I am sending the following piece as an indication of how the grand
bourgeoisie is thinking about recent changes in the international
political climate. Like most bourgeois thinking it contains both
progressive elements and non progressive elements. The end of
nationalism (ethnicism, tribalism, etc.), I think is a progressive
thing. The lack of democratic institutions on the international scale is
however regressive. As the democratic governments lose sovereignty and
power, the ability of people to provide a check on the actions of those
in charge is lessened. The progressive political position is, I think,
to demand democratic accountability. Just how international democratic
institutions would emerge and operate, I am less sure.
A new kind of war
By R. C. Longworth
>From NATO's pointof view, Slobodan Milosevic's attempt to drive
ethnic Albanians from Kosovo was a dangerous
anachronism in a globalizing world.
Right on cue, just as the millennial midnight was about to strike, NATO
entered a new legal and strategic world. The battle for Kosovo was both
the result of global pressures that have been building for a decade
now,
and a precedent for a future that is only dimly perceived.
Like most explorers in a new world, the NATO nations are making this
one up as they go along.
The issue is sovereignty--what does it mean and who has it? Is it
absolute? If not, when can it be violated, and by whom? Who decides?
Czech President Vaclav Havel, talking about the NATO bombing of
Serbia in a speech to the Canadian parliament, said that "blind love
for
one's own country . . . has necessarily become a dangerous anachronism,
a source of conflict, and, in extreme cases, of immense human
suffering."
We live, Havel said, in a new world "in which all of us must begin to
bear
responsibility for everything that occurs."
"In such a world," he said, "the idol of state sovereignty must
inevitably
dissolve. With this transformation, the idea of noninterference--the
notion
that it is none of our business what happens in another country and
whether human rights are violated in that country--should also vanish
down the trapdoor of history."
State sovereignty, enshrined at the Peace of Westphalia more than 350
years ago, became absolute in this century. We recognized foreign
governments when they controlled their own territories, and we granted
them the right to do anything within their own borders as long as they
did
not infringe the borders of their neighbors. Violations of frontiers
were a
cause of war; violations within frontiers were not.
Given the holocausts, pogroms, cultural revolutions, and gulags of the
twentieth century, this doctrine of absolute sovereignty left a lot to
be
desired. But it was what we had, the basis of the international system
and
a useful tool. The Soviet Union rejected any Western criticism of its
regime as "an impermissible interference in the internal affairs of a
sovereign country." Mostly, we went along with this, because the
alternative could upset a nuclear balance that trumped all other
issues,
including human rights.
The effects of globalization
That era ended 10 years ago, and in the past decade the concept of
sovereignty has changed, but the change has never been dramatized as
starkly as last spring. The Balkan war was truly the last
twentieth-century
war.
On one side was Serbia, fighting for territory, frontiers, and
sovereignty in
a globalizing world where such concepts just weren't that important any
more. The Serb cause was powered by the memories of 600-year-old
defeats, of blood grievances against neighbors, of a conviction that
ancestral lands were too important to be shared with tribes speaking a
different language or professing a different religion.
On the other side was NATO, a multinational alliance of 19 nations that
had agreed to share, to a greater or lesser degree, their defenses,
which is
one of the key attributes of national sovereignty. NATO said it fought
for
human rights, or to excise an infection from the European body, or to
protect its own credibility, or out of simple revulsion at the sight of
Europeans being jammed into railway cars 55 years after that sort of
thing
was supposed to have ended forever.
What it was not fighting for was land, or conquest, or oil, or empire.
That
last empire, the Soviet one, is dead, and no one is building another.
In a
globalizing world, brains and communications are important, land is
not.
The globalization of the world, in fact, is the key to what's going on
in the
Balkans. The war, in a way, was an atavism in a world of global markets
and global cooperation, with money and jobs and ideas flying across
frontiers as though they didn't exist. Of the 19 NATO nations, 11 are
consciously submerging their sovereignty--even their currencies--into a
new, borderless economic and political bloc, the European Union.
Even more important is the fact that all the Balkan countries except
Serbia
long to join the EU. This is astonishing, given the extreme nationalism
for
which the Balkans are notorious. But all the other Balkan
nations--Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia,
probably Montenegro if and when it breaks free of Serbia--have either
applied for EU membership or say they will.
This desire is having amazing and positive consequences. For the first
time
in their history, many Balkan nations are behaving in a most UN-Balkan
way. Romania has agreed to stop persecuting its Hungarian minority.
Macedonia and Greece have agreed to disagree on their dispute over
Greece's challenge to Macedonia's name. Bulgaria and Macedonia have
settled their argument over whether the Macedonian language is a
separate language or is only a Bulgarian dialect. An Albanian political
party is part of the governing coalition in Macedonia, as is a Turkish
party
in Bulgaria.
