What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

About

What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Reflections on Kosovo, in the Wake of Independence

The Albanian rump state in the Serbian secessionist province of Kosovo, in reality nothing more than a satrapy of the European Union, on Sunday declared unilateral independence via a declaration likely composed by apparatchiks at our own State Department. The news scarcely came as a surprise to me, inasmuch as Western policy has not only been fixed, but has tended to exhibit a peculiar inertia; even policies obviously deleterious to the medium and long-term interests of the West, policies worse even than crimes - mistakes, in the words of Srdja Trifkovic - will be persisted in, perhaps precisely because of their very perversity. Such is the cause of independence for the Albanians of Kosovo, a territory which is kept from the roster of failed states solely by the presence of NATO forces and American and EU diplomatic functionaries, who provide the modicum of stability that the Kosovo Liberation Army, a band of brigands and terrorists, could never provide. The sordid reality of Kosovo is that of a mafia state ridden through with jihadists, flesh merchants, gun smugglers, drug runners, and irredentists nostalgic for the halcyon days of the Ottoman Empire, when Albanian and Bosnian Muslims were the local jackboots trampling the necks of Balkan Christians - all right under the noses of NATO and the EU. In point of fact, given that the ostensible rationale for the illegal intervention in 1999 was the prevention of ethnic cleansing, and given that Western security forces simply looked the other way as their wards largely cleansed the province of its Serbian population, a longstanding ambition of the local Albanians, one might be forgiven for speculating that these seemingly negative aspects of the situation are features, and not bugs, for America and the EU.

However, let us take a few steps back from the exigencies of the situation, which, with the massive street demonstrations in Serbia against the declaration and the Western endorsement thereof, has now escalated to an attack on the American embassy in Belgrade.

My interest in the region, and the geopolitical rivalries pursued therein, dates to the Autumn of 1994, which I spent as an undergraduate at Messiah College, in Grantham, Pennsylvania. During those first few days of orientation, my roommates and I chanced to meet a fascinating young woman with an Eastern European accent, who turned out to be Serbian. How a Serbian Orthodox girl came to attend Messiah College is a bit of a mystery to me, but she was there, all the same. I did not have the opportunity to speak with her at any time during the remainder of the semester, though one of my roommates did; hence, towards the end of finals week, when she stopped by our block of dorms to say her goodbyes, I was somewhat surprised to hear that she, like I, was planning to transfer out of Messiah. Her reason was that she could no longer endure the abuses heaped upon her by fellow students, who considered her Orthodox faith sub-Christian, and her people nothing more than a race of savage animals; it was easily discerned that this otherwise indomitable personality had been profoundly affected by fellow students, who merely parroted the tendentious reporting of the American media at the time, according to which the Serbian people were uniquely at fault in the renewed Balkan civil wars, savage ethno-religious nationalists mercilessly victimizing helpless Bosnians, Croats, and others. The complexities and subtleties of the situation eluded the media, as they did the students, who added a little verbal colour to their discussions. There was indeed an informal campaign of demonization, and, in retrospect, when reporting accords so perfectly with American strategic ambitions, well, one is given pause. The episode was hardly unprecedented in American history, as witness the demonizations of German-Americans in WWI, among other shameful eruptions of crude, nationalist prejudice.

Understand: this young woman who, like so many from that part of the world, had endured much, and was quite steely, was in tears as she related this to us. A small thing, perhaps; but I have never forgotten it. When reporting is as tendentious as reporting on the Balkans was at the time - and still is - we are often meant to have hatreds stoked and directed upon certain objects, which are usually far away and therefore abstract to us. This, after all, is what nationalism, in Lukacs' sense of the term, does, and it is immensely useful for unifying a fractious people around common external enemies and hate-figures. Except when they are not so far from us, and are made tangible. Then, the hatred can become all too personal.

That said, the current debacle has many origins, and is worthy of extended, discursive treatment, which I assume will be given it in due time. Kosovo is emblematic of the West's desire to curry favour with the Islamic world, its self-loathing effort to placate the implacable, to demonstrate by means of favour in one place that resented policies elsewhere cannot be so bad after all, and that Muslim opinion should reconsider openness to the West. We are supposedly destined, after all, to dwell in an integrated world, and so ways must be found of propitiating the Muslims.

