cite 39 representative texts, nine from NATO officials, seven UN documents, three EU documents, as well as 11 texts with statements from Serbian officials and nine with statements from Kosovar officials. The texts were originally published in English, translated into English by the governments, or, in a few instances, translated by media outlets. I argue that references to interventions have indeed become a habitual part of politics and that what Ketzmerick (2019) calls “securitised state-building” has thus become normal. On an international level, Kosovar and Serbian political actors use such references to continue their struggle over state-building and state consolidation, to counter previous securitising moves by their opponents, and to create political authority towards their audiences.

The article proceeds as follows. First, the state of the art on research about the NATO intervention and state-building process in Kosovo will be explored. Second, I introduce a conceptual framework of pragmatic securitisation studies, which helps to explore the strategic use of securitising references in political communication. The subsequent empirical sections, thirdly, illustrate the arguments from the international administration of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) up to the independence of Kosovo declared in February 2008, and lastly the period since the beginning of the EU-led Belgrade–Pristina dialogue in 2011. In June 2008, UNMIK transferred its authority to the government of Kosovo, after having de facto governed Kosovo since the summer of 1999 (in cooperation with Kosovar institutions). UNMIK is still present in Kosovo today, mainly because the UN Security Council cannot agree on ending its mandate, as established in Resolution 1244 (1999). For all states that do not recognise Kosovo’s independence, the resolution and UNMIK are still important—and they rigorously “gate-keep” this status quo in the UN (Interview with UN Official, by Werner Distler, New York City, 1 May 2015).

Intervention and State-Building in Kosovo

The Kosovo conflict, the subsequent NATO intervention in 1999, and the following decades of international presence in the country gave rise to an impressive number of publications. Literature on the NATO intervention, conducted without a mandate from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), mostly focuses on its legality, legitimacy, and its legacy for the practice and norms of humanitarian interventions (Hehir 2008; Wheeler 2001). Regardless of whether authors are critical or supportive of the concept of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), they agree that the intervention in Kosovo was a prominent point of departure for the concept’s development (Bellamy 2008; Chomsky 2015; Newman and Visoka 2019).

In international politics, references to Kosovo are used for, but also against intervention. As such, Russian decision-making regarding Syria or Ukraine is explained by its negative experiences of NATO’s behaviour in Kosovo (Hughes 2013; Kuzio 2018). Furthermore, the political dispute over the meaning of the 1999 intervention is very much present in the ongoing conflict about Kosovo’s current and future status in a deeply divided international community (Caspersen 2015; Visoka 2018). More than half of all UN member states do recognise Kosovo as a sovereign, independent state, but a significant number of states, also in the European Union, continue to dispute it (Ferrero-Turrión 2021).

In international politics, the Kosovo intervention is far from unambiguously assessed and has developed into a symbolic reference to various phenomena in conflict communication, including state violence against citizens (referring to the situation before the NATO intervention), humanitarian intervention, unilateral declaration of independence, and struggles for recognition (Newman and Visoka 2018). Speech acts by political actors referring to Kosovo serve, for instance, to warn of certain threats and risks, or they can demand or threaten consequences for behaviour from other political actors that they consider problematic and dangerous.

This important legacy of the NATO intervention of 1999, and interventions in Southeastern Europe in general, is not yet explored in the literature on state-building in Kosovo and the wider region. While a huge amount of literature explores peace-building and state-building, it tends to focus on the international actors and their blueprints, or perceptions (Beha and Hajrullahu 2020; Yannis 2004). While there is literature that analyses state-building in Kosovo as a relational and interactionist process of “locals” and “internationals” (Gippert 2016), few studies are concerned with the attempts of actors to create legitimacy or authority by referring to political symbols or the identity of Kosovo via interpretations of the past (Distler 2017a; Simonsen 2004).

