(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
33 years have passed since Soviet Union disintegrated and the Cold War was finally over. Most people then believed that a new period, which should be characterized by peaceful coexistence between states, was ahead of us. Instead, we have seen that not only conflicts between states have built up anew. The will and ability to resolve the conflicts diplomatically also seems to be less than even in the coldest periods of the Cold War. The question therefore becomes how could it end like this?
The premise of the Norwegian debate is that it is Russia who have chosen war over diplomacy. However, the march towards war did not begin on 24 February 2022, nor with Russia's takeover of Krim in 2014. It began on March 24, 1999. That was then NATO chose to put an end to the UN pact as a norm for conflict resolution, by going to a bombing war against Yugoslavia.
Jugoslavia
Before NATO launched the bombing, the defense alliance "offered". Jugoslavia what they called a "diplomatic solution" to the conflict between the Kosovo Albanian rebel group UCK and the Federation of Yugoslavia. The Ramboillet Agreement, as it was called, meant that Yugoslavia would cede control of Kosovo to NATO and give NATO free rein in whole Yugoslavia. Also included in the plan were points that had nothing to do with the ethnic conflict, such as that Kosovo's economy should function according to free market principles. The conditions were thus very reminiscent of those Austria-Hungary set in the ultimatum to Serbia in the summer of 1914, and which historians agree were formulated to make it impossible for Serbia to accept – and to legitimize the initiation of war.
We can never claim that some follow rules we don't follow ourselves.
When Yugoslavia, as expected, rejected the Ramboillet agreement, NATO, without any form of UN mandate, began to systematically bomb civilian infrastructure – such as power supplies. So we have to ask ourselves, why did NATO do this? What we can rule out is that it was the humanitarian concerns that were officially used as justification, which lay behind it. NATO itself had ensured that the conflict had escalated militarily in the previous two years, by covertly providing weapons and training to the KLA.
A new behavior pattern
That NATO could said, is that Serbia has no right to rule Kosovo, because the majority of the population there, who are Albanians, do not want it. However, that would mean a change in the principles of international law with consequences for NATO countries as well. This particularly applies to Spain, with strong separatist movements in the Basque Country and Catalonia, and Turkey, which, amid NATO's most intense bombing of Yugoslavia, intensified warfare against the Kurdish PKK guerrillas. Therefore, the bombing war, which took place without any decision in the UN Security Council, was attempted to be presented as an exceptional act in an emergency, not as the real change in the rules of the game in the international community that it actually was. The is it we see the effects of now:
Russia's formal justification for carrying out its "special operation" against Ukraine is such an exact mirror image of NATO's justification for bombing Yugoslavia on 24 March 1999 that it is hardly coincidental. Formally, it meant intervening to prevent an impending genocide by Ukrainian forces against the Russian-speaking population of Donbass. In reality, it was about the fear of what a further NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia would entail for Russia's own security.
In the West it is presented as that om If Russia is in any way accommodated in relation to Ukraine, it will give Putin blood on his teeth for new conquests. However, it is only a projection of what we have seen from the West after the attack on Yugoslavia. The absence of physical counterforce against NATO in 1999 led to the building up of hubris that the West was not only can advance their interests despite established international law, but that it is also the case that the West should and almost mustn't do this. For what was presented then and there as a deplorable emergency act, became a pattern of behavior in the following decades: First came the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, then Iraq in 2003, then Libya in 2011, and then Syria, where the US occupies 28 percent of the country's territory Today, with the greatest self-righteous obviousness.
«Rules-based international order»?
When this hubris has now met criticism and opposition, the reaction is moral dismay, and a cry for the restoration of a "rules-based order". This term is now often used in Western propaganda instead of "international law", which is the formal English word for international law. Perhaps because it can be more easily redefined to describe a world order where the West can carry out military interventions with or without a UN mandate, and where other great powers must accept the West's supremacy. However, there is no conceivable moral justification for wanting the restoration of such a neo-colonial world order. To the extent that some have suffered from illusions that there was a grain of truth in the notion that a Western hegemony is humane and 'benevolent' – "a benevolent hegemony" as it was called in the program statement of the Project for a New American Century from 1990- century, the genocide Israel is now carrying out with the United States' continued and unconditional support must tear the ground away from under this life lie. At the same time, the vision of rebuilding a Western-dominated "rules-based international order" is also completely unrealistic, and thus dangerous. The other great powers have risen economically, and militarily, and can no longer be dominated and humiliated, as they were during the Kosovo war – exemplified by NATO's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999. In 2020, China took over the US's former position as the most important trading partner for most countries in the world.
Diplomacy as a conflict resolution method requires that the idea of Western hegemony be thrown on the scrap heap of history.
Diplomacy can be resurrected as a method of conflict resolution in international relations, but this requires that the idea of Western hegemony be thrown on the scrap heap of history. "Whataboutism", which is used to retouch the backdrop for and the connections between the conflicts we are in now, must also be rejected as the childish, and logically invalid, concept it is. We must instead lay down the principle that underlies any legal order, that precedent is as important as written rules, and that we can never demand that some follow rules we don't follow ourselves. The West must stop everyone sine violation of international law – before we can be taken seriously by the others.
Leeraand is the leader of the new party for Peace and Justice (FOR). Former deputy chairman of Rødt.
