Europe, Yugoslavia And The Blame Game

In the aftermath of unpleasant international developments, Americans tend to ask questions like "Who lost China?" and "Who lost Russia?" If there were a poll in the U.S. as to "Who lost Yugoslavia?" there is little doubt that the European Union would top the guilty list. This scapegoating reflects a widespread misperception in the U.S. that the E.U. "failed" in its response to the conflicts in former Yugoslavia because it was cowardly and that America was therefore twice called in to save the day.

This article does not so much defend European actions in Yugoslavia as it seeks to provide a more objective view of E.U. and U.S. policies towards the Balkans over the past decade. In fact, as this article will show, the initial decision not to intervene militarily in Yugoslavia when the war broke out in 1991 was made on both sides of the Atlantic. From the beginning, the E.U. sought in a principled manner to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table and broker a peace settlement. These efforts almost succeeded in 1993 but were not supported by the U.S.

Consequently, a further two years of fighting, accompanied by much transatlantic mudslinging, ensued before a cease-fire was concluded at Dayton. Regrettably, that agreement did not attempt to defuse the ticking time bomb in Kosovo which would explode in 1998, but the E.U. and the U.S., having learned from Bosnia, quickly came together to resolve the conflict and to lead the reconstruction efforts.

This article also touches on the main lessons the E.U. has learned from the Yugoslav experience, lessons that have important ramifications for transatlantic relations.

E. U. Limitations
When the first free elections took place in post-Tito Yugoslavia in 1990, nationalistic, ethnically-based parties emerged as the strongest political force in all republics. Indeed, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was already using nationalism to consolidate his power as early as 1989, as shown by his infamous Kosovo speech that year.

Milosevic's rise, coupled with the overall election results, should have been a clear warning signal to the E.U. and the U.S. David Gompert, a senior National Security Council official in 1991, comments that the Bush administration knew "a year before the fighting that Yugoslavia was being led toward the abyss by a few demagogic politicians but simply knew of no way to prevent this from occurring."

Unfortunately, ministerial agendas on both sides of the Atlantic were already overflowing with meetings dealing with a seemingly endless succession of crises. The sudden collapse of communism let loose long pent-up tensions that would soon lead to the disintegration not only of Yugoslavia, but of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. At the same time Europe had to contend with the challenge of German unification.

As fighting broke out in Yugoslavia in 1991, the European Community (as it was still known at that time) was preoccupied with the intergovernmental conference that would lead the following year to ratification of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union. This process required difficult, high-level negotiations to prepare the ground for the introduction of the euro and the establishment of a common foreign and security policy (CFSP).

But at the time, the E.C. was still operating under a loose system of foreign policy coordination known as European Political Cooperation. EPC committed member states to cooperate in the foreign policy domain, but specifically excluded any discussion of security issues, the assumption being that the U.S. and NATO would take the lead on European security.

Despite EPC restrictions, the question of military intervention was raised in the summer of 1991; both NATO and the Western European Union (WEU) calculated the force levels required to influence events in Yugoslavia. Both assessments concurred that between 100,000 to 150,000 troops in combat readiness would be required to enforce a cease-fire -- more than the member states of the E.U. could muster. In fact, only the U.K. and France had even a limited capability to project power in the region.

There was also the question of political will. Preoccupied with reunification, Germany stated that it was constitutionally unable to act, while London was adamant that it would not become engaged unless the U.S. was involved. Polls at the time showed that European public opinion favored a military intervention to stop the conflict, yet no government was prepared to commit ground troops for combat (as opposed to protection of humanitarian relief supplies) without U.S. readiness to intervene, or at least to support a European military intervention. For its part, the U.S. was experiencing fatigue after the Gulf War and the collapse of communism. As former U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann notes in his memoirs: "Even a great power has difficulty in dealing with more than one crisis at a time." The Bush administration, advised by old Yugoslav hands Lawrence Eagleburger, Brent Scowcroft and Zimmermann, was content for Europe to deal with the crisis. That was also the predominant view in Congress.

