02/19/08 – Philip Cunliffe – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Our next guest is Philip Cunliffe.
He's a researcher at King's College in London, and he's written for Culture Wars, The American Prospect, Novo, and Arena Magazines.
He's the co-editor of the book Politics Without Sovereignty, a critique of contemporary international relations.
And he's got a new one at Spiked Online, which is called Kosovo, the Obedient Child of Europe.
Welcome to the show, Philip.
Thanks.
Glad to be here.
Good to have you on.
And you're in London today, is that right?
That's right, yeah.
It's interesting, your book, Politics Without Sovereignty, a critique of contemporary international relations.
I think I might see where you're going with that title after reading your newest article here.
Kosovo, the Obedient Child of Europe.
You say in this article that Kosovo has not truly declared independence from Belgrade, or even from the UN or the European Union, that basically they're still under the jurisdiction of, I'm not sure which all forces now.
Yes, very much so.
I mean, that's one of the main problems with the whole scenario, is just how confusing these situations become.
I think Kosovo is very interesting because it presents some of the most kind of retrograde, some of the most kind of regressive things that are happening in international politics today.
It presents all those things in a very concentrated, distilled form.
And one of those problems is this deep kind of hostility and suspicion towards the idea of sovereignty, of the idea of a state acting autonomously, being fully independent to kind of stand on its own two feet and do as it pleases, the kind of classical understanding of self-determination.
Well, now, in this country, the belief in independence is called isolationism.
Is that basically the same thing over there, where it's just, you kind of get smeared if you're for real independence?
Yeah, I mean, it's always a classic way of kind of smearing ideas of self-determination, I think, is to call people isolationists or to kind of call into question their morals because they don't care about what's happening to other people on the other side of the world, which, you know, is kind of always a problem when you're having these kinds of discussions.
I mean, that's not to say that you can't take kind of principled positions on these issues.
I mean, I suppose the point is that, you know, self-determination applies not just at home, but also abroad.
And as a principle is something which means it's actually genuinely kind of internationalist rather than isolationist, because it means that all people should be free to exercise their rights to self-determination rather than it's not just kind of an introspective principle, but is a fully universal one.
Now, back in 1999, there was an air war for, I guess, a month and a half or two, where NATO, led by Bill Clinton and Wesley Clark, bombed Serbia in order to end, that was what they said anyway, to end the war over Kosovo, to basically force the Serbian government to relinquish control.
And they've been more or less autonomous since that time, right?
Yeah.
I mean, what's very kind of striking about the war in Kosovo was that, as you say, I mean, in 1999, NATO went to war, they bombed Serbia in order to force the Serbian government to withdraw its forces from Kosovo that were, at that point, involved in a counterinsurgency operation against local separatists in Kosovo, Albanian separatists.
And ever since then, until this recent declaration of independence, Kosovo was run as a protectorate.
So it wasn't autonomous or independent in any kind of, in any sense of the word.
In fact, it was run fully as a protectorate of the United Nations.
But something that was very peculiar about that war was, back in 1999, when NATO went to war, they went to war not to defend the freedom of the Kosovar Albanians or to liberate them or to kind of spread democracy.
That wasn't a justification given.
It was cast in humanitarian terms.
They were rescuing the victims in Kosovo, the people who were being oppressed or driven from their homes or whatever it might be.
So it was cast in this kind of terms of rescuing victims.
And what's kind of important about that is that once people are cast in this kind of passive role of being victims, of not having any kind of independent will or ability to act on their own, then it's very, very easy to kind of take away any kind of, to take away what you want from them.
So, you know, the Kosovar Albanians were rescued as victims.
And what happened was, you know, as victims, as powerless, kind of hapless and vulnerable individuals, they were run as a protectorate for the following eight years until this supposed declaration of independence right now.
Well, and the other thing important about that is it just wasn't true.
I mean, they told us that 100,000 Kosovar Albanians had been killed, that there was a genocide taking place there.
