Syndicate: Tony Judt on The Reason Why

[ichael.benson@pristop.si]

The Reason Why 
TONY JUDT 

The New York Review of Books
May 20, 1999   

 With the onset of war in the Balkans, President Clinton
 has taken to wrapping himself in the cloak of Winston
 Churchill. Defending his own decision to face up to
 Slobodan Milosevic and bomb Serbia, he asked an
 audience on March 23: Wouldn't everyone be better off
 if people had listened to Churchill and stood up to
 Hitler? 

 The implicit comparison does not merit comment, but it
 prompts a different, more plausible historical reference.
 For there was once another British leader and
 statesman. Like Bill Clinton, he came to office with a
 long record of experience in local government and built
 his political coalition upon a claim to competence in
 domestic management. Like Bill Clinton, he found
 himself faced with an unexpected crisis in Eastern
 Europe. He too calculated that public opinion was not
 interested in overseas military ventures, and he
 accordingly went to great lengths to negotiate and
 compromise with a foreign dictator, assuring his fellow
 citizens that he had no intention of dragging them into a
 ground war over a faraway country of which "we know
 nothing." 

 When the foreign dictator finally went too far and
 undertook the systematic bloody destruction of an
 Eastern European state, the British statesman reluctantly
 declared war-a war that he pursued with such
 lassitude and incompetence that he was finally replaced
 by Winston Churchill himself. That British statesman, of
 course, was Neville Chamberlain-and *his* mantle fits
 all too snugly upon the shoulders of our present
 commander-in-chief. 

 I invoke this comparison as a reminder that we can
 indeed learn from History-but only if we choose the
 right examples. The war in the Balkans has been the
 occasion for all manner of claims about the things the
 past does and doesn't teach. We have been told that it
 is an "age-old" conflict dating at least to 1389, and that
 our intervention would change nothing: a half-truth
 invoked to support a self-serving falsehood. We have
 been told by leftists nostalgic for cold war certainties
 that the US's own past misdealings overseas make us
 no better than those we are attacking and that we thus
 have no business judging the behavior of others: a
 sophistic assertion of moral equivalence that cuts the ground
 from under the very universal principles upon which the
 left itself purports to stand. 

 We have been told by isolationists of the right that we
 have no reason to care or react to overseas events that
 don't touch our "vital interests": as though, since 1941,
 America's interests-however amorally
 calculated-have not been intimately dependent upon
 developments around the globe. And we have been
 reminded by realists of all stripes that we failed to stop
 mass murder in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Kurdistan, and
 thus look rather odd taking a stand in Kosovo: as
 though our past irresponsibility in the face of genocide
 were a warrant and justification for repeating the
 mistake. Today, it seems, it is those who remember the
 (recent) past who are doomed to repeat it. 



 If we must invoke the past, let us not be quite so
 selective. What is happening in the Balkans did not
 begin six centuries ago, but it does have a history.
 Ethnic cleansing was not invented by Slobodan
 Milosevic. To confine ourselves to the present century,
 population clearances have a long pedigree. After
 World War I an unsuccessful effort was made to leave
 people where they were and draw new boundaries
 around them in the name of self-determination-leaving
 Poland, Czechoslovakia, and especially the newborn
 Yugoslavia as multinational states under nationalist
 rulers. The experiment failed. 

 World War II produced the opposite outcome: with
 the notable exception of Poland, which was shifted
 westward in accordance with Soviet dictates, frontiers
 were left in place and people were moved instead. By
 1945 there were some 46 million people who had been
 forced to leave their homes in East-Central Europe
 alone; most of them never returned. Ukrainians were
 expelled from Poland, Hungarians from
 Czechoslovakia, and Germans from everywhere (there
 were 13 million German "expellees" in the Federal
 Republic by 1949). The complex and conflicted social
 and "ethnic" landscape of the continent had been
 radically simplified: by involuntary emigration,
 expulsion, resettlement, imprisonment, and
 extermination. 