In June 1991 Secretary of State James Baker visited Belgrade to make clear his preference for the preservation of Yugoslavia and warn of the dangers of the constituent republics declaring independence. (President Bush was to deliver a similar message warning Ukraine about the dangers of leaving the Soviet Union six months later.) The fact that the Yugoslav army attacked Slovenia and Croatia just three days after Baker departed Belgrade demonstrates how right Milosevic was that Washington would turn a blind eye to a military engagement within the borders of Yugoslavia.

When the fighting started, the Bush administration publicly supported E.U. efforts to achieve a negotiated solution but categorically ruled out committing U.S. troops to Yugoslavia. Yet the U.S. also sent a demarche, the Bartholomew/Dobbins letter, warning the E.U. not to develop an independent defense capability.

Could the war in Yugoslavia have been prevented, or at least contained? The answer is no, not once the U.S. decided to defer to Europe. As U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and others have argued, only NATO could have provided a credible deterrent to Milosevic but there was no willingness in Washington to lead the Alliance into Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, the Europeans were incapable of acting alone in a decisive manner in 1991, as they had been under U.S. political and military leadership and protection for nearly half a century and had not developed any crisis management experience.

The Rift Deepens
The E.U.'s response to the outbreak of fighting included the appointment of the former NATO Secretary General, Lord Carrington, as the E.U. special representative with a broad mandate to bring the parties to the negotiating table through the Conference on Yugoslavia; the sending of a European Community Monitoring Mission (ECMM) comprising some two hundred monitors who did much valuable work; efforts to involve the wider international community and in particular the U.N; and effecting an arms embargo covering all of Yugoslavia. In the first half of 1992 the U.N. finally began to send troops to support the humanitarian aid efforts in Croatia and later Bosnia. The U.K. and France alone accounted for nearly half the 15,000-strong U.N. contingent.

The spread of hostilities to Bosnia in 1992 further deepened the growing policy rift between the E.U. and the U.S. David Owen, who had taken over from Lord Carrington as the E.U. special representative, and former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, the U.N. Secretary General's personal representative, reached a deal in January 1993 (the Vance-Owen Plan) which provided for a settlement of the war based on the military realities on the ground. This would have established a Bosnia-Herzogovina Federation with large-scale autonomy for the provinces controlled by the three main ethnic groups.

Although it initially supported the deal, the new Clinton administration, under pressure from Sarajevo, eventually rejected the plan -- a decision David Owen later called a "`tragedy." The U.S. instead endorsed rearming the Muslims to enable them to attain a more favorable settlement, a policy termed `lift' (the arms embargo) `and strike' (against the Serbs). The Europeans, with many troops on the ground, were upset at this change in the American position. The divergent views led to the most serious crisis in transatlantic relations since 1949. To help ease tensions, the U.K., France, Germany, Russia and the U.S. established a Contact Group in April 1994 to discuss the situation in Bosnia and to seek to coordinate policy towards reaching a settlement. Despite the involvement of the U.S. and Russia in the Contact Group, however, the E.U. remained the chief provider of U.N. troops and of humanitarian aid, and also administered the city of Mostar, Bosnia.

Dayton And Beyond
By 1995, television coverage of the siege of Sarajevo had brought Western public opinion around to the realization that Slobodan Milosevic would only be prepared to negotiate seriously under the threat of force. So in August 1995 NATO finally agreed (with U.N. authorization) to launch air strikes against Serbian positions. The air attacks, combined with the Croatian blitzkrieg advances in Krajina, had a devastating effect on Serbian morale and forced the warring parties to the negotiating table at Dayton.

The negotiations leading to the Dayton agreement have been well documented by Holbrooke, but it should be emphasized that the terms of the ceasefire were not significantly different from the earlier Vance-Owen agreement. In addition, as Holbrooke himself admits, the record of Dayton was flawed by insufficient follow-up, poor coordination between the military and civilian sides, lack of U.S. financing and the deferral of some key issues.