And it turned out, of course, that there were about 2,000 something deaths and they were all from battle injuries.
There were no massacres or genocide going on of any kind.
I mean, I more or less agree.
I mean, you know, there were enormous claims made for the kinds of atrocities that were going on.
And as you say, the genocide turned out to be as invisible and as manufactured as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
Yeah, exactly.
So, I mean, yeah, as you say, I mean, it was a war that was also the kind of the reasons given, the justification given to war.
Well, they also said, as you point out, that they were not fighting for the independence of Kosovo.
They were just going to help those people.
And I see what you're saying.
The side effect has been that Kosovar Albanians now are cast in the role of being the permanent victims and dependents upon the international system to prop them up.
And the point of your article, I guess, here is really that this hasn't changed.
And in fact, you even say in this article, and this confused me, was that they haven't even truly declared independence from Belgrade, much less from the United Nations or the European Union.
Yeah.
When there's this distance from ideas of sovereignty, then it becomes much more difficult to actually pin down what the actual relations of power are at work.
So you have this situation now where Kosovo claims to have declared independence from Serbia, from Belgrade.
But on the other hand, they've not been run from Belgrade since the end of the war in 1999.
They've been run by the U.N.
Yet, on the other hand, they've not kind of really, you know, they're not kind of leaving any dependent status because the U.N. is being replaced by the European Union.
So they're going to become a European Union protectorate now.
But they are still officially tied to Belgrade, too?
Not at all.
No, I mean, they're not tied.
Formally, they've cut their links.
And what the situation at the end of the war was, it was a U.N. resolution that put this kind of, completely imposed this kind of very contradictory solution to the end of the conflict, which was that the territorial integrity of Serbia was preserved in terms of the resolution, at least formally.
But the province itself was going to, de facto, was going to be run by the U.N.
OK, so in your article where you say, you're referring to Sunday's declaration, you say, Kosovo's parliament did not declare independence from Belgrade, yet nor did it declare its independence from the ruling U.N.
You say that because they already had declared independence from Belgrade, not because they still haven't.
Well, I say that because it's not so much, I was getting, trying to get beneath the kind of formality of the occasion.
So the formal declaration is the declaration of independence from Serbia.
But I was, what I was saying was essentially it's meaningless because they've not been run from Serbia for the last eight years.
Right.
So I'm saying, you know, in that kind of sense of the word, it's not a declaration of independence at all.
OK.
Yeah, I guess I just misunderstood the context in the article then.
Now you say that under this so-called supervised independence of the European Union now instead of the United Nations, that there's to be a 16,000 strong NATO army occupying Kosovo.
And is that indefinite?
Well, I mean, it's the, it's the NATO forces that have been in Kosovo since the end of the war in 99.
So they're going to keep on staying there and they're going to retain kind of control of Kosovo's borders and they're going to retain ultimate responsibility for Kosovo.
There's also the huge American base in Kosovo, Camp Bonsteel as well.
So how long NATO plans to stay there, whether those bases will be permanent or not, is an open question.
But I mean, I mean, you know, obviously the other, the other, the flip side of it all is like to declare, to declare independence when you've got 16,000 troops, foreign troops on your territory who are, who actually provide all security for the country, you know, for the country you've just declared independence for.
It kind of makes a nonsense of the idea that you're really independent at all.
Yeah.
You talk about in the article how they really have worked with the European Union on all of this from beginning to end.
I forget if it was your article or another article on Spicer, they talk about how the EU even took priority over the new flag.
Yeah, it's, I mean, that was just astonishing, the amount, kind of just the sheer scale of the way, of the way this kind of thing has been manufactured from beginning to end.
So, I mean, if you read, you know, if you look at the papers or watch the coverage on the TV, you see kind of, it's always presented in this kind of way of the people kind of surging towards freedom, you know, people waving flags and celebrating on the streets and so on.