Kosovo is also emblematic of the postmodern, post-national tendencies of modern Western political formations and ideologies, a sacrament of the negation of traditional identities and loyalties - at least for post-Christian, Western peoples. As such, it is also an enactment, a fore-presentation, of the coming dramas of European politics generally, as John Zmirak notes over at Taki's Top Drawer, with reference to the original NATO war on behalf of Albanian separatism:


The Europeans were enacting a little drama in their heads, acting out a mystery play intended to teach a lesson to their descendants: The lesson was “You will never act like this. You will not resist. When the Moslems come to power, you will go quietly and cooperate.” The French, the English, the Germans who endorsed America’s attack had admitted that the lights of their societies would soon go out, and they were quietly setting the timer.

The drama of Serbia and Kosovo is a mystery play intended to instruct the Europeans of the future: you are to hate that you are, that you are everything that you are, and, indeed, that you are not the Other, who is entitled by everything that you are and have been to rule over you. And when the Other comes for you, you are to go quietly.

In that piece, Zmirak references the differential birthrates of Albanians and Serbs, arguing, essentially, that demography settled the territorial dispute decades ago, such that it was all over but for the waiting. There is much to be said for this, though it is also worth observing that the Twentieth Century history of the region was rife with overt political attempts to hasten the process, to disfavour the Serbs and induce them to depart the province; the political logic of Yugoslavia, in brief, was to keep the (untenable) unitary state together by keeping the Serbs down. Demography, in other words, may be significant, but it is not everything.

Demography, however, does disclose broader cultural tendencies which bear upon the respective futures of conflicting peoples. Children require sacrifice on the part of parents; rearing them is not merely a matter of keeping faith with one's ancestors, or of hope for the future, but also - or, rather, these are aspects of one and the same thing - an ascetical act in the broadest sense. Asceticism, self-sacrifice, the sublimation of desires, affects, drives, is the prerequisite of civilization, and is ultimately inseparable from a proper appreciation of that great congress of the living, the dead, and the yet-to-be. That those who are either our adversaries, or merely forces of primal disorder, grasp this more profoundly than we do, and live it out, says something about us - about the inheritors of what was once Christendom - that is less than flattering. Damning, actually.

Kosovo, however, is more than a symbol of Western self-betrayal, self-loathing, and civilizational exhaustion, though it is all of these things. Kosovo also has something to do with the geopolitical struggle between America and the European Union, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other. These issues have been touched upon previously, and the recent declaration of independence does not retire, but rather intensifies, all of these factors. Consider the following, from James Poulos' defense of Kosovo independence as a sort of geopolitical "why not?", an exception to international law that will not precipitate further exceptions:



Sitting midway on Europe’s youth/porn/whore/slave Garter Belt, running from Tallinn to Bratislava to Zagreb and then doglegging back through Kosovo and Macedonia to disappear somewhere in a crack house at the mouth of the Danube and then reappear in Dubai, Kosovo is ideally situated as a main hub in the pipeline that feeds Europe’s foul longings. The biggest obstacle to Europeanizing Kosovo is of course the Kosovars themselves, for whom there is little point in finally working free of Serbia only to rejoin it on purportedly equal terms as a Euro-Federal Sub-Administrative Unit. So for some time they will work, and work well, as a conduit to everything the EU is designed to frown at and categorize and task force and ultimately sort down to the syringe but never eradicate and hardly dent.

Meaning finally that Kosovo will help Europe turn a profit — and that the ‘law gradient’ between Serbia, which will soon be overrun and ruled by Western banks, Western credit, and Western capital, and Kosovo, which will remain a wild-west petri dish located just kilometers away, will function as one of the world’s preeminent studies in postmodern geopolitics.



The European Union and the United States have been endeavouring to housebreak, to domesticate, Serbia, breaking her of her atavistic attachments to national history, identity, and sovereignty; indeed, the carrot of EU accession has been offered as an enticement to Serbia to acquiesce in the amputation of Kosovo, and it was assumed that the Serbian president Tadic would offer formal denunciations of independence for the province, while eventually resigning himself, and through himself, the nation itself, to the 'inevitable', after which would follow the glorious age of European integration: a normal nation, prosperous and materialistic, its past a theme-park for holiday-makers, but nothing living and vital - a dessicated husk, in other words, lavishly adorned in decay, like the remainder of Europe. And the symbols of that integration, as always, would be the primitive accumulation of native commons by foreign multinationals, the usual panoply of Western-government-backed development loans, with the interest payments the tribute demanded by the postmodern form of empire (postmodern politics is not solely about post-nationalism, but also concerns the transnational structures, politico-economic, which transcend the discarded narratives of the nation-state), and the inevitable strings that such finance capitalism brings.

