https://www.bostonherald.com/2022/07/02/tadic-wests-failures-over-territorial-integrity-set-stage-for-ukraine/amp/
Tadic: West’s failures over territorial integrity set stage for Ukraine
Boris Tadic
July 2, 2022 at 12:10 a.m.
The conflict over Ukraine is exposing an inconsistency at the heart of Western foreign policy.
Left unaddressed, it poses as strong a threat to international relations as any Russian aggression. It’s not the extent to which democratic nations should be reliant on Russia’s fossil fuels, though confusion reigns here too. Rather, the issue is territorial integrity.
When it comes to Ukraine, today the West’s position is that territorial integrity is sacrosanct. Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea are non-negotiable as parts of Ukraine and must be returned by Russia: Their legally, UN-recognized status demands it. Similarly for Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Balkans: The country’s borders are judged, rightly, to be immutable.
Yet for other nations, such clarity appears not to apply. For instance, Azerbaijan’s sovereign borders are legally recognized, thanks to multiple UN Security Council resolutions which the U.S. and Europe wholeheartedly supported. Yet in the U.S. Congress, ethnic-Armenian separatists are described as “friends and allies,” even after their vocal, public support for the pro-Russian rebels of Donetsk and Luhansk.
French politicians go further, visiting for photo-ops with separatist leaders. While backing Azerbaijan’s sovereign borders at the UN, American and French diplomats say in the same breath that talks are necessary and the right to territorial self-determination must be considered. How this circle can be squared is not clear.
For still other states, the policy is turned upside down. When president of Serbia, I led our diplomatic campaign to counter destabilizing moves to unilaterally alter the status of Kosovo and Metohija — then, as now, unrecognized as a state under international law. Then, as now, Serbia’s territorial integrity and the views of its citizens — who remain resolutely attached to their nation’s heartland and identity — were, apparently, irrelevant. And yet the territorial integrity of Serbia’s next-door neighbor Bosnia is declared absolute.
As the principle of UN member states’ territorial integrity is enshrined in the UN Charter, in 2010 a non-binding advisory opinion was sought from the UN’s International Court of Justice to the question “whether Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence is in accordance with international law.” The answer, essentially, was to avoid one — the response allowing different, arbitrary interpretations according to the interests of competing world powers.
At the time, I warned setting such a precedent would be a justification for others to ignite hotspots worldwide. I warned about Ukraine. Indeed, today, that advisory opinion has emboldened Russia to justify its slow takeover of the country’s east and south. Before them, Georgia’s breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia were recognized by Russia as independent states. But this recognition only occurred after the West first recognized Kosovo, opening the door and showing them the way.
Now in Ukraine, with both sides dug in, the war risks festering, needlessly consuming countless more lives, threatening a prolonged energy crisis, and engendering famines across the world.
The ramifications can be seen in the results of recent votes at the UN condemning Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Governments representing half the world’s population did not vote for them, as much over frustration with Western inconsistency as indecision over crossing Russia.
This state of affairs offers some explanation for flagging support in countries like Serbia for membership in the EU. It is an organization described as a part of the “rules-based international order,” and yet has embraced Kosovo’s self-proclaimed statehood. (Fortunately, five out of 27 EU members continue to recognize Serbia’s territorial integrity).
By positioning Serbia not just in both western and eastern camps, but between them, current Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic has played a role in diminishing the EU’s popularity. Still, no one should be under the illusion that Western mixed signals towards Serbia are not also at play.
Putin is to blame for invading Ukraine. But he did not open the Pandora’s box of relativizing respect for the territorial integrity. Western contradictions have added weight to his claim of double-standards, and unfortunately it is heard with sympathy in many corners of the world even in the midst of the horrors of the Ukrainian war. Indeed, those contradictions puncture the West’s greatest advantage — its moral authority — at a very time when other great and rising powers are starting to match the West’s influence. And that makes another Ukraine somewhere else more likely.
Boris Tadic served two consecutive terms as Serbia’s first democratically elected president (2004-2012).
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