And I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of positive sentiment, but unfortunately, the way it's just been controlled right down to the detail of actually kind of forbidding any national symbols in the new flag of Kosovo, the Albanian national symbols have been completely taken out and in its place, this very bland flag, which ends up matching the colors of the European Union flag exactly, and is designed to be as kind of as inoffensive as possible.
So, you know, hardly the mark of kind of the great national struggle for independence when you have somebody else designing your flag to make it as bland as possible and to make sure that doesn't offend any minorities within your country.
When you brought up Camp Bonsteel, first of all, I want to urge everybody in the audience to go to Google or Yahoo images and search for a picture of Camp Bonsteel.
It's absolutely incredible.
But it brings up the question of what America's real interest is.
It wasn't saving the lives of 100,000 people.
It wasn't guaranteeing the independence, so-called, of Kosovo.
And yet we have this massive Camp Bonsteel there.
And for all I know, 10 other ones.
Why?
What is the real point?
It's a difficult thing to draw out.
I mean, I don't think there's lots of talk about kind of oil pipelines and so on, about the need to control that area, the need to kind of have military bases.
I don't think any of that really gets to the heart of the issue because, you know, at the end of the day, I mean, the really important kind of bases are all outside of that region and more in Eastern Europe, outside of Kosovo, more to the north in places like Poland and Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania and so on.
So I don't think the military bases explains it.
And I don't really think the oil pipelines either.
I think it was much more, the idea of going to war for a humanitarian sentiment is much more to do with the need for political leaders domestically to kind of project the appearance of being principled and standing above the kind of the spray of bitter kind of petty partisan politics at home and coming to the rescue of people suffering abroad is a way to kind of present yourself in these kind of clear moral terms of fighting evil, being on the side of good.
It's a way to kind of bestride the world, this moral colossus.
Whenever you present things in terms of good versus evil, you can brook no disagreement.
There's no place for discussion or debate.
It means there's an immediate, you know, you're either with us or against us.
It's always cast in those terms whenever, whenever kind of international politics becomes about and is moralized and put in terms of good versus evil.
Yeah.
And this did take place just what, two or three months after Clinton's acquittal in the Senate on his impeachment charges.
So I can see that as a great, you know, rehabilitation, war leader, and particularly for humanitarian reasons.
Isn't that nice?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Here we are nine years later, still going on.
And I guess maybe it has rehabilitated Bill's image to people a little bit, but it seems like, well, in a sense of festering wound, I know that there are still many Serbs inside Kosovo who now are going to want to secede back and, you know, there's basically all kinds of opportunities for, for more conflict now that this has happened.
Well, very much so.
I mean, it's the striking thing, I mean, about the when, you know, when you start kind of thinking about things in these moral terms, it becomes much easier not to think or rather you know, people stop thinking kind of practically like if you're going to go in there and if you're going to rescue people, you know, kind of claim to rescue people from, from being oppression and suffering, then what are you going to do afterwards?
You know, how are you going to carry what is going to happen to the situation afterwards?
How are you going to resolve the longstanding tension?
How are you going to deal with the situation once the conflict's over?
And so, as you say, you know, there's this, there's this complete kind of absence of forward planning or any kind of strategic vision for these things.
So they end up in this situation where they've got the kudos for being, for having kind of being the morally superior party, rescuing these kinds of, of these hapless individuals.
And then, you know, where did they end up nine years later?
They've got to manufacture a new state from scratch and even design the flag for them in order to kind of try and wangle their way out of the situation.
I mean, and it's similar parallels to Iraq, you know, the complete kind of absence of any kind of forward planning or strategy for what's going to happen after you knock down the Iraqi state is very similar.
So I think this, you know, this is the kind of the flip side of this moral approach, the absence of being able to kind of think things through in a rational and coherent way.
Sure.
And in fact, you have a great article about the situation in Sudan that makes the same point.
In fact, you explain how promises of intervention and further intervention by international forces, whether the African Union or the European Union, the United Nations, peacekeeping troops or whatever, that the more promises of intervention are heard in Darfur, the longer it takes for anybody to make peace, because then it becomes a contest for who can get the international forces to come in on their side.
