Authors

Abdullah Kesvelioglu¹;  ¹ University of Edinburgh, UK

Discussion

The 2007 Ahtisaari Plan envisaged a supervised independence process for Kosovo. However, Serbian and Russian opposition to any proposal that ended Belgrade’s sovereignty over Kosovo failed the prospects of a mediated outcome. Although Pristina unilaterally declared independence in 2008, the flaws during the independence process continue to hunt the country as it cannot join major international organisations such as the UN, and the Serb majority in Northern Kosovo challenges Pristina’s sovereignty. Belgrade’s intransigent attitude plays a key role in this. Nevertheless, Moscow’s support was also critical with its seats in the Contact Group for the Balkans and the UN Security Council. In the face of mounting American and European pressure, Belgrade would have been in a much more challenging position in defending its interests over Kosovo without Russian backing. The question remains: why did Russia support Serbia’s claims during the independence process? Employing a framework based on social identity theory, this study argues that Moscow’s policy on Kosovo’s independence process was driven by its status concerns. In Moscow’s perception, the US and the EU’s determination to provide independence to Kosovo without considering Russia’s concerns was an act of disrespect to Russia’s great power status. Therefore, from 2007 onwards, Western-led liberal peacebuilding was no longer a legitimate effort in the eyes of Russian policymakers. Conversely, the Kremlin’s discourse on recovering its great power status and Belgrade’s decision to rely more on Russia during the process led Moscow to perceive the international process on Kosovo’s status as more open to its influence than before. In such circumstances, where the international regime is perceived as illegitimate but permeable to the status-seeker, social identity theory predicts an identity management strategy based on social creativity: reframing negatively considered attributes as positive to alter the status measurement criteria. Thus, in the Kosovo case against the West’s liberal internationalist peacebuilding, Moscow increasingly emphasised the traditional international norms on sovereignty and continued international mediation for a mutually acceptable solution. Despite the West’s negative evaluation of these, in the Kosovo case, the Kremlin purported them as cornerstones of a stable and peaceful future for Serbia and Kosovo. This was an effort to position itself as an equal and responsible power outside the liberal camp. The unresolvable gap in the Western and Russian approaches and the use of international conflict management initiatives for status-seeking seeded the problems Kosovo and the wider Western Balkans face today. In the emerging multipolar world, how status-inconsistent powers manage their status-seeking efforts will play a crucial role for stability. Therefore, lessons from the past, such as the Kosovo case, are worth revisiting.