EUROPEAN DECLINE
By Peter Gowan in CounterPunch, a Correspondent for New Left Review
In the midst of the bombing campaign it is impossible for us to grasp the
full significance of the NATO war against Yugoslavia. This is particularly
true for those of us living in NATOland since the war, for us, is purely
synthetic experience, television images as part of our daily, normal
routine and images which are themselves increasingly routinised and thus
normal. Indeed for us the whole war is part of our everyday routine:
yesterday it was Iraq, some newsflashes about Sudan and somebody with an
exotic name in Afghanistan, today Kosovo, tomorrow Taiwan -- all far away
places which we naturally care deeply about but about which we know little
and need to know less.
But one of the significant consequences of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia
is almost certainly that it marks the end of the European project as a
political project for Western and Central Europe. That political project
could only have succeeded if the member states of the European Union had
been prepared to stick to their words and reconstruct the European
political order as a norm-based rather than a power-politics based system,
becoming democratic and embracing the Eastern part of the continent. This
war seems certain to bring that effort to an end. A gathering of
intellectuals at the Marc-Bloc Foundation in Paris on 29th May, entitled
'After the Emotion the Political Reflection' began to tackle this question
seriously. Claude Lanzmann, the producer of Shoah, the documentary account
of the Holocaust spoke. He said that the NATO attack on Yugoslavia was a
new Dreyfus Affair. It is, but this time with a whole European nation, the
Serbs, cast in the role of Dreyfus. A handful of French intellectuals
sensed quickly that the whole case against Dreyfus was constructed out of
lies. Millions upon millions of people across Europe now see the Serb
nation for what it is: a victim of the power plays of Western powers
which have constructed this war on a foundation of lies, shattering the
entire normative scaffolding upon which the new Europe was supposed to be
built. Powerful States can and so wage wars rooted in fictions and
falsehoods, and get away with it. But attempts to build transnational,
post-nation state structures like the European Union, the Council of
Europe or the OSCE on a power politics that displays contempt for the
supposedly founding principles of such bodies are unlikely to be
sustainable.
The continuation of the European project as a form of political
development for Europe will be possible only if one of two conditions are
met: either the NATO Dreyfus affair in the Western Balkans can be quickly
forgotten in a rapid move to prosperity, peace and hope in a reconstructed
Western Balkans; or the political and intellectual resources of Europe are
mobilised to decisively repudiate the entire aggressive war against Serbia
and against a tolerable future for all the peoples in that region. Neither
of these two conditions seems a remote possibility. As a result, the
European project is likely to become a Single Market project, harmonised
with the requirements of American business plus a currency under American
tutelage. And the tendency will be for the main West European powers to be
constantly involved in power politics manoeuvres on an American led
agenda, manoeuvres focused largely on mounting chaos in the Eastern and
South Eastern part of the continent.
The NATO attack on Yugoslavia was the result of, American diplomacy, just
as the war itself is essentially an American war legitimized by the fact
that it
is run as a NATO war. For many months during 1998, the West
European powers did try to resist the American drive for a NATO war. Their
resistance was partly based upon the fact that their strategic interests
differed from those of the Americans but the form of their resistance was
that of attempting to resolve the conflict in Yugoslavia by mediation and
by peaceful means. But in late January, 1999 the British and the French
governments broke ranks and lined up behind the Clinton Administration for
war.
Thus to understand the current war we have to understand the character of
American aims. There are broadly speaking two approaches to this question.
One approach says that the Clinton Administration was reacting to events
in the Western Balkans in deciding to go for war. Its aims were governed
by the plight of the Kosova Albanians. This line of argument then leads
to the conclusion that there was an extraordinary mismatch between US aims
and US methods, a mismatch which the European pundits supporting the war
explain by reference to supposed American stupidity. We will survey the
diplomatic background and the launch of the war to explore the validity of
this theory which we will call the Theory of American Stupidity. In doing
so we will show how the approaches of the US and the West Europeans to the
Kosova issue in the run-up to war were not complementary: they were
directly contradictory. The US approach undermined European efforts at
mediation and peaceful resolution of the conflict. The West European
approaches constantly undermined the US drive for war, until the
Franco-British turn in January 1999. Those who support the war need to
address this conflict of approaches in order to provide themselves with a
consistent position. They can say that the European approach was complicate
with the Serbian government; or they can say that the US approach was
responsible for much of the terrible sufferings of the Kosova Albanians
both before the NATO attack and especially after it had begun. But they
should not evade these issues. But there is a second way of understanding
US aims in launching this war. This says that the Clinton Administration's
drive for war was dictated by US strategic political aims in Europe and in
the international arena and thus that a war against Yugoslavia over Kosova
was simply an instrument in US geopolitical strategy: the Kosova
Albanians' plight was a pretext and the Kosova Albanian political groups
were simply pawns. This view is, of course, anathema to the media pundits
in NATOland, but it is overwhelmingly popular in the foreign offices and
state executives of the states of Europe and of the entire world. On this
view, the war demonstrates one central lesson: the inability of the main
West European powers to sustain a collective political will in the face of
unremitting US pressure. Thus, despite the very strong political and
economic interests of the main West European capitalist states in
maintaining a collective stance in the face of US manoeuvres over European
affairs, their rivalries and vanities can always ultimately be exploited
by the US to divide them. In essence this gives us a theory of the current
war in terms of the West European states' stupidities. We will examine
that theory, which we will call the Theory of European Stupidity.
