Erratum: I said Witte led the attacks from the Caucasus against Trotsky, Lenin et al. Wrong. I've been reading about Witte lately but the White leaders from the Caucasus were Deniken and Wrangel. As nearly as I can tell no one caught it.
In reply to Doug's query I am saying:
1. The social conditions for capitalism seemed to require a triple period of violence: A) the slave system of the mediterranean, which was an assault on clans; B) feudalism and its primogenitor problem, which operated against "communalistic" European tendencies; and C) the period of capitalst development with the major dislocations associated with the development of the labor market.
2. In other words, complacent bourgeois capitalism required the must sustained, continuing violence imaginable in order to evolve.
3. It does seem possible for the feudal/oligarchies (Spain, Japan, etc) to move into oligposony and into capitalism. But the whole problem with "Crony capitalism" in Asia suggests that extended family networks continue to predominate there and that there are some "functionality problems" as a consequence. But it remains a different typology of capitalism.
4. Notwithstanding, you *can* bomb a tyranny into a bourgeois democracy if you want to: cf. Germany, Japan. But the efforts required are considerably more vigorous than anything going on in Kosovo. I would say this. You need to destroy the space of the old system, and absorb any survivors into your labor markets. The bourgeois democratic systems evolved in this manner, whether in England (destruction of feudalism), or North America.
5. Stalinistic violence is insufficient to repress tribalism. No wonder. If yoou put 500,000 Chechens on a train to Kazakstan, as happened in 1945, when they debark they have as a survival tool: only each other. This kind of oppression could reinforce the clan system.
6. Ditto a system of state power controlling the distribution of material goods. One group gets the upper hand and becomes hated by all the excluded groups. The Serb's tendency to "serbianize" Yugoslavia in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungary empire has been opposed for generations. Though a Croat, Tito, like the French revolution, exte4nded the centralizing tendencies of his predecessors, pumping the federal system full of Serbian police. It is highly significant that the leading consultative body under Tito was called the "Chamber of Nationalities."
7. All of which is to say that the news is bad: "leaving 'em alone" means leaving 'em with a system that can and has created extreme antagonisms, which is if anything made worse by trying to "modernize" via the state which turns the whole of these countries into the "included" and the "excluded," provoking massive refugee movements (as after WWI and WWII). The clan system is not so great and generates its share of violence; in any case it is incompatible with capitalism development and if anything gets worse when it is adjacent to a capitalist zone.
8. I have no solution. Hoover's argument on this list that Democratic Socialism is better reminds me of the days when, as a mmber of the Peace and Freedom party, I got primary mail arguing whether, after achieving the presidency, GM and other companies should be nationalized (revneues going to the state) or turned over to their workers. The absence of a logically coherent "solution" means that decisions will be made on the basis of some kind of utility algorithm which will have no particular moral compass.
9. The evidence that the NATO plan is ill-conceived is pretty strong.
10. There is a logic: semi-periphery for Eastern Europe: bourgeois private property rights and democracy, you can even have social democratic parties if you want. Tyrannies tolerated in the Franco/Salazar model but please no excesses. And don't block the Danube. And yes, this is an identifiably different strategy than Iraq, which no one wants to promote to semi-peripheral status. Just peripheral, which means tyranny is OK and not actively discouraged (e.g. the gassings of Kurds during the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s).
11. Sometimes, when I'm teaching Weber to my students, I say he can be summed up as follows: 1. Things are bad; 2. They're getting worse; and 3. There's nothing you can do about it.
That seems to be what everyone who has had, as a policy matter rather than a theoretical one, to tackle the "national question" has concluded.
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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