Liberal International Law Theory and the United Nations Mission in Kosovo: Ideas and Practice

Abstract

The creation of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo was a unique moment in
international politics, a moment when events compelled the key players in international politics to
reveal what they thought about a crucial question of international affairs: what is a state? The way
the important individual states, the United Nations, the North American Treaty Organization, the
European Union, and other international organizations went about creating a new government from
thin air provides important insight into both what ideas dominated international law thinking at the
time and, perhaps more importantly, how ideas impact decision-making at the international level.
This Article argues that “disaggregated sovereignty,” and the general corpus of “Liberalism”
in international relations and international law, provided the dominant understanding of state
behavior in late twentieth century legal scholarship. Moreover, the Article will argue that the
principles of this legal and international relations literature underlay the design of the United
Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). The administrative and legal framework of UNMIK closely
resembles the idea of a modern liberal state inherent in the disaggregated sovereignty literature.
As such, this Article attempts to use the creation of UNMIK instrumentally. Through
analyzing its structure, it tries to understand what international decision-makers think about the
crucial question of what a “state” is (or rather, thought at the time of the creation of UNMIK), the
ways in which the answer to this question impacted the citizenry of Kosovo, and the implications
this has for contemporary international law theory. This Article argues that, in contrast with the
predictions of purely sociological analyses of the way ideas travel in world society, the internal
structure of disaggregated sovereignty theory was a crucial reason for its adoption as a model for
UNMIK.