7 - Euroskeptic

Summary

As he moved forward with plans to create a Bosnian Serb state in late 1991, Karadžić was acutely aware that the new polity could not be established permanently unless it won European and U.S. recognition. He and Milošević had hoped that the Europeans would apply the international legal principle of self-determination to recognize the national aspirations of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. They were disappointed to learn that, while EC diplomats were prepared to grant self-determination to any of the six republics, they were loath to do the same for groups within a republic or across two or more republics. The Serb leaders seemed unaware that Europe was in the grip of its own euphoria at having established and maintained the kind of multicultural society that the Serbs were intent on dismantling. But Karadžić proved to be a Euroskeptic: he had no interest in the values of individual rights and majority rule, and he took offense when EC diplomats emphasized those values in dealing with the Yugoslav crisis. This chapter relates his encounters with European officials and examines how the Europeans’ viewpoints typically diverged from those of Karadžić and other Serb nationalists.

The EC Quest for Peace

Having successfully mediated an end to the brief war in Slovenia, EC negotiators were confident they could secure peace in Croatia as well. On August 28, 1991, as Serb-Croat violence was spreading in Croatia, the EC created two institutions to promote peace: the EC Conference on Yugoslavia, chaired by the former NATO Secretary General and British diplomat Lord Carrington; and an Arbitration Commission headed by French jurist Robert Badinter. The EC charged its Conference on Yugoslavia with ending hostilities through negotiations and its Arbitration Commission with establishing guidelines for EC recognition of new states emerging from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. The commission was to apply principles of international law as fairly and quickly as possible to establish and maintain peace in the region. Its opinions suggest that the commission’s greatest concern was avoiding further war and imposing conditions on those states seeking independence. The EC was already complicit in Slovene and Croat declarations of independence, having in July 1991 persuaded those two republics to accept a ninety-day moratorium on the effective dates of their declarations of independence.