Soundings a journal of politics and culture |
The editors of Soundings,like many of the left in
Britain, did not find it
easy to make a straightforward response, either sympathetic or hostile,
to the NATO
intervention in the Balkans War. Some of us thought that there
was a humanitarian case for armed intervention, comparable to that
which had justified the Vietnamese intervention against Pol Pot's Cambodian
regime, or Tanzania's against Idi Amin's Uganda, and which would
and should have justified intervention to halt the Rwandan genocide had
it takenplace.
It is the moral responsability, as Michael Walzer has argued, of
bystanders, whoever they are, to intervene to prevent atrocity where they
can. Once
the maas expulsions of the Kosovans, and the military
intervention against Serbia, were both in full process, it seemed to us
difficult
to argue that the preferred outcome was a victory for Milisovic, which is
what an anti-war position would at that time, though perhaps not at an
earlier stage before the bombing started, have amounted to.
But how how had this whole disaster come about? Was the undoubted
humanitarian crisis which was used to justify NATO's intervention its actual
cause, or is it mere pretext? Had NATO first decided to 'teachMilosovic
a lesson',
following the humiliation of the UN during the Bosnian crisis, and to impose
the dominance of NATO as the single global military force as its objectives?
Was it possible that the fate of the Kosovans at the hands of the Serbs
was not
merely a political bonus to NATO commanders, giving much-needed public,
justification for their war, but had been calculated as such, as the predicted
and
predictable response of Milosevic to the NATO bombing campaign?
It is difficult ot answer these questions with certitude. It seems likely,
however, that political misjudjement (Milosevic had given way quickly when
air power had been eventuallydeployed in Bosnia) and expediency (constraining
what kinds of military intervention were deemed politically acceptable)
played
as much part as informed strategic calculation in what took place. We can
say
now that NATO's armed intervention brought about the very catastrophe it
was intended to prevent (terror ann mass expulsions in Kosovo). One can
say
too that this consequence should have been anticipated, to some degree.
But
this is different from asserting that everything took place according to
a script
written beforehand in Washington and London. What is certain is that armed
violence is always unpredictable in its effects, and usually develops a
cumulatively destructive momentum of its own. The intervention in Kosovo
has so far solved few problems in this region, and at great human cost.
We
recoiled in particular at the idea of a supposedly humanitarian war in which
Western and in particular American casualties were weighed in value on a
scale
of one to a thousand or more of casualties among former Yugoslavs. It seemed
to us that the responsibility of politicians is to protectand spare all
human
lives, not merely the lives of their own political subject, and the contrary
of
this seemed to us to be approaching a kind of racism, which was all the
more
unacceptable wearing its'humanitarian' face. This is not to ignore the fact
that
in this war, unlike in the war against Iraq, avoiding unnecessary casualties
even
among the 'enemy' was in reality given an unusual priority. but if risks
have to
be run, to prevent atrocity, it cannot be right that virtually none of these
risks
are to the subjects of the intervening powers.
And what about the manifest double standards employed by NATO in this
as in virtually all of its military interventions?Why had injustices to
Kurds or
Palestinians been ignored for decades, and a blind eue turned to genocide
in
Rwanda, but here, on Western Europe's doorstep, synthetic moral outrage
and
a vast military machi were mobilised? Why was it only now that the problem
of Kosovo was recognised, when its dangerous potential had been clear during
the Bosnian crisis? We came to see that in the era of global communications
and human international rights, moral claims had become a significant factor,
but rarely the decisive one, in decision-making about political and military
action.
The Falklands war depended both on the claims to self-determination of the
British Falkland Islanders, and on Britain's continuing imperial
ambitions; Kuwait
was defended both because of its international entitlement as a sovereign
state,
>I>and because of its strategic importance as an oil state; the Kosovans
were
defended both because of the injuries done to them, and because
of Western
determination to defeat Serbian (and less directly. Russian) ambitions,
in the
Balkans region. Justifications of moral legitimacy seem to have become one
condition, but by no means a sufficient or determining one, of the West's
recent
military interventions.
It is something positive, perhaps, that the claims of 'hman rights' may
now
count at least for something more than they used to in international relations.
