All money is funny. It has fetishistic power. Whatever its units, its exchange value is a proportion of the total social labour of the economy, in this case the global economy.
When the West printed itself vast supplies of Special Drawing Rights in the 70's after the Arab oil price hikes, it was not printing "notional currency". Nor was it motivated by touching faith. It wanted, and got, access to massive amounts of real exchange value which would otherwise have been lost to the Arabs. It forced a devaluation of the entire global currency system to cushion itself against having to take the shock of the oil price hikes and go into recession.
The point I was making about the Balkans was similar. Apart from a typo (IMG for IMF) I wrote:
>Power in the [IMF] is proportional to capital contributions. It has a
>constitution that favours the largest capitalist countries and perpetuates
>their control of the global economy. Should they think it in their
>interests they will issue Special Drawing Rights. Full stop/period!
This war is about definitions of human rights which differ substantially in advanced capitalist countries from those in other countries. It is about very different definitions of national rights. For the Serbs, Kosovo is part of their nation because of a mass of medieval Christina archeological sites prior to 1389.
It is about the fragmentation of Comecon and the expansion of the European superstate into Eastern Europe, imposing its own conditions.
Not just for humanitarian reasons, because of the infrastructural desert that will be left in Serbia and Kosovo after the war, but far more importantly, for the stabilisation of the whole of eastern Europe short of the border with the Ukraine and Belarus, it is in the interests of the leaders of the IMF to inject capital resources into this region.
As the Chinese emphasise, it is risky to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states even against manifest national oppression. But the treatment of the refugees at the Macedonian border shows that once armed force is used to clear patches of communities out of one bit of the Balkans or another, the fear and paranoia can spread undermining all the borders of sovereign states in the region. The loss of life and economic destruction will be comparable to the partition of India.
That is the explanation of the curious hesitation of NATO to arm the KLA openly, and to state openly the call for an independent Kosovo.
No, there simply has to be an investment and stabilisation plan for the Balkans. As all money is funny money, and SDR's have served the purpose in the past, they can serve it again.
The only reason why this will not happen is if the US does not want Europe to get too strong. But so long as Europe is dependent on US air power, that might be thought to be appropriately packaged balance of power.
It will be called the Fischer Plan, and it will have nice green edges.
Chris Burford
London