Commentary No. 9, Feb. 1, 1999
"The World and Yugoslavia"
During the years when Tito ruled Yugoslavia, it was a Communist state not too different from other Communist states in east/central Europe, except that it was "neutral" in the Cold War. Yugoslavia was indeed one of the founders and key figures in the worldwide "nonalignment" movement. To be sure, Yugoslavia had many internal problems. The one problem it did not seem to have was intergroup conflict. The Stalinist schema of constitutional group autonomy in a complicated, terraced pattern seemed to work. Indeed, it does not seem that, in the allocation of positions inside Yugoslavia, there was significant favoritism to any particular ethnonational group. In this respect, Yugoslavia was considered almost a model country.
When Tito died, the Yugoslav state began to unravel slowly, as was happening everywhere in Communist regimes. The Serbian state cancelled autonomy in Kosovo (Albanian area) and in Voivodina (Hungarian area). Then Slovenia sought to secede from Yugoslavia. When it succeeded, Croatia followed suit, but contested by the Serbian minority in Croatia. When Bosnia-Herzogovina also declared itself independent, a three-way war broke out, which finally ended in a shaky truce known as the Dayton agreement. Then, civil war erupted in Kosovo.
Throughout all of this, there has been a decade of horror stories - of rapes, tortures, murders, and "ethnic cleansing." Needless to say, all sides have pointed the finger at each other. In the view of most international observers, although blame for these horrors is unequal, there seems to be no side with truly clean hands. The question, however, is what to do about this. This is not a question so much for those who live there. Most persons in these countries think they know what to do - fight. The question, what to do, is a question the rest of the world has posed itself. There are no doubt persons outside the region who have commitments because of common ethnic heritage or solidarity. But there are many not thus directly involved who are simply concerned about their appropriate role.
There are two different languages the Western world has used about the conflicts in this zone. One language is geopolitical; and one language is that of human rights. Each is complicated. In geopolitical terms, the conflict concerns the "great powers" for two reasons. On the one hand, there is fear that the ongoing warfare will spread to areas not presently involved, such as other parts of the Balkans. The image is that of a forest fire which, if not contained, can grow and do serious damage to world order. Logically, it follows that the great powers should "interfere." But which great powers, and what kind of interference? The U.S., western Europe (collectively and singly), and Russia have all tried thus to "interfere," and thereby contain, if not resolve, the conflict.
There have been two basic problems here. As always, the great powers have conflicting interests in the region, and therefore tend to draw different conclusions about the kind of interference, preferring the kind that will enable their "friends" to emerge on top. They have thus not acted in harmony, to say the least. This situation has been made all the worse by the fact that all the great powers have been reluctant to use serious military power in the region. It is hard to "interfere" successfully, if one has one's hand tied behind one's back.
Hence, we have arrived at the unclear in-between situation we may observe: just enough interference to slow down some of the participants in the conflicts, but not enough to stop any of them from pursuing their conflicts violently. This kind of in-between situation always gives the benefit to the strongest, most decisive local forces, and simultaneously undermines the credibility of further great power interference (and not only in this region).
For many persons outside the region, however, the situation is not a question of geopolitics, but a question of human rights. Ethnic cleansing is deeply immoral, they say, and it is the duty of the world community to stop it, if necessary by force, and to bring to individual justice the leading perpetrators of ethnic cleansing. The people who argue this case do so quite loudly. They are seldom, however, in positions of state power, but the media allow them to broadcast their denunciations and their pleas. So they have become a real political factor in the internecine struggles.
Of course, the advocates of a human rights approach are quite right in one fundamental respect. Ethnic cleansing is indeed immoral, and the world should do something to stop it. The question is what? The advocates of a human rights approach are not naive. They do not think it is enough to denounce evil. They want action, and they know that, for action, they have to turn to the coercive machinery of states. Since however there exists no world government with a world police force, the only real coercive machinery available is the armies of the great powers, and the great powers have been giving priority to geopolitical considerations, which does not lead them at all to the same conclusions as are drawn by the advocates of human rights.
The great powers have espoused human rights rhetoric from time to time, as it suited them, but they have not been willing to do very much about it, as the human rights advocates know only too well. The crucial thing to see is that this tension between geopolitics and human rights concerns is viewed differently in the Western world and in the "three continents" - Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the Western world, it is seen as a conflict between the realists and the idealists (in the language of geopolitics) or between the cynics and those guided by moral values (in the language of the human rights advocates).
Persons in the three continents tend to have another view. While many of them are as opposed to "ethnic cleansing" as anyone in the Western world, they are a lot less sure that there is a virtue in great power interference in the name of human rights. What they remember is that the whole European imperialist thrust of the nineteenth century was clothed in the language of a "civilizing mission," the necessity to end the "barbarous" actions of local despots and their "cruel" customs (including slavery and cannibalism). The people of the three continents suspect that often behind the human rights rhetoric there lies a new imperialist invasion, if not in intention then in actual result. They are not sure that having U.S. or west European troops occupy Kosovo (even if they were ready to do so) would actually result in a situation that was morally or politically better than the current one. Nor are they sure that, once these troops came in, they would leave so readily.
What we can say is that there are at least four different stances vis-a-vis ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia (and by
analogy anywhere else in the world): that of the people in the region; that of the geopoliticians in the great powers; that of
the advocates of human rights concerns (primarily but not only Western); and that of politically alert persons in the three
continents. The four views are largely incompatible one with the other.
Immanuel Wallerstein
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
Email this Commentary to a colleague
______________________________________________
Go to List of Commentaries