KOSOVO (2)

In my blog of 13 June, I asked whether Kosovo could now be regarded as a state (I actually used the word "country"), when more than 60 other countries had already recognised it as such, but a fair minority - including politically important ones such as Russia, China, India and Spain - had not. I also said that the International Court of Justice had been asked by the United Nations to give its opinion on the matter.

The ICJ's ruling, issued on 22 July, was widely expected, because of the political circumstances, to fudge the issue. It did; though not perhaps in the way anticipated. By ten to four, the court gave a clear ruling that Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence did not violate international law. That was a huge boost to the Kosovans and a punch in the stomach for Serbia, the country of which Kosovo is/was a part, and the driving force behind the request to the ICJ.

However, that is not the end of the story. As the court itself noted, a declaration of independence does not of itself confer the status of a state. As nationalism took hold in former empires, the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were full of such declarations; "sometimes a declaration resulted in the creation of a new State, at others it did not". Because the question at issue was a narrow one ("Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo in accordance with international law?"), there was no need for the ICJ to come to a view on whether Kosovo had, as a matter of law, achieved statehood. Nor was it necessary to come to a view on whether Kosovo had had the right to secede from Serbia; again, it had simply not been asked.

This result may be legally satisfying (though note that since four judges voted no, even the narrow point was not 100% clear-cut), but doesn't really take things much further forward. Serbia now needs to decide what to do next, bearing in mind a) that a new question to the ICJ would take time to get through the United Nations, and even longer to be decided by the court, b) that as time goes on, the reality on the ground (i.e. independence) becomes more and more entrenched, and c) that Serbia would like to join the EU, 22 of whose 27 members have already recognised Kosovo. Not surprisingly, the Serbs have gone into a huddle to think about things.

And my original riddle, namely "when is a country not a country?" remains unanswered.

Walter Blotscher