And they would rather prolong the conflict with strong backup than make peace.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, and it's a pattern that's repeated, I mean, not just in Sudan, but since the end of the Cold War, I mean, throughout the 1990s, you ended up with this situation where the willingness of the international community to launch humanitarian interventions and to come in to come into these conflicts in order to kind of resolve them or claiming to resolve them, you ended up where it kind of completely changed the dynamics of what was happening on the ground.
So it was always in the interest of one party in the case of Sudan, the rebels, to hold out rather than to kind of seek a compromise solution or to go back to the negotiating table.
The longer they hold out, the longer they prolong the conflict, the greater the chance that the humanitarian sentiment will continue to build up until they can provoke an intervention in their favor.
So perversely, it has the exact opposite of, you know, the exact opposite of the humanitarian effect, because the willingness to intervene means that these conflicts are prolonged on the ground and people end up suffering more.
In fact, you even quote a State Department official saying that the rebels let the village burnings go on, let the killing go on, because the more international pressure that's brought to Baron Khartoum, the stronger their position grows.
Yeah, it's I mean, the kind of the various rebels, I mean, this is another thing kind of as as the kind of pressure on Sudan has grown and as the war drums have grown, you know, people start beating the war drums about whether they're going to go to war or declare a no fly zone over Darfur or escalate intervention.
The rebel movement, the various rebel movements in Darfur have just completely splintered as they kind of compete for the favor of various kind of, you know, various states and organizations in the international community.
And they seem by all accounts, they seem to have been the most cynical about exploiting exploiting humanitarian sentiment in the international at the international level, to the point where even you know, the State Department is admitting the fact that these groups are prolonging the conflict in order to drag out the outside world into their to intervene in their favor.
Now, this does relate to Sudan in a sense, because a lot of the battle there is between nomads and farmers.
And it's really the kind of thing that, you know, I can't imagine Americans or Europeans or anybody could ever fix from the outside at all.
But it seems especially when you look at the situation in Kosovo is a really good example.
And you have so many Serbs in Kosovo who are worried.
I don't know exactly about what, but apparently they're worried that they will have less rights now.
And it seems like you have all these ethnic divisions that come primarily because of the amount of power that can be wielded against them.
So that, you know, if there was basic property rights protections for everybody in Kosovo, it wouldn't matter if you were an ethnic Albanian or ethnic Serb or whether you were an Orthodox Christian or whether you were a Muslim.
Because, you know, if you lose the election this time, it's no big deal.
Your rights aren't going to be violated.
But apparently people just assume that their rights are going to be violated.
So you have a push to, you know, keep Serbian control over certain parts of Kosovo that still have religious shrines and Serb populations and all this kind of stuff, where really what we just need are individual rights protections.
And then none of these ethnic differences will really matter.
I mean, I think the problem, one of the real problems in Kosovo is the fact that the ethnic divisions have been institutionalized in the way the province has been run under the terms of the UN Protectorate.
So far from kind of encouraging people to kind of rise above their identity when they're engaging in public life, it's been institutionalized, fossilized.
So there's no way of escaping it.
So in the kind of political institutions that the UN set up to run Kosovo for the last eight years, it's been, you know, there've been seats set aside for various minorities in the various public bodies, in the legislature.
The voting is structured around your ethnic identity.
So all these things have been fixed in stone.
So far from, you know, it's not just something which is bubbling up from below.
It's also something which is actively kind of cultivated by the international community.
Everybody has to fit in their box.
And, you know, there's no way to escape it.
So it's a way, you know, I mean, it's a question of politics, at least as much as a question of economics and property rights.
Now, I'll refer to your book here.
You're the co-editor of a book called Politics Without Sovereignty, a Critique of Contemporary International Relations.
And I read a couple of reviews and so forth of it.
