In 2005, I was asked by an editor at Cornell University Press to review a book manuscript titled Speaking Loudly and Carrying a Small Stick: Why the World Could not Transform Kosovo. The book, I was told, was already accepted for publication in the United Kingdom. Cornell was considering it for publication in the United States market.

The manuscript was fully anonymized when I received it. After reading it, I was shocked by its content. It was a blatant call for a return to colonialism. In fact, the manuscript was critical of people in international organizations who suffered from “guilt about historical colonial abuses” and were, therefore, too tolerant of local mores. I found such a premise morally and politically unacceptable and communicated my dismay to the editor.

After a few additional exchanges, I decided to write a lengthy critical review. Despite my strong objections, the book was published in 2006 albeit under a different title, Peace at Any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo. The editor explained his decision based on the book’s market potential. His instinct was right: the book sold well and was widely cited. It was translated into Albanian and published in Kosovo. It received good reviews in academic journals. One of its authors was eventually awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to governance in Libya, Afghanistan and Kosovo. The other author continued his peace-building work in – among other places – Iraq, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and Ukraine.

I found the review recently, by accident, as I was searching through my USB drives for some other texts. I was struck by how little has changed in the relationship between the international community and Kosovo since 2005, despite Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008. The colonial gaze, which expects local actors to conform to its own prejudices and leaves no room for maneuvering to domestic polity, continues to persist. Kosovars’ quest for recognition of their sovereignty, most importantly by Serbia, is still viewed with suspicion. To this day, Kosovo’s political leaders continue to be portrayed as politically immature, unhinged and irrational: prone to making maximalist demands, not knowing their place at the table. 

I enclose the full review here, with small editorial changes. I view the chasm between my reading of the book and its worldly success as a marker of the times we live in. It is a warning, perhaps, to all those people whose political aspirations come to depend on acts of benevolence by great powers: no matter what you accomplish or where you fail, your story will always be told by those who speak more loudly and carry the big sticks. 

Speaking Loudly and Carrying a Small Stick: Why the World Could not Transform Kosovo

Review of the manuscript for Cornell University Press

2005

Speaking Loudly and Carrying a Small Stick: Why the World Could not Transform Kosovo is an ambitious manuscript. It attempts to explain the failure of the international community to “transform Kosovo – for the first time, in its long, strife-ridden history – into a society based on the rule of law being applied equally to all citizens irrespective of their station or ethnicity.” 

The manuscript opens with a dramatic account of the riots in March of 2004, following the drowning of three Albanian boys in the Ibar. The boys disappeared in the river after encountering a group of Serbs who lived in the vicinity. Their death triggered the worst violence in Kosovo since the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) had taken control: 19 people (including Albanians and Serbs) were killed, over one thousand injured, and around 800 homes and 38 churches, monasteries and other religious and cultural sites were destroyed or seriously damaged.

In the view of the authors, the riots exposed the weaknesses of the international mission in Kosovo, and how “hopes that the world would keep its promises to turn Kosovo into a society in which all members could live in security and dignity had gone up in smoke in a mere 48 hours.” According to the manuscript, Albanian media and politicians instantly blamed the Serbs for the boys’ fate. The authors describe the riots as “two-day spree of looting, arson and murder” when “thousands of Kosovo Albanians rampaged across the territory.” 

The sense of betrayal, disillusionment and resentment towards Albanians because of their ingratitude for the international intervention, which the world had commanded on their behalf, permeates the text. Many staffers working for international organizations took the riots personally. Speaking of Albanians, a Dutch staffer allegedly said: “We worked really hard for them – really hard – especially in the early days. And this is what they do!”  

The combination of the authors’ disappointment with Albanians and their quasi-objectivity towards Kosovo are reminiscent of an essay by Toni Morrison, “The Official Story: Dead Man Golfing,” which tackles uncomfortable tensions between sympathy and racism. Morrison builds her essay around parallels between the OJ Simpson trial and Henry Melville’s description of slave mutineers in “Benito Cereno.” This is a story in which the narrator’s racist perspective is gradually revealed, as he discovers that peaceful and docile slaves on the ship are actually savage killers and rioters.

But, as Morrison rightly points out, it is precisely this move, this change in perception that displays the full spectrum of the racist gaze. As Cereno’s understanding of the slaves shifts from simple and child-like creatures, who are deserving help and sympathy, to irrational violent monsters, it becomes obvious that both positions equally deny a possibility of strategic and intelligent action to those who are viewed as being lesser creatures than the benevolent savior.

