They called it “the 21st century arriving early”. In April 1999, the New York Times declared Kosovo a template for the new millennium. Nato’s humanitarian intervention in the Kosovo War that spring would augur a new era in which human rights would trump national sovereignty. No head of state, irrespective of their democratic legitimacy, would have the right to slaughter their own citizens. In the future, “the Western democracies”, led by the United States, would be tasked with protecting people from violations of their human rights – anywhere they were under threat. An uncharacteristically optimistic Human Rights Watch report from that year christened it “the beginning of a new era for the human rights movement”. Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and darling of democratic transition, concurred. “Human beings are more important than the state,” he said. “The idol of state sovereignty must inevitably dissolve.”
Bernard Kouchner, the first UN mission chief in Kosovo, was similarly hopeful. The former communist student activist from France, who had protested the Vietnam War and French colonialism in Algeria in 1968, wrote of the incipient world in a 1999 op-ed for the LA Times. “Can we dream of a 21st century where the horrors of the 20th will not be repeated?’” Kouchner asked. “The answer is a hopeful yes – if, as part of the emergent world order, a new morality can be codified in the ‘right to intervention’ against abuses of national sovereignty.” This era would marry the Kouchner generation’s 1960s activist sensibilities and internationalist affectations with unprecedented military, economic and political power. At the end of the 20th century, wars of nationalism naturally shocked the Western conscience, but war waged in defence of human rights would imbue it with a new moral force.
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