And it seems like basically what you're doing is you're arguing for traditional notions of independence and the Westphalian nation state against the kind of modern notion that nation states are obsolete and need to be replaced by more of a global federal system.
Is that about it?
Yeah, I mean, very much so that the, you know, the best way to kind of to enshrine democracy and accountability in politics today remains the form of the sovereign state.
The best way to kind of guarantee at least the possibility for some measure of self-determination is the idea of the sovereign state, precisely because the idea of the sovereign state kind of embodies the idea that there is somebody who's ultimately responsible, the sovereign, somebody who calls the shots.
While in today's world, there's much more, I'm not so sure it's global federalism that's so much a problem, it's much more the fact that they're kind of the clear authority of the sovereign state where every, you know, at least, I mean, it may not be perfect, but at least you know where you stand because there are clear relationships of accountability and responsibility.
In place of that, today, we seem to be having more and more kind of this idea of vague overlapping duties and responsibilities, and it becomes, you know, increasingly less clear who's responsible for what, who's accountable for what.
The exercise of power becomes much more difficult to see where it's happening, what's going on.
So in the case of Kosovo, you know, you have this example of a country that's supposedly independent.
It's going to be run, effectively, though, it's going to be run by a local EU nation-building operation who have the, and the head of that nation-building operation is going to have the right to veto public legislation, intervene in public life in Kosovo.
So in that situation, you know, you're going to have an elected government in Kosovo.
That's not going to have any power.
So it's not actually going to be responsible for anything happening in Kosovo, while the people who have all the power, the European Union, won't be accountable in any way to the people of Kosovo.
So as I said at the beginning, you know, you've got, what you have there, I think, is a very kind of concentrated form of trends that are much more widespread, which is this complete blurring of the lines of political authority.
And that, I think, is the really most insidious thing that's happening at the moment.
Well, you also have the precedent set for when intervention is okay.
And it seems like since the end of the Cold War, first they had to set the precedent that if one nation invades another, even if we don't have a treaty with either of them, well, for example, they'll use the United Nations to expel Iraq from Kuwait.
That kind of thing was, I believe, a new precedent set after the Cold War.
And then, of course, intervening in Bosnia, and in Kosovo, and the rest of the Balkans there, is basically intervening in a civil war, where it's not even one nation invaded another, but it's just a faction fight, or a fight over secession within a state.
And it seems like, well, as you say, they just use the humanitarian references to make their excuse for it.
But the precedent is basically set now that the Security Council, and or the United States and Britain teamed up anyway, can start a war with whoever we want, and basically call it legal.
Pretend that it's some form of legitimacy under the international system.
Yeah, very much so.
I mean, this is kind of what's particularly perverse about the whole thing is, for all the kind of claims of defending vulnerable people, of expanding human rights, of humanitarian sentiment, and all of this stuff, effectively, what it's done is extended the rights of war to the powerful states.
And I mean, it's particularly pernicious, because you end up in the situation where, you know, if there's a humanitarian emergency, and there's kind of genocide supposedly happening, or some kind of great crisis, it always calls for, you know, there's always this call for something must be done.
And there's always a call for an immediate response.
And it's a way of short circuiting any kind of reflection, or discussion and debate about what actually would be the appropriate response or the right strategy.
So presenting things in moral terms is always a way to kind of, is always a way I think always works in the interests of the powerful states, because obviously, they're the ones who are best placed to act quickly and effectively.
So in you know, in these kinds of whatever it is, whenever there's an outcry for, you know, there's a moral humanitarian crisis.
And there's always this thing, you know, there's always the demand that something must be done.
You know, something must be done always means effectively that you can, you know, who can actually do something, it means America, Britain, the European Union.
And so, you know, this kind of extended, essentially, it gives the extent extended the rights of war to powerful states to wage war as they please, give them a blank check to go in wherever they may choose to, under circumstances of their choosing, you know, they decide if they want to go on in this situation, to resolve it, you know, whatever kind of motives they may have to do it.