The persistent portrayal of Albanians as being responsible for the international community’s disappointment in their victimhood is deeply troubling. Perhaps, the manuscript would have been more credible had it been written in first person, and if the authors were willing to address the sources of their own failed expectations. As it is, however, their lack of self-awareness hides what it was supposed to disclose – the “true” nature of Kosovo society – and reveals what the authors really wanted to hide – their own perceptions of the world. 

To those who know something about Kosovo, the manuscript offers little beyond information that is readily available through various information networks that cover the Balkans. To those who know little, the manuscript offers a politically dangerous description of an allegedly cursed land, populated with ignorant and zealous people who are beyond salvation – save for some authoritarian exercise of power by their civilizing outsiders.

Muscular Imperialism

The authors’ main argument appears to be that the failure to transform Kosovo was the result of a failure to forcefully introduce Western values. As they write with great confidence, it “was a classic failure to assert power: the intervention neither compelled nor persuaded Kosovars to behave as they should.” Therefore, the overriding lesson of the book is quite simple – it is the rejection of “empire lite” and an embrace of imperialism with a muscle:

“(…) stable societies don’t just happen, they are built. An intervention must be prepared to confront and defeat the forces who benefit from the status quo and so fight to preserve it, even though in the wake of conflict, these forces will be quite strong. The intervention must impose itself, and then impose a notion of progressive change, ideally one which is already active, or at least latent, in the society itself. Transforming a violent, dysfunctional society like Kosovo’s into a one in which all its people can live in security and dignity requires the political equivalent of combat engineers: people equipped to build bridges under fire.” 

The manuscript appears to be built on a profound contradiction. The authors claim that the ultimate responsibility for the failure to transform Kosovo into a society based on Western rules rests squarely on the shoulders of the international community, and particularly its (mis)perceptions and (mis)understandings of the situation in Kosovo. The solution for Kosovo – and, by implication, for other sites of military and humanitarian interventions – depends on a more forceful application of power by the international community, and at least temporary suppression of democracy with the unapologetic and unilateral imposition of the rule of law. In the manuscript, the contradiction is masked by the stark juxtaposition of Kosovo’s troublesome political culture, on the one hand, and the norms and values of Western civilization, on the other. 

In that respect, the manuscript is reminiscent of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. Kosovo is repeatedly described as a threat to the Western world – as “the dark heart of a black hole in the middle of Europe,” “a mire of poverty, unrest and criminality in the heart of Europe,” or as “a dependent, crime-ridden political netherworld.” Albanians, too, are viewed as unreconstructed remnants of some bygone era, factionalized zealots and nationalists, living in a “poor, mountainous, and clan-based land,” “unable to remove the ballast of their troublesome history.”  

For the authors, it is impossible to establish what public opinion is in Kosovo, because “there is no public.” They claim that given their history, Albanians simply had no chance to ever acquire any skills with governance, and particularly not democratic governance; therefore, Kosovars are politically immature, and have “no experience of the compromises that define politics elsewhere.” 

But if the legacies are problematic and undying, the future offers even less hope. On several occasions in the manuscript, the authors note that Kosovo demographics conspire against the province’s better future. The “departure of more than half of Kosovo’s Serb population, including many of the most economically active and talented,” has left the province almost entirely in the hands of Albanians, most of whom are, in their view, too young and politically and economically challenged. 

Standards of Civilization and Delusions of Independence

In contrast to Kosovars, whose political culture is, therefore, in many ways and on many occasions alleged to be demonstrably incompatible with Western values, the international community is described as the defender of the 19th century civilizational principles, which had unfortunately been abandoned “through the process of decolonization” when “international society became indiscriminately inclusive.” 

Thus, the authors’ praise is saved for the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) Michael Steiner, head of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, UNMIK. Steiner developed the benchmark standards according to which Kosovo’s political development could be measured. This framework clearly resembled European “Standards of Civilization,” a system developed by European powers as they wished to limit and regulate access to the European Family of Nations during the centuries of expansion in the 1600s and 1700s.

Steiner’s “Standards before Status” formula successfully delayed discussions about Kosovo’s final political status – one thing that UNMIK was explicitly forbidden to prejudge. In Steiner’s own words, the standards were a deliberate stalling tactic – the authors cite him to have said: “I always wanted to maintain control over the public agenda: To give people some issue to talk about so they wouldn’t start focusing on the status question.”  

And so we arrive at the crux of the problem – Kosovo’s independence. For the authors, the Albanian quest for independence is a ludicrous and dangerous goal, which is probably one of the reasons why the authors never address it as an issue on its own merit. In fact, even in the lengthy historical section on Kosovo history, the authors jump from the demonstrations of 1981 – without any explanation why young Kosovar protestors may have wished for a “Kosovo Republic” – to the early 1990s and the establishment of the parallel government in the province. Thus, the manuscript minimizes Kosovars’ historical quest for independence and their persistent opposition to Belgrade.