In comparison to international policies and politics, much less is known about the internal dynamics of Kosovar politics and references to the past that are supposed to legitimise political actions (Distler 2017b). Among the few exceptions is Limani-Beqa’s analysis of how Kosovar political actors followed very different strategies of political communication towards international and domestic audiences in the years after 1999 (Limani-Beqa 2011). Furthermore, a number of studies show how symbols and agents of national resistance in the Kosovo Albanian community have been used to idealise ethnonational solidarity, serve militant mobilisation, and still shape competitions in politics today (Di Lellio and Schwandner-Sievers 2006; Schwandner-Sievers 2013; Ströhle 2006).^[1] Ingimundarson shows how nationalist discourse and identity constructions of the Kosovar Albanian political elite after 1999 refer back to “nineteenth-century notions of nation-state building. It includes the reification of the myth of an ancient past and of a continuing independence struggle, highlighting heroism, sacrifice, victimhood and trauma” (2007, 95). These publications recognise the importance of references to the past for the political discourse. While they sometimes hint towards the legacy of the NATO intervention, this important point of reference and, in a much broader sense, the role of the threat or promise of intervention in Kosovo seems largely unexplored.

For Serbia, a number of newer studies focus on the political construction and strategic use of the memory of the NATO intervention. Recently, Subotić and Ejdus have observed the construction of a truth regime by the Serbian government at the end of the 1990s on the “illegal, illegitimate, and unprovoked” (2021, 170) intervention, which outlived the Milošević era and continues to influence memory politics. Official commemorations of the NATO intervention in Serbia have been analysed in detail by Mandić (2016) and Satjukow (in this issue). Adding to that, Fridman (2016) and again Satjukow (2020) have discussed the social legacies and citizens’ perspectives in the context of memory politics.

Finally, while several newer studies analyse Kosovo–Serbian relations through the prism of relations with the European Union (Beha 2015; Gashi and Musliu 2017), there are few works about the politics in both states from a relational or historical-processual perspective. One such exception is the volume edited by Mehmeti and Radeljić (2017), bringing together studies on the interrelated and interdependent developments in both countries before and after the intervention.

Thus, while many aspects of the intervention of 1999 and its consequences for international politics have been explored, our knowledge is still expandable on how legacies of intervention constitute politics, especially from a relational perspective. This article suggests a relational, pragmatic securitisation framework to explore the consequences and usage of references to intervention for state-building and state transformation in Kosovo and Serbia. Thereby, it adds to the literature that focuses on performativity, political communication, and discourse in the region (Vulović 2020).

A Pragmatic Securitisation Framework for the Analysis of State-Building

Although Critical Security Studies (CCS) is a rather diverse field, it shares the common understanding that “security” is a fundamentally social and political category—its meaning and consequences emerge through practices (e.g. physical, technological, or via speech) in various arenas, ranging from the everyday experiences of actors to macro-discourses in international politics (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2020). Earlier schools of CCS from the 1990s have focused on very particular modes of security construction. The so-called Copenhagen School of securitisation underlined the paramount importance of language in the making of security. By constructing a referent object in a speech act, quite literally a quote from a public speech or from a text (e.g. in the media), as being substantially threatened, political actors aim for the introduction of extraordinary measures (beyond the normal political decision-making) to immediately act against this threat. This “securitising move” needs the affirmation of an audience, which should confirm the state of emergency and accept the extraordinary measures. Only then is a complete securitisation of a given issue (for example of refugees or health) observable (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998). While still a very important school, Copenhagen was criticised extensively for this focus on speech acts, emergency, and fixation on the liberal “Global North” and underlying “whiteness” (Bertrand 2018; Wæver and Buzan 2020). Other authors have instead suggested the importance of security routines and practices, technologies, bodily performance, and non-verbal communication—also beyond “Western” societies (Bigo 2002; Hansen 2000; Vuori 2018).

In this article, I work with a pragmatic framework of securitisation as introduced by the so-called second generation of securitisation studies (Balzacq 2005; Distler 2021; Stritzel 2011). This pragmatic framework, while still supporting the important role of discourse and speech, argues that securitisation emerges through various forms of meaning-making, like routines and practices. It is less focused on extraordinary measures, and more on the process of political decision-making itself. Here—and this is important for a relational analysis—securitising moves are read (a) in relation to (previous and following) security constructions of other actors, and (b) as expressions of a political “game of moves” (Stritzel and Chang 2015, 560) with strategic goals. Additionally, they have to be (c) contextualised in their specific contingency, to avoid reductionist explanations. In this way, the study of threat- and security-related language and enforced security practices allows for a much more complex analysis of political processes. Actors can use securitising or de-securitising moves to push a political agenda and either deepen or transform their strategy in reaction to other actors’ moves. For example, as Stritzel and Chang (2015) have suggested, actors can counter-securitise their own securitisation—meaning that they react to threat constructions with threat constructions, and thereby deepen securitising dynamics.