Although the E.U. was only marginally involved in Dayton, since the U.S. wished to run the show alone, it soon became a key player in the reconstruction efforts. Washington argued that since it had provided the bulk of the military resources that had ended the war, the E.U. should provide most of the subsequent financial and economic assistance.

There was considerable criticism of the reconstruction efforts in Bosnia, particularly from the U.S., which contrasted the rapid deployment of the NATO forces under the stabilization force (IFOR, later SFOR) with the delays on the civilian side. But defenders of the international assistance program note that the IFOR mandate was highly restrictive, actually discouraging cooperation between the military and civilian efforts for fear that the U.S. would be dragged deeper into the Balkan morass. Under pressure from Congress, the Clinton administration expressed constant concern over exit strategy. Thus, as Carl Bildt, the E.U.'s High Representative based in Sarajevo, observed, at times fear of mission creep seemed to turn into fear of the mission itself.

The Kosovo Conflict
In retrospect, it was a considerable failure not to have tried to resolve the Kosovo issue at Dayton or in the years thereafter. Some politicians took the view that things would improve with the hoped-for removal of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, while others maintained that it was impossible to intervene in a sovereign country and still others saw no vital European or American interests at stake. What changed the simmering conflict into a full-blown crisis was the massacre of 25 Kosovo civilians at Raczek in October 1998. The TV pictures broadcast around the world provoked widespread revulsion and prompted the international community to take action.

Unlike in Bosnia, the E.U. and U.S. managed to coordinate their response to the Kosovo crisis. While Holbrooke flew to Belgrade in November 1998 to warn Milosevic that such behavior was unacceptable, the U.K. and France organized a conference at Rambouillet, co-sponsored by the U.S. and Russia, to urge an agreement between the Serbs and Kosovo Albanians. When the Serbs refused the deal that was presented, which would have allowed Kosovars a large degree of autonomy and the prospect of a future referendum on their status, Holbrooke again flew to Belgrade in March 1999 to tell Milosevic that the international community (NATO) was ready to use force against him in order to enforce a settlement. The ensuing bombing campaign started on March 24, 1999 and continued until Milosevic conceded defeat on June 10, 1999.

The Europeans surprised many observers -- and Milosevic -- by maintaining a common front throughout the bombing campaign, though there was some opposition to the air strikes from Greece and Italy. But the war highlighted the fact that militarily, the Europeans remained heavily dependent on the U.S., particularly in terms of air power. Although the Europeans have just over half the number of fighter bombers that the U.S. has, most European aircraft do not have equipment allowing attacks at night, which is when most sorties in the Kosovo conflict were carried out. Still, while the U.S. flew 80% of the air strikes, the E.U. provided 80% of the ground troops. Furthermore, the E.U.'s diplomatic efforts bore fruit with Finland's President Martti Ahtisaari playing a crucial role in the negotiations that ended the war.

Lessons Learned
The E.U. drew three main lessons from the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts. The first concerns the value of close cooperation with the United Nations. Thanks to the U.N.'s humanitarian operations thousands of lives were saved in Yugoslavia over the past decade. But the U.N. protection force in Bosnia (UNPROFOR) was often given impossible mandates and unclear instructions. In addition, criticism is often unfairly levelled at countries that sent troops to Bosnia, rather than the ones that did not send any. As Bildt points out, "This was a major factor in complicating the efforts of the international community, and a major constraint on the U.N. capability throughout the war." This lesson was clearly taken on board in planning for the IFOR and its successor SFOR mission; both forces managed the peace in Bosnia by involving American, Russian and German forces among others.

A second lesson is the need for Europe to develop a credible and effective common foreign and security policy and to bolster its defense capability independent of NATO. Towards that end, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had fumed at the E.U.'s inability to support its Kosovo diplomacy with military clout, relaunched proposals for a European Security and Defense Initiative (ESDI). Blair's first task was to get the French on board, which was achieved at the St. Malo summit in November 1998. The European Union leaders then endorsed the Anglo-French proposals at the Cologne summit in June 1999. E.U. leaders agreed that the Union should have the capacity for autonomous action, which would require credible military forces and new institutional structures. At this point, the U.S., previously strong supporters of ESDI, suddenly began to have second thoughts about the E.U. operating alone, even in carrying out peacekeeping and conflict management operations. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned in March 1999 that there should be no duplication of military assets, no decoupling of European states from NATO and no discrimination against non-E.U. members of NATO. Fortunately, over the summer and fall of 1999 these fears were allayed.

