Germany, Kosovo and the ethics of order after the Cold War

For the first time, the Albanian public has at its disposal a comprehensive study that explains not only what Germany did towards Kosovo, but also how it thought, why it hesitated, when it changed course and under what conditions it took on historical responsibility, namely how the case also influenced the continuous evolution of German foreign policy. The importance of Sylë Ukshin's book "The Role of German Foreign Policy Towards Kosovo 1990–2008" is even more pronounced today in light of the current international context. At a time when the liberal post-Cold War order is increasingly being questioned and when the concept of humanitarian intervention is being relativized, Ukshin's study reminds us that Kosovo's statehood was neither a random historical act nor a geopolitical gift.

Historian Sylë Ukshini's book "The Role of Germany's Foreign Policy towards Kosovo 1990–2008" represents one of the most important contributions to Albanian political historiography after 1999. This importance lies not only in the fact that the work addresses the role of a key international actor in the processes of engagement, internationalization and state formation of Kosovo, but also in the way this role is analyzed: through a disciplined archival approach, based on German, parliamentary and diplomatic sources, and articulated from a Kosovar epistemic position.

This approach makes the book fundamentally different from existing Albanian literature. For decades, the history of Kosovo has been told mainly from within with romanticism and from without: by Western diplomats, Anglophone or German academics, and by narratives that have treated Kosovo as an object of crisis, not as a subject of history. Ukshini overturns this logic without falling into interpretations narrowed by the local context or into national apologies. He does not idealize the role of the reunified Germany, but analyzes it with scholarly meticulousness, relying on archival sources and with full awareness of the limitations, hesitations and ambiguities that accompanied this role.

For the first time, the Albanian public has at its disposal a complete study that explains not only what Germany did towards Kosovo, but how it thought, why it hesitated, when it changed and under what conditions it took historical responsibility, respectively how the case also influenced the continuous evolution of German foreign policy.

The book’s relevance today is even more pronounced in light of the current international context. At a time when the post-Cold War liberal order is increasingly being questioned and when the concept of humanitarian intervention is being relativized, Ukshin’s study reminds us that Kosovo’s statehood was neither a random historical act nor a geopolitical gift, but the result of a long normative, moral and institutional process. In this process, international actors such as Germany played important roles and at decisive moments, but always in complex interaction with the resistance, resilience and political agency of Kosovar society itself.

In this perspective, the book is not just a study of Germany. It is also a profound reflection on the political subjectivity of Kosovo in history: on how an issue considered for years “peripheral”, “dangerous” or “destabilizing” gradually became a central test of Europe’s own moral identity after 1989. Kosovo, in Ukshin’s analysis, is not simply an object of German foreign policy; it is a defining moment in Germany’s transformation from a historically self-contained power to an actor accepting normative responsibilities beyond its borders. Precisely for this reason, this book has not only historiographical, but also political and academic importance. It provides scholars, students, diplomats and decision-makers of the state of Kosovo with an analytical framework, a framework that shows how a great power’s foreign policy position is constructed, how diplomatic operations and hesitations are read, how moral compromises are decoded and how the long time of international decision-making is understood.

Basic thesis: From the closure of the German issue to the opening of the Kosovo issue

One of the most compelling and at the same time most implicit theses of Sylë Ukshini’s book is the idea that the reunification of Germany in 1990 represented not only the closing of a historical European chapter, but also the opening of a new political cycle, in which the unresolved issues of the continent’s peripheries gradually became inevitable. In this logic, the closing of the “German issue”, which for decades had structured the European security architecture, created the political, diplomatic and normative space for the emergence of other “closed” issues, including Kosovo since the establishment of the Versailles system.

Ukshin reads this process not as a linear transition from the Cold War to the liberal order, but as an intermediate stage filled with uncertainty, historical fears, and moral dilemmas, especially for Germany. After 1990, Berlin found itself in a paradoxical position: it was the most economically and demographically powerful state in Europe, but at the same time the state that felt the most strongly the need for political restraint. The normality that the reunified Germany sought was not dominance but credibility, not expansion but legitimacy.

This dual situation also explains its initial relationship with Kosovo. Until the mid-90s, Kosovo remained on the periphery of European diplomacy not because it was invisible, but because it was politically dangerous: an issue that risked setting a precedent for border redrawing, rekindling fears of further Yugoslav disintegration, and placing Germany at the center of accusations of destabilizing Southeast Europe, a charge that is historically sensitive for Berlin.

In this context, the marginalization of Kosovo in Dayton does not appear, in Ukshin’s reading, as a cynical or indifferent diplomatic act, but as a calculated strategic choice, documented in German archives and internal debates. Germany chose to postpone the Kosovo issue at that moment, as it recognized its injustice, but in those circumstances for the main countries of the Contact Group (a kind of new European Concert) the absolute priority was the stabilization of Bosnia and the preservation of a minimal European order after a period of upheaval. This makes Ukshin’s analysis particularly important: he strips diplomacy of moral myths, without reducing it to cold realpolitik.

In this way, the book offers a structural understanding of historical time: Kosovo was not delayed because it was unimportant, but because the international system was not yet ready to face its implications and, above all, because the disintegration of the Versailles creation was proceeding as a process in stages. Only after Germany and Europe began to free themselves from the trauma of reunification itself, from the fear of repeating history and from the illusion of stability through the status quo, did the way open for a serious treatment of the Kosovo issue, the solution of which closed the last chapter of the disintegration of the Versailles Yugoslavia.

From “civil power” to normative actor: the German transformation

Another fundamental pillar of the book is the analysis of Germany’s gradual transformation from what the literature has defined as Zivilmacht, a civil power, oriented towards diplomacy, multilateralism and the rejection of force, into a normative actor that accepts the use of force as a last moral and political instrument. This transformation does not occur suddenly, nor as a result of strategic ambition, but as a consequence of a series of crises that challenge the very moral identity of the German state.

Ukshin treats Bosnia as the vanguard of this process: a political trauma that exposed the limits of absolute pacifism in the face of genocide. However, Kosovo constitutes the real turning point. There, Germany was no longer a mere witness or diplomatic mediator; it became an active participant in a military intervention without a direct UN mandate, an act unthinkable for German policy in previous decades.

At the heart of this turn lies what Ukshin documents as an institutional moral awakening. Debates in the Bundestag over the use of the Bundeswehr, legal dilemmas over the constitutionality of intervention, and clashes within the German political elite are presented not simply as formal discussions, but as signs of an identity crisis. The question was not just should we intervene?, but what does it mean to be Germany after Auschwitz? It was a time when Germany was being held to account more.

The famous discourse of “Nie wieder Auschwitz” (never again Auschwitz), articulated by the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, marks precisely this moment of normative rewriting: from “never again war” to “never again indifference to mass crime”. This was Fischer’s response to the attacks launched against him by the radical left, since this slogan, together with the slogan “Never again war”, has been unfolded as the only obligation emerging from recent German history. Fischer, the newly appointed Foreign Minister of the red-green government, used the memory of Auschwitz to justify German military participation in the Kosovo war. “Milosevic seemed to have forgotten that Europe no longer lived in 1937, but had arrived in 1999 and was based on completely different values”, Ukshini quotes Joschka Fischer’s opinion.

In this logic, the use of force is not seen as a denial of German history, but as a response to it. Ukshini shows how this moral argument, combined with the strategic pragmatism of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, created a new political consensus that led Germany out of the policy of strategic and normative restraint shaped after World War II as a response to the historical burden of the Nazi past and as a commitment to an international order based on norms, multilateralism, and collective responsibility.

To be continued in the next issue of the Culture Supplement