Which brings us to Charlie Szrom, writing in the Weekly Standard:



Yet pretenses of defending international law or analysis pointing to traditional ties hide the real reason for Russia's position: Serbia lets
Russia project power and accrue profit in Southeastern Europe. Russian-Serbian trade has spiked, and Russian corporations have begun snatching up Serbian assets at bargain-basement prices. Vladimir Putin has even acknowledged this, calling it "natural that a resurgent Russia is returning [to Serbia]."

Trade between the two topped $2.6 billion in 2007, a 22 percent increase over 2006 and a 56 percent increase from 2005. Much of this exchange has been in energy imports from Russia, the country with which Serbia has its largest trade deficit.

When Serbia opened up the bidding for the assets of its national oil conglomeration, Naftna Industrija Srbije, Belgrade's favoritism led to enormous Russian profits. A number of companies--Hungary's MOL, Poland's PKN Orlen, Russia's Lukoil, and Romania's Rompetrol--made offers for the group late last year.

Despite a market valuation estimated at between 1 and 2 billion euros ($1.5-3 billion) by most analysts, Russia's Gazprom purchased a 51 percent stake in NIS for just 400 million euros ($589 million) in late January. Gazprom enjoys close ties with the Russian administration: Putin's presumptive heir to the presidency, Dmitry Medvedev, is chairman of the firm's board of directors.

In December, when Russia made an initial bid similar to the final purchase price, Serbia's economic minister, Mladjan Dinkić, said, "This offer is humiliating . . . the property alone is worth 800 million euros ($1.17 billion) according to conservative estimates, excluding business or market share." Analysts inside and outside Serbia believe the prime minister overruled Dinkić and pushed the deal through anyway to reward Russia for its support on Kosovo.(Snip)

Most importantly, the NIS deal came bundled with a plan for Russia to construct the intermediate leg of its 550-mile South Stream pipeline project through Serbia. Carrying nearly 2.6 trillion gallons of natural gas a year to Europe from the Black Sea through Bulgaria, South Stream would force Serbia to rely on Russia for fuel supplies.

The pipeline would also cement Russia's control over the European market. The EU and the United States, hoping to blunt the Russian monopoly over the European energy market, plan to build a pipeline, known as the Nabucco project, to bring Caspian fuel from Azerbaijan through Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary.

South Stream would hobble such aspirations and cut out U.S. allies like Turkey and Romania. Its northern sister, the Nord Stream project, would bring fuel under the Baltic Sea directly to Germany, allowing Russia to cut off supplies to Central European states without interrupting supplies to their more economically and politically powerful counterparts in the West. Together, these projects would give Russia even greater control over the European energy market.



It may be recalled that foreign investment in Serbia's NIS was one of the issues mentioned in an earlier post on the betrayal of the magic of Western finance capitalism. The question that should be posed is simply that of why Serbia, in need of investment for the modernization of this enterprise, would consider turning to the very geopolitical formations that have throttled her at every turn since the early Nineties? Why wouldn't Serbia turn to Russia, and on favourable terms? Moreover, why wouldn't Russia, after the calamitous subordination to the West of the Nineties, wish to gain some degree of strategic leverage over the West through the construction of certain pipeline routes, the stymieing of competing routes, and, to put the matter gently, the use of energy as a tool of geopolitics? What must be appreciated is that these designs on the part of Russia are actually more defensive in nature than offensive, despite the ways in which they will be perceived in the West. According to Szrom,


Without Serbian cooperation, Russia would be forced to rely on more pro-Western states such as Romania. And without Serbia, Russia might not be able to head off Nabucco, which represents the greatest Western threat to Russia's energy strategy.



Resisting that energy strategy is important, according to Szrom, because "A Europe dominated economically and politically by Russia cannot stand up to Kremlin sponsorship of autocrats in Eastern Europe and Central Asia or Russian foot-dragging on international sanctions against an Iranian arms program." In other words, it is imperative, according to the foreign-policy establishment of the West, to resist this Russian strategy, not so much because such dependency can be destabilizing, but because, given such dependency upon Russian energy, the Western programme of regime-changes throughout Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Near East cannot be seen through. It is not the fact of dependency per se that bothers Western strategists, but what they will be prevented from doing: furthering the illusions of the end of history, the hegemonic fantasy of an integrated, global, democratic capitalist order. In other words, they seek, not to avoid dependency -indeed, they court it in other respects - but to pursue hegemony, to make the satrapy-status of Kosovo a template.

To this end, Szrom continues, the EU should


... join the United States in forming a unified policy on Russian energy that would accelerate the development of the Nabucco pipeline and liberalize trade with Russian energy companies. Prohibiting Gazprom from investing in European energy distribution networks until Russia opens up its own domestic network to foreign investment, as a September European Commission proposal urged, would be a good step in this direction.

