Kosovo disaster brings home need for security policy

That war accelerates the politics of security has been starkly revealed as European states come to terms with the consequences of NATO's air bombardment of Serbia and the catastrophe that has seen nearly one million people cleared out of their homes.

This week saw the European Union take a more central role in the conflict, initiating moves to bring Russia and the United Nations back into the frame of a settlement. It also began to put flesh on a long-term proposal for a stability pact with the Balkan states which would hold out the promise of eventual EU and NATO membership.

Much of the initiative came from the German government, currently holding the EU presidency. The Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, has been to the fore, holding intensive discussions before Wednesday's EU summit with the Italians and the French particularly on how to restore relations with Russia and reactivate a UN role. The presence of Kofi Annan at the summit and the appointment of Viktor Chernomyrdin as Russian envoy on Kosovo signalled a new commitment to a diplomatic endgame.

For, as Patrick Smyth put it in these pages yesterday, "Kosovo has transformed the nature of the EU's recently reinvigorated debate on a `European Security Dimension' from a theoretical discussion into an imperative". The consequences for Ireland's underdeveloped debate on the subject will be profound; but at last there is evidence that it is being taken seriously by political leaders.

Inescapably, too, there are major consequences for Europe's relations with the United States. Le Monde pointed out this week that France has supported the Russian and UN initiatives "because it feared in current (like Iraq) or future circumstances leaving the way open to the unilateralism of the United States and its domination of NATO".

There are suspicions throughout Europe (voiced here by John Bruton) that the US pushed the bombing campaign so hard partly to marginalise Russia and assert its hegemony within NATO as that alliance prepares to mark its 50th anniversary in Washington next week. If that is the case, a new determination to develop European security structures makes much sense.

Domestic political factors are also coming into play in the definition of a diplomatic way forward. The French government proposed the idea of an EU protectorate in Kosovo, which was incorporated into Wednesday's summit statement. It raises the question of who would have authority over political and military structures there in the event of a settlement. The US is most uncomfortable with any idea of sharing military leadership with Russian or UN commanders. It is also impatient with constraints imposed by Security Council resolutions, the price for getting Russia on side, even if the means chosen include imposing a UN-endorsed settlement on Serbia, as the French have suggested.

In Germany, too, domestic factors are at play. The Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, was endorsed as SPD chairman this week, but only after a heated discussion on Kosovo, in which left-wingers criticised NATO's air attacks.

The German settlement plan proposed this week suggests a 24-hour ceasefire once Serb troops begin to withdraw; but this proved unacceptable to EU leaders, with the British particularly opposed. But the St Malo defence agreement between Mr Blair and President Chirac last November is still being actively pursued in the wider context of developing the EU's security and defence arrangements, as the Amsterdam Treaty comes into effect.

The Kosovo crisis has dramatically accelerated the process and Britain's European interests necessitate that it be actively involved. The other main demands put by NATO and the EU on Serbia include an end to violence and ethnic cleansing, full withdrawal of Serb forces, return of the refugees and an international force put in place to supervise the agreement. The German plan includes provision for standing down the Kosovo Liberation Army and disarming it; it stops short of endorsing Kosovan independence, seeking to restore the autonomy arrangements agreed at Rambouillet. How realistic this is after the grim events of the last three weeks remains to be seen.

To some hardened realists these long-term plans for a settlement, reconstruction and incorporation in European structures in the middle of an escalating war may smack of the old utopian slogan, "Be realistic, demand the impossible!" But after the war there will be up to a million refugees; and, as Rupert Cornwell wrote in the Independent on Sunday last week, "there will still be a land called Kosovo, deemed by Serbs to be the cradle of their nation. There will still be desperately fragile, perhaps collapsed states around it, in Montenegro, Albania and Macedonia. There will be a battered, bitter, resentful Serbia, whether or not Slobdan Milosevic is in power. Out of this chaos, the diplomats must try to fashion a new Balkan order".