Looking at long-term conflicts like the Kosovo–Serbia conflict, the “reconceptualization of securitization theory as a game of moves and countermoves in a communicative struggle of adversarial wills” (Stritzel and Chang 2015, 560) appears especially helpful. Pragmatic securitisation aims at uncovering such long-term, historical emergence of patterns of securitisation and security “translation” over time, which gives “any securitizing move ‘deep historicity’ by locating the move in a specific temporal and spatial sequence” (Stritzel 2011, 350). Recent literature has additionally shown that not only successful cases of securitisation (in which immediate audience acceptance and extraordinary measures occur), but precisely repeated (even failing) securitising moves are of key interest for the understanding of discourse, relations, and perceptions on a fundamental level (Ruzicka 2019; Stritzel 2012), for example to show why political actors modify threat constructions (Guzzini 2011). By constant securitising moves, political issues become unavoidably linked to security and evoke threats as a long-term consequence. For the study of state-building and state formation, Bonacker shows that, instead of referring to exceptional measures (like in the Copenhagen School), strategic security construction becomes “a key mode of governing in state-building” (2018, 192).

Securitised State-Building in Kosovo

The NATO Intervention of 1999 and Securitised State-Building under UNMIK

In the late 1990s, the Kosovo conflict already had a long and complex history of physical and discursive violence, driven by constructions of threat by government institutions in Yugoslavia, later Serbia, and in the Kosovo-Serb and Kosovo-Albanian communities (Bieber 2002; Ingimundarson 2007; Pavković 2017). The NATO intervention of March 1999, as extraordinary measure and escalation of the conflict, can be understood as the outcome of a successful—in the theoretical sense—securitisation process in the alliance. The context of the Yugoslav breakup and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina had already established numerous international references to threats, genocide, risks, catastrophes, and dangers (Bilder 1999; Weller 1999). Therefore, the government in Belgrade and the actions of Yugoslav security forces in Kosovo were considered an existential threat to Kosovar citizens and regional peace, as this NATO statement illustrates:

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) has repeatedly violated United Nations Security Council resolutions. The unrestrained assault by Yugoslav military, police and paramilitary forces, under the direction of President Milosevic, on Kosovar civilians has created a massive humanitarian catastrophe which also threatens to de-stabilise the surrounding region. […] These extreme and criminally irresponsible policies […] have made necessary and justify the military action by NATO. (NATO 1999a; compare also NATO 1999b)

In June 1999, UNSC Resolution 1244 (UN Security Council 1999) put the territory of Kosovo under the international administration of UNMIK, in cooperation with the EU, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and NATO. The literature generally frames the following spring and summer of 1999 as a period of chaos and a state of emergency in Kosovo—with a lack of monopoly of legitimate use of force, a breakdown of institutions and services, a massive humanitarian crisis, and large-scale violence against the Serbian and Roma populations after the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops (Human Rights Watch 1999; King and Mason 2006).

Looking back at the period of international administration after 1999, one major issue stands out that led to securitised state-building in Kosovo: the constant securitisation of interethnic violence in all major political decisions by international actors. While the protection of minorities in the territory was not explicitly part of the initial mandate of UNMIK (but the general establishment of a secure environment and conditions for a peaceful life for all inhabitants was), interethnic violence as well as violence between Kosovo-Albanian actors emerged as a significant political problem in the autumn of 1999:

The OSCE reported 348 murders, 116 kidnappings, 1,070 lootings and 1,106 cases of arson within the first four months of their mission [and] within five months, KFOR [Kosovo Force] had recorded over 400 murders, of which 33.8 per cent had Serb victims. […] Especially in the immediate aftermath of the war, minorities were disproportionately victimised. The population of Kosovo was 89 per cent Albanian and 10 per cent Serb, with scattered populations of other minorities such as Roma, Slavs, Gorani, Turks and Egyptians (less than one per cent). […] While there is only scattered data from the UN Civilian Police (CIVPOL) on this period, the data clearly reveals that Serbs and minorities bore a higher share of the violence. In 1999, Serbs experienced 34 per cent of the murders and 23 per cent of the kidnappings. Other minorities—including the Roma, Gora, Bosniaks and Turkomen—experienced 26 per cent of the murders and 17.9 per cent of the kidnappings. (Boyle 2010, 199–200)

