Kosovo and Palestine: Diverging Self-Determination
Though united by aspirations for independence, they ended up in opposite geopolitical camps.
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Who gets to have a state? How are the competing principles of sovereignty and self-determination resolved? Where does a state’s right to defend itself end, and the right of a community to fight for freedom begin?
The UN, created after World War II, was meant to offer a common framework for such dilemmas as decolonisation gathered pace. The stakes were clear: the earlier collapse of European empires like the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian ones had left a scramble for territory that helped produce two world wars.
Yet since the UN’s founding, international law has treated self-determination struggles inconsistently. Outcomes have always hinged on geopolitics and power balances, fuelling grievances over double standards.
These became sharper after the Soviet Union’s collapse, when the West held unrivalled sway over global norms. A liberal interpretation of international law began to erode the notion that sovereignty granted states a free hand over their populations, holding governments to account for crimes against their citizens.
It was in this moment of liberal triumphalism—under the logic of humanitarian intervention—that Kosovo became a sui generis case of how a state is born in international law, even if the self-determination stuggle of Kosovan Albanians had preceded this international moment of its recognition.
NATO’s 1999 intervention halted Serbia’s campaign of ethnic cleansing, and in 2008 Kosovo declared independence through a UN-mediated process backed primarily by Western states. When Serbia challenged the move at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the latter concluded that Kosovo’s declaration did not violate international law.
In a masterful opinion, Brazilian ICJ judge Antônio Cançado Trindade captured the prevailing liberal ethos.
“States exist for human beings and not vice versa,” he wrote, adding, ”States transformed into machines of oppression and destruction ceased to be States in the eyes of their victimised populations.”
But what the West hailed as a legitimate resolution to a dispute in the age of human rights was not seen in the same light by revisionist powers and critics of the liberal order. Russia, treating Kosovo as a mere case of Western annexation, has since misleadingly invoked it to justify its annexation of Ukraine. Critics on the left, meanwhile, contrast the West’s embrace of Kosovo’s plight with its silence on other cases of human rights violations – especially Palestine.
Two Struggles, Two Outcomes
The self-determination struggles of Kosovo and Palestine both trace their modern roots to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. This was a time when ethnic communities from the Balkans to the Middle East, which had lived together for centuries, scrambled to establish nation-states or were absorbed into new imperial spheres of influence – processes often associated with ethnic cleansing.
Kosovo, an Albanian majority Ottoman vilayet, was violently annexed by the Serbian Kingdom in 1912 and ruled in colonial fashion. It briefly unified with Albania under Italian and German occupation in World War II, but postwar great power politics cemented it as a part of socialist Yugoslavia. For decades, Kosovo’s status was a non-issue in international affairs, as the great powers considered the matter settled, and no notable bid for self-determination took hold within Kosovo itself.
Palestine, by contrast, was placed on the UN’s agenda much earlier as the British Mandate expired. The UN’s 1947 partition plan proposed separate Jewish and Arab states, but was not accepted by the latter. The wars that followed entrenched a dynamic that derrailed from this attempt to seek a universally accepted solution, and focused on both side’s attempts to dictate terms by shaping the reality on the ground.
Over time, Israel’s growing military dominance, the expansionist policies of its far right, and the devastating humanitarian toll of occupation—most recently in Gaza—have steadily undermined Palestinian statehood capacity, even as recognition at the diplomatic level is growing.
Kosovo’s case, on the other hand, emerged in the international arena much later with the breakup of Yugoslavia - with ultimately greater success. Under Yugoslav President Josep Broz Tito, Kosovo’s autonomy had evolved into a quasi-republic. But Serbian leaders Slobodan Milošević revoked that status in the late 1980s, sparking a sequence of repression and conflict that escalated into the Yugoslav wars.
When the European Community’s Badinter Commission set rules for Yugoslavia’s dissolution, it limited secession rights to full republics, excluding Kosovo—even after its 1991 self-declared independence. It was only after the atrocities of 1998–1999, when Serbian forces carried out mass expulsions and killings in response to a growing insurgency, that Kosovo became a sui generis case in international law, with Serbia’s sovereignity suspended by UNSC 1244.
Today Kosovo is recognised by over 110 states, fewer than currently recognise Palestine. But it has control of its territory, is backed by the West in the orm of a NATO mission and is able to operate internationally, even if it faces limitations due to Russia’s and China’s refusal to grant UN membership.
At Arms Length
The different outcomes of the two self-determination struggles show the importance of contingency, timing, and geography. Kosovo benefited from Western - especially US - attention at the peak of American power, something unthinkable today. Its location in Europe also heightened Western fears of regional spillover.
Yet domestic agency and ideology mattered too. Kosovo Albanians courted Western support while Serbia defied it. They also distanced their liberation movement from Marxist and radical Islamic currents, and – crucially in 2008 – accepted the West’s tough conditions for independence. The UN envoy’s plan created not an Albanian nation-state but a compromise multiethnic state built on minority protections. In this sense Kosovo resembled Israel in 1947, which reluctantly agreed to elements of the UN partition plan as the price of recognition.
Palestinians on the other hand relied on anti-Western allies—most notably the USSR during the Cold War and later on pariah states like Iran—which instrumentalised the Palestinian cause within their broader geopolitical struggles. While this gave the movement international backing, it also fueled radical factions opposed to coexistance with Israel and limited their ability to build Western support for statehood (certainly, radicalization was driven not only by these alliances but also by the direct conditions of occupation and displacement).
Though united by aspirations for self-determination, Kosovo and Palestine ended up in opposite geopolitical camps and embraced different normative frameworks, which has eroded solidarity and even fueled antagonism between the two. Kosovars often recall how, in 1999, right after NATO bombed Serbia, Milosevic was invited by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and treated as an anti-colonial hero. They also point to how Palestinian leaders still deny Kosovo’s right to statehood, and side staunchly with Serbia’s position.
Such stances have been reciprocated with self-interested realism. When Israel recognised Kosovo in 2020 with US support, Kosovo opened its embassy in Jerusalem—one of only six states to do so. Since October 2023, nationalist and secularist sections of Kosovar society have sided consideraby with Israel, with some seeing perhaps in Hamas echoes of the political Islam they oppose at home.
Still, at the social and community level, particularly among religious conservative and leftist circles, Gaza’s suffering resonates deeply. The mainstream of society has no sympathy for Hamas, but it also recoils at the devastating humanitarian toll of Israel’s military campaign on civilians and children, a sentiment notably shared by parts of Israeli society itself. Much as in many European capitals, this fuels a growing moral consensus that Palestinian statehood is imperative—even if the path to achieving it, as a state living in peace alongside Israel, remains elusive.