The pending extradition of General Pinochet is another straw in the wind
here.,br> But we would be gullible if we mistook our governments' rhetorical
posturing
on these questionsfor the full explanation of why they acted as they did.
The
crisis in East Timor, unfolding as this article is written, is revealing
these levels
represented at least some process of learning from the disasters of Bosnia
and
Rwanda, we observe taht after all nothing may have changed. It seems that
decades of complicity with the authoritarianrulers of Indonesia are not
going
to be set aside because of a democratic vote in a small country, least of
all to
preserve the reputation of the United Nations. In the light of these events,
the
UN appears to have been brushed aside in kosovo not merely because the
United States and British governments see its power as a rival to their
own,
and positevely desire its impotence.
What is really needed in this situation is to get beneath the surface of
events - to which, like everyone else, we had our sometimes confused
day-by-day responses - to try to find an understanding of what was
fundamentally at issue in the Balkan Crisis. Here there continues to be
a massive
failure of Western imagination and understanding in regard to the problems
created by the collapse of Communism in Russia and eastern Europe. The major
culpability of the West in this region does not lie in the specifics of
the Kosovan,
or of the preceding Bosnian crisis, but in its short-sighted and exploitative
response to the collapse of this rival political system in its entirety.
In this respect,>
the problems of the former Yugoslavia are a microcosm of the much larger
disaster
which has befallen the former Soviet Union, partly as a result of the misguided
and ideologically driven nature of Western interventions.
The underlying problem in Yugoslavia was plainly what was to happen
afetr the collapse of Communism. What possible pathways were available to
bring this former nation, or its component nations, from the partial version
of 'modernisation' which they had accomplished, with considerable success,
under Communist governments since 1945, into a post-Communist era? It
should have been possible to foresee thw dangers that would be posed, both
in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, by latent nationalism. these were,br>
especially acute in the Balkans, the permanent border-country of the
successive competing empires of the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, the Russians,
in their spoke. In this region, there were no stable equations between ethnic
and religious cultures and political jurisdictions. The 'normal' course
of
modrnisation, described by Ernest Gellner, in which a unified national culture
developed in many territories in the ninenteenth and twentieth centuries,
as a
container for industrialisation, had been pre-empted by the complex imperial
history of this region. The main task was always going to be to find a system
of political containment for the nationalist forces which were ptherwise
certain
to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the COmmunist system. It was
an
achievement of Communism that ethnic divisions were contained for so long,
in the former Yugoslavia and USSR, just as the Communist Party of South
Africa deserves credit for its contribution to the non-racial universalism
of
the African National Congress.
It is not as if this problem should have been so difficult for the Western
European or United States governments to understand, European integration
how to contain potential nationalist antagonism after the defeat of Nazi
Germany at the end of the Second World War; and the Franco-German alliance
and the European Union was the wise solution to this. It is worth remembering,,br>
however, that this solution had been discovered fifty years too late, following
Versailles Treaty; it took its catastrophic turn under the Naxis. It then
led to
And lo and behold, it is exactly this '1918, nation-first model' that the
west chose to espouse for its defeated eastern rival after 1989. Having
in 19445
decided in its own heartland to learn the lessons of 1918, it has opted
in the
former Eastern Europe to repeat its pro-nationalist errors of the inter-war
period.
In the former Soviet Union, Yeltsin's dissolution of the Soviet Union in
favour
of its component nationalities was welcomed as a fatal blow against the
still
suspiciously reform-Communist Gorbachev. the result of this, and of the
imposition of free market ideology on a system and political culture quite
unsuited to it, has been disastrous, culminating in economic chaos and in
the
rule over Russia bt thieves.
In the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia's and the Croatia's exit from the
Federation were encouraged and welcomed by their respective Western
protectors, Austria and Germany. Whilst ostensibly the war in Kosovo was
fought
to secure multi-ethnic coexistence, and the restoration of the former autonomy
of the province within the remains of federal Yugoslavia, it seems likely
that its
effect will be to reinforce ethnic particularism. The Kosovan Liberation
Army,
a factor in provoking Serbian oppression in the first instance, may well
prove to
be the ultimate inheritors of power in Kosovo as a result of the war. The
logic of
the nationalist politics encouraged, intentionally or otherwise, by the
West is
such that the KLA are now engaged in meting out the remaining Serbs the
same treatment as that which the Kosovan Albenians were subjected by
Serbian paramilitaries. It is not clear what will now obstruct the emergence
of a
Kosovan Albanian State, viable or otherwise, even though the Westdid not
and still does not support this. There now seems more to be said for the
idea of
a partition of Kosovo, guaranteed by Russia as well as the West, than there
did
at the outset or even during the war.