Of course, the word 'stupidity' is a polite one, it is a neutral, problem-
solving word, without significant ethical connotations. It is necessary,
perhaps to add that the word is used here in an ironical sense. The moral
and political consequences of this war for Europe are terrible to
contemplate. The hopes of a better future for the continent 10 years ago
are over. Never glad confident morning in Europe again, at least not for
decades. The next phase of European history will be marked by the efforts
of the United States to push further its drive for global hegemony in
Europe and elsewhere. As soon as it has finished its bombing campaign in
the Western Balkans it will switch its pitiless gaze East towards the
coming truly awesome confrontation with China. Back and forth between
Asia and Europe the US will move, attempting to beat the world into shape
for the next millennium. The really strong arguments for the NATO war are
actually the general arguments for US global hegemony. These take two
forms. First, those who actually believe that US hegemony will produce a
new world of global citizens rights, global prosperity and global justice.
Secondly, the pragmatists argue that we cannot buck the trend, we must
bandwagon with the hegemon in order to subvert it later from within its
secure security zone. That subversion will take the form of transforming
hegemonic dominance into a cosmopolitan set of institutions of global
governance and justice. We will survey those arguments at the end of this
article.
PART 1: THE THEORY OF AMERICAN STUPIDITY
The notion of American stupidity is really a British idea. It has been a
double-sided notion throughout the post-war period in Britain: on one side
it is a variety of Anti-Americanism much beloved in the British upper
classes (especially those on the Right); on the other side it is a message
of hope -- perhaps we can be cleverer than the Americans and manipulate
them to our advantage. Thus have the British upper classes reconciled
themselves to being constantly managed -- often for the benefit of the
world's populations, as in the case of Suez -- by successive American
administrations in an uninterrupted progress of British decline. The
notion of American Stupidity is now becoming a European idea during the
course of the present war. It has become the absolutely central conceptual
mechanism for overcoming the contradictions in the efforts to justify the
NATO air war against Yugoslavia.
These contradictions derive from one single source: the attempt to explain
the origins of the NATO attack as lying in a reactive effort to respond to
the plight of the Kosovar Albanians. The contradictions disappear if we
explain the attack as an attempt involve the European NATO members in a
war to destroy the existing Serbian state. But that latter explanation
raises a great many new questions about this war which NATO governments
are seeking, so far very successfully, to evade.
The distinction between seeking to help the Kosovar Albanians and seeking
to destroy the existing Serbian state may seem a fine one. Common sense
may suggest that the two goals are simply two sides of a single coin:
supporting one side in a local conflict against the other side. But the
NATO attack on Yugoslavia has involved much more than support for one side
against another. It has entailed a decision by NATO to overthrow the
normative cornerstones of the post-war international order: the principle
of state sovereignty and the outlawing of aggression against a state
without UN Security Council mandate. To take that step, the NATO powers
could not simply claim that they were opposed to the domestic policies of
the Yugoslav state. They had to claim that they were taking drastic action
to save the Kosovo Albanians from a genocidal catastrophe. More, they had
to claim that nothing other than military aggression against Serbia could
prevent the catastrophe because all other methods had been tried and had
failed.
From this stance come all the contradictions in the NATO position. For
during the 14 months up to the launch of the NATO war, the West European
and Russian governments were in continuous conflict with the USA over
Kosovo, the USA systematically tried to sabotage a peaceful settlement of
the conflict in Yugoslavia and the way in which the Clinton Administration
launched the war invited a genocidal slaughter of the Kosovo Albanians.
The European variant says that for 14 months the 'International Community'
tried every possible means of resolving the conflict peacefully. All
efforts were thwarted by the Yugoslav authorities. So there was no choice
but to turn to US air power. The US variant claims that for 14 months the
US was struggling to gain agreement to a war against Yugoslavia, but the
Europeans and Russians were blocking war. But finally, the US managed to
push the Russians out of the picture (along with the UN) and bounce the
West Europeans into a just war that they had been resisting.
These two variants may not appear incompatible, but a glance at that 14
month history shows that they were, because the failure of the
European-Russian efforts to gain a negotiated solution was the direct
result of the activities of the US State Department. Only for a brief
moment at the very start of the current phase of the Kosovo crisis did the
USA appear to be on the same line as the Europeans, in viewing the KLA as
a terrorist group. To search for the real origins of the war we need to
survey this history.