To much of the world, these concessions to sweet reason may seem
marginal. In the Balkans, they are seminal. The Bulgarian-Macedonian
language dispute, for instance, held up the signing of treaties between
the
two neighbors, because they could not agree which languages should be
used. The solution: an agreement earlier this year to write the
treaties in the
languages of the two countries, which amounts to a Bulgarian
recognition
of Macedonian as a separate tongue. It's not that Bulgarians really
believe
that Macedonian is separate from Bulgarian. They don't. But they have
agreed that the dispute--which has enormous psychological meaning for
people in this area--will not stand in the way of progress.
The Balkan carrot
Bulgaria, Macedonia, and the other Balkan nations are willing to take
these steps--to put their Balkan past behind them, in effect--because
they
so desperately crave NATO and EU membership and know the only way
to get it is to convince Brussels that they are modern nations. It is
the same
lure that persuaded other ex-communist nations like Poland, Hungary,
and
the Czech Republic to break with their own pasts and adopt both
democracy and market economies. The reward for the Poles, Hungarians,
and Czechs has been acceptance into the Western family of nations. Now
the Balkans want in, too, and they know what they have to do. NATO
membership could be near for many of these Balkan nations although,
given the state of their economies, EU membership is probably a
generation away. But the promise of membership and progress toward
that goal will be a powerful incentive.
Sali Berisha, the former president of Albania, said "the EU is a model
for
us. It asks us to give up some of our sovereignty, but it works. It
means
integration and cooperation."
"The Balkans today are not about borders but about what kinds of states
are going to flourish in the region and about the chances of the region
to
be part of the new Europe," said Ivan Krustev, director of the Center
for
Liberal Studies in Bulgaria.
But the war was precisely about borders. Was Kosovo part of Serbia or
not? Could Serbs and ethnic Albanians live within the same borders?
Would Kosovo be independent, with its own borders, or only
autonomous, within Serbian borders? Would new borders be drawn,
partitioning it?
"It is precisely the fears of exclusion from Europe that command the
behavior of governments and publics," Krustev concluded.
The unpunishable crime
Slobodan Milosevic has committed many crimes. But he will not be tried
in The Hague for one of the worst, the hurling of his explosive
nationalism
into this attempt by the other Balkan countries to turn themselves into
mature European nations. Serbia stands, both geographically and
politically, astride the routes connecting the Balkans to Brussels. No
Balkan economy could thrive as long as Milosevic prosecuted his wars,
scattered hundreds of thousands of refugees into countries that could
barely support their own people, and continued to fertilize the ethnic
rivalries that fueled the conflict.
The fear and hate spread by Milosevic has deeply affected a new
generation of Kosovar Albanians, who are ready to retaliate and fight.
"I
never remember when I could go out and feel secure," said 19-year-old
Memli Krasniqi, a Kosovar refugee now in Tetovo, Macedonia. Locked
in the idleness of exile during the war, he and his friends spent their
days in
a pizzeria on the main street of this western Macedonian city, drinking
strong coffee, smoking, and talking about revenge.
"We tried to live a normal life," said Krasniqi, "but it was a fake
life. If I
saw a policeman, I'd cross over so I wouldn't meet him. He'd stop me,
beat me, take my money. This is not just the last year, it's the last
10
years."
A state of mind
If and when Milosevic goes, the Serbian people themselves must come to
terms with their own past and decide if they, too, want to be a normal
European nation. Currently, Serbia has a foot in both worlds, the old
one
driven by nationalism and ethnic rivalries, and the modern European one
of which so many Balkan people want to be part.
The Balkans, as a state of mind and geography, embrace Greece, the
European portion of Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and the shards
of Yugoslavia--not only Serbia and Montenegro, but the new
ex-Yugoslav nations of Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, and the various
pieces of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The region's history mixes long periods of oppression--500 years under
the Ottomans, 50 years under the Soviets--with spasms of tribal wars,
terrorism, refugee flows, shifting borders, mighty empires, misery,
foreign
intervention, all stored up in conflicting memories to be used as the
excuse
for the next battle.
Can we blame all of Serbia's present problems, however, on Milosevic?
The Serbian people were given a choice 10 years ago between the Balkan
past and a European future. Three times, by voting for a Milosevic
government, they chose the past. Nothing good will happen in the
Balkans
until the Serbs accept the enormity of their nation's crimes and, like
the
Germans after World War II, opt for the new world, born from the end of
the Cold War and the rise of the global economy.
Crumbling sovereignty
Much has been said about how the global economy saps national
sovereignty by taking control of currencies and economies from national
governments and giving it to global markets and traders. The financial
crises in Asia, Brazil, and Russia portrayed this loss of economic
sovereignty.
Less discussed is the way that political sovereignty--the right and
ability of
governments to run their own countries their own way, without outside
interference--also is crumbling.