The West should resist Russia, that is to argue, in order to pursue hegemony; and the strategy of resistance entails efforts to prise open the debate the Russians have recently closed: that of the status of the Roaring Nineties. It is a brilliant strategem, equitable on paper and pixels, but completely asymmetrical in practice; Russia will be permitted to invest in European energy distribution, on the condition that Russia permits a resumption, on the part of the West, of the economic practices of the Nineties. Russia cannot permit such investment, since the inevitable terms of the contracts would involve revenues disappearing into the West, depriving the Russian government of its (for now, at least) secure financial basis, leaving Russia open once more to the manipulations and ultimatums of the past. And Szrom undoubtedly knows this, because that is the point.

This is worthy of denunciation, not because we ought to admire the Putinist regime in its totality, but because hegemonism is unpatriotic, a deformation of the native love of place into a will-to-dominate, the subordination of the rational part of the national character to the spirited part, as though thumos, and not nous, is to rule. Empire is not merely the senescence of republicanism, its overthrow, but a disorder of the soul, individual and collective.


Comments (26)

Maximos,
I know orthodox Catholics aren't as exotic as the members of the Eastern church, but my oldest son is leaning heavily towards attending Messiah. While, he can hold his own, I hope he doesn't have continually fend off anti-papist diatribes from some of the students. I know it's awkward to communicate on a public forum, but if you have any insight and the time to offer it I would appreciate it. I assume you have my email address.
Thanks

As far as Kosovo is concerned, you nailed it. Our post-Christian elites have found in Putin, a fellow creature of modernity who shares their ethics, but not their death-wish. Russia will not go quietly into the Islamic night. Christians everywhere should be grateful.

Maximos: "Empire is not merely the senescence of republicanism, its overthrow, but a disorder of the soul, individual and collective."

I guess France and Napolean would make a case study. Did America just take longer to reach the "Empire" stage? And how do empires differ? Russia itself was an empire (and can still be considered that in some way). But how does Russia as an "empire" differ from American "hegemonism"?

Your article was very interesting. I've always wondered why our government seemed so full of Russophobes even after the Soviet Union fell apart. It seems that at every turn they want to grind Russia's face in the dirt as much as possible. This never made much sense to me. But your article throws some light on the situation.

Our post-Christian elites have found in Putin, a fellow creature of modernity who shares their ethics, but not their death-wish. This is as good a summary as any I've seen. The general architecture of Putinism was more-or-less inevitable, if Russia was to remain a viable nation-state, as many analysts have observed. Implementation, however, has often been, well, ethically questionable; and, on that level, though the divergence of local circumstances as between Russia and the West means that the foibles and failing of politicians will be somewhat different in the respective countries, we are still dealing with the same crooked timber of humanity in both instances.

Where Putin differs from many Western politicians is that he remains a patriot, whereas many Western pols are essentially post-patriotic, either in the bellicose, nationalist sense of neoconservatism, or in the stultified, bureaucratic, post-nationalist sense of the EU.

I guess France and Napolean would make a case study. Did America just take longer to reach the "Empire" stage? And how do empires differ? Russia itself was an empire (and can still be considered that in some way). But how does Russia as an "empire" differ from American "hegemonism"?

Interesting questions all, which merit further reflection. I'd say, in response to the latter question, that American hegemonism is essentially expansionist in nature, involving the pursuit of a certain type of openness that entails the augmentation of American power, the expansion and integration of markets, and the spread of certain 'values' as the legitimating veil. Russian imperialism is essentially defensive in nature; the great motif of Russian history is that Russia is either expanding or contracting, but is never static - this, because Russia sits on the periphery of the West, and bestrides Asia, the womb of horrors, the roiling cauldron of unrest.

Two factors surely involved in 'The West's' support for Kosovan independence are the drug trade and the opportunity to bring a Muslim controlled territory and population under the NATO umbrella (for both PR and terror training).

http://oraclesyndicate.twoday.net/stories/2585325//

"Two factors surely involved in 'The West's' support for Kosovan independence are the drug trade and the opportunity to bring a Muslim controlled territory and population under the NATO umbrella (for both PR and terror training)."

Our elites are corrupt, dessicated and beholden to
a fictional account of reality. However, the charge that they hope to profit from a Muslim terror-gang & drug cartel integrated into the E.U. is best served with a tin-foil hat.

I must disagree.

I believe that Kosovo should be independent not because (1) its Muslim, (2) the drug trade, (3) resistance of Russia, or any of that. None of that is relevant here (to me).