It is remarkable that Western politicians should have been sponsoring self-
determination east of their own borders, at a time when they had decided
that
supra-national forms of integration or containment were the necessary pathway
to full modernity within their own boundaries. They had become adept, in
Catalonia, Scotland, even perhaps Northern Ireland, in making use of the
larger
structures of containment and identification as ways of releasing intra-national
pressures, and allowing a necessary measure of autonomy and self-expression
to nationalist currents inside their own states. yet in the former Eastern
Europe
such remaining structures as there were have been utterly cast aside. The
selective inclusion of some favoured states in the charmed circle of the
European
Union and NATO (Hungary, the Czech Republic, poland) has only worsened
the plight of those left out. It seems that a continuing preoccupation with
the
ideological struggle against residues of Communism is What explains this
folly,
just as fears of the Bolshevik revolution played a large part in unhinging
the
West's political sense in the inter-war period.
Milosovic has thus only attempted to write his own part in a larger
play already scripted for him by the covertly pro-nationalist Western
response to the crisis of Yugoslavia. States use the resources available
to them. The principal military resource available to Milosovic was the
former
Yugoslav army, and his principal political resource has been ethnic absolutism.
Nationalism based on military power was hardly an option without a precedent
- it had been, afer all, the essence of Prussia's unification of Germany
in the
previous century. The Yugoslav tragedy is taht the failed 'partial modernisation'
of Communism was followed by utter anachronism, by a Serbian strategy of
military nationalism embarked on at the very moment when the nation-state
elsewhere is in terminal decline as the facilitator or container of modern
social
development. The West has been confused and myopic in its response to this
situation, on the one hand condoning the erosion of the remaining structures
of containment (the Yugoslav Federation), on the other vainly trying to
secure
continued 'multi-ethnic co-operation' (in Bosnia or Kosovo).,br>
The West has chosen, in its public response to Milosovic's adventures, to
deal largely in the moralistic terms of personal demonisation. It is a notable
fact of Western politics today that the binary structures of ideological
antagonism
which maintained its internal unity and purpose throughout the Cold War
have
been trasmuted into such personalised hatreds of individualised enemies,
wherever and whenever it encounters the limits of its power. But this
denunciatory rhetoric obscures far more than it reveals. The scale of death
and
injury inflicted by the economic catastrophe of the former Soviet Union,
following the West's triumph over it; or by NATO's continuing economic
sanctions on Iraq; or by the continuing failure of Western promises to bring
investments and prosperity to the new South Africa, or to the Palestinians,
provide little basis for Western moral self-righteousness. unfortunately,
the mass
sufferings of poverty are less visible, and less attributable to their causes,
than
the personalised misdeeds of individuals. The global media currency which
gives
a 'value' to humanitarian crises where individual leaders rather than less
visible
social processes responsible for ills and harms.
There have been the glimmerings of enlightenment in the proposals of some
European politicians 9initaially, Joschka Fischer, the German Green Foreign
Minister) for the economic reconstruction of the Balkans and its eventual
admission to the European Union. This at last recognises the need for a
post-
national structure, on a scale which can nurture economic and social
developments, which can impose rules of reasonable democratic practice,
and
which can provide guarantees for minorities which preclude the necessity
for
strategies of dsperate self-defence and self-assertion. The European Union
is,
unlike NATO, an institution based on formulated principles of democratic
practice, and respect for human rights (and of course the market economy);
and its extension and development into this region are thus to be cautiously
welcomed. There is no decent future for independent states derived from
the
former Yugoslavia without their inclusion in some broader containing federation.
The pity is that this recognition by the European Union has come only now,
after two terrible wars and after hundreds of thousands of people have been
expelled from their homes. But this is the only hopeful development that
has
emerged from this crisis. It is vital that something substantial should
now come out of it.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |