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Interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo
by Zoran Pajic
Methodological remarks
From World War II to the end of the Cold War, the game of global politics was relatively unambiguous. Unlike the world of the last decade, the international community for most of the twentieth century was a picture presented in black and white. The main features of such a two-dimensional world were easy to interpret, understand and govern. At the same time, the whole structure hang on the balance of power between the two superpowers which reduced the number of players in the international arena to an absurd disproportion. The rules and issues of a bipolar system were, for the most part, clearly defined, as were the interactions between allies and enemies and between official and unofficial actors. The number of players was manageable, and they knew their roles or could instinctively guess what position to take in any given circumstances. In short, as Lewis Rasmussen puts it "there was a constancy, a simplicity, and a predictability to international life that was rather reassuring."
Since the fall of the Berlin wall, we have been living in a turbulent world where new rules are being created to accommodate the process of transformation in the community of states. The loss of clear bipolarity in world politics has opened a huge gap and allowed for a violent global disorder in the form of unchecked and often violent passions for socio-political change that had long been suppressed. Foreign affairs professionals―government representatives; academics; journalists; members of business, religious, and humanitarian assistance communities; and many others―all struggle to both formulate relevant questions and seek answers in what has become a period of greater uncertainty than at almost any other time in living memory.
One of the greatest challenges confronting us today is how to understand the dynamics, the motives and the driving forces of contemporary political disputes and violent conflicts in the international arena. Our ability to predict, prevent, manage and resolve such discord has been seriously tested. The situation is not made easier by the fact that most conflicts in the past decade are, by and large, of non-international character. Realism, the dominant way of explaining and predicting international behaviour, is no longer singularly capable of interpreting the forces that determine political relations among nations and other relevant actors.
The deficiencies of realism as a possible guidebook have come to surface in the new international political environment. It can no longer serve as the only optic for understanding the complex dynamics of internal socio-political conflicts and its myriad inter-related problems. Numerous factors of non-strictly-political nature have come into play and they reflect the new diversity of our post-cold world, as well as complexity of understanding and "running" the world. As pointed out by Richard Harass,1 these factors have a profound effect upon the external behaviour of states, whether in conventional diplomatic relations, situations of tensions and a growing conflict, or full-scale conflagration, where states are involved either as combatants or external third parties. A step further from more traditional factors of political-military nature, the whole spectrum of cultural, demographic, developmental, economic, ecological, educational religious, and psychological aspects have the say in the affairs of world politics today. It is important to acknowledge the eruption of civil society sector in the former communist countries, where the level of socio-political predictability through political control had, for generations, systematically suppressed unofficial voices.
