Its the people, stupid

The structural realism article by Karen Ruth Adams, in my opinion, raised more questions than it answered. She did a very good job of explaining how Yugoslavia was allowed to break up because of the end of the Cold War, and she showed why the US and NATO became involved in the conflict, but she never really answered the question of why Yugoslavia was breaking up in the first place. This should be the first and most important thing that anyone attempting to explain Kosovo should talk about. The US and NATO intervention in Kosovo is only the response to this original problem. And that is what needs to be understood.

Why in the first place was Yugoslavia falling apart?

Adams is unable to answer this question because realism doesn’t have a way to answer it. Realism focuses too much on states and not enough on the people living inside of these states. Anyone who knows anything about Yugoslavia can tell you that it was a mixture of many different ethnic and religious groups. The lumping of all these people together after WWI went against the idea of self-determination. Yet the Allied powers created Yugoslavia anyways. So it should come as no surprise that Yugoslavia in the end failed as a state once the external forces holding it together disappeared. But it is not the disappearance of these forces that caused Yugoslavia to dissipate; it was the ethnic and religious diversity inside of the country that caused it to fail. The end of the Cold War merely allowed the forces inside of Yugoslavia to tear itself apart, it did not create them. But no where in the article does Adams discuss this. Instead she treats Kosovo as any realist has to, as an interaction between state actors.

This is the inherent flaw in realism, it ignores the foundation of everything thing that we know, individual people. States, just like all other organizations, are composed of people and this is a fact that can not be forgotten. For just as states struggle between themselves for power in the international system so do people struggle between themselves for power inside of those states.

Matt Bank