SCHROEDER, KOSOVO, IRAQ, AND TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

I've been trying to figure out how to respond to an excellent e-mail that I received from reader Jack Ben-Levi about how Gerhard Schroeder's apparent piety regardling international norms (specifically, the need for Security Council authoriziation for any use of force in Iraq) squares with his government's claim that such authorization was not necessary to legitimize NATO intervention in Kosovo and Germany's participation in that intervention. The point takes aim at a broader target than simply Schroeder's respect for international norms: I hope I'm not presmptuous in surmising that the looming question is whether or not Schroeder is simply a political opportunist who has tried to stop his party's precipitous decline by pandering to a native anti-americanism and pious pacifism.

I have had to refresh my memory of the events in Kosovo, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. But I would respond to Jack's criticism of Schroeder with the following points:

• The UN Security Council did get in on the act with resolutions that didn't explicitly authorize the use of military force (much like the current resolutions on Iraq). But it seems to me that it's the nature of such resolutions that they are indeterminate in such a way that their meaning needs to be shaped by diplomacy and agreements between member states. Both sides of a dispute on the interpretation of a resolution have an incentive to claim the high ground of international law. The answer to the obvious question -- who has the correct interpretation? -- is probably that both do. Resolutions have a built-in ambiguity that needs to be shaped by further discussion, not unlike other written statements such as statutes and constitutions.


• The shaping that was done to convince German leaders that the Kosovo conflict required a military solution through NATO involved two fronts: the international front (primarily centered on NATO) and the domestic front (centered, especially, on the questions of domestic refugee populations and the politics of national memory). The U.S. helped to craft a consensual set of decisionmaking procedures to govern the NATO campaign, allowing Germans and others to have control over the campaign itself. Only fair, of course, if Germans were to face the difficult political choices necessary in the crisis. But we should note that the Bush administration has not attempted anything similar -- bullying Germans with claims that they're "old Europe" does not count, I'm afraid. And forcing the NATO troops in Turkey issue in the way that the administration did was hardly an attempt to bring the Germans into the decisionmaking process.


• So the Clinton administration made sure that Germans had a stake in the military side of the process. Hardly likely this time around, with a President who essentially says to everyone on the planet: I have the authority to bomb wherever and whenever I want because of my role as commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. See the press briefing, Dec. 5th, 2001:
  

  Q What gives him the authority to go into other countries and bomb them, which is what he is threatening to do?
  

  
  MR. FLEISCHER: The right as the Commander-in-Chief to protect and defend the American people.

  
  But aside from the role that the Bush administration has played in boxing Germany out of the process, it should also be clear that the domestic political concerns are different this time around. Germany already had a political controversy over immigration and asylum policy. Kosovo was about a displaced ethnic minority subject to genocidal attacks of the kind that had already created mass migrations within Europe over the past half-decade. The context of genocide made the German discussion of intervention in Kosovo much more complicated. If I remember correctly, the debate was centered on the following question: Should we Germans, with our history of both brutal militarism and committed pacifism, intervene to prevent a genocidal campaign within Europe's borders? How can we not intervene, yet still hold to a belief that we have learned to oppose large-scale, state-sponsored ethnic violence within Europe? That intervention became politically palatable is not particularly surprising. And that all of these concerns influenced the interpretation of UN - SC resolutions is to be expected.

So, since I don't think that security council resolutions are self-evident guides to whether or not military action is necessary, I am not that troubled by the apparent inconsistency in Schroeder's positions here. Resolutions are embedded in a diplomatic, international, and domestic political context, At the end of the day, what probably counts most are the reasons advanced for intervention or non-intervention. Kosovo was certainly a clearer case.

To prove this point further, though, I need to do some more work on Schroeder's reasons for opposing the U.S. efforts in Iraq. So, Jack, I realize that my burden has not quite been met. . .yet!