Kosovo and world politics

Abstract

Kosovo 1999 might mark the symbolic end of the post‐Cold‐War era. What better moment could we have picked than the sunset of the millennium, a year packed with activities of all sorts that commemorate the events of this century and celebrate the dawn of the next, to put the finishing touches to a more just and orderly global community? The Cold War was over, East and West were coming closer together, some of the last communist outposts were opening up to international engagement, and diplomacy was increasingly replacing bombs in solving conflicts between states. The force of ideas, not the force of war; human rights, not state rights; and reconciliation and conflict resolution, not Clause‐witzian war making, were supposed to ring in the new century and millennium.

Yet, the peace dividend of the end of the Cold War did not spread to all parts of the world. Throughout the developing world, conflicts—mostly internal—continued to be fought with intense ferocity and great loss of lives. Most of these conflicts went largely unnoticed by the major powers, whose interest in the former Third World disappeared with the end of the Cold War's bipolar competition over influence, ideology, geographic reach, and power. Short of a few unsuccessful attempts to embrace the Third World within the emerging “new world order,” the stable North showed little interest in the conflict‐riven South. If Somalia was an experiment in mutual engagement, Rwanda was the harsh reality in the return to the solitude of separation between the two worlds.