Spain Recognises Palestine But Not Kosovo - the Failure of Madrid's European Policy
This week the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is expected to vote on admitting Kosovo as a member state. It is 25 years since Nato intervented in Kosovo to put an end to the Serb butchery, ethnic cleansing, destruction of whole families in farming communities in Kosovo. By Easter 1999 half the Kosovo population had fled outside their nation seeking asylum in other European countries.
Since then Kosovo has sought to join other states that emerged from the carnage of Slobodan Milosevic’s decade of war in the West Balkans after 1990 and the disintegration of Yugoslvia as small West Balkan state.
Most NATO and G7 democracies have recognised Kosovo. Spain however refuses to recognise Kosovo exists. This is curious as Spain has just become become the ninth EU member state to recognise Palestine. The call to recognise Palestine has gained in emotional appeal across Europe as the slaughter of civilian women, children and elderly men continues relentlessly across Gaza.
Palestine has been recognised by 140 UN member states and is an Observer member of the UN General Assembly.
It is completely clear that recognising Palestine has had no effect on Israel’s respect for international rule of law or encouraged Hamas to take the path of peaceful negotiation in place of its Islamist ideological commitment to exterminating Jews and destroying the state of Israel.
But diplomatic recognition is always better than pretending that a state and a people do not exist. For decades the United States refused to recognise China until Richard Nixon, advised by a wise European, Henry Kissinger ended the fiction that Taiwan was the state governing the Chinese people.
When Labour took over the British government in 1997, Tony Blair gave diplomatic recognition to North Korea at a time when the United States insisted the communist dictatorship in the North of Korea should be shunned by all its allies.
As a British foreign office minister representing the UK at meeting of the EU and Arab countries I asked why the Arab countries refused to recognise the existence of the state of Israel?
The Arab ministers looked at me as if I were mad. I said that the wisest political leader in Europe in my life was Willy Brandt. Why? Because he ended the self-defeating doctrine of Germany’s post-war conservatives of refusing to accept the German Democratic Republic existed, was a functioning state and it was better for Bonn to do business with East Berlin.
We can all in our dreams wish that Catalonia accepted its undeniable historic, cultural, and citizenship relationship with the rest of Spain.
I have never met a prouder Catalan than Josep Borrell. We have climbed Mount Canigou together.
I have never met a European so committed to partnership between the people of Spain and the people of his Catalonia.
Francois Mitterrand said once “Le nationalisme, c’est la guerre” – Nationalism is war. We have seen that in Europe in Ireland, in the Basque country, in Corsica, in Serbia, and today as Israeli nationalism makes war on the all the people of Palestine and Hamas Islamist nationalism make war on all Jewish people.
I was born a Scot, near Glasgow. On my mother’s side my bloodline is Irish. I can list every atrocity committed by the Protestant supremacists of England against the Catholics of Ireland.
But today Ireland has found an answer. It is the second richest European country in terms of GDP per capita after Luxembourg. Ireland no longer exports its poor to work in England.
But still the demons of European nationalism live on. What is the Russian invasion of Ukraine other than an assertion of Russian nationalist supremacy over the people of Ukraine?
We have this closer to home. Yugoslavia was a serious attempt to eradicate national identity after 1945. But it needed a communist dictatorship, a secret police and many of the same tools of the Franco state between 1945 and 1974 to suppress different national and cultural identities from the Alps to the frontier with Greece.
Today the last expression of that autocracy and refusal to accept national identity is Serbia. It’s leader Slobodan Milosevic, tried to impose Serb nationalism on on the rest of the former Yugoslavia. His Serb supremacist nationalism led to terrible wars, ethnic cleansing, the genocidal murder of 8,000 unarmed men, women and one child who were tied up and and murdered by Serbs at Srebrenica.
The Serb mass murders in Kosovo in 1998-99 led to half the population fleeing as refugees out of Kosovo to avoid Serb death squads. The patience of Europe finally broke and European leaders together with President Clinton agreed that serious miliary force needed to be used to tame Serb nationalism.
25 years ago Spanish airforce pilots had the honour of leading the first Nato attacks to bring to an end the Serb nationalist butchery of Kosovar civilians. Milosevic was a bully. The moment he met the determination of a united Europe and US he quickly folded and was taken the Hague to stand trial for his years of butchery.
But Serb nationalism did not disappear. Milosevic’s young press officer was Alexander Vucic. A skilful political opportunist he is today, the president of Serbia which like his friend Viktor Orban in Hungary he has turned into his personal fiefdom based on media control and corruption. Most educated Serbs leave the country to find jobs elsewhere in Europe. Vucic acts as Vladimir Putin’s ambassador in the West Balkans in keeping this region of Europe in a state of no war but no peace.
It is 25 years since the short conflict to liberate Kosovo from Serb colonial oppression ended. But still Vucic refuses to make peace and insists on the fantasy that Kosovo is just a breakaway province of Serbia.
Spain helps in keeping the West Balkans in a state of permanent tension by supporting the Vucic nationalist ideology that Kosovo is part of Serbia. Unlike the other major EU nations – Germany, France, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands and Nordic state Madrid refuses to recognise Kosovo and thus urge Vucic to come to terms with reality.
Spain will recognise Palestine which will have no impact sadly on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. But it won’t recognise a fellow European nation and state – Kosovo which helps to keep a key European region permanently unstable.
The argument that recognising Kosovo is a precedent for Catalonia is surreal. France recognises Kosovo and ignores Corsican demands for independence. Britain recognises Kosovo without any independentista in Scotland using that as an argument for breaking up the United Kingdom. Canada recognises Kosovo without the having any impact on the claims by Quebec secessionists for Quebec to break links with the rest of Canada.
Spain should be a major foreign policy player in Europe shaping Europe’s policy towards Latin America. But Madrid’s constant refusal under different governments to being part of the solution to Europe’s unsettled, unhappy West Balkans region and instead to support the Vucic regime’s policy in line with the Kremlin’s wishes to keep alive nationalist divisions within the EU is now past its use-by date.