International actors reacted with the discursive securitisation of the violence as a substantial threat to the stability and future of Kosovo (NATO 2000, 2001a, 2001b; UN Security Council 2000, 2001). While the levels of interethnic violence diminished gradually after 2000, except for the events of March 2004 (NATO 2004; UNMIK 2004), the threat of interethnic violence remains central to the securitising moves of UNMIK, OSCE, and NATO, when legitimising their own presence and in political negotiations on the future of Kosovo. Consequently, the de-securitisation of interethnic troubles became a key strategic practice of international actors. One aspect of this strategy was the focus on minority rights and representation. Minority rights became the most important precondition for Kosovo statehood in all political initiatives, such as the Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement, known as the Ahtisaari Plan (as it was proposed by the former president of Finland Martti Ahtisaari) (Beha 2014), and political institutions in Kosovo were designed to guarantee substantial power-sharing for minorities, for example with reserved seats in the elected assembly (Marko 2008).

In addition, spatial practices of de-securitisation attempted to reduce the threat of interethnic violence, for example when UNMIK and KFOR de facto supported ethnic territorial segregation (Beha 2011; Reinhardt 2002). With these separations, confrontations between Kosovo Serb and Kosovo Albanian communities and UNMIK and KFOR were supposed to be reduced or avoided. This territorial de-securitisation had consequences for the authority of political actors in Pristina: while UNMIK, together with NATO, established a consequent monopoly on the use of force in most parts of Kosovo, both refrained from establishing such complete control in the northern Serbian-majority regions to avoid further (violent) escalations with Kosovo Serb citizens and Serbian security institutions operating there (Stakić and Bjeloš 2015)—a legacy which still limits state authority in this part of Kosovo:

Parallel elites in the North refused to cooperate with UNMIK and the UNMIK-run Kosovo Police Service (KPS) and refused to allow access to regular and border police. […] UNMIK and KPS explicitly reported having failed to consolidate police control in the North. […] In response to Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in 2008 Serbs in the North used violence against state institutions and foreign interveners, attacking the customs gates on the boundary with Serbia along with UNMIK, KPS, and EU Rule of Law Mission (EULEX) personnel. Armed groups seized the courthouse in Mitrovica, preventing EULEX and UNMIK staff from working there until 2009. (Jackson 2021, 14–15)

For politicians of the Kosovo Albanian community, Resolution 1244 and the denial of sovereignty by UNMIK kept alive the threat construction to Kosovo’s Albanian identity and desired independent statehood. The political limbo strengthened the insistence on independence, which can be traced in public speech acts during election campaigns from 2000 onwards (Limani-Beqa 2011), as well as in political negotiations on the new state institutions (Distler 2017b). It is no coincidence that, especially for political parties emerging from the Kosovo Liberation Army, the “symbolic association with and glorification of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and its fight against the Serbs in 1998–1999 [became] a hegemonic source for constructing national identity, public morality, and political legitimacy among the Albanians in postwar Kosovo” (Schwandner-Sievers 2013, 953). The sacrifice of war made “the claim to independence non-negotiable” (Di Lellio and Schwandner-Sievers 2006, 527) and the state-building legacy was (and is) militarised and deeply entangled with war and intervention.

Having lost the protection of Yugoslav state institutions, the situation for Kosovo Serbs who did not live in the northern part of Kosovo after 1999 was characterised by threats of violence and eviction, as happened in 1999 and 2004. However, cooperation with international and later Kosovar state institutions developed much more positively than in the north, in which “parallel” (at least from the perspective of UNMIK and Pristina) security networks, controlled by Serbia, evolved. There, Serbian politicians regularly called for boycotts of Kosovar elections and institutions, using such calls as securitising moves in the struggle over the status of Kosovo (Beha 2011).

International negotiations, initiated in 2005, in 2007 failed to bring a settlement on the status of Kosovo, with the consequence that Kosovo’s new government after the elections of late 2007 decided to unilaterally declare independence in February 2008, under the condition of the continuation of international intervention in the country. Kosovo’s institutions accepted the continuing presence of various intervening institutions: UNMIK, KFOR, and OSCE remained, the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) was introduced, and a new International Civilian Representative for Kosovo (ICR) with its International Civilian Office (ICO) oversaw the implementation of the Ahtisaari Plan until 2012. Despite the continuing international intervention, independence immediately initiated new securitising moves by Serbia. For example, in an emergency meeting of the UNSC on 18 February 2008, the day of unilateral independence, Serbian president Boris Tadić argued:

Independence is being conferred on those who, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, created Serbian ghettos in Europe—ghettos girdled with barbed wire and surrounded with cannon barrels and soldiers armed to the teeth. A reward is being bestowed on those who have taken part in the segregation of Serbs and who deny them freedom of movement and force them to live in darkness and in constant fear for their lives. […] Another argument that has been invoked in favour of granting independence to the Albanians has been the contention that they would otherwise resort to violence. Whoever may support Kosovo’s independence must realize that this act legalizes the threat of violence as a means of creating new states and promoting one’s own political agendas and interests. (UN Security Council 2008a, 4; cf. UN Security Council 2008b)

Within the process of independence, the state-building process in Kosovo did not become de-securitised; on the contrary, the struggle over “legitimate” statehood became further securitised, with threat constructions surrounding interethnic violence and ethnic self-determination at the core of the “communicative struggle of adversarial wills” (Stritzel and Chang 2015, 560) of pro- and anti-independence political actors in the region, but also of EU and UN member states.

The Belgrade–Pristina Dialogue since 2011: A Complex Relationship of Securitisation and “Normalisation”

Ten years after its initiation, the EU-facilitated dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo continued to be deadlocked in the spring of 2021, with neither the Serbian nor the new Kosovar government under the leadership of the long-term opposition party Vetëvendosje keen on making compromises regarding the countries’ political relations (Kurti Says Kosovo Will Not Open, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 28 April 2021). However, at its start in 2011, the dialogue had offered a possible structure for a “de-securitising routine” in the form of regular meetings and negotiations between politicians and bureaucrats of both countries. As described in the United Nations General Assembly document that stood at the outset of the negotiations, “the process of dialogue in itself would be a factor for peace, security and stability in the region” (UN General Assembly 2010). A key term in the dialogue is “normalisation”, as used by the European Union (European External Action Service 2016). The term, however, is quite difficult to define. First, it is simply unclear what effectively is meant by those who use it (Greenberg 2011; Lemay-Hébert and Visoka 2017), even if intended as a general countermove to securitising conflict-speech acts. Furthermore, the usage of the term “normalisation” by the EU constantly underlines the current abnormal or exceptional relations and thereby reaffirms “diplomatic interventionism” (Visoka 2017, 8) in the dialogue. The term positions the EU as an authority on what is to be considered normal and what the relations of the two governments should look like. The EU argued earlier that the EU membership ambitions of both countries would be threatened should “normalisation” fail (European External Action Service 2018).

The communication of the governments in Pristina and Belgrade since 2011 can indeed best be categorised as an interrelated game of moves of adversarial wills before domestic and international audiences. Their dialogue has been driven by interrelated securitising and de-securitising moves, for example shown in this quote from Marko Đurić, the director of the Serbian Office for Kosovo and Metohija. In November 2015 he said:

Thus, when we say the dialogue has no alternative, we aim to remind everyone that any other scenarios are contrary to the most fundamental existential interests of both Serbs and Albanians. To put it in other words, anyone opposing peaceful settlement of a dispute desires either a frozen conflict or a resolution of problems by non-peaceful means. (Đurić: The Dialogue Is the Only Reasonable Path, European Western Balkans, 27 November 2015)

Đurić underlined the importance of dialogue, at the same time suggesting that any alternative to the dialogue or its failure would mean violence. In speech acts on the army of Kosovo, we can trace comparable communicative strategies from actors in Pristina and Belgrade, which link references to dialogue and threat constructions.

(De-)Securitising the Army of Kosovo

For former leading figures of the KLA, an army was always of key symbolic importance for Kosovo’s state-building process and sovereignty. In the period under international administration, Kosovar politicians regularly clashed with UNMIK over the issue of a state military force (Distler 2017b). With the legacy of the KLA under threat—it is framed as a terrorist organisation by Serbia^[2] and has been under investigation by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague since 2018—politicians defend it: “We will remain faithful to defending the ideals and vision of Kosovo’s citizens and the war of the Kosovo Liberation Army” (Office of the Prime Minister of Kosovo 2012a)^.

Due to Resolution 1244, NATO has the responsibility for security. However, political actors in Kosovo countered the dominance of KFOR/NATO in security questions in the state-building process with plans for an army of its own, as exemplified in this quote from the then prime minister Hashim Thaçi at a military parade in honour of Independence Day in February 2014: “Now is the time when we must take full responsibility for the security of our country” (Office of the Prime Minister of Kosovo 2014a). In the communication on the army, which in itself is a manifestation of potential violence, securitising and de-securitising moves shifted strategically. For example, Prime Minister Thaçi insisted that the “Kosovo Armed Forces will contribute to building and maintaining regional and global stability” (Office of the Prime Minister of Kosovo 2014b). On the other hand, the government in Pristina reacted to international concerns about the well-established threat of ethnic violence, while simultaneously counter-securitising moves from Serbia:

This is an army which will serve all of Kosovo’s citizens, without exceptions. The only threats to our region are irrational calls for war and conflict that stem from our northern neighbor. In addition, allow me to assure you that Kosovo will respect every existing international agreement […]. We will continue to cooperate very closely with NATO. (President of the Republic of Kosovo 2018)

Nevertheless, the plans to create an army received criticism from NATO, as they appeared a challenge to NATO’s authority as well: “We discussed Kosovo’s intention to move ahead with the transformation of the Kosovo Security Force into an army. Such a move is ill-timed. It goes against the advice of many NATO Allies. And may have serious repercussions for Kosovo’s future Euro-Atlantic integration” (NATO 2018a).

After the intervention of 1999, Serbian politicians insisted on NATO’s responsibility for the (military) security of Kosovo, in reference to Resolution 1244 and the Military Technical Agreement signed between KFOR and the governments of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Republic of Serbia on 9 June 1999, known as the Kumanovo Agreement. This agreement ended the Kosovo War and established new basic relations between Yugoslavia and the KFOR, which replaced the units of the Yugoslav Army in Kosovo (NATO 1999c). Based on this strategic position, the Serbian government framed plans for a Kosovar army under the control of Pristina as an existential threat. The speech acts regarding the army were quite aggressive. For example, Tomislav Nikolić, a nationalist conservative and president of Serbia from 2012 to 2017, said on 15 January 2017: “We will never start or provoke conflict, but we are a state that must protect its people and its territory. […] If they kill Serbs, we will all go there, not only the army. I would be the first to go, it wouldn’t be my first time” (Baily and Hopkins 2017).

Recent securitising moves from the Serbian government exemplify the controversial position in the political struggle over statehood in Kosovo. In October 2018, Vulin used securitised language in an interview on the Kosovo army, NATO forces, and northern Kosovo. Addressing Kosovo-Serbs and their potential cooperation with the Kosovo army, he declared that “[y]ou should not be a part of some formation [the army, W.D.] that will one day be used to shoot at your fellow-countrymen. For Priština, there are no other adversaries or enemies but Serbia and the Serbs.” Addressing international audiences, he argued that “[t]he Serbian Armed Forces are much more powerful and much stronger, and they are ready to fight with far more superior ones […]”, implying violence between Serbian forces and international troops (Ministry of Defence Serbia 2018a). Earlier in October, he underlined that the army is “threatening Serbia and Serbs” (“Kosovo Moves to Create an Army, Serbia Warns of ‘Threat to Peace’,” Euractiv.com, 19 October 2018). On 5 December 2018, prime minister Ana Brnabić argued that Serbia “cannot stand aside and watch in silence while someone is conducting new ethnic cleansing” of Serbs in Kosovo (NATO 2018b), and president Aleksandar Vučić added on 13 December that “We are not going to beat the war drums, but we will not allow anyone to purge and humiliate the Kosovo Serbs” (Stojanović 2018). Thus, in the communicative struggle on the army as part of ongoing state-building in Kosovo, the threats of intervention and violence have been an essential part of securitising and de-securitising (counter-)moves of international political actors, as well as actors in both Pristina and Belgrade.