I believe in the self-determination of peoples as a general principle. Here, where ethnic and religious strife has led to repeated massacres falling slightly short of attempted genocide, I am reminded of Rwanda (1994), Iraqi Kurdistan (1986-88), and Germany (1940-45) and all the Jewish pogroms.

Did we learn anything last century? Well I did. And Kosovo should be ruled by the Kosovars.

Ethnic self-determination, for reasons implicit throughout the second post I've written on the subject of Kosovo in the preceding week, cannot be elevated to such normative status, as this would be to call everything about the order of nation-states into question, to make every issue intrinsically and interminably contestable. Will we now countenance the union of the Respublika Srpska with Serbia proper? Separatism for the patchwork of ethnic republics scattered throughout Russia, even as far into Russian territory as Kazan, located in a majority-Tatar region? Do the Tatars of Crimea get to assert political claims to some portion of Crimean territory, along with a corresponding claim to independence? Some of them already do, as my in-laws can attest; and the claim would find precedent in the Islamic doctrine of the inalienability of the lands of the Umma. What of the American Southwest? The Indian lands? The Aborigines in Australia? We could multiply examples indefinitely, but the point is that "ethnic-self-determination" is a piece of political rationalism, a one-size-fits-all-problems solution to intractable realities usually best looked at indirectly, if at all.

And this, of course, ignores the fact of Albanian misgovernance of Kosovo throughout the later history of Communist Yugoslavia, and the repeated attempts to cleanse the province of its Serbs through a variety of measures.

No, no, a thousand times no; this would mean no end of war and suffering, a breaking of eggs without any omelets at the end. The best we can hope for is to muddle through, and, when problems arise, to either ignore them as being unrelated to our interests (as is the case with many an African civil conflict), or at least intervene in a manner favourable to our interests - which the creation of more Muslim states is not.

"Ethnic self-determination...cannot be elevated to such normative status, as this would be to call everything about the order of nation-states into question"


Well, I guess the war for independence as fought by the American colonies was normatively wrong, because that regional break-away called into question the status of the British Empire itself.

Otherwise, perhaps there is something to this self-rule thing. Certainly, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson appreciated the necessity of regional self-rule.

You're conflating ethnic self-determination and regional self-rule, for one thing. For another, I'm not arguing that the American War of Independence is a geopolitical template. It is our historical experience, not an ideological postulate to be exported on a whim.

Actually, I see them as the same issue. For America, it was regional self-rule alone. For Kosovo, it's regional self-rule intertwined with ethnic self-determination because the ethnicities are largely regional. From what I've heard, Kosovo is 90% ethnically Albanian.

I do agree with your underlying principle. If we gave a country to every oppressed group, it would re-draw the map. However, there were many occassions where precisely that happened:

-American colonial independence from Britain (with the opposite result happening with the Confederacy)
-the creation of a Jewish state in 1947
- the creation of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia

As a normative guideline, yes we should give regional autonomy, but that's the Thomas Paine in me. As a practcal matter, no we shouldn't. However, the flip side is not correct (i.e., regional autonomy should never be granted), otherwise we undermine the existence of the United States.

So when are new countries recognized? That's actually a pretty complicated question, but the best answer I can come up with is basically "who wins the war."


Now, on a related but different note, where there is the threat of genocide, I think there is a moral necessity for (1) international interventionism, and (2) regional autonomy. That's the summation of what I learned from the Holocaust and Rwanda. Kosovo fits squarely in to that.

Now, on a related but different note, where there is the threat of genocide, I think there is a moral necessity for (1) international interventionism, and (2) regional autonomy. That's the summation of what I learned from the Holocaust and Rwanda. Kosovo fits squarely in to that.
How does either example prove your point? The vast majority of Jews killed by the Nazis weren't in Germany, but in Poland and the USSR. Neither regional autonomy nor statehood would have helped them at all. Nor would it have made much difference in Germany proper, where Jews lived in every town, not in some region of the country. In Rwanda, the Hutus and Tutsis lived among each other, again, and it was not a matter of one region attacking another, but of one segment of the population attacking its neighbors.

There was no threat of genocide in Kosovo. None. Approximately two-thousand ethnic Albanians were killed in a typically grubby counter-insurgency campaign in the long-running civil wars of the reigion, the majority of whom were KLA regulars. The actual ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population only transpired after the American intervention, which swiftly reversed that cleansing and turned it against the Serbian minority of Kosovo.

"Who wins the war." Well, yes, that is normally how such convoluted questions of territorial jurisdiction are determined, though this only raises the further question of the conditions of intervention: when does a power such as the US intervene, on what principles, and on behalf of whom? If we assume that American intervention in the Balkans was warranted - which I, personally, do not grant, but will stipulate for the sake of argument - there was no really sound reason, no overriding imperative, to intervene on behalf of the Bosniaks and Albanians, not least because these populations are Muslim, and have since proven to be conduits of the jihad to the wider Western world, but, at the time, primarily because all parties to the Balkan wars were complicit in atrocities and injustices. The American rationale boiled down to a preference for certain war criminals over others, presumably on the grounds that, otherwise, the Serbian war criminals would emerge victorious, or at least dominant. It is not that I am sanguine about those conflicts - far from it - but it is impossible to convince me - or any impartial observer - that such an outcome would have been absolutely intolerable, while the present realities of Bosnia and Kosovo are splendid examples of enlightened statecraft.

As I have argued elsewhere on this site, there are numerous reasons that tell against the American regional strategy, which has had everything to do with the attempt to curry favour with the Muslim world, to construct a legitimating myth for American foreign policy after the close of the Cold War, and the usual pursuit of pipeline politics. Those are shabby bases upon which to favour Muslims in a dispute with Christians, to advantage civilizational opposites at a time of Western existential self-doubt.

"How does either example prove your point? The vast majority of Jews killed by the Nazis weren't in Germany, but in Poland and the USSR."

Ah, you called me out. It does read like a non sequitor. Let me clarify....

I drew the lesson that ethnic cleansing can and will occur, oftentimes under the guise of "internal matters". The only way to stop this is by breaking the power of the hegemon over the subjugated. Where the disputes are regional, self-rule can help.

Where groups live amongst each other, correct, regional self-rule is quite irrelevant. But in order to prevent the genocide, the power of the hegemon over the subjugated can only be broken by international intervention.

In the context of the Balkans (and Darfur, and Iraq), self-rule seems to be what's necessary.

"There was no threat of genocide in Kosovo. None"


Genocide and ethnic cleansing had been rampant during the rest of the Balkan wars. A lot of which was reportedly ordered by Milosevic himself. Had the US (err..NATO) not intervened, Kosovo may very well have been a repeat.

So, the operative principle is that sovereignty must be overridden by some superior authority, when it is merely possible that an ethnic minority may be subjected to maltreatment?

I do not believe that the implications of this doctrine have been carefully contemplated.

Finally, I am weary of the notion that ethnic cleansing was somehow unique to Serbian strategy in the Balkan wars of the Nineties. American policy was predicated upon the assumption that ethnic cleansing was wicked and unjust, except when it wasn't, and that some ethnic cleansers were more equal than others. American policy was about as idealistic as the musings of a confirmed, hardened cynic, and the pseudo-reality in which American actions in the Balkans were enlightened and disinterested must be regarded as the fiction that it is. We chose sides in a grubby civil war. Period.

We will all live, I suspect, to witness the consequences of such folly. We've gone and performed our own damn, fool things in the Balkans.

"So, the operative principle is that sovereignty must be overridden by some superior authority, when it is merely possible that an ethnic minority may be subjected to maltreatment?"

That's not what I said, nor is that a fair assessment of the Balkans in the 1990s.


"Finally, I am weary of the notion that ethnic cleansing was somehow unique to Serbian strategy in the Balkan wars of the Nineties."

The Serbians had the largest army, were the most entrenched and organized of the break-away states, and demonstrated their willingness to use that tactic. That neither condones nor justifies the tactic, but explains why Serbia receives most of the blame.


"American policy was predicated upon the assumption that ethnic cleansing was wicked and unjust, except when it was not"

I could not agree more. America's support for Israel, South Vietnam, and the Central American warlords proved that America is quite willing to forego its own principals to allow puppet states to destroy demonized enemies.

At risk of being complicitous in a thread-jacking, I'll just pop my head in here to tell Royale that he's all wet on calling anything Israel has done "genocide." Even, for that matter, the bad things. If it had been, they'd have a heck of a lot less trouble now than they do have. We do no one any favors by over-using a term like "genocide." Or even "ethnic cleansing." Okay, bye, I'm outta here. You can go back to talking about Kosovo.

"I believe in the self-determination of peoples as a general principle."

July 4 rhetoric is always trotted out to cloak our real intentions; the weakening of Russia, currying favor with the Islamic world and punishing the the insufficiently progressive tribe. Geopolitical concerns should trump the adherence to a viscerally appealing principle when it's application may prove suicidal. Then again, for some that's the whole point; our time is past.

"The Serbians had the largest army, were the most entrenched and organized of the break-away states, and demonstrated their willingness to use that tactic. That neither condones nor justifies the tactic, but explains why Serbia receives most of the blame."

The truer explanation is their "backward ways" and parochial customs made the Serbians an easy target for our cosmopolitan elites. Change their ancestral religion from Christian to Muslim and they becomes victims, not oppressors.

That's not what I said, nor is that a fair assessment of the Balkans in the 1990s.

Perhaps then you'll offer your own clarification, since you have already written that the mere possibility of large-scale ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, when, in point of fact, this did not transpire until the NATO campaign had commenced, justified American intervention - which intervention could only assume the form of restricting the sovereignty of Serbia over its own territory. Moreover, my own comment was not intended as an encapsulation of 1990s Balkan history; a better summation of that history would be that some Balkan nations were permitted to seek independence, while others were compelled to accept territorial reduction, and yet others were compelled to acquiesce in inviable multicultural, pluralist states, all as an offering to the American and European idols of post-nationalism and post-sovereign politics.

The Serbians had the largest army, were the most entrenched and organized of the break-away states, and demonstrated their willingness to use that tactic. That neither condones nor justifies the tactic, but explains why Serbia receives most of the blame.

Well, not exactly; or, rather, not completely. Serbia was easily the dominant 'power' of the former Yugoslavia, prior to the American interventions, but American strategy was aimed, not so much at preventing the emergence of this 'regional power', as at precluding that rise so that other geopolitical ambitions could be realized. Keeping the Serbs down was not the goal, merely a means to other goals.

As for the rest of it, Lydia has already commented. Suffice it to say, for my part, that while the founding of Israel was irregular - ie., some parties have legitimate complaints about the manner in which this was effected, and so forth - Israel has not perpetrated any genocides, and, in any event, the irregularity of the founding offers little insight into our current obligations. In other words, we are not obligated to endorse a one-state solution, or any such thing, merely because we possess the knowledge of the circumstances of Israel's origins, which, being modern, cannot be pushed into some mythic past. Some Israeli policies merit criticism, but cannot exactly be likened to what was feared would be the result in Kosovo (remember, upwards of 500,000 Albanians fled the province during the NATO campaign, and Western agitprop had it that the Serbs would have killed them, anyway). Now, where Central America is concerned, American hands have often been quite filthy, but that's another story.

re: Israel

I was not calling their actions "genocide". I was only agreeing in the idea that principles of American foreign policy contradict each other. Ariel Sharon, did however, contribute to (if not plan) the civilian massacre at Sabra and Shatila. Here, the civilian massacre were mere by-products of American-Israeli goal of the destruction of the PLO, as much as the civilian massacres of alleged "communists" in Guatemala and South Vietnam and Serbian massacres were overlooked as by-products of the greater goal.

It sucks. It's ugly. But it happens, even by our allies.


re: "Perhaps then you'll offer your own clarification..."

I will. The 1990s in former Yugoslavia was a cauldron. Croatia and Bosnia had repeated reports of mass rapes and killings until finally UN troops entered, but they were ineffective since they couldn't engage the enemy without being fired upon themselves. The granting of independence to Croatia and Bosnia, although that didn't completely prevent flare-ups of violence, did substantially help. Only Slovenia escaped this, largely because Belgrade had to fight through Croatia and Bosnia in order to get to quell the Slovenian rebellion.

In early 1999, it looked like the same thing was going to happen in Kosovo. What's the solution? Well, what worked elsewhere - troops and independence (or at least regional autonomy). Clinton didn't want to use ground troops because of the Black Hawk Down mess in Mogadishu. So, the air war began to keep the Serbian troops out of Kosovo civilian centers to prevent the mass rapes and killings that occurred in Croatia and Bosnia.

No, the air war was not limited to driving back the Serbs. It was aimed at destroying the infrastructure of the country, which goes to the tactics and politics of the American military (i.e., they didn't want to lose troops, so the best way to do it is to bomb the country to disable it).

Note - when Clinton began the air campaign and mentioned one purpose was to prevent a regional flare-up like what sparked WWI, I thought that was a load of BS.

Were there reprisals by ethnic Albanians against the Serbs? Yes and that is just as wrong as anything else I've discussed. But, on America's part, it was not intended, even if it was an inevitable result.

Is the KLA a criminal organization? Of course. But America has a long history of supporting thugs if they're fighting the right enemy: Chiang Kaishek against Communist China, the Afghan Muhahadin against the Soviets, or hey - Uncle Joe Stalin against Hitler.

Does this result in two Albanias? Perhaps. Just as much America and Canada are actually two Americas, or that Costa Rica and Panama are two Panamas, or that Belorussia and Russia are two Russias, etc....