1. The US both encouraged the Serbian government to launch the
counter-insurgency and wanted war against the Serbian government because
of its counter-insurgency. From early March 1998, Albright wanted war
against Serbia on the grounds that the Serbian government was genocidal.
On March 7th, 1998, just after and in response to the Serbian security
force operation in the Benitsar region of Kosovo, she declared: "We are
not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what
they can no longer get away with doing in Bosnia." Two days later she
reserved the right for the US to take unilateral action against the
Serbian government, saying, 'We know what we need to know to believe we
are seeing ethnic cleansing all over again.' This remained the US line
right the way through from that first Serbian counter-insurgency drive
against the KLA in Benitsar: Albright demanded war against Serbia. But
the signal for the Serbian government to launch its counter-insurgency in
Benistar also, intriguingly, came from Albright's own State Department.
This signal was given by the United States special envoy to the region,
Ambassador Gelbard. The BBC correspondent in Belgrade reported that
Gelbard flew into Belgrade to brand the KLA as a terrorist group.
' "I know a terrorist when I see one and these men are terrorists," he
said...At the time, the KLA was believed to number just a several hundred
armed men. Mr. Gelbard's words were interpreted in the Yugoslav capital,
Belgrade, as a green light for a security forces operation against the KLA
and the special police conducted two raids in the Benitsar region in
March.'
So the Clinton administration encouraged the Serbian counter- insurgency
in order to liberate the Kosovo Albanians from it through a NATO war. The
Europeans on the other hand, wanted the Serbian counter-offensive against
the KLA to result in an internationally brokered a compromise peace
granting Kosovo Autonomy within Serbia.
2. The ''international community' tried for 14 months to broker a peaceful
solution, but the Clinton Administration did not. The UN (in its
resolution 1199), the West European powers and the Russians sought, during
1998, to bring about a cease fire and a negotiated solution in Kosovo,
granting autonomy to the Albanians within Serbia. The Serbian government,
from March 1998 declared its support for this, and there was support for
this approach, as an interim solution, from the Rugova shadow government
in Pristina. Only two major actors opposed this: Madeleine Albright and
the KLA. Albright and the whole Clinton administration gave massive
political support to the KLA, undermining the line of the other members of
the Contact Group and the line of UN resolution 1199.
Support for the KLA did not involve support for its aims: the Clinton
administration has always opposed the aims of both the KLA and the Rugova
leadership, both of whom demand independence for Kosovo. The Clinton
administration did, however, support the KLA's means -- guerrilla warfare
against the Serbian state -- by repeatedly and vigorously making demands
upon the Serbian government which strengthened and encouraged the KLA war.
This US support for the KLA became unequivocal by June 1998, by which time
NATO military planning for an attack on Yugoslavia was completed. In that
month, White House spokesperson Mike McCurry asserted that Serbia 'must
immediately withdraw security units involved in civilian repression,
without linkage to...the 'stopping of terrorist activity.' In parallel,
Pentagon spokesperson Kenneth Bacon said: 'We don't think that there
should be any linkage between an immediate withdrawal of forces by the
Yugoslavs on the one hand, and stopping terrorist activities, on the
other. There ought to be complete withdrawal of military forces so that
negotiations can begin.' In other words, Washington was insisting that
before any cease-fire or negotiations on a Kosovo peace settlement, the
Serbian authorities must withdraw all their forces for Kosovo, handing
over the territory to the KLA's military forces despite the fact that the
urban Albanian population of Kosovo was far more pro-Rugova than the KLA.
As Gary Dempsey explains, the US was demanding that the Serbian government
'effectively hand over one of its territories to an insurgency
movement.....This...led many ethnic Albanians to further conclude that the
Clinton administration-- despite its official statements to the contrary
-- backed their goal of independence....Although US policy was officially
opposed to independence for Kosovo, Washington would not allow Belgrade to
forcibly resist it.'
Air War supporters thus have a choice of interpretations on these matters:
either the US was right to back the KLA and sharpen the internal conflict
in preparation for a NATO attack, in which case the Europeans are the
Russians were presumably covert supporters of the dictatorial, genocidal
Milosevic regime. Alternatively, they can argue that the
European-Russians-UN were right to seek an internal cease- fire and
negotiated solution and the US was wrong to try to sabotage this. But Air
War supporters cannot embrace both variants.
3. Sabotaging the October 13th Cease-Fire:
On 13th October, Albright's rival in the Clinton administration, Richard
Holbrooke, negotiated a cease-fire agreement with Yugoslav President
Milosevic. The cease-fire would be monitored in Kosovo by OSCE observers.
Milosevic agreed on the basis that the US administration would ensure that
the KLA did observe the Cease-fire.
But the Clinton administration sabotaged the whole operation. The OSCE
monitors did not enter Kosovo for a whole month after the agreement.
