How the West Built a Failed State in Kosovo

Aidan Hehir

Politics, Europe

Liberal internationalism was after its own prestige, not Kosovars’ well-being.

Since NATO’s intervention in 1999, Kosovo has been the subject of an unprecedented degree of international supervision. UNMIK, EULEX and K-FOR were afforded extensive, and essentially unaccountable, powers to maintain law and order and regulate Kosovo’s economy, judiciary and political system. In per capita terms, Kosovo has received the largest flow of aid ever distributed to a developing country: the international community put twenty-five times more money and fifty times more troops on a per capita basis into post-conflict Kosovo than into post-conflict Afghanistan.

Regularly heralded as a success story, Kosovo is championed by some as proof that not all projects launched under the banner of liberal internationalism fail. Indicatively, Victoria Nuland, U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, recently lauded Kosovo’s “considerable progress” and “political stability,” and expressed her expectation that Kosovo would become “a multi-ethnic country where Kosovo Serbs, Kosovo Albanians, all ethnicities can live in peace, because not only does the region need that but the planet needs it and Kosovo has an opportunity to set that example.”

Yet, despite the hyperbole and the extraordinary scale of the state-building project, Kosovo currently suffers from a crippling array of problems, and bears the hallmarks of a failed state. This could be verified by consulting the Failed State Index but for the fact that—illustrative of its contemporary predicament—Kosovo is not considered a “recognized sovereign state.”