You might think all this about America/West/EU sucking up to Islam. I don't see it that way. A lot of people in Europe and America believe, rightly or wrongly, that we prevented the next Holocaust.

"But America has a long history of supporting thugs if they're fighting the right enemy..."

The US foreign policy establishment has it exactly backwards. It holds the Christian Serbs to be the enemy and the jihadists of "Greater Albania", as thuggish allies. Regardless of how it was sold to their gullible publics, the US & EU intervention on the side of the Muslims makes a truly bloody conflict, with it's own holocausts more, not less likely.

When talking about the rights of certain peoples to their ancestral homelands (which cannot be the be-all-and-end-all, yet which should also not be dismissed lightly) lets not overlook the fact that until WWII the majority population of Kosovo was Serbian. Why did that change? Because the Muslim Albanians, recognizing a natural affinity with the Nazis, sided with the Germans, had their own SS Division, and massacred, raped, interned and otherwise "cleansed" Kosovo of its ancestral people, the Serbs. Kosovo is a reward for siding with Nazis.

In early 1999, it looked like the same thing was going to happen in Kosovo....

Which is precisely my argument: to the West, it appeared as though certain things were going to transpire, things which did not, in fact, come to pass until the West actually intervened; and the practical conclusion the West drew was that preventing the possibility of those things warranted the violation of the sovereignty of an existing state. The assumed obligation to prevent genocide/ethnic cleansing/denial of ethnic autonomy was invoked to legitimate overriding the sovereignty of a weaker nation. I'm sorry, but the logic of events communicates a (somewhat) objective meaning, and in this case, that meaning is simply that the "international community", or, more realistically, shifting coalitions of the cynically interested, are permitted to overturn the system of sovereign nation-states in order to prevent other states from 'misbehaving' within their own territories - and that without regard for the historical and existential complexities involved, such as the historical reasons Serbs would be terrified at the prospect of dwelling as minorities within Croat or Bosniak dominated states.

No, the air war was not limited to driving back the Serbs. It was aimed at destroying the infrastructure of the country...

Which is merely another demonstration of its fundamental injustice: it targeted civilians, imposing suffering upon them as a means of pressuring their government to acquiesce.

But, on America's part, it was not intended, even if it was an inevitable result.

We are responsible, not for what we subjectively intend, or wish to accomplish, but for those actions we actually perform, whether by commission or omission. The United States, as the power on the ground, had the capacity to prevent the ethnic cleansing of the Serbs and the liquidation of their historical heritage, but did not; the Serbs were disposable.

You might think all this about America/West/EU sucking up to Islam. I don't see it that way. A lot of people in Europe and America believe, rightly or wrongly, that we prevented the next Holocaust.

Let's refrain from cheapening the historical memory of Nazi atrocities and Jewish suffering. No holocaust was in the offing; a few concentrations camps here and there, while utterly atrocious, unjustifiable, and worthy of a war crimes tribunal somewhere, do not amount to a replay of the darkest passages of European history. What was occurring was a messy inter-communal civil war, which would have resulted in ethnic partition, along more coherent boundaries, in the medium-term, much like Iraq. This is not intended as an argument in favour of permitting these things to play out; Western powers could always endeavour to arrange population exchanges on the model of those which occurred following WWII, a course which, though it would involve enormous hardships, would result in greater long-term stability. The West opted to implement an incoherent, ad hoc policy that establishes the conditions of long-term instability, which they hope to smother with the suffocating embrace of the European Union: everyone will be encouraged to surrender inherited cultures and loyalties in return for a generic Euro-culture and the possibility of a conformist prosperity. As in Western Europe, this will accomplish one thing, should it succeed: the nominally Christian populations will become deracinated, while the Muslims will adhere to their inherited identities. America and Europe are merely postponing something much, much worse.

...everyone will be encouraged to surrender inherited cultures and loyalties in return for a generic Euro-culture and the possibility of a conformist prosperity.

So having them start a World War every other decade was working out better for us.

They wouldn't be starting World Wars if the great powers would simply recognize that they have no necessary interests in Balkan P****ng contests.

Post a comment


Bold Italic Underline Quote

Note: In order to limit duplicate comments, please submit a comment only once. A comment may take a few minutes to appear beneath the article.

Although this site does not actively hold comments for moderation, some comments are automatically held by the blog system. For best results, limit the number of links (including links in your signature line to your own website) to under 3 per comment as all comments with a large number of links will be automatically held. If your comment is held for any reason, please be patient and an author or administrator will approve it. Do not resubmit the same comment as subsequent submissions of the same comment will be held as well.