A Conversation with David Bosco - The American Prospect

David L. Bosco [“The Next Test In Kosovo,” TAP Vol. 11 Issue 1] worked in Bosnia from 1996 to 1998 as a political analyst and journalist. He is now a second- year student at Harvard Law School and co- director of the Harvard Seminar on Ethics and International Affairs. Nicholas Confessore [“Rwanda, Kosovo, and Limits of Justice,” TAP 46] is a staff writer at The American Prospect.

NC: You ended your piece in the Prospect by pointing out that, to ensure peace and create democracy in Kosovo, the UN has employed all the methods of democracy’s opposite: blacklisting, sham elections, and restrictions on movement and speech. You write that it is unclear “how tolerable these rough methods will be to liberal Western societies.” But left unanswered is the question of how the Kosovars themselves view trusteeship; your piece reveals a certain amount of ambivalence. Do the Kosovars- or, for that matter, the Bosnians- want a U.S. presence?

I think what’s happened is that there’s a kind of maturity that has developed. The world changed so much in 1990, and suddenly so many things became possible. We had this rash of missions, but the enthusiasm to interevene was not at all matched by the technical competence about how to do it. I think we’ve realized that there has to be a division of labor. I think a lot of people have realized that the UN- which many people thought would be the ideal instrument for intervening- was not the right instrument. The talk that was common back in ’91- ’92 about a permanent UN military force to these kinds of missions has almost entirely vanished. There has been a specialization that I think is beneficial to these missions- the UN is focusing more on the humanitarian and civilian sides, and the regional powers are becoming the core of the military component.

Who exactly is “the international community?” Who would you place under that rubric?

Did you notice a lot of tension or friction between the different organizations?

It’s sort of interesting how its intervention but also prevention- not just to separate people and prevent violence, but to stop genocide as well.

Is nation- building any easier in Kosovo because, unlike Bosnia, Kosovo is effectively already a nation- state?

It almost seems as though the intervention in Kosovo is both a bright spot- in the sense that it has been more successful than previous interventions- but also less of a bright spot, in that it illustrates how difficult and perhaps impossible it may be to construct multiethnic states in these kinds of situations.

You said before that in Kosovo, the end result is pretty much preordained. But what’s the timeline- when does trusteeship end in Kosovo, and what conditions are prerequisite to its ending?

I wonder if five or six years is even within the time horizon that most politicians can envision for this sort of thing.

The spark for intervention in the post- Cold War world has generally been civil war, and most recently actual genocide. But the main objection in the 1960s to neo- trusteeship was that it was, in essence, neo- colonialism. Has the frequency of state failure and genocide changed that- is there now a sort of moral authority for neo- trusteeship that didn’t exist before?

Would you say that there is an emerging consensus- among U.S. policymakers or world policymakers- that is more positive about intevention?

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Nicholas Confessore