REJECTING FALSE PARALLELS: WHY KOSOVO IS NOT SOUTH OSSETIA OR…
By Marko Attila Hoare

New Kosova Report
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
Sweden

Marko Attila HoareWe are all familiar with a certain dishonest
rhetorical tactic: the use of an argument that is objectively
ridiculous and that the person making it knows is ridiculous, but
that nevertheless can sound impressive to the ears of someone who
does not pause to think twice about it.

A good example is the claim that we should not recognise Kosovo’s
independence lest it set off a chain reaction across the world,
with secessionist territories rushing to follow Kosovo’s example by
declaring independence. Former Serbian foreign minister Vuk Draskovic
suggested these would include northern Cyprus, the Basque country,
Corsica, Northern Ireland, Scotland, South Ossetia, Chechnya and
Taiwan. A superficially more sophisticated older brother of this
argument is the one made by Russian President Putin and his supporters:
that if Kosovo is allowed unilaterally to secede from Serbia, the same
right should be accorded to the Russian-backed breakaway territories of
Abkhazia and South Ossetia (formally parts of Georgia) and Transnistria
(formally part of Moldova). Both of these arguments are sophisms,
and it is worth pausing for a moment to understand all the reasons why.

We can start by rejecting the obvious falsehood that recognising
Kosovo’s independence without Serbia’s consent would be an
irresponsible act of radicalism equivalent to Prometheus’s
revealing the secret of fire to mankind or Pandora’s opening of
the box. Unilateral declarations of independence – and unilateral
recognition of the independence of secessionist territories by outside
powers – are part and parcel of the modern world. It is enough to
mention France’s recognition of the independence of the United States
in 1778, Britain’s recognition of the independence of Bangladesh
in 1972 and Germany’s recognition of the independence of Croatia in
1991 – all of them without the consent of the country against which
the wars of American, Bangladeshi and Croatian independence had
been fought. None of these actions led to global chaos. Recognising
Kosovo’s independence without Serbia’s consent is hardly an action
without precedent in international relations.

Nor is it true that the world is covered by dozens or hundreds of
potentially separatist territories, all eagerly watching to see what
happens with Kosovo before deciding whether themselves to follow its
example. We know this is not true, because several of the territories
that are usually cited – South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria and
northern Cyprus, in particular – have already unilaterally seceded
from their parent countries. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus
formally declared independence in 1983, years before Kosovo attempted
to secede from Serbia. Anyone with any knowledge of the chronology of
historical events in greater south-eastern Europe knows perfectly well
that the acts of secession in question were not in any way inspired
by events in Kosovo. In the cases of South Ossetia, Abkhazia and
Transnistria, the obvious precedent, in the eyes of the secessionist
leaderships, was the secession of the constituent republics of the
USSR, to which was coupled their own reluctance to be left in an
independent Georgia or Moldova.

Secessionist leaderships, in other words, choose the precedents
that suit them. Those South Ossetians, Abkhazians and Transnistrians
seeking precedents can cite the recognised secession of Lithuania,
Azerbaijan, Croatia, Montenegro, etc. If Kosovo is recognised, they
will be able to cite Kosovo as well. But nobody should confuse rhetoric
and propaganda with genuine motivation. And it is particularly comical
to hear the Russian leadership voice its ‘fears’ of Kosovo setting
a precedent, when it was the Russians whose military intervention
enabled South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria to break away from
Georgia and Moldova in the first place. That the Russians continued
to support the secessionists in question while crushing Chechnya’s bid
for independence should be enough for us to dispense with the illusion
that their arguments over Kosovo have anything to do with principles
over consistency and precedent-setting. They could, if they wish,
respond to our recognition of Kosovo’s independence by recognising
formally the independence of their Transnistrian and South Caucasian
clients – as Turkey has recognised northern Cyprus – but nothing forces
them to do this, certainly not their infinitely malleable ‘principles’.

This brings us to the question of whether Kosovo really is
fundamentally different from those secessionist countries that
we have already recognised – Slovenia, Croatia, Latvia, Georgia,
Montenegro, etc. – and fundamentally similar to those we have not –
South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria, Nagorno Karabakh, etc. The
answer on both counts is, simply, no. Kosovo is different from the
latter territories in terms of its status in the former federation
to which it belonged: it was – like Croatia, Slovenia and the other
former Yugoslav republics – a constituent member of the Yugoslav
federation in its own right. By contrast, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and
Nagorno Karabakh were not constituent members of the former Soviet
Union. Transnistria was not even an autonomous entity at all. If one
applies consistently the principle that all the members of the former
federations of the USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia should have
the right to self-determination, then this right belongs to Kosovo.

