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How the West has won

Everybody seems to think that the West has failed in Bosnia. In fact it has achieved an important victory at the expense of all the peoples of Yugoslavia, argues Joan Phillips

Critics have lambasted the Western powers for their lack of moral fibre over Bosnia. By signing the Washington agreement, which provides for the creation of safe havens for the Muslims in Bosnia, the USA, Britain, France and Italy signalled that they did not intend to defend the integrity of Bosnia. According to their critics, this was an act of betrayal against a small state as bad as that at Munich, when Neville Chamberlain acquiesced to the Nazi carve-up of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

On both occasions, suggested Noel Malcolm in the Sunday Telegraph, appeasement led to a loss of imperial standing: 'When Mussolini heard of Neville Chamberlain's decision to kowtow to Hitler at Munich, he remarked: "This is the liquidation of English prestige." The same could be said today of the prestige and authority of the United States and Western Europe.' (30 May 1993)

Far from being enfeebled by its intervention in Yugoslavia, however, the West has been strengthened. What appears to many to have been an embarrassing failure is in fact a political success.

Of course, individual politicians have not come out of the diplomatic circus looking very good. Bill Clinton can no longer claim consistency as a virtue, after US policy on Bosnia changed as fast as Italian governments. First there was the Vance-Owen plan, which the administration rejected, then supported, then rejected again. Then there was the proposal for safe havens: on 21 May, Clinton was warning against safe havens; a day later this was US policy.

Clinton may look like an idiot, but there are bigger things at stake than the personal standing of individual politicians. The moral standing of the West is what matters more than the popularity ratings of a US president.

The critics of Western policy in Yugoslavia say that the West has lost its moral authority. In fact, the opposite is true. Many people may be critical of what the West has done or not done in Yugoslavia, but nobody questions the West's right to be involved there in the first place. In fact the predominant criticism of the West is that it is not doing enough in Yugoslavia.

The Western authorities have won because most people now believe that they are a civilising force in the Balkans. Everybody accepts that it is the right and the responsibility of the Western powers to sort things out in Yugoslavia. Indeed the West is seen as having a moral duty to intervene and impose a solution.

White 'wogs'

Even the most liberal supporters of intervention accept that the West has a civilising mission in Yugoslavia. When you strip away all the sugary coating about humanitarianism from the arguments for intervention, what you are left with is the old colonial condescension for the natives. The fact that even erstwhile radicals now share this outlook reveals the extent to which Western imperialism has been rehabilitated as a progressive force.

Implicit in many of the discussions of the war in Yugoslavia, and sometimes explicit, is the assumption that the people living there are 'wogs'. Although usually disguised by diplomatic language, racist explanations for the war in Yugoslavia are commonplace. We are constantly told that these people are fired by hatreds that go back centuries, and that is why they are fighting today. It would appear that people born in the Balkans must be genetically programmed to slit each other's throats.

Barbarians

The Serbs have been singled out as the most barbaric, bloodthirsty and Balkan of all the warring 'tribes' in Yugoslavia. But the underlying assumption is that they are simply the worst of a bad lot. There is an increasing tendency to depict all the warring parties in Bosnia as uncivilised barbarians. In June, a few minor incidents set off a major discussion about 'gangs' of unruly militiamen roaming the mountains of Bosnia and looting Western aid convoys. Perhaps they were the same 'gangs' that used to go round looting food aid in Somalia. The effect of such discussions is to suggest that these are dark and dangerous places which need to be subjected to the civilising influence of the West.

The message behind the debate about intervention is that people in the Balkans are incapable of running their own affairs in a civilised fashion. The implication is that racial differences are at the root of the problem: that these are less advanced peoples, who need to be guided by the superior wisdom of the mature nations.

In one form or another, this view is endorsed by both liberal supporters and conservative opponents of Western military intervention in Bosnia. The interventionists believe that the Yugoslavs are incapable of sorting out their own problems and that the West must intervene to separate the warring factions. The anti-interventionists also believe that the Yugoslavs are incapable of behaving in a civilised fashion, but draw the conclusion that the West should avoid getting sucked into the Balkan savagery. The fact that both sides share the same assumptions about Western superiority and Eastern inferiority reveals that the Western powers have won the moral argument.

Those who claim that the West has suffered a moral defeat because it has not backed up its threats with military action miss the point. Their mistake is to believe that the West intervened in Yugoslavia for principled reasons, because it supports independence for Bosnia or because it believes in human rights.

Power games

That was never what Western intervention was about. The Western powers have used the conflict in Yugoslavia for their own selfish ends. They really could not care less about the fate of any of the peoples in the Balkans. Western politicians are hard-nosed pragmatists who act out of self-interest and nothing more. It would be a big mistake to think that they were guided by any principle in their attitude towards the various protagonists in Yugoslavia.

For example, the Western powers never had anything against the Serbs ideologically. Likewise, they never had any real sympathy for the Croats or Muslims. When they took sides, it was only because it suited their own strategic purposes. The truth is that all sides in the Yugoslav conflict have been used as pawns in a Great Power game. And all of them have paid a high price.

Serb demons

It was an accident of history that the Serbs were singled out as the guilty party in Yugoslavia. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Germany decided to use the secession of Slovenia and Croatia as the issue over which to stamp its authority on Europe, it was inevitable that support for the secessionists would have to be justified at the expense of the Serbs.

Germany first presented the conflict in strong moral and ideological terms, as one between civilisation and barbarism. But it suited the purposes of an awful lot of Western politicians to go along with the idea that the Serbs were the incarnation of evil. For politicians down on their luck at home, and missing the Cold War bogey of the Red Menace, bashing the Serbs became a way of bolstering their authority on the world stage.

In order to satisfy the ambitions of power-hungry Western politicians, the Serbs were turned into a pariah people. In one of the most defamatory media campaigns of history, they were vilified as apes, barbarians, communists, fascists, rapists and psychopaths. As Living Marxism pointed out a year ago, the Serbs have been turned into the 'white niggers' of the New World Order, cast out of every major world body and brought to their knees by sanctions.

High price

Even those whom the West is supposed to support in Yugoslavia have been used and abused with consummate cynicism. The Muslims of Bosnia, who were promised everything they wanted by the West, are the biggest losers. The Western powers invited the Muslims to apply for independence in December 1991. Led by the USA, they then recognised Bosnia as an independent state, ignoring the wishes of the substantial Bosnian Serb population, who wanted to remain in Yugoslavia. Having encouraged the Muslims to go all the way, the West then abandoned them to their fate. Having been promised the Earth, or Bosnia anyway, the Muslims have ended up with a few scraps of land, which go under the euphemism of safe havens.

On the face of it, the Croats have probably fared better than anybody else. They have won their independence, as well as new territories in Herzegovina. But they too have paid a high price for the Western-sponsored break-up of Yugoslavia. They have lost many lives, and, although they may not know it yet, they have no basis for a viable existence as an independent state.

The Albanians of Kosovo will no doubt be the next to pay the price for the West's cynical manipulation of the situation in Yugoslavia. Western politicians are now issuing dire threats about what will happen to the Serbs if they do anything against the Albanians in Kosovo. The Serbs have been oppressing the Albanians in Kosovo for considerably longer than a few months; but it was never before a cause for concern in the chancelleries of the West. Yet now that bashing the Serbs has become a way to prove how big and tough you are, Western politicians who probably don't even know where Kosovo is, are falling over themselves to find human rights abuses there.
Reproduced from Living Marxism issue 57, July 1993

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