>Chauvinism doesn't come out of thin air, nor should leftists regard it
as
the cause of the wars in the region.<
and proceeds to do just this, to give an account of the yugoslav war as founded on the recognition or otherwise of 'ethnic' borders by 'western imperialism' (see below*).
but more importantly, what gets dropped out of sight in both nathan's and yoshie's analyses of the war is class struggles, in yugoslavia, the region and even those in the US which placed certain limits and set certain paths for the conduct of the war (eg, air bombing and not troops). for a class struggle perspective, you can check out: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/6368/Communism/yugowar.htm http://www.webcom.com/wildcat/Yugoslavia.html
but it is true, chauvinism does not come out of thin air. which is why statements like unemployment leads to chauvinism are both absurd and do little more than give credence to arguments that migration levels and unemployment levels are connected. in order to explain the historical and specific connection between anti-immigrant politics and rises in unemployment, you'd have to go into an analysis a definite history (within the labour movement as well as within social democracy) of viewing the nation-state as the guarantor of the conditions of labour, which in any case is an extrapolation of the capitalist state's dual role as regulator of national money and national labour markets. in 1996, the Milosevich Commission proposed a deregulation of trade and finance and the closure of 'innefficient' enterprises, and the all fiefdoms within the party (later to collapse) resorted increasingly to dealing with the rises in unemployment which resulted from the (heavily resisted) lay-offs by actively encouraging the competition between 'ethnic' groups for dwindling jobs, by milosevich blaming the rise of unemployment on the resistance of 'albanians' to the 'reforms', and so on. so, the connection between chauvinism and unemployment is already written into the premises of the social democracy of which milosevich came from, and which, having dropped one side (the regulation of finance) resorted more strenuously to the other side (a nationalistic figuration of labour). social democracy followed the same path in many places, including here in australia.
Angela _________
* > One should look at the post-WW2 history of Yugoslavia, internal & external causes of economic problems before the wars, the West's recognition of the breakaway republics (whose boundaries were never meant to become the external borders of independent nation-states), the Western support of right-wing nationalists, and so forth. Both in the NYT Magazine article and Nathan's own post, _the Western imperialism disappears from the picture altogether_.<