Before and after Dayton: The UN and NATO in the former Yugoslavia

Abstract

There is no doubt that the development of the relationships between the United Nations (UN) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been very much affected by the Yugoslav crisis, both before and after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement.1 The experience of cooperation is relevant for a better understanding of the complex relationships within the UN’s system of collective security as well as between the UN and regional organizations. There was no blueprint nor any ‘arrangement’ which regulated such mutual relationships. Furthermore, the cooperation before and after Dayton took place under fundamentally different conditions of subcontracting. This reflects the fact that the international community’s involvement in the falling apart of the former Yugoslavia made the Balkan region a testing ground for international politics that required new definitions of crises, analyses and responses. The evolving UN and NATO forms of cooperation had an experimental character. These contacts would have been unthinkable during the preceding years of the Cold War. The Atlantic Alliance chose not to identify itself as a regional organization under Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, thereby excluding any Soviet infringement in NATO’s security matters. The central question is whether subcontracting, as applied in the former Yugoslavia, set precedents for future relationships between the UN and regional organizations, particularly in terms of division of labour and accountability.