It has occurred to me that one reason for the lack of serious attention to the “status” question may have been the authors’ desire to protect the international community from criticism that it should have been aware of Kosovo Albanians’ political goals many years before the NATO intervention. And yet, despite this omission, the authors feel confident to argue that, given that Albanians are most likely incapable of measuring up to the standards of the West, Kosovo’s independence would set a very dangerous precedent for separatists elsewhere, as they would feel emboldened to seek independence for themselves, without earning it based on virtue and alignment with Western tenets.

Not only, trying to lessen the importance of political status, the authors state that it was merely “a widespread myth [that] progress in Kosovo was impossible until Kosovo’s status was resolved.” They conveniently neglect the fact that Kosovars had no control over any of the vital institutions – defense, security, economic policy, external affairs, policing and minority issues – all of which were reserved for the office of SRSG. Instead, they assert that Albanians were wrong in believing that Provisional Institutions of Self-Government could do little to remedy the territory’s ills. And they ridicule Albanian desire for sovereignty by offering an example of “the director of the art gallery (…) who complained that he could not deal with his counterparts abroad because of Kosovo’s unresolved political status.” 

Foreign staffers, panelists in “town meetings” organized by the Standards working group as a way of selling the “Standards before Status” plan, taught Kosovars that “many dysfunctional societies are politically sovereign while some societies whose political status is unresolved – most notably Taiwan – are thriving.” Similarly, SRSG Michael Steiner instructed Albanian parliamentarians:

 “It’s the simple truth that the better you handle the authority you already have, the more authority will come and that’s my program and that’s what we all want to achieve. […] But I would urge you not to be sidetracked from the urgent tasks which are in your competence. And, please, even if you don’t see it in this room, don’t forget that there’s also an international community out there. Don’t antagonize the international community whose support I’m fighting for daily and whose support is not easy to win and keep.”

Thus, as Albanians continued to press for independence from Belgrade and for the resolution of Kosovo’s political status, as they had historically done, the authors came to the conclusion that “the biggest danger to the evolution of Kosovo’s sovereignty would be for Kosovo’s leaders to paint themselves into a corner by making maximalist demands that the international community could never accept.”

Colonial Gaze

With its unreconstructed praise for colonial rule and civilizational standards, portrayal of other peoples and cultures as unsuited for democracy, and perpetual claims of the locals’ political immaturity, the manuscript often reads like a 19th century colonial travelogue. 

Indeed, the manuscript starts with a description of the airport in Vienna, where an assembled group of cosmopolitan peacekeepers stands in contrast with a group of Kosovo Albanians: “The young often sporting outlandish fashions, middle-aged men wearing dark suits and even darker expressions and elderly man and women in skullcaps and kerchiefs nervously waiting to board a plane for only the second time in their lives.” The introduction proceeds with an aerial view of Prishtina, whose “most visible landmark from the air is a pair of suppurating smokestacks that belong to an aged power plant.” And the paragraph concludes with an amazing puzzle:  “looking down at this overwhelmingly rural county, it is hard to believe that on the cusp of the millennium it had been the obsessive focus of all 19 members of the greatest military alliance the world has ever known.”

The stark juxtaposition of the politically immature Kosovo and democratically established West obfuscates the reasons for that obsessive focus. Why, indeed, did the “greatest military alliance ever known” worry about a bunch of mountain men and women on the outskirts of Europe? The sharp civilizational separation hinges upon the assumption that Kosovo and international community, intervention and non-intervention, Europe and the Balkans, are spatially and temporally distinct peoples and political/geographic regions. Hence the possibility that the Kosovo crisis of 1998, 1999 or 2004 may have also been related to political and/or military (in)actions of that same international community in other parts of that same region is never addressed. 

There is no meaningful discussion of the possibility that it was the arrival of the international community that facilitated Kosovo’s segregation and the destruction of the civil society established in the period of parallel governance. The thought that KLA may have been propped up and legitimized by the acts of the international community, and by the NATO intervention itself, and not just by the KLA’s own acts within Kosovo, had obviously never occurred to the authors. Similar in respect to the Western support of Slobodan Milošević from 1995 to 1998, despite growing opposition in Serbia. The list could go on.

And that brings us back to Toni Morrison, Henry Melville and “Benito Cereno.” Is it really Kosovars’ fault that they were perceived as docile victims of Serbs’ indiscriminate violence? Is it really Kosovars’ fault that they are fractious, that they come in all sorts of religious shapes and forms, that they are not all on the same political page, that they are not a homogenous ethnic entity as they had been envisioned by the West?