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed and died, the global economy
was
already nibbling at economic sovereignty. Erosion of political
sovereignty
swiftly followed.
The United Nations, led by Russia and the United States, began
authorizing interventions in other countries to settle civil wars or
cure
ethnic outrages. Sometimes, as in El Salvador or Cambodia, the
countries
agreed. Sometimes, as in Somalia, there was no government to agree.
In 1991, after the Gulf War, the victorious powers, using U.N.
authority,
set aside no-fly zones in Iraq where planes belonging to that nation's
government could not fly. This was the international community ignoring
national sovereignty for humanitarian reasons: in this case, the
persecution
of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein.
Other interventions followed, in places like Rwanda and Bosnia.
International monitors began passing judgment on whether Third World
elections met democratic standards. A former dictator, Gen. Augusto
Pinochet, was jailed in Britain on the basis of charges filed in Spain
for
acts committed in his own country, Chile; British courts have ruled he
must
be extradited to Spain. An international court, the very one that has
now
indicted Milosevic and his aides, was set up in The Hague to judge
accused Yugoslav war criminals.
The U.N. contradiction
Clearly, the old idea of absolute sovereignty was giving way to a new
world where concern for human rights limited sovereignty and made it
conditional on the good opinion of the world community. Kofi Annan,
now the U.N. secretary general, told me in 1993 that "sovereignty cannot
be absolute. . . . There are very few issues that one can really say
are
internal. . . . The suffering of [oppressed minorities] is so much more
important than sovereignty."
These earlier incursions into sovereignty took place under U.N.
authority.
But the U.N. itself is based on "the sovereign equality of all
peace-loving
states." Its charter says that members "shall refrain . . . from the
threat or
use of force against the territorial integrity or political
independence of any
state."
But the charter also pledges members "to take joint and separate
actions"
to uphold "universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and
fundamental freedoms for all."
So what if the only way to protect human rights and freedoms is to use
force against the territory of another nation?
That was the Kosovo rub. In this turn-of-the-millennium era, when
human
rights may trump sovereignty, it may only be possible to uphold the
U.N.
Charter by breaking it.
This is what happened in Iraq, with Security Council approval. But
Russia
and China threatened to veto any repeat of that precedent, especially
in
Kosovo. It was the Western community--represented by NATO--not the
international community, that decided that Serbia had forfeited the
right to
sovereignty by its actions within its own borders against some of its
own
citizens, the Kosovar Albanians. Thus has the right of intervention
devolved down from the world community to the Western alliance.
In the past, nations went to war to defend their "vital national
interests." In
this case, NATO went to war not because of the national interests of any
of its 19 members but to defend the civilization of the West.
Philip Stephens, writing in the Financial Times of London, said that
"this
war has marked out with awkward clarity the irresistible tension
between
two distinct forms of international law. The first, and most familiar,
of these
is that of the United Nations Charter designed to preserve the
territorial
integrity of sovereign states. The second, born at Nuremberg and
developed subsequently in international conventions against genocide
and
torture, hold that there are some crimes which transcend the
inviolability of
national states."
The Nuremberg standard, established by the Nazi war crimes trials in
1946, lay dormant through the Cold War. Now it rules international
affairs.
Humanitarian precedents
This is a new world. The Greek newspaper, Kathimerini, wrote that
"today's policy is a legitimizing precedent for the future." In the
future, if
some NATO allies like Greece refuse to go along with a U.S.-led
humanitarian intervention, would the United States and a few allies
have
the right to act? Or the United States alone? And, if so, would this
right
also belong to, say, China?
Greece belongs to NATO, but Kathimerini, like most Greeks,
sapproved of this NATO intervention because it has its own border
problems--a dispute with Turkey over ownership of 200 Aegean
islands--and worried that any NATO-sponsored border changes in
Kosovo would give Turkey an excuse to move in. But its fears of a
precedent were legitimate. In truth, no one yet understands this new
world
and where it is going.
In Kosovo, Serbia and Greece speak for the twentieth century, which
has
been the heyday of the nation-state. NATO speaks for the twenty-first
century, which will be global, for better or for worse, and will pay
less
attention to borders, sovereignty, and who owns the Aegean islands.
Havel, in his speech in Canada, also saw an "important precedent for
the
future" in the NATO intervention. But, unlike Kathimerini, he found the
philosophical and humanitarian justification overwhelming:
"It has been clearly said that it is simply not permissible to murder
people,
to drive them from their homes, to torture them, and to confiscate
their
property. What has been demonstrated here is the fact that human rights
are indivisible and that, if injustice is done to one, it is done to
all."
R. C. Longworth, a senior writer for the Chicago Tribune, wrote about
the Balkans for many years while a European-based correspondent
Rod Hay
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The History of Economic Thought Archives
http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html
Batoche Books
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