At the December 1999 European Council summit in Helsinki, participants agreed that the E.U. would develop a 50,000-strong rapid reaction force within two years. They also agreed to incorporate the WEU into the European Union; this does not mean the creation of a European army but simply enables the E.U. to back up its diplomacy with a credible military force. Under this arrangement, neutral countries will not have to sign up for a new defense alliance but they will have to play a role in European peacekeeping operations. The European Council then appointed former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana, the new E.U. High Representative charged with carrying out the organization's common security and foreign policy, to oversee this merger as well as the creation of a E.U. military staff to provide advice to ministers. Finally, in response to U.S. concerns, the Helsinki agreement specified that non-E.U. members would be able to participate fully and on an equal footing in European Union-led operations and that formal links would be established between the E.U. and NATO.

Staying Engaged -- Together
The WEU audit of European militaries published in November 1999 revealed several important gaps in capability that will take a number of years to rectify. As defense budgets are unlikely to increase, the Europeans will have to spend their money more effectively in order to get a bigger bang for their euro. This should be perfectly feasible, however, as there is currently considerable duplication of resources with, for example, several countries engaged in the production of tanks, fighter aircraft and warships. The consortium which built the `Eurofighter' is perhaps a model for the future. Similarly there is a trend towards more regional commands such as the Eurocorps, the Nordic battalion, the Anglo-Dutch rapid reaction force and so on. In addition, because many national force structures in Europe still reflect Cold War postures, there is an urgent need for restructuring. This will ensure that the E.U. has the necessary mobile, well-equipped and trained forces for today's peacekeeping and peacemaking operations.

But the most important lesson of the Yugoslav conflict is that the E.U. and the U.S. must work together to achieve results. During the Bosnian conflict uncertainty as to what Washington was or was not prepared to do inhibited European diplomacy. Mutual recriminations did considerable damage to transatlantic relations. In welcome contrast, close E.U.-U.S. cooperation was a key factor in achieving a solution to the Kosovo crisis.

There is no longer talk of an `exit strategy' for the Balkans since it is clear that the E.U. and NATO will have to remain involved there for many years during the reconstruction process. The forces of separation remain stronger than those of integration and the threats to peace in Europe remain higher there than in any other region. The E.U. has recognized that it will have to take the lead to promote regional integration and deepen cooperation with the countries of the region, which it is doing with strong American support.

The European Union has some very powerful `carrots' to push the individual countries of the region towards democracy, respect for human and minority rights, and the establishment of a market economy. This conditionality is a key element in the E.U.'s approach and is already having some effect. For example, the countries of the region can see how far Slovenia has moved towards full membership of the E.U. Progress in Bulgaria and Romania (and Turkey) has been rewarded with the opening of E.U. accession negotiations, while Macedonia will be the first country to benefit from a new agreement setting out a clear path towards future membership. The way is thus open for other countries, including a post-Milosevic Serbia, to go down the same track.

As President Clinton said at the Istanbul summit in November 1999, "Europe has demonstrated its strong leadership in support of recovery and stabilization throughout Southeast Europe. I welcome the very substantial E.U. assistance package [$17 billion in grants and loans since 1991] which will create tremendous opportunities for the countries of the region and affirm in the strongest terms European support for their transformation."

When Clinton and European Commission President Romano Prodi met in Washington in December 1999, the two leaders pledged to continue to work together in the Balkans. After the trials and tribulations of the previous decade, it appears that both the E.U. and U.S. have learned that working in partnership produces far greater results than going their separate ways. This is a message that will resonate far beyond the Balkans.

Fraser Cameron is the political counselor at the European Commission Delegation in Washington. Before joining the Commission in 1991, he was a British diplomat serving in Bonn and East Berlin.