During that time, the KLA did not respect the cease-fire, continued its
operations and extended its reach in Kosovo. During the delay, the Clinton
administration took control of the OSCE, placed William Walker, a key
organiser of the Contra operation in Nicaragua and the blood-bath in El
Salvador, in charge of the OSCE monitoring force. Some 2,000 trained
monitors waiting in Bosnia to be sent into Kosovo were blocked by the US,
who put US ex-military personnel in as the monitoring force and from
mid-November they surveyed every bridge, cross-roads, official building,
security force billet and barracks -- every item that could be relevant to
a future NATO-KLA joint offensive.
At the same time the European-Russian-UN line continued to be to seek an
internal solution and blamed the KLA for the failure to achieve it. Thus,
for example, at their General Affairs Council on 8th December, 1998, Cook
and the other foreign ministers of the EU assessed the situation in
Kosovo. The report of the meeting in the Agence Europe Bulletin of the
following day stated: 'At the close of its debate on the situation in the
Western Balkans, the General Affairs Council mainly expressed concern for
the recent 'intensification of military action' in Kosovo, noting that
'increased activity by the KLA has prompted an increased presence of
Serbian security forces in the region.' ' Thus, the EU saw the KLA as the
driving force undermining the possibility of a cease fire and a compromise
solution. They were simply on a different line from Albright. And they
continued to be right through January.
4. Turning the Rambouillet Negotiations into an Ultimatum, while
overthrowing the Rugova Leadership:
The two variants continue into the Rambouillet process. The idea of
bringing the two sides together into face to face negotiations under
international auspices came from the French government. The Clinton
administration had been against such an idea, favouring a straight move
towards bombing. But on this occasion, the differences were overcome in
favour of the French getting their way on the form while the US would get
its way on the substance. This was a turning point. The French and British
switched over to the US position at a meeting of the contact group in
London on 29th January, 1999, exactly a week before the opening on 6th
February of the Rambouillet 'negotiations'. From that moment on the NATO
attack on Yugoslavia was a virtual certainty. We can see why when we
appreciate that the Rambouillet 'negotiations' were not negotiations at
all: they were an ultimatum to the Serbian government which was drafted in
such a way as to ensure that it would be rejected.
The Serbian government wanted face to face negotiations at Rambouillet
with the Kosovo representatives. This the Americans absolutely refused,
presumably with British and French support since they were formally
supposed to be in charge of the process. It is also fairly clear that
there were some on the Kosovo side who were interested in discussing with
the Serbian authorities. Why else would be Clinton administration have
decided to overthrow the elected Rugova government of Kosovo and replace
it with a KLA-led government, there and then, at Rambouillet?
The Serbian side was then required to agree to the 'Agreement' without
changing it, or face NATO attack on Yugoslavia. If the Serbian government
had signed the 'Agreement' the agreement would have had no status in
international law, since treaties signed under threat of aggression have
no force in international law. But the Serbian authorities, probably
wisely, did not have any confidence in their ability to rely upon
international law, so they refused to sign.
Most people assume that the Serbian government refused to sign, because
the 'Agreement' would lead to the independence of Kosovo. The 'Agreement'
did involve a de facto NATO Protectorate (not, by the way, a democratic
entity. The Chief of the Implementation Force could dictate to the Kosovo
government on any aspect of policy he considered relevant to NATO (i.e.
US) concerns.)
But the real sticking point for the Serbian government seems to have been
the threat that the 'Agreement' posed to the rest of Yugoslavia. The NATO
compliance force would have complete control of Kosovo deploying there
whatever types of forces it wished: ' NATO will establish and deploy a
force (hereinafter KFOR) which may be composed of ground, air, and
maritime units from NATO and non- NATO nations, operating under the
authority and subject to the direction and the political control of the
North Atlantic Council (NAC) through the NATO chain of command. The
Parties agree to facilitate the deployment and operations of this force.'
Thus, if the US wished to use Kosovo as a base for the invasion and
occupation of the rest of Yugoslavia it could do so.
This was threat enough. But the so-called 'Appendix B' added to the
document at Rambouillet itself and kept secret until it was leaked and
eventually published in the French press, insisted that NATO forces could
move at will across the whole of Yugoslavia. Thus: 'NATO personnel shall
enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment,
free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY
including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include,
but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, manoeuvre, billet, and
utilisation of any areas or facilities as required for support, training,
and operations.' NATO could also alter the infrastructure of Yugoslavia at
will: 'NATO may.... have need to make improvements or modifications to
certain infrastructures in the FRY, such as roads, bridges, tunnels,
buildings, and utility systems.' It could thus move around investigating
all Yugoslav infrastructures with a view to destroying them (in an attack)
later. And the Yugoslav authorities 'shall provide, free of cost, such
public facilities as NATO shall require.' The Yugoslav authorities 'shall,
upon simple request, grant all telecommunications services, including
broadcast services, needed for the Operation, as determined by NATO. This
shall include the right to utilise such means and services as required to
assure full ability to communicate....free of cost.' 'NATO is granted the
use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties,
dues, tolls, or charges occasioned by mere use.' The Yugoslav authorities
must not merely tolerate this: they must facilitate it:' The authorities
in the FRY shall facilitate, on a priority basis and with all appropriate
means, all movement of personnel, vehicles, vessels, aircraft, equipment,
or supplies, through or in the airspace, ports, airports, or roads used.
No charges may be assessed against NATO for air navigation, landing, or
takeoff of aircraft, whether government-owned or chartered. Similarly, no
duties, dues, tolls or charges may be assessed against NATO ships, whether
government-owned or chartered, for the mere entry and exit of ports.'
And in all such activities in the whole of Yugoslavia, NATO shall be
completely above the law: 'NATO shall be immune from all legal process,
whether civil, administrative, or criminal.' And again: 'NATO personnel,
under all circumstances and at all times, shall be immune from the
Parties' jurisdiction in respect of any civil, administrative, criminal,
or disciplinary offences which may be committed by them in the FRY. ' And
again: ' NATO and NATO personnel shall be immune from claims of any sort
which arise out of activities in pursuance of the operation'.
This threat to move from Kosovo to the overthrow of the entire Serbian and
Yugoslav regime was underlined by the fact that NATO claimed the right to
dictate the fundamentals of socio-economic policy within Kosovo, with the
Yugoslav and Kosovo governments completely under the diktat of US
policies. Thus:' The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with
free market principles.' And: 'There shall be no impediments to the free
movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to and from Kosovo.' And
again: 'Federal and other authorities shall within their respective powers
and responsibilities ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services,
and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources. There must
also be complete compliance with the IMF and World Bank. Thus:
'International assistance, with the exception of humanitarian aid, will be
subject to full compliance with....conditionalities defined in advance by
the donors and the absorptive capacity of Kosovo.' The Yugoslav government
must also agree to handing over economic assets to foreign interests.
Thus: 'If expressly required by an international donor or lender,
international contracts for reconstruction projects shall be concluded by
the authorities of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.'
These statements made it perfectly clear that NATO was out to destroy the
existing character of the Serbian economy. The ultimatum also demonstrated
that NATO was determined to wage war against the Serbian media. It
demanded 'Free media, effectively accessible to registered political
parties and candidates, and available to voters throughout Kosovo.' And it
said that 'The IM shall have its own broadcast frequencies for radio and
television programming in Kosovo. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
shall provide all necessary facilities.....'
Rambouillet was thus an ultimatum for a war against Serbia and the terms
of the ultimatum demonstrated that if the Serbian government accepted
Rambouillet they would very likely face a crushing attack in the future
from NATO forces on Yugoslav soil.
5. The Launch of the War and the Need for Stupidity
With the 'failure' of Rambouillet, the Clinton Administration took open
charge of the preparations for war. And it is at this point that the
analysis of those who support the NATO Air War faces absolutely
irreconcilable contradictions. For the way in which the war was launched
is, on the face of it, absolutely inexplicable.
The bombing campaign was launched in 24th March. But President Clinton
announced on the 19th of March that the bombing campaign would be launched
and nothing now could block it. The US administration thus gave the
Serbian government 5 days in which they could do as their pleased in
Kosovo. And when the bombing started, it was organised so that the Serbian
authorities could continue to have a free hand in Kosovo for more than a
week. The air war's first phase was directed largely at targets outside
the Kosovo theatre itself for a full week.
And this military side of the attack was combined with an absolutely
contradictory set of explanations for NATO's aggression. On one side, the
attack was justified as an attempt to prevent the genocidal threat to the
Kosovar Albanians from the Milosevic regime. But on the other side, the
attack was simultaneously justified by the claim that the Milosevic regime
had no such genocidal intentions and indeed wanted the bombing campaign in
order to use it to sell Rambouillet to the Serbian people.
These contradictions cannot be explained away by haste, improvisation and
confusion on the part of the Clinton administration. We know that the US
National Security Council and the State Department had been planning this
war in detail for 14 months before it started. We know also from the
Washington Post that the experts in the US administration spent those 14
months running over, day after day, all the variants of the course of such
a war, all the scenarios of possible Yugoslav government responses to the
air attack. We know that they foresaw the possibilities of mass refugee
exits from Kosovo. The Pentagon foresaw a long air war: the notion that
Milosevic wanted the bombing attack was political spin put about by
General Wesley Clark: it was nonsense. So why did they plan the start of
the war in this particular way?
There is only one serious explanation: the Clinton Administration was
giving the Serbian authorities the opportunity to provide the NATO attack
with an ex post facto legitimation. The US was hoping that the five days
before the launch of the bombing and the first week of the war would give
various forces in Serbia the opportunity for atrocities that could then be
used to legitimate the air war.
This was a rational calculation on the part of the US planners. They knew
that the main political opponents in Serbia of Milosevic's Socialist Party
-- the Radical Party of Seselj and various Serbian fascist groups --
supported the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, though the Socialist Party did
not. They knew also that Yugoslav military forces would pour into
positions in Kosovo as the OSCE personnel left, clearing strategic
villages, driving forward against KLA-US supporters. They could predict
also that there would be a refugee flow across the borders into Macedonia
and Albania.
And the US planners were proved right. Extremist Serbian groups did, it
seems, go on the rampage in Pristina for three days after the start of the
war. Refugees did start to flood across the borders. And the resulting
news pictures did indeed swing European public opinion behind the war. As
for the Serbian government organising a genocidal mass slaughter, this did
not happen: the Clinton administration organised the launch of the war to
invited the Serbian authorities to launch a genocide, but the Milosevic
government declined the invitation.
It is simply impossible to argue that the US military campaign was
designed to stop the brutalities against the Kosovo Albanians. It would be
far easier to demonstrate that this thoroughly planned and prepared war
was designed to increase the chances of such brutalities being escalated
to qualitatively higher levels. The way that the war was launched was
designed to increase the sufferings of the Kosovar Albanians in order to
justify an open-ended US bombing campaign against the Serbian state. The
technique worked. But this success cannot be acknowledged. Instead it must
be hidden by the notion of Clinton administration stupidity.
And to this stupidity the European pundits of NATO can add many
other supposed American stupidities. The stupidity of trying to save the
Kosovar Albanians with an air war instead of a ground war. The
stupidity of killing so many Albanian and Serbian civilians. The
stupidity of not swiftly admitting such killings when they occur.
And then there is the most fascinating stupidity of all: the bombing of
the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. This particular stupidity must have been
a defining moment for the European powers, a moment for hard, focused
thinking, for one very simple reason: stupid or not, the governments of
Western Europe know that it was not a mistake. They know that the US
military attaches in Belgrade had dined more than once at the Chinese
Embassy compound in the city before the war started. They know very well
how prominent the compound is and how professional the US intelligence
operation for targeting is. They know that the Embassy was hit on a
special mission by a plane from the United States. And they noted
Clinton's casual response: no press conference to make a formal public
apology. Just an aside about an unfortunate mistake in a speech about
something else. They know too that China is by far the most important
issue in the entire current US foreign policy agenda.
And the West European states have learned more about the stupidity of the
bombing of the Chinese Embassy since it has occurred: it resulted in the
collapse of weeks of German-Russian diplomacy which had gone into
producing the G8 declaration agreed just before the Embassy was bombed.
That G8 declaration threatened to undermine the US's 5 conditions for
ending the war and threatened to rebuild the central authority of the UN
over NATO: the Embassy bombing put a stop to all that. More, it completely
sabotaged Schroeder's planned business visit to China: West European
efforts to steal contracts with China by taking a softer line than the
Clinton administration were brought to a standstill and the West Europeans
are being brigaded into line behind Washington's policy in a new
confrontation with China.
All this, for the West Europeans is surely the height of stupidity. But
pennies have been dropping in the Chancelleries of Western Europe. They
are realising that even if there has been plenty of stupidity in the NATO
war against Yugoslavia, the stupidity may not lie in Washington. It may
lie in quite a different quarter, namely in the state executives of
Western Europe itself. To see why, we need an entirely different take on
the origins of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia.
PART 2: THE THEORY OF EUROPEAN STUPIDITY
The alternative take on the origins of the NATO war against Yugoslavia
starts from the fact that the war did not derive from big power reactions
to local events in the Balkans at all. Instead, this theory starts from
the premise that the Clinton administration was seeking a war against
Yugoslavia as a means for achieving political goals outside the Balkans
altogether. The conflict between the Serbian state and the Kosovar
Albanians was to be exploited as a means to achieve US strategic goals
outside the Balkans on the international plane.
This conception turns the cognitive map used by the proponents of American
stupidity on its head. Thus, for example, instead of thinking that the US
was ready to overthrow the norms of the international order for the sake
of the Kosovar Albanians, we assume exactly the opposite: the US was
wanting to overthrow the principles of state sovereignty and the authority
of the UN Security Council and used the Kosovo crisis as an instrument for
doing so. Instead of imagining that the US was ready to shut Russia out of
European politics for the sake of the Kosovar Albanians, we assume that
the Clinton administration used the NATO attack on Yugoslavia precisely as
an instrument for consolidating Russia's exclusion. Instead of assuming
that the US was ready to abandon its policy of engagement with China for
the sake of the Kosovo Albanians, we assume that the Clinton
administration used the war against Yugoslavia to inaugurate a new phase
of its policy towards China. And last but not least, instead of assuming
that the US firmly subordinated the West European states to its military
and political leadership in order create a new dawn in the Western
Balkans, it used a number of ingenious devices -- especially the
dilettantish vanity of messieurs Chirac and Jospin -- to drag the West
European states into a Balkan war that would consolidate US hegemony over
them, the EU and the Euro's development.
This is where the European stupidity enters the theory. The one strategic
interest of the main West European states (Germany and France) in the
Balkans lies in maintaining stable and strong enough states in the region
to keep their impoverished populations firmly in place. West European
military intervention in the Balkans has essentially been concerned with
preventing mass migrations Westwards when states collapse. Anglo-French
military involvement in Yugoslavia through UNPROFOR was essentially about
that: 'humanitarian aid' in the war zone to ensure that the civilian
population did not leave the war theatre. Italian military intervention in
Albania in 1997 was about the same thing: stanching the flood of humanity
out of Albania Westwards, by rebuilding an Albanian state while blocking
emigration and asylum rights. Anglo-French efforts in Macedonia and
Albania in the current war are similarly about caging the Kosovar
Albanians within the Western Balkans. Yet now the American air force has,
with European support, turned the Western Balkans into twenty years
(minimum) of chaos from which all the energetic younger generations of all
ethnic groups will rightly wish to flee West for decades to come. This is
the first European stupidity.
The second strategic interest of the West European states (especially
Germany) in Eastern Europe is to maintain stable, friendly governments in
Russia and Ukraine. That too can be ruled out as a result of this war as
far as Russia is concerned; Ukraine will have to choose between Russia and
the USA (the EU is not a serious alternative. And both Russia and Ukraine
could spiral out of control with disastrous consequences for Central
Europe Western Europe. This is the second European stupidity.
The third strategic interest of the main West European states has been to
combine an effort to bandwagon with US power with preserving an effective
check on US efforts to impose its will on their foreign policies, whether
in Europe or other parts of the world. That too seems finished now. The
basic West European check on US power was the French veto at the UN
Security Council, restraining the US with its 2 votes (including that of
the UK). Now that Chirac has chosen to discredit the UN Security Council,
he has undermined his own ability to speak for Europe at the UNSC and to
be a useful partner for other states seeking to gain European help to
restrain the US. That is a third stupidity.
A fourth West European priority was to be able to claim that the EU is an
independent, West European political entity with a dominant say at least
over European affairs. Yet the current war demonstrates that this is a
piece of pretentious bluff: the EU has played absolutely no role whatever
in the launching or the management of this war. It will play no role
whatever in the ending of the war. It is simply a subordinate policy
instrument in the hands of a transatlantic organisation, the North
Atlantic Council, handling the economic statecraft side of NATO's policy
implementation. And within the North Atlantic Council the United States
rules: the way the war ends will shape the future of Europe for at least a
decade, yet that decision will be taken in the White House: the West
European states (not to speak of the EU institutions) are political
voyeurs with their noses pressed against the windows of the Oval Office
trying to read the lips of the people in there deciding Europe's fate.
This is a fourth stupidity.
To explain the background to these stupidities we must examine US strategy
since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.
US GLOBAL STRATEGY IN THE 1990s
In some conditions the cognitive framework -- local actions, big power
reactions -- is useful. Such conditions exist when the superpower is
satisfied and secure that the structures which it has established to
ensure its dominance are safely in place. It is sitting astride the oceans
comfortably and it reacts now and again to little local blow-outs and
break downs.
Some might regard that as being the situation of the United States after
the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. If we look at the power of the United
States in the 1990s in resource terms, it has had no rival or even
potential group of rivals in the military field, it dominates the
international political economy, there is no power on earth remotely able
for the foreseeable future to challenge the United States for world
leadership.
Yet curiously enough, the United States has been far from satisfied with
its situation in the 1990s. It has felt itself to be facing a number of
important challenges in the two key traditional regions of the world where
it must exercise leadership -- Europe and the Pacific Rim -- and the
challenges there are linked to another big challenge: the battle to ensure
the preponderant weight of US capitalism in the so-called 'emerging
markets'. Leadership of Europe and of the Pacific in turn ensure that the
United States can channel the activities of these states to ensure that US
interests predominate in designing regimes to open up and dominate the
'emerging markets'.
These problems were all connected to another, deeper issue: concerns about
the basic strength and dynamism of the American economy and American
capitalism. When the Clinton administration came into office it was
determined to rejuvenate the dynamism of American capitalism through an
activist foreign drive to build a new global set of political economy
regimes accented to the strengths and interests of American capitalist
expansion. Getting leverage over the Europeans and Japanese to achieve
that was key.
To understand US policy in the 1990s, we must appreciate the double- sided
situation that it found itself in: on one side, its old way of dominating
its capitalist 'allies' had been shattered by the Soviet Bloc collapse,
giving lots of scope for these 'allies' to threaten important US interests
in their particular regional spheres. But on the other side, the US had
gigantic resources, especially in the military-political field and if it
could develop an effective political strategy it could convert these
military power resources into a global imperial project of historically
unprecedented scope and solidity. We must grasp both the challenges and
the great opportunities after the Soviet Bloc collapse to understand the
strategy and tactics of the Bush and Clinton administrations.