Securitising the Present through the Prism of the Past: Remembering the NATO Intervention of 1999

The intensity of the mutual securitisation of Kosovo and Serbia is high in speech acts concerning the commemorations of the NATO intervention as well (Satjukow, in this issue). Against the continuing presence of NATO in Kosovo and the constant process of NATO enlargement to the successor states of Yugoslavia—with Serbia’s neighbours Slovenia (2004), Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017), and North Macedonia (2020) joining the alliance— references to the intervention negotiate not only the past but also the present.

In anniversary speeches, Kosovar politicians regularly re-securitise Yugoslavia, for example as “Milošević’s dictatorial machinery”, and reaffirm the “vital importance” of the NATO bombing campaign for Kosovo (Office of the Prime Minister of Kosovo 2012b). References to the intervention are used to consolidate the threat-related vocabulary of a “genocide against the people of the country” (Peci 2013). The term “genocide”—the ultimate threat to any society and a keyword in the process of the securitisation of Serbia in March 1999 (Booth 1999, 92)—is an established component of the memory politics of the war. In early April 2019, then prime minister Ramush Haradinaj opened a “Memorial Center for the Serbian Genocide in Kosovo” in Bllacë, a village about halfway between the capital Pristina and the city of Prizren (Office of the Prime Minister of Kosovo 2019). Who may talk about genocide and in what context in Kosovo is of course highly contested (Zeidler, in this issue). For her public interpretation of the NATO intervention in Serbia as a genocide on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary—the “NATO alliance committed a deliberate, planned genocide against a sovereign country that fought Albanian terrorism within its own borders” (Begisholli 2019)—the Kosovo-Serbian deputy justice minister Vesna Mikić was dismissed from office by the prime minister on the following day, 25 March 2019.

Otherwise, Serbian interpretations of the NATO intervention—termed “NATO aggression”—have been influenced just as much as Kosovar ones by securitising moves and present political struggles (Ministry of Defence Serbia 2018b). In 2019, the twentieth anniversary of the intervention in fact brought forth a series of remarkable public events and speech acts in Serbia, which exemplified the complex interplay of securitising and de-securitising moves. In an event with NATO in Belgrade on 15 January 2019, then defence minister Vulin made clear that the “NATO aggression” was considered “the last major crime of the 20th century” by Serbia, but when the NATO force in Kosovo “sticks to its mandate […] KFOR is most respected by Serbs and will surely enjoy all the support of the Republic of Serbia” (Ministry of Defence Serbia 2019a). De-securitising Serbia, the minister underlined the value of peace for his country and instead re-securitised Albanians as a threat in the Balkans:

And that is why you have to understand our justified fear when we see and hear that the highest officials of the Albanian state speak of the creation of a Greater Albania, the unification with the Albanians wherever they live, without hearing a clear and loud condemnation of what could be a threat to peace throughout the Balkans. You must understand our justified fear, and we are also using this opportunity to ask you to invest your authority and your undisputed power not to have challenging peace in our region, and that nobody is trying to make a Greater Albania, that no one is trying to bring us back to evil called war and conflict. (Ministry of Defence Serbia 2019a)

Another example is the press statement of the chief of general staff of the Serbian armed forces, Lieutenant General Milan Mojsilović, of 12 March 2019 on the situation in Kosovo. Exactly like the minister, the officer de-securitised Serbian relations with the intervener NATO: “We are, first of all, interested in the protection of our citizens in Kosovo and Metohija and we daily exchange information with KFOR that are [sic] significant for the state of security, about our activities […] aimed at preventing misunderstandings in the field”. At the same time, he underlined the readiness of the Serbian military. Even though “a military reaction is currently excluded, or better to say that it is not under consideration”, Mojsilović continued after enumerating Serbian military equipment, “all that is going to be presented with the aim of showing our citizens that the armed forces and police are ready, trained and motivated to execute all the tasks assigned to them” (Ministry of Defence Serbia 2019b).

Politics of state-building and consolidation in Kosovo and Serbia are thus negotiated through the prisms of the past NATO intervention and the ongoing NATO presence. The threat constructions are vital and omnipresent; they are an intrinsic component of the political vocabulary. Intervention and violence always seem to be a minor step away. This is a key legacy of the conflicts of the 1990s and NATO intervention.

Conclusion

The 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, respectively in Yugoslavia, has influenced and transformed the lives of countless citizens in the region. It has influenced the institution of NATO, the practice of humanitarian interventions, and thereby international politics. However, the intervention is not only part of contested individual and collective memory. As many examples in this article illustrate, it has shaped political struggles on state-building and state consolidation in Kosovo and Serbia over the last two decades. I argue that the constant presence of the threat or promise of intervention has been constitutive for securitised state-building, meaning politics of statehood which are driven and justified by threat constructions around military interventions and the risk of renewed acts of violence.

In my analysis, I have suggested a framework of pragmatic securitisation studies, understanding securitising and de-securitising moves as strategic acts by politicians in constructing political issues as highly important and in need of decision-making. In constructing issues as security-related, these political agents claim authority on the matter and justify their decisions (Balzacq 2005; Stritzel and Chang 2015). A pragmatic securitisation approach follows threat constructions and securitisation as a strategic practice over longer periods. Thus, securitisation becomes a process in which the degree of linkage between security construction and politics is more crucial than the “success” of an individual securitising move (Ruzicka 2019; Stritzel 2011). Finally, the strategic use of securitising and de-securitising moves is highly relational, meaning that political actors, like the Kosovar government, the Serbian government, and the EU, mostly react to previous political security constructions in their political communication (Stritzel 2021). They may aim at entering or continuing a specific political struggle, countering a securitising move, or generating political authority with their references to specific threats to the state-building process.

Regarding Kosovo and Serbia, such securitisation processes are traceable in statements by international actors and domestic politicians since 1999. International actors continue to focus heavily on threats of interethnic violence in their state-building and intervention strategies, for example in the “de-securitising” routine of the EU-facilitated dialogue on “normalisation” between the two countries. I illustrated this strong continuity of references to threat and intervention with examples regarding the Kosovar army and the commemoration of the NATO intervention. Kosovar and Serbian actors do not refrain from intense and aggressive securitising moves in their political communication on state-building or, respectively, state consolidation. While de-securitising moves in speeches run parallel, both sides construct the impression that the “survival” (Rudic 2018) of their identities, states, and societies remains permanently under threat.

What implications do my findings have for further studies? First, a pragmatic securitisation framework can help to identify and understand the close connection between security constructions and politics, with reference to legacies of interventions, also in further cases. The question of ethnic territorialisation is negotiated via threats elsewhere as well, for example in Bosnia-Herzegovina, another society heavily influenced by conflict and interventions. In reaction to a proposal by the Bosnian and Croat members of the three-member Bosnian presidency, in September 2020, to recognise Kosovo, Serbia’s then minister of defence Vulin suggested to President Vučić: “Mr President, you have forgiven them for trying to kill you in Srebrenica, do not forgive them for trying to kill Serbia. If Bosnia and Herzegovina is in favour of an independent ‘Kosovo’, I am in favour of an independent Republika Srpska” (Ministry of Defence Serbia 2020).

Another field of further inquiry supported by this study is the connection between securitisation and violence. While securitised language does not necessarily lead to violence (Bonacker, Distler, and Ketzmerick 2018), the continuous references to the threat or promise of intervention (and war) inscribe the violence of the past deeply in the policies and discourses of both the Kosovar and Serbian state of the present, drowning the many initiatives and bottom-up attempts to counter elite and top-down nationalism (Kostovicova, Sokolić, and Fridman 2020).

Corresponding author: Werner Distler, DFG Collaborative Research Centre SFB/TRR 138 “Dynamics of Security. Types of Securitization from a Historical Perspective”, Center for Conflict Studies, Philipps University Marburg, Marburg, Germany, E-mail: werner.distler@uni-marburg.de

About the author

Werner Distler

Werner Distler is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Collaborative Research Center SFB/TRR 138 “Dynamics of Security” and the Center for Conflict Studies at Phillips University of Marburg (Germany). In his work, he engages empirically with cases of international intervention and state-building, also from a historical and comparative perspective, with a theoretical perspective of critical security studies.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the reviewers and editors for helpful critique and comments. Furthermore, I thank Laura Kotzur, Theresa Bachmann, and Lea Stromowsi for their support with the text. This article is part of a research project at the Collaborative Research Centre SFB/TRR 138 “Dynamics of Security” (University of Marburg) and has been funded by the German Research Foundation, TRR 138/2-2018.

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Published Online: 2022-07-13

Published in Print: 2022-06-27

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