Arts & Sciences

The war in Kosovo illustrated how deeply the United States remains involved in European affairs. NATO's victory over Serbia is a cause neither for international euphoria nor depression. The humanitarian disaster that NATO's bombing helped bring about in Kosovo and the widespread destruction it created in Serbia make celebration difficult. And the defeat of Slobodan Milosevic's policy of fomenting ethnic hatred and violence and NATO's survival of its first military test limit regret. Outside of the United States, in Europe, Russia, and China, the reaction is ambivalent. While Milosevic had no defenders, the preponderance of U.S. power and the sidelining of the United Nations alert all secondary powers to the threat of an unconstrained U.S. hegemony.

A similar ambivalence is noticeable in U.S. domestic politics. The war presented Americans with an opportunity for a public debate about the purpose of U.S. military power after the Cold War, one that was supposed to have occurred a few years back at the time of the first wave of NATO's enlargement. In its absence, we are now witnessing a realignment of political voices that is likely to influence the presidential election next year. Traditional political alignments were simple and predictable. The old Right favored the military and a global policy of containing communism. The old Left sought to weaken the military and criticized the global engagement of the U.S.

The new Left favors military intervention in the support of human rights on a global scale. The new Right holds to the same position in defense of core moral values held by the U.S. polity. The old Left counsels caution in the face of a Vietnam-style, quagmire ground war. Their allies on the old Right focus primarily on the defense of tangible U.S. interests. Talk shows on TV and teach-ins at universities illustrated the split between new and old rather than between Right and Left. The central intellectual issue in this realignment is how to bring together moral purpose and political interest in a world that now is arguably more complicated than during the bad old days of the Cold War.

Complexity has increased because the world is composed of distinct, overlapping regions that differ in the institutional forms and normative foundations of diplomatic statecraft and military strategy.

Since 1945 the United States has had a profound impact on western Europe. On questions of national security the traditional European institution was the bilateral or trilateral security pact. It has been replaced by multilateral institutional arrangements of which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) are two prominent examples.

In the history of military alliances, NATO is unique in having an operational, integrated defense and command structure in peace time. In the words of its First General Secretary, Lord Ismay, NATO had three main purposes: keeping the Americans in, the Russians out, and Germans down. Throughout the Cold War it succeeded in all three tasks. Had it been only a military alliance, NATO should have faded quickly as the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union removed the primary threat against which it was defending Europe and the U.S. But over time NATO had transformed itself into a security community of states. It thus succeeded in institutionalizing a dependable expectation of peaceful change as the modus operandi for its members. There is widespread agreement that the democratic character of virtually all NATO member states has had much to do with this remarkable evolution. Indeed, judging by the determined efforts of most central and eastern European states seeking to join NATO, membership has become a defining attribute of contemporary European statehood even when, as in the case of the Czech Republic, the security benefits of NATO membership are, at best, modest. The fact that NATO membership was possible only for states that had settled all of their outstanding territorial and political controversies with their neighbors has enhanced the pacifying effect of NATO in the 1990s.

The EU is a second example of multilateralism in Europe. Originally it was the fruit of an imaginative French strategy of tying Germany firmly to Europe so as to prevent a renewal of German military aggression. In its original conception the EU was designed to put under multilateral supervision both Germany's military-industrial complex (the European Coal and Steel Community and Euratom) and Germany's armed forces (the European Defense Community, EDC). In the end France was not prepared to internationalize its own military, thus leaving the EU as an economic institution that has evolved from a customs union to a single market and, since 1999, to a monetary union.

Since the early 1970s, however, the EU has gradually developed a set of procedures for greater consultation on issues of foreign policy that have matured into institutionalized coordination of a common foreign and security policy (CFSP). Furthermore, the EU's eastern enlargement is spreading this system, together with all of its other institutional practices, to central and eastern Europe. And as a result of the Kosovo war, the EU is likely to move faster and further in developing additional common elements for the conduct of a European security policy that may become more distinct from NATO without contradicting NATO policies. Should a European balancing against U.S. preponderance occur in the future, it would thus happen within multilateral institutions.

The normative foundations of Europe's security orders are as distinct as its multilateral form. Historically, that order had been defined by the Westphalian system of sovereign states committed to the principle of non-intervention. Even when political expediency and power asymmetries made governments violate these principles, the same governments insisted on the principles' timeless validity. The end of the Cold War, however, saw the articulation of a new normative order that is now competing with the old. Under the auspices of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the November 1990 Charter of Paris and the operational instruments approved in Stockholm in December 1992 reversed the norms supporting Europe's security orders. No longer was international order rooted in the possibility of domestic disorders protected by the principle of non-intervention. Instead, domestic order became the precondition for an international order that rested on the inviolability of existing state borders. In Europe's new security architecture, cultural autonomy is a legitimate political objective of ethnic minorities; the right to self-determination is not.

The CSCE has specialized in mediation, crisis management, the monitoring of human rights, and the practice of preventive diplomacy. Although its extensive interventions are not backed by the possibility of military sanctions, they have helped defuse what might have become explosive crises as, for example, in the protection of the Russian minority in Estonia. Since 1993 the CSCE has mediated on an ongoing basis ethnic or minority conflicts in 10 states; and it has established 13 Missions of Long Duration. Yugoslavia's government withheld visas for CSCE mediation personnel in 1993; and, in the same year, it suspended the operation of the CSCE Mission in the northern (Vojvodina) and the southern (Kosovo) parts of the country. It thus opted out of the collective commitment of European states to resolve issues of minority and human rights based on the principles of democratic governance and the rule of law. The observance of human rights rather than the principle of non-intervention has become an important cornerstone for Europe's security order. And it, rather than traditional great-power rivalry, has constituted the foundation for the "contact group" of major western states and Russia, today's equivalent to the nineteenth-century "concert" of Europe.

Peter J. Katzenstein,is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies in the Department of Government. He has published widely on German, Japanese, and European politics, on issues of national security, and most recently on regionalism in Asia and Europe. His numerous awards include fellowships from the German Marshall Fund, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wissenschaftkolleg and the Wissenschaftszentrum, both in Berlin, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He currently holds the Abe Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council.