Invitation to War

William Pfaff

From Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993

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Summary:  War in the Balkans stems not from mysterious and unresolvable ancient hatreds but from forces and events of recent times-nineteenth-century romanticism, the emergence of nation states and the breakup of empires. The idea of an ethnic nation, based on political imagination rather than the European reality of racial intermixture, is a permanent provocation to war. Yugoslavia's war is about political values, specifically separatism versus secular, nonethnic democracy. Without nato guarantees against forcible border changes and a Western willingness to intervene, ethnic conflict will dominate the course of events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union for years to come.

THE MODERNITY OF ANCIENT HATREDS

War in the Balkans is widely thought to be atavistic, the product of a perverse time warp that unloads fourteenth-century hatreds at the edge of the Europe of Maastricht, high-speed trains and the Single Market. Its cruelty is imputed to impulses beyond modern grasp or response. This is mystification by history.

The situation in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe is the result of perfectly understandable forces and events of recent times: nineteenth-century romanticism, the emergence of the modern nation state after the French Revolution, the collapse of Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. Yugoslavia itself did not exist until 1918. Its supposedly primordial hatreds are a twentieth-century phenomenon.

The forces at work in contemporary ethnic war are neither ancient for the most part, nor incomprehensible. They are a modern affair, and a great deal could be done to contain their atrocious consequences. The most important step would be for NATO to guarantee against forcible change of those political frontiers in Eastern, East-Central and Balkan Europe that have not yet been violated but are threatened because of ethnic claims and rivalries. This guarantee would have to come from NATO, as the United Nations has lost its military credibility in the course of the Yugoslav affair. Such a guarantee would be politically difficult to organize but is militarily feasible. NATO is the true Great Power in Europe today. If this is not done, ethnic conflict risks dominating the course of events in the eastern half of Europe and the former Soviet Union for years to come, with serious jeopardy to the narrow but crucial gains that European (and Western) political civilization has made since 1945.

Already the sanctions broken in the Yugoslav war, the thresholds of law and international convention breached, the conventions of civilized political conduct violated, and the precedents of atrocity thus far set, have undermined that qualified confidence in the future of international relations that seemed to be justified by communism's collapse, political union in Europe, and the achievements of Western political cooperation. It was possible to believe that a new form of international order and cooperation might be extended eastward in Europe, eventually to incorporate the former Soviet Union itself. Instead, the assumption that atrocity is natural to the Balkans has rationalized the United States' and the West's acquiescence in aggressive war and their indirect collaboration in Yugoslavia's ethnic cleansing over the past two years. U.N. humanitarian interventions have in practice facilitated ethnic purge, and the Vance-Owen plan, meant to bring peace to Yugoslavia, would only ratify ethnic cleansing's outcome. New ethnic violence is thus invited elsewhere, outside the former Yugoslavia and inside Serbia itself, where the party that now holds 30 percent of the parliamentary seats demands the expulsion of all the Hungarians, Croatians, Slovenes, Muslim Albanians and Slovaks still inside Serbia's borders. More than 100,000 non-Serbs have already left the province of Vojvodina, largely populated by Hungarians. Hungary itself consequently risks becoming involved in the conflict, as does Albania, which is rightly concerned ...

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