On Sunday afternoon, Kosovo declared independence. On Monday morning, The New York Times completely botched its coverage of the delicate event. It took an extremely complicated issue with no clear winners or losers, not to mention without a clear U.S. policy, and launched into a simplistic us vs. them, let’s-bring-back-the-Cold-War analysis. The sub-headline simplistically read, “Climax of Long Struggle Between the West and the Kremlin”. But it is not as simple as bringing back the Cold War. It is not even an issue of democracy vs. some non-democratic option. It is also not necessarily clear that the West should support independence. So please stay out of your fall-out shelters folks, the Cold War is not coming back.
To claim that Russia and the East are doing this to oppose the West is degrading the issue. While Putin loves to push the West’s buttons at all opportunities, the more important point is that Kosovo’s secession could cause problems for regions of Russia that have similar intentions. It’s a separatist issue. Russia doesn’t want this to suddenly encourage Chechnya to try and become independent again. Heck, Russia could simply just worry about the violence this might cause by emboldening secessionist movements. Russia is not the only country with this complaint. Even cute little Belgium is not so excited about Kosovo’s independence, as it is also in the middle of applying band-aids to its splintering nation.
For the West, the problem is that not all nationalist movements are good. Simply speaking, nationalism is dangerous. There are two types of nationalism: one based on ideas (e.g. the USA, Canada, Australia) and one based on an ethnic or religious group (e.g. Russia, Israel, and Kosovo). The issue with the ethnic or religious type of nationalism is in the process, it creates an in-group and an out-group. Upon coming to power, the out-group is unfortunately still in the borders of the country. Kosovo is the most important region for the Serbian people as far as their religion is concerned. The truth is that the agreement with Serbians concerning visitation rights is very liberal but the rhetoric of Kosovo independence is not so liberal. President Bush actually understood this and The New York Times article quoted his remarks correctly but failed to give them any context. In his comments on the new-found independence, Bush says that despite Kosovo’s independence, he hopes that America’s relationship with Serbia and the relationship of Serbians in Kosovo and the Albanian Kosovar majority will not be damaged. Clearly, this is not a Cold War issue, but actually a post-communist issue.
Kosovo’s declaration of independence is a delicate situation and the Times simplifying Kosovo’s independence to a US obligation to recognize Kosovo as part of old Cold War tensions is minimalist and serves little more than to bait fears that Putin is going to bring back the Cold War.