The Kosovo Crisis: A Dostoievskian Dialogue on International Law, Statecraft, and Soulcraft

The secession of Kosovo from Serbia in February 2008 represents a stage in the unfolding of a revolution of constitutional dimensions in International Law that began with NATO\u27s 1999 intervention in Kosovo against Serbia. NATO\u27s intervention called into question the authority and viability of U.N. Charter system for maintaining international peace. Likewise, the West\u27s decision in 2008 to support Kosovo\u27s secession from Serbia dealt a further blow to the central post-War legal rules and institutions for controlling and mitigating Great power rivalry. Russia\u27s later support for South Ossetia\u27s secession from Georgia demonstrated the potential that the Kosovo precedent has for destabilizing the international legal order. This article takes the form of a five-act play, consisting of a series of speeches and exchanges between characters drawn from Fyodor Dostoievski\u27s classic novel, The Brothers Karamazov. The dialogue moves on three levels. The first level is that of normal international law: the characters engage in a prolonged debate over the legality of Kosovo\u27s secession that explores the usual modalities of international legal argument. The intention here is to demonstrate that when the conceptual resources internal to international law have been exhausted, they yield no decisive answer to the question of the legality of Kosovo\u27s secession. The second level is an attempt to grasp the consequences for the international order of Russia\u27s re-emergence as a Great Power (and even more basically, of the emergence of a multi-polar world). The third level is an examination of the basic, but usually unstated, philosophical and theological presuppositions of what can be called the Western idea and the Russia idea. The speeches in this final act of the drama are directed to showing how these two rival understandings yield corresponding views of the international order, and more particularly of the proper scope and limits of international law