Is it really Albanians’ fault that they are political actors much like the Brits or the Germans or Italians, and that political battles continue to take place among them, despite being “liberated” by NATO? Finally, is it really Albanians’ fault that after five years of being denied even a discussion of the most pressing political issue for them – their independence – they would turn to riots? If the international community is so superior to Kosovars, why is it then that it is simultaneously so ignorant, so naïve, so stupid in its assessment of Kosovo Albanians?

Disclosure and Concluding Thoughts

By now, readers may think that this review was written by some great Albanian sympathizer or an ignorant bleeding-heart liberal from the US. Neither is the case. My own background carries the stain of contradictions which framed Kosovo’s position within Yugoslavia.

My Serbian grandmother was severely injured in a staged accident in Kosovo, in the early 1960s, on a school trip in a bus full of children, when a group of Albanian men intercepted the road and the bus driver veered off into an abyss. I lived in Belgrade during the 1980s, witnessing the resurgence of Serb nationalism, but I also met numerous Serbs who had fled the province claiming Albanian harassment. Some of my friends – educated, “cosmopolitan,” anti-Milošević – still refer to Albanians as “Šiptars.” They were gleeful after the March 2004 demonstration because the riots “finally showed to the West what Albanians were really like.”

At the same time, I learned about repression and discrimination in Yugoslavia by watching what happened to Albanians after the 1981 demonstrations. As a young journalist at a Sarajevo radio station, I watched my editors fire the entire staff of a weekly program for Albanian students because, as they did not speak Albanian, they feared their broadcast. My Albanian neighbors were put under police surveillance, and their son disappeared in Yugoslav jails. My friends stopped eating pastries in Albanian stores as the rumors spread that they were poisonous. An Albanian girl in my school was gang raped after being declared a “Šiptar whore.” 

I have little faith in separatist movements or self-determination, but I have lived as a stateless person. I understand what it means to live in an entity whose political status is not resolved. 

I do not find the claims of the ridiculed art gallery director absurd. It is impossible to insure art for exhibits in stateless entities. I wonder if the authors have ever considered how complicated it is for Kosovars to journey beyond Kosovo borders? How easy or difficult is it for them to travel while they still depend on Serbian authorities for their passports? How easy or difficult is it for them to get visas with their UNMIK passports? And what happens – as it did happen to a friend of mine in London – if they lose that UNMIK passport in some European metropole? Who can Kosovars turn to help, and what organization outside of Kosovo can issue a replacement of that document? 

And I wonder if the authors are even aware of how many of these allegedly non-cosmopolitan Albanians that they describe in the introduction were forced to spend the night in the transit zone of the Vienna airport – as I had to on a number of occasions, along with Albanians, with Romas, and with other Balkan refugees – because something was amiss with our visas or travel documents? How often did they consider such little luxuries of life that they have – not just salaries, SUVs or positions of power, but basic documents – thanks to the legal protections offered by a sovereign state behind them? 

If the authors had written this manuscript in the first person, they would have had to confront many of the unquestioned – yet problematic – assumptions of their manuscript. They would have had to take ownership of the failures they ascribe to the international community. 

Why, for instance, do the authors find their knowledge and expertise so indispensable to believe that Kosovo would slide into a political netherworld if their advice were not heeded? What do they think would have been lost if there had been no NATO intervention? Was the intervention about saving Kosovars or about saving something else? Perhaps the image that the West has of itself? And are they – the intervention, UNMIK, this manuscript – about Albanians, or about Serbs, or about Kosovo, or are they about the West, the authors, and their view of themselves and their role in the world?

Having read the manuscript, I would argue – and I think the authors would agree if they honestly answered such questions – this is really a book about the authors’ worldview rather than about this peripheral land that they are supposedly preoccupied with. And the insights in those worldviews are not always flattering. 

I am reminded of another wonderful text about colonial representational practices – Stephen Greenblatt’s book Marvelous Possessions. “Their culture,” wrote Greenblatt of the European conquerors as they encountered the New World, “was characterized by immense confidence in its own centrality, by a political organization based on practices of command and submission, by a willingness to use coercive violence on both strangers and fellow countrymen, and by a religious ideology centered on the endlessly proliferated representation of a tortured and murdered god of love.” Perhaps for that reason, the conquerors’ visions of the New World and of the natives – much like the views given to us in this manuscript – were never much more but the “fantasmatic representations of authoritative certainty in the face of spectacular ignorance.”

I sincerely wish, and I hope the authors will understand that I say this without malice, that they ask themselves some difficult questions before proceeding with publication of this manuscript.

Feature Image: K2.0.