ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) campaign against Serbia in 1999. On the one hand, it is clear that NATO committed many errors of judgement, and made many mistakes in carrying out its plans. On the other hand, NATO's recourse to the threat and eventual use of military violence was understandable. Critics of NATO, during the conflict, occasionally claimed that it was wrong to identify the assault on Kosovar Albanians as 'genocide', or even suggested that this charge somehow 'demeaned' the most notorious twentieth-century case of attempted genocide, namely the Jewish Holocaust. It is easy to suppose, all crimes against humanity, and indeed all crimes that are properly so called, would be acknowledged globally. The authority of such a Global State cannot rest on any Lockean principle of consent - that its citizens are bound to obey it or else leave.