So, you know, far from being humanitarian, what it actually does is expand the possibility for war.
And it looks like a much uglier international order as a result of that.
And it's not always outright invasions, right?
A lot of times, it's sort of strong arming local politicians that we're going to put our peace forces in your country, that kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, it's the I mean, you're exactly right.
I mean, you know, the kind of the, the war is always kind of the threat of war is always the blackmail hanging in the background.
And then, you know, in the run up to that, you can have sanctions, can have peacekeeping forces, you can have all sorts of pressure.
But once you have a situation where going to war is much more of a possibility, and in under the terms of the within the terms of the UN than it was before, that it always means that it hangs in the background.
And so you get much more, you know, you're kind of you get much more room to be coercive.
So yeah, I mean, that's exactly right.
And now, when it comes to, you know, the larger arguments within the foreign policy establishments of Europe and the United States, how small of a minority view is yours?
I'd say pretty much, yeah, very, very minority view.
There is, I think, kind of a great deal of of cynicism after after Iraq, about, you know, the kind of that it's because it's been such a kind of bloody catastrophe, and there's no way to kind of avoid what had just how disastrous it's been.
There's been a very kind of cynical response to that.
But, you know, it's important, I think, also, not just to be cynical, but also to try and, well, firstly, to try and understand how we got to this situation.
But also, second, to make sure to hold the people to account, who, you know, who put us in this situation as well, which is why it's important to force those people who argue for for humanitarian intervention, to force them to take responsibility for Iraq, precisely because, and you know, all the other disastrous scenarios, because the way in which they, you know, kind of constantly demanded that we go to war, in order to kind of defend the vulnerable is, you know, this is the logical endpoint where we've ended up because of that.
So, yeah, it's a very, very minority view.
But I don't think, you know, it's, I don't think just being cynical, is the right response, either.
It's important to kind of make sure that we draw the appropriate lessons from from the kind of where intervention and interventionism has taken us.
Right.
Yeah, I think that's, that's very true.
The moral high ground is taken by the interventionists, and then they're quiet, or they change the subject when the consequences come due.
And it is up to us to point out the consequences of well, this is what happened when you intervene last time.
Are you sure you want to intervene this time?
And in fact, Iraq is the perfect example.
You know, now, Iran is threatening to disrupt the balance of power in the Middle East.
Yeah, well, who invaded Iraq and invited the Iranian Revolution to come on in on their heels?
I mean, give me a break.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, it's, it's, it's incredible that they, there's all this talk about Iranian involvement in Iraq and the threat that Iran poses to the region.
When, you know, I mean, look, look what the West did right next door.
Yeah.
So yeah, it's, I mean, the whole thing is kind of perverse.
And it's important always to kind of keep on coming back to those points, I think, to keep on kind of flagging up what happened in the past and where we are, where we are now.
Yeah.
Well, now, and when you talk about the cynicism caused by the Iraq war, I think you're really onto something there.
It does seem sort of like the doctrine, the mindset of the bureaucrats and the, you know, the non-governmental organizations, the think tankers and all that has really shifted from the 1990s.
And the idea that, you know, baby blue helmets are going to go and solve every problem everywhere.
On one hand, the American war party has decided that the UN just gets in the way we want more war sooner.
And, and we don't want to wait for the UN to, to go along, that kind of thing.
And then on the other hand, the alienation and the cynicism that's been engendered, especially over there in Europe, by that American policy.
Do you think that the mindset of, you know, multilateral intervention in every crisis in the world has really suffered a blow from this?
It's, I mean, I don't think it has.
It's difficult.
I mean, you know, it is difficult to say, and obviously it's still an open-ended thing, but I think, no, I don't.
I mean, I think, you know, there's certainly a sense in which there's been, you know, there's a sense in which there's been, we've overreached ourselves.
I think there is definitely in the kind of foreign policy elite, in the political elites in Europe and America, there is that sense that we've gone, you know, we've gone too far.