 The ethnic cleansing undertaken by Hitler and Stalin
 thus "solved" the ethnic problem in Europe. The solution was not one
 that the democracies of the West would have sought, nor were they in
 a position to prevent it. But in conjunction with the enforced
 stability of the cold war, the radical "tidying up" of Europe's
 interwoven nations and peoples prepared the ground not just for the
 peace and prosperity of Western Europe but for the post-Communist
 trajectory of Eastern Europe too (except, significantly, in
 Yugoslavia, where neither Hitler nor Stalin had been in a position to
 enforce his writ during or after the war). The majority of Eastern
 European politicians today have little interest in reviving memories
 of injustices suffered at the hands of their erstwhile ethnic
 foes-Ukrainians in Poland and vice versa, Transylvanian Hungarians in
 Romania, etc.; the prospect of a European future trumps the demagogic
 advantages to be gained from invoking local pasts. The exception
 proves the rule, and not just in Serbia: Slovakia's Meciar saw
 little hope of securing early entry into the EU and thus felt no
 inhibition about exploiting nationalist sentiment against the
 remaining Hungarians in his country. He was defeated in Slovakia's
 last election. 



 But it is one thing to build a postwar world on the
 unacknowledged foundations of someone else's crimes,
 quite another to endorse those crimes for the future.
 Since 1945 we have set in place a plethora of
 precedents (the Nuremberg and subsequent trials),
 treaties, charters (notably that of the UN itself), and
 accords such as the 1948 Genocide Convention,
 whose purpose has been to outlaw any further
 "solutions" of this kind and to provide legal and
 practical grounds for intervention and punishment
 should someone seek to undertake them. At first this
 framework of international disapproval for final
 solutions of one sort or another was, correctly,
 understood to be an effective, realistic response to
 behavior that was not only immoral but deeply
 disruptive of international relations, and thus a threat to
 everyone's interests, however selfishly conceived. But
 the passage of time, and the fond illusions fostered by
 the security of the cold war era and the fall of
 communism, have returned us to an earlier perspective
 in which ethics and national self-interest have parted
 company. We are now taught to think of foreign
 conflicts, in James Baker's deathless phrase, as fights in
 which we have "no dog." 

 This is curious, and made curiouser still by the
 occasional emphasis  upon "national sovereignty." Like General
 Pinochet's defenders in Chile and elsewhere, the critics of armed
 intervention in Yugoslavia point to the inviolability of sovereign
 states. If Slobodan Milosevic wants to do nasty things in the poor
 little country he rules, that's his business; even if it means
 stamping roughshod over years of nonviolent attempts at conciliation
 and local self-rule by Kosovo's Albanian representatives. But if he
 starts crossing frontiers, it becomes our affair. Even if we don't
 want to refer to the dictators of the Thirties, we ought to find this
 stance rather bizarre: we live today in a world where the "sovereign
 state" is hemmed in by an ever-growing body of international laws,
 regulations, treaties, and unions. "Globalization," if it means
 anything, means that the national state has been forced to abandon
 many of the economic and fiscal instruments that once defined its
 claim to autonomy. If a sovereign state can't make multinational
 companies conform to its tax laws, can't ignore international
 regulations on air traffic safety or food manufacture, and can't
 block the cross-border flow of money and goods without facing the
 wrath of various international agencies and banking authorities, why
 are we so quick to acknowledge its right to rape and murder its
 citizens? 

 The war on Slobodan Milosevic, then, is a war we have to
 fight (albeit we are fighting it in the wrong way and under
 the most inappropriate leadership). Our responsibility is
 not diminished by the fact that in many ways we invented
 Milosevic-he was "our man" in the Balkans (Richard
 Holbrooke built a second career on his assignment to
 "deal" with the Serbian dictator, a project which required
 that the latter be accorded an appropriate level of
 recognition and honor for many long years). The end of the
 cold war has not brought History to a close, nor has it
 returned us to the starting point. But it has confronted our
 reluctant leaders (political and military alike) with a
 reminder of something they either forgot or never knew:
 that the extermination of minorities within national frontiers
 has many recent European precedents. It is illegal,
 unethical, and threatens the interests of everyone. But it
 works, as Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, and
 others well know. Unless we want to collaborate not just
 in the slaughter of Kosovo's Albanians but also in the
 dismantling of the fragile international system built on the
 ruined landscape of the last great exercise in ethnic
 cleansing, this is our war, too, and we had better win it. 


           -April 22, 1999 
-----------------------------------




   

Michael Benson  <michael.benson@pristop.si>
<http://www.ljudmila.org/kinetikon/> 
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