yugoslavias implosion

warfare. The most the Europeans did was to provide peacekeeping
forces in the Balkans, while the United States carried out the decisive
phases of military mission and stabilized the situation. Freed
from the requirement of creating any military deterrence, internal
or external, the Europeans developed a set of ideals and principles
regarding the utility and morality of power that differed from those
the Americans held. 538
THE ABSENCE OF AN INSTITUTIONAL MECHANISM
FOR CONFLICT MANAGEMENT ENCOURAGES
SHORT-TERM, HASTILY CONCEIVED, AND
COUNTERPRODUCTIVE POLITICAL MEASURES
The violence accompanying the collapse of Yugoslavia took place
amid monumental historical changes in the world in the early 1990s.
The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union
and the Eastern bloc took the United States and the European Union
by surprise. Many of the ensuing decisions relating to the former
Yugoslavia were hasty, ill-conceived, and often purely palliative.
Measures were taken and mechanisms were established without a
proper assessment of evolving developments, often in an excessively
self-assured, overly optimistic way.
Had the eu and/or nato possessed effective early warning systems
and conflict-prevention mechanisms, and had it employed
those systems and strategies throughout crumbling Yugoslavia, the
West might have been able to formulate a proactive, comprehensive
strategy to deter aggressive actions and reward a readiness to negotiate
and to respect human rights. Lacking such mechanisms, however,
the West was obliged to take a reactive, piecemeal approach and
to expend its energy on recurrent intra-Western disputes about how
to deal with each crisis once it erupted. Western powers came up
with a series of peace plans, each with its own formula for preserving
538 Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness”, Policy Review, No .113 .
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