But I don't think that means that the, the underlying assumption that we've got the right to do as we please around the world.
I don't think that's been eroded in any serious way.
To give one example, like Jamie Rubin, who was the foreign, he was a State Department spokesman during the Clinton administration and during the Kosovo conflict.
He appeared on BBC radio here in Britain a few months back, saying that he thinks that if there was a future democratic administration in the States, he thinks they would have to launch a humanitarian intervention in order to kind of, in order to recover moral authority for the US after the debacle of Iraq.
So, you know, and this is coming from somebody who probably will be in the next democratic administration if there is a democratic president after the next election.
So I mean, you know, this just astonishingly brazen, cynical, and open statement of the fact that they're going to need to do more intervention in order to recover from the disaster of the last intervention.
So I think, you know, even though there is this kind of chaff and sentiment, but I don't think the underlying assumptions that, you know, that we need to rescue kind of people at risk, we need to rescue the victims of human rights abuses, that still remains very much in place.
Well, now, I don't know, maybe I'm too cynical, but it usually seems to me that, you know, all the saving people is just an excuse.
There's always underlying reasons that are really behind whichever intervention.
I mean, I can't ignore the fact that, for example, in Somalia where we're fighting a proxy war right now, they have oil.
And in the Sudan, not up in Darfur, but at least down there in the south, they have oil too.
And it seems to me like, you know, any time that they're, you know, crying over humanitarian problems, that that's always just crocodile tears in order to justify what they're really up to.
I mean, I'm not so sure, because I don't think, I mean, I think the kind of the suspicion of underlying motives, I think it's always, I think it's maybe too easy.
Because, you know, it's always kind of, you know, if you take the kind of the pipeline argument, then if there's no oil fields present, then you can always kind of say, well, there's going to be an oil pipeline there.
And that's the reason they're doing this.
So I think, you know, maybe it's trying to read it too forcefully, you know, like, I think it's just much more irrational than that.
It's much more kind of obscure and much more, it's just the kind of it expresses a much deeper malaise in the political elite rather than kind of, you know, kind of sinister characters kind of plotting in their bunkers, kind of where they're going to kind of stake out the next oil pipeline.
I think it's just much more a response to their isolation, and their feeling of needing to kind of to put forward some kind of clear principle, some kind of moral mission, that will, that will give them legitimacy, and give them kind of some sense of mission and purpose.
And in a sense, I think that's much more destructive than any kind of sinister kind of strategy for for securing the national interest or securing kind of some kind of imperialist interest abroad.
Yeah, it's I think, it's just much more kind of lashing out when the opportunity arises.
Yeah, yeah.
And obviously, less thought put into it, you know, like you're saying, no thought really for the consequences at all when it's humanitarian motives.
And of course, you know, we're talking about, you know, what all the policymakers in New York and DC, they're all individuals, and they all have different motives.
And some of them, I'm sure really believe in what they're doing.
And others of them are Dick Cheney, you know, and, and, yeah, yeah, everybody's an individual and has different motives.
I can see the cheerleaders for the policy of say, intervening in Darfur having really big hearts, but I can't imagine that you know, guys at the Pentagon or on the National Security Council, you know, really care about the people there if they don't see an advantage for the United States or at least some favored interests in it.
But then again, you know, as I preface my comment in the first place, it's possible that I'm just too cynical.
Well, I mean, I think, you know, it's, it's, I think, you know, I mean, as you say, there's all sorts of people kind of involved in the in the Save Darfur coalition, probably for all sorts of reasons.
But I mean, certainly, I mean, the most I suppose the most important thing is that this, this kind of the idea of the humanitarian imperative that we need to rescue people abroad, whatever the underlying motive may be, the simple fact that it's there means that there is a license kind of to wage war.
But I think also the the only way to explain the fact that it exists in the first place, I think you have to look kind of to the politics of the countries that are doing the intervening.
You know, and it's like you said, I mean, if there really was some kind of sinister agenda, you think that they would have paid more attention to the consequences, you know, right?