Furthermore, when Kosovo joined Serbia in 1945, it did so formally
of its own free will, by a vote of its provincial assembly. Kosovo
was, before Slobodan Milosevic’s abrogation of its autonomy in the
late 1980s, already effectively independent of Serbia, which was
a composite republic consisting of the two autonomous provinces of
Kosovo and Vojvodina and so-called ‘Serbia proper’ – each of which was
a member of the Yugoslav federation in its own right, independently
of the other two. There is absolutely no reason why the international
community should, given the collapse of this federation, automatically
assign Kosovo to the possession of an independent Serbia. Since Kosovo
joined Serbia in 1945 on the understanding that it was simultaneously
part of Yugoslavia, the only reasonable course of action would be to
permit Kosovo’s assembly to decide what its status should be in the
new circumstances. These new circumstances were, let us not forget,
created by the leadership of Serbia’s deliberate and successful
campaign to break up Yugoslavia and deprive all Yugoslavs – including
the Kosovars – of their common homeland.

Not only is Kosovo not equivalent to Abkhazia, South Ossetia
and Transnistria in legal and constitutional terms, but it is not
equivalent to them in other respects either. With roughly two million
people, Kosovo has a resident population roughly four times the size
of Transnistria’s, ten times the size of Abkhazia’s and thirty times
the size of South Ossetia’s. It has a larger population than several
independent European states, including Estonia, Cyprus, Malta and
Iceland (about five times the population of Malta and seven times the
population of Iceland, in fact). Furthermore, Kosovo’s population is
overwhelmingly Albanian and supportive of independence, and was so even
before the exodus of non-Albanians following the Kosovo war in 1999.

By contrast, Abkhazia’s largest nationality was, until the ethnic
cleansing operations of the early 1990s, the ethnic Georgians, who
outnumbered ethnic Abkhaz by two and a half times, who comprised nearly
half the population of Abkhazia and who oppose independence. In South
Ossetia, ethnic Ossetians outnumbered ethnic Georgians by two-to-one;
still, an independent South Ossetia would be considerably smaller
in terms of population and territory than any independent European
state except for mini-states like Monaco, Liechtenstein and San
Marino. Were their independence recognised, Abkhazia and South Ossetia
would in practice become parts of Russia; a vast state would thereby
have expanded its borders at the expense of a much smaller state
(Georgia). As for Transnistria, its population is somewhat larger than
Abkhazia’s or South Ossetia’s, but Moldovans who oppose independence
comprise the largest nationality, albeit outnumbered by non-Moldovans
two-to-one. And as we noted above, Transnistria’s claim to independence
on constitutional grounds is even weaker than Abkhazia’s or South
Ossetia’s. One could make a case for the independence of any of these
territories, but in terms of constitutional status, population size,
national homogeneity and viability, Kosovo’s is by far the strongest.

Modern European history has witnessed the continual emergence of newly
independent states that successfully secede from larger entities:
roughly in chronological order, these have been Switzerland, Sweden,
the Netherlands, Portugal, Greece, Belgium, Luxemburg, Serbia,
Montenegro, Romania, Norway, Bulgaria, Albania, Poland, Finland,
Czechoslovakia, Ireland, Iceland, Cyprus, Malta, Lithuania, Latvia,
Estonia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Slovenia,
Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Slovakia, the Czech Republic
and Montenegro (for the second time). There are, of course, many
countries or nations that have failed to secede, or whose secession
has not been recognised internationally. The merits of any particular
claim to self-determination have to be judged on their own basis.

In supporting Kosovo’s independence, both justice and as many
precedents as we care to pick will be on our side. And we can safely
ignore the sophisms put forward by hostile governments against us.

Marko Attila Hoare is a Senior Research Fellow at Kingston University,
London with considerable experience in the Balkans. He is author of
books The History of Bosnia and How Bosnia Armed. This article was
first published on 28 November, 2007.
From: Baghdasarian