The quest for legitimacy in independent Kosovo: the unfulfilled promise of diversity and minority rights

Abstract

When Kosovo declared its independence in 2008, it did so not as a nation-state, but as a “state of communities,” self-defining as multiethnic, diverse, and committed to extensive rights for minorities. In this paper, this choice is understood as a response to a dual legitimation problem. Kosovo experienced both an external legitimation challenge, regarding its contested statehood internationally, and an internal one, vis-à-vis its Serb minority. The focus on diversity and minority rights was expected to confer legitimacy on the state both externally and internally. International state-builders and the domestic political elite in post-conflict Kosovo both pursued this strategy. However, it inadvertently created an additional internal legitimation challenge, this time from within Kosovo’s majority Albanian population. This dynamic is illustrated by the opposition movement “Lëvizja Vetëvendosje” (Self-Determination Movement), which rejects the framing of Kosovo as first and foremost a multiethnic state. The movement’s counter-narrative represents an additional internal legitimation challenge to the new state. This paper thus finds that internationally endorsed “diversity management” through minority rights did not deliver as a panacea for the legitimacy dilemmas of the post-conflict polity. On the contrary, the “state of communities” continues to be contested by both majority and minority groups in Kosovo.

Keywords:

• minority rights
• Kosovo
• state-building
• legitimacy
• diversity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants of the 2015 UK Conflict Research Society Conference, and in particular Sandra Joireman, as well as Richard Caplan and the two anonymous reviewers at Nationalities Papers for their helpful comments on previous drafts.

ORCID

Dana M. Landau http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2900-4163

Notes

1. The term “Communities” is employed in Kosovo’s legal framework to mean ethnic or national groups. The use of this term – as opposed to “minorities” – is a custom carried over from earlier international proposals to resolving the Kosovo conflict, which sought to avoid prejudging Kosovo’s future status by defining which group would be in the minority: Albanians within an undivided Serbia, or Serbs within an independent Kosovo (Bieber 2004b, 117).

2. Hayden (1992) discusses pertinent regional examples from Croatia and Slovenia, among others.

3. I thank the anonymous reviewer at Nationalities Papers for drawing my attention to this point.

4. Others include the Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian communities (in the postwar period often referred to jointly under the acronym RAE), as well as the Turkish, Gorani, and Bosniak communities. This study does not discuss the responses by these smaller and less politicized communities to Kosovo’s diversity-focused state-building process, and instead focuses exclusively on the Kosovo-Albanian and Kosovo-Serb communities.

5. UNMIK took over all civil administrative functions after the conflict. See, e.g. Caplan (2005b).

6. A stark exception to this is the Kosovo Police Service (KPS), which was hailed a success for being Kosovo’s most multiethnic and professional institution.

7. In 2008, Martti Ahtisaari received the Nobel Peace Prize for, among other reasons, his mediation efforts in Kosovo as Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General.

8. The question posed to the court was extremely narrow, referring only to the act of declaring independence, against which there is no legal prohibition. The judgment, therefore, does not touch on whether the people of Kosovo had a right to self-determination, or more importantly, whether Kosovo fulfilled the requirements of statehood (Caplan 2010).

9. Florian Bieber argues, however, that while Kosovo possesses some features of power sharing, it also lacks some crucial ones, such as grand interethnic coalitions, firm veto powers for minorities or, for example, a second chamber of parliament for ethnicities, as in Bosnia (Bieber 2004a, 2, 2004b, 126).

10. A system of 20 reserved seats for minority parties had already existed during the UNMIK period. It was included in the Ahtisaari Plan, but limited to the first two electoral mandates from independence, after which the same number of seats was to be understood as guaranteed, meaning that if minority parties won below that number (10 for Serbs, 10 for other minorities), these would be topped up to the minimum of 20 total minority seats (Annex I Article 3.3). In every legislature, since 1999 minority parties have held between 20 and 35 seats in the 120-seat Assembly.

11. Howard (2012, 162) describes a rise of “ethnocracy promotion” following ethnic conflict on the part of policy-makers in liberal democracies since the end of the Cold War.

12. I thank the anonymous reviewer at Nationalities Papers for pointing out this distinction.

13. This featured in many states’ official statements of recognition of Kosovo’s independence to alleviate concerns of precedent setting (Bolton, 2013). Kosovo’s declaration of independence itself takes up this language, stating that it is “a special case arising from Yugoslavia’s non-consensual break-up and is not a precedent for any other situation.”

14. The differentiation of output and input legitimacy was initially borrowed from systems theories (Easton 1965).

15. Potential resentment from the majority community, not unlike Vetëvendosje’s contestation of the “state of communities” described below, was foreseen during the negotiations of the Ahtisaari Plan. For example, in order to avoid an impression that decentralization was merely a benefit given to Serbs, an excessive degree of decentralization was simultaneously enshrined for all of Kosovo, which has since been burdened with unreasonably small, underfunded, and low-capacity municipalities (Capussela 2015, 177).

16. For a broader discussion, see also Edelman (1964) and Eriksen and Jenkins (2007).

17. Incidentally, and linked to the further internal legitimation challenge described below, this judgment faced intense opposition. Despite pressure from the International Civilian Office on the municipality, the ruling was effectively ignored (Capussela 2014, 13–14).

18. As mentioned above, the last undisputed census in which all of Kosovo’s population participated took place in 1981, finding an Albanian majority of 77.5% and a Serb minority of 13.2%. Due to migration, differing birth rates, and conflict-related displacement, these ratios have changed significantly in the past three decades. In 2008, the Statistical Office of Kosovo operating under UNMIK estimated a population of 92% Albanians and 5.3% Serbs (Judah 2008, 2). The Ahtisaari Plan was negotiated with these percentages in mind. Finally, the 2011 census found the Serb population to be even smaller, but should be read with caution as it did not cover the mostly Serb-inhabited north of Kosovo, and was characterized by a partial boycott on the part of Serbs and Roma in the south (Visoka and Gjevori 2013). Using the votes cast in the 2010 elections to calculate the extent of this boycott, and adding the estimated 45,000 Serbs in the North of Kosovo, leads to an estimate of Serbs making up 4.5% of Kosovo’s population (Capussela 2015, 84).

19. Non-recognizing states include two veto powers in the UNSC (Russia and China) and five EU member states (Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, and Slovakia). A continuously updated list of recognitions can be found at http://www.kosovothanksyou.com/. Accessed November 27, 2016.

20. Vetëvendosje increased its representation in parliament in the following elections in 2014 with 13.59% of the overall vote. In a major boost for the movement, Vetëvendosje’s candidate also won the race for mayor of Pristina in the 2013 local elections. 

21. Those include most notably the small political elites of Kosovo’s minority communities, particularly representatives who benefitted from positions in Kosovo’s state structures despite limited electoral support from their supposed constituents.