I mean, you know, what people say about Iraq, if it really was for the oil, then I mean, you know, that's just turned out to be a complete disaster, because they're not getting any oil out of it.
You know, there's not kind of, it was didn't turn out to be a great kind of bonanza for imperialist interest at all.
Although there are those who made the argument that the purpose was to keep the oil off the market and the price artificially high due to that fact.
But that's a different that's a different story.
Yeah, well, I just wanted to say, I mean, the other thing is, I think those kinds of arguments also give them give our leaders too much credit.
You know, I mean, at the end of the day, they're much less, much, much less smart, and much less some kind of calculating than you know, than often we imagine.
I mean, which isn't to say, you know, they should be underestimated.
But um, you know, nonetheless, I think sometimes these kinds of grand kind of schemes that are imputed into them, give them far too much credit.
Yeah, I'd agree with that as well.
Now, let's end on the larger question of the nation state and secession in general.
It's interesting to me that you, you've here, you're the co editor of a book that is basically insisting on older notions of national sovereignty in the face of larger political units and, and internationalist organizations and so forth.
And yet, you also seem to take the position, you know, it's sort of implied, I think, in your argument that yeah, the coast of ours want to secede from Serbia, that's just fine.
But the point is, if they're really going to secede and be independent, they ought to be really independent, not under the thumb of Belgrade or the EU or anybody else.
So you're a nationalist, but who's also for secession if necessary, then, you know, as a general principle, I can't say you have to, you know, you, you have to oppose the session and every kind of conceivable scenario, think, you know, there is, you just have to be ready to judge certain situations as and when they arise.
But I think I mean, as regards Kosovo, I think, you know, that was so difficult about it, is that what you have, instead of like a people saying, we want to stand on our own two feet, Kosovo's political leaders have essentially said, we want help.
And from the international community, we want this kind of open ended commitment to support us in order that we can claim to be independent.
So it's very difficult to actually have an honest debate about the rights and wrongs of whether Kosovo should be independent, when that's not what's on the table, you know, what's on the table is Kosovo should be dependent on international support on the international community on the European Union.
So you know, how can you have a debate about the rights and wrongs of secession in that case, the very way in which they're making the argument for independence undermines itself, not a genuine, open, honest demand for independence.
Right?
I love the quote in your article, I wrote it down, the conditions of petty freedom is conceding that real freedom is unworkable.
Which I mean, I think that is perhaps I mean, the most kind of pernicious thing that comes out of that comes out of Kosovo, is that this idea of supervised independence, which means I mean, in a way, I mean, it's what's so kind of insidious about it, I think is that it, it actually undermines the idea of independence and freedom much more thoroughly than outright repression.
Because, you know, I mean, if you're being oppressed, you know, if there are tanks in the streets, and you know, you've got a secret policeman watching your move, you have a very clear idea of what freedom means, you know, then you know what freedom means.
But on the other hand, if you if you have some petty freedoms, you know, if you get kind of the right to a seat at the UN, and you know, you get some kind of diplomatic trinkets and baubles from the European Union, you know, and if you get some kind of small measures of autonomy to decide on petty things, then you have to concede that actual complete freedom, you can't have you can have little freedom, like those kind of, you know, petty freedom, but you can't actually have complete freedom.
And so in that way, I think this idea of supervised independence is much more dangerous, because it means that you can never really realize freedom, what you have instead is, you have to admit that it's unworkable, and that you have to commit yourself to being monitored and supervised by some external power, who will constantly keep an eye on you to make sure that you don't get out of hand, and you don't get carried away.
And so I mean, you know, in many ways, I think that's worse than outright kind of oppression by an external power is this just this kind of monitoring by an external power is much more pernicious.
Philip Cunliffe, he's a researcher at King's College in London.
He's the co editor of the book politics without sovereignty, a critique of contemporary international relations, and his new article at spiked online is called Kosovo, the obedient child of Europe.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Thanks.