(a) The Post-Cold War Problems
The challenge to the US in Europe created by the collapse of the Soviet
Bloc has too often been ignored. That collapse not only made the USA the
sole global super-power. It also simultaneously destroyed the political
structures through which the USA had exercised its direct leadership over
West European capitalism. And it simultaneously opened the whole of
Eastern Europe for business with the West, a business and political
expansion opportunity which the West European states, especially Germany,
would spontaneously tend to control. What if West European capitalist
states threw off US leadership, forged their own collective
military-political identity, joined their capitals with Russian resources
and Russian nuclear capacity? Where would that leave the USA in Western
Eurasia outside of Turkey?
The central political pillar of US leadership over Western Europe during
the Cold War was NATO. The US-Soviet confrontation positioned Western
Europe on the front line in the event of a US-Soviet war. This situation
enables the USA to gain political leadership over Western Europe by
supplying the military services -- the strategic nuclear arsenal -- to
protect Western Europe. In return for these military services, the West
European states agreed to the US politically brigading them under US
leadership. The US could exercise control over their foreign policy
apparatuses, integrating the bulk of their military forces under US
command, imposing discipline of the dealings of West European capitalism
with the East and so on. And the US could also exercise this political
leadership for economic purposes, especially to assure the free entry of
US capital into Europe, to ensure that Europe worked with the US over the
management of the global economy etc. So NATO was a key military-
political structure. The hierarchy was: US military services give
political leadership which gives leadership on the big economic issues,
those to do with the direction of accumulation strategies.
But the Soviet collapse led to the redundancy of the US strategic arsenal
which led to the redundancy of NATO, the collapse of the political
leadership structure for the US in Europe and the undermining of the US's
ability to impose its core political and economic goals for Europe and for
the
world on the West Europeans. This is one of the key things that has made
the United States a paradoxically dissatisfied power in the 1990s. It has
had to combat all kinds of European schemes for building political
structures that deny the US hegemonic leadership in Europe. And in
combating such schemes it has had to develop a new European programme and
strategy for rebuilding US European leadership. In short, the USA has been
an activist and pro- active power in Europe during the 1990s, not a
satisfied and reactive power. The 1990s have been a period of political
manoeuvres amongst the Atlantic capitalist powers as the key players have
sought to advance their often competitive schemes for reorganising the
political structures of the continent.
And in these manoeuvres, the territory and peoples of the former
Yugoslavia have played a very special role. The states bearing competing
programmes for a new European political order have all sought to
demonstrate the value of their political project for Europe by showing how
it can handle an important European problem: the long Yugoslav crises.
Yugoslavia has been the anvil on which the competing great powers have
sought to forge the instruments for their new European orders. No power
has been more active in these endeavours than the United States.
And this means that a cognitive framework for understanding the Balkan
wars cannot take the form of local actions, great power reactions. We need
an entirely different framework: great power European strategies, and the
tactical uses of Yugoslavia's crisis for advancing them.
(b)The New Opportunities.
Yet the United States was not just a power dissatisfied with the
international arrangements it confronted at the end of the Cold War. It
was also aware that it had a gigantic relative lead over all other powers
in the world in terms of the resources for entirely reshaping arrangements
on the planet. It had not only unrivalled military capacity but command of
new military technologies that could enable it to strike safely and fairly
accurately at will anywhere on the planet. It could, for example, out of a
clear blue sky, destroy the great dam on the Yangtse river and drown 100
million Chinese at the heart of the Chinese economy without the Chinese
government being able to stop it: that kind of power. It could take on
China and Russia together and win. It could militarily seal off Japan and
Western Europe from their sources of vital inputs for their economies and
from the export markets vital for their economic stability.
The United States also have supreme command over the international
political economy through the dominance of the Dollar-Wall Street Regime
over international monetary and financial affairs and through US control
over the key multilateral organisations in this field, especially the IMF
and the World Bank.
With resources like these, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc opened up the
possibility of a new global Empire of a new type. An empire made up of the
patchwork of the states of the entire planet. The legal sovereignty of all
these states would be preserved but the political significance of that
legal sovereignty would be turned on its head. It would mean that the
state concerned would bear entire juridical and political responsibility
for all the problems on its territory but would lose effective control
over the central actual economic and political processes flowing in and
out of its territories. The empire would be centred in Washington with
Western Europe and Japan as brigaded client powers and would extend across
the rest of the world, beating against the borders of an enfeebled Russia
and a potentially beleaguered China.
And it would be an Empire in which the capitalist classes of every state
within it would be guaranteed security against any social challenge,
through the protection of the new Behemoth, provided only that they
respected the will and authority of the Behemoth on all questions which it
considered important. It the US played its new strategy for empire
building effectively, it could thus earn the support and even adulation of
all the capitalist classes of the world.
Thus the decade from 1989 to 1999 has been marked above all by one central
process: the drive by the US to get from (a) to (b): from political
structures left over from the Cold War which disadvantaged and even
threatened the US in the new situation, to entirely new global political
and economic structures which would produce a historically new, global
political order: New Democrats, New Labour, New NATO, new state system,
new world economy, new world order. This is the context in which we can
understand the various Yugoslav wars, including the current one.
(
geocities.com/capitolhill)