Just under a year ago, on March 12th 1999, peace talks at Rambouillet, outside Paris, finally broke down. The negotiating teams never actually met, but Milosovic's refusal to allow NATO peacekeepers into Serbia proper, gave the green light to a war that was intended to last 48 hours. It lasted 78 days and the NATO victory, if such it can be called, is Pyrrhic at best: the multi-ethnic community that the West's intervention was intended to restore has disappeared, probably for good. Fault lines between Serbs and Albanian Kosovars have become gaping chasms, and the shudder of shock waves threatens not only the benighted inhabitants themselves, but the rest of Europe, contends Michael Ignatieff, whose Virtual War - Kosovo and beyond is published this week.
We meet at his London flat, a floor of a converted warehouse in the City, although I sense he regrets the invitation, a recent interview in a British broadsheet having focused on the colour of his sofas and his lack of familiarity with junk TV rather than the issues he raises in the book, issues he believes threaten the very core of democracy. What does she think, he fumes, that I jump into my trousers rather than put my legs in one by one like everybody else? And the great intellectual does a very funny, spontaneous mime.
In fairness, an academic CV which includes Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley and the LSE is hardly indicative of a one-leg-at-a-time, ordinary bloke - although the grim-reaper bone structure which screamed egghead when he first appeared on BBC2's Late Show in the 1980s has been softened by age.
Yet it is precisely Ignatieff's uncomfortable (for him) straddling of these worlds that gives his take on war, both in print and next month in a series of three TV documentaries (only the third of which is related to Kosovo), real weight.
His media-intellectual identity has given him access to, and a voice in, world affairs denied even to politicians and the military. But he addresses us as a man of the people. "I have no policy for prescriptions for politicians," he writes, "and no advice for generals. I am writing for citizens, so that when we are asked to go to war again, as we surely will be, we will know of what we speak and we will act on what we know."
Virtual War looks at the distancing of war from the people in whose name it is being waged, war that has become a spectator sport. Not one single NATO combatant was killed in the Kosovo bombing, and the terminology was of arcade games.
The war in Kosovo came about not through any democratic process, he says, but through pressure from media pundits just like him. "The weakness of the Something Must Be Done brigade is that they have access to the media, often have access to politicians, but they don't care that much about democracy. "We have replaced institutional democracy through our representatives with a kind of media-ocracy, in which key public issues are debated with Dimbleby or Jon Snow in the chair. And I think these are important parts of democracy but they shouldn't substitute for the institutional core of it - which is that a prime minister should go the House of Commons and say: `I want to send your constituents out to get shot at. Do you or do you not approve?' Democracy does not get more basic than that. "
It was a British Labour politician, Bob Marshall-Andrews, MP for Medway and an opponent of intervention, who pointed out to Ignatieff, live on Channel 4, that Kosovo had not been debated in the House of Commons. The war lasted 78 days rather than two largely, Ignatieff claims, because politicians both in the UK and the US knew they had no democratic consent.
"If you go to a parliament and say: `Listen guys, something extremely serious is going to happen. We are about to bomb a European city, we are about to take some moral risks with other people's lives. Let's understand what we're doing here.' "If you do that, that's one thing. But had the military gone in with a sledgehammer, hitting Belgrade and the electricity grid without that consent, the repercussions would have been disastrous. CNN and the BBC would be there and John Simpson would say, the incubators are down, the babies are dying. The Western public wakes up and says: `Shit, we didn't authorise this. We didn't approve this'."
He shrugs his shoulders. So the political masters made their call, he says. "But because they got it wrong we had to go 78 days."
The bombing of the grid was indeed what finally ended the war when NATO was just one week away from losing, believes Ignatieff. "They ran out of bombs, they ran out of aircrew, they ran out of planes. That's why it was much much more of a scramble than people realised. And if you're a human rights interventionist like me, it has a very very hard lesson, which is that if you get the military mix wrong in these interventions, it can be a catastrophe."
Ignatieff remains a firm supporter of NATO's intervention. The fact that ethnic cleansing has continued does not mean that going in was wrong. "The hard fact we're all struggling to deal with is that in the 10 years since the coming down of the wall, ethnic majority tyranny has been established in state after state after state that had been multi-ethnic. We have to face up to the fact that when democracy came to eastern Europe, it came in the form of ethnic majority rule and ethnic majority rule meant ethnic cleansing of minorities."
Eastern Europeans are quick to point out, however, that western European history is just as tainted. "Remember France and the Albigensians and Huguenots. Ethnic cleaning is everybody's dirty little secret." Ignatieff's concern with the Balkans is far from academic: his father was a Canadian diplomat in Belgrade. "Almost everybody who was in Yugoslavia in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s remembers with a real pang of sorrow the fact that this was a multiethnic state. That some of the cities that are now most stained with blood - Vukovar, Sarayevo, Mostar - were where ethnic intermarriage was at its highest level in the old Yugoslavia in the 1991 census, suggests to me that the outcome wasn't inevitable. Because we thought democracy and freedom were such good things, we just didn't understand what would happen when democracy and freedom hit that multi-ethnic tapestry."
The idea, he says, that you can have a western Europe that's stable and free when people are massacring each other just across the Adriatic is an illusion, and it's no use building walls.
`If you don't integrate the Balkans properly, if you don't find a way that these people can be prosperous and stay where they are, where they speak their own language in a climate they adore, they're going to get on the night boat to Bari in their hundreds and thousands." However tough you are on immigration, he says, it's almost impossible to stop people who are desperate and London and Dublin are only two hours away.
At the moment, he admits, it's anarchy. The West's job now is to keep the peace long enough for the Kosovar Albanians to create the necessary infrastructures to bring the KLA to democratic heel and prevent the Albanian virus from spreading.
"There isn't anyone in the West who wants to stay five minutes in that place. And they have to focus on that. Because we're their security guarantee. If we go, the Serbs are over that border in 24 hours. That's the stick. The carrot is in 15 or 20 years they all want to be in Europe. The way to get into Europe is very clear. You have to leave your poisons at the door. We have carrots, we have sticks, we must use them. No more Mr Nice Guy."
Virtual War - Kosovo and beyond by Michael Ignatieff is published by Chatto and Windus, price £12.99 in UK. His TV documentary series, Future War, starts on March 19th, on BBC 2 at 6 p.m.
