NATO aggression against FRY: “A war on the border between law and morality”

Abstract

The paper focuses on the ethical aspects of NATO aggression (or so-called “humanitarian intervention”), exerted against the FRY, actually Serbia, in the period from March to June 1999. The paper has been conceived as a critical dialogue with Jürgen Habermas, or rather the positions presented by him in a text entitled “Bestialität und Humanität: Eine Krieg an der Grenze zwischen Recht und Moral”. Following a short presentation of Habermas’s point of view, in the introduction to her paper the author discusses the moral implications of, as he points out, “the surgical precision of the air-strikes, as well as the programmatic sparing of the civilian population”, which are, according to him, the characteristics of this aggression with “a highly legitimating effect”. She then focuses on the key and declaratively moral argument that served to justify the aggression - the protection of human rights of Kosmet Albanians and the prevention of the humanitarian catastrophe they had been allegedly exposed to. After analyzing this argument thoroughly, in several steps, the author concludes that the aggression was not, as Habermas claimed, a “war on the border between law and morality”, but that it was actually beyond the borders of both law and morality and was deeply situated into a domain of interest-driven armed acts of the US foreign policy.