1. Chomsky: The anarchist position is always the most consistent because power (domestic or international) in its most terrible form is organized by the state. Taking a stand against the state and its policies as such is indeed the most consistent platform to begin political analysis, but that all depends on what you think about the "historical inevitability" of states. If you "accept" states, which is a pragmatic (judging from history) thing to do, you are always going to confront the problem of inappropriately applied force. This is almost tantamount to an analytic trap, since it can lead directly into a my-state/your-state problem, such as has been seen on this list, that is not resolvable (Serbia's better, Kosovars are better, US is worse, etc.). But to accept states as "inevitable" is basically to resign one's self to arguing about this or that policy.
2. There are a lot of people on this list whom I respect with whom I've been on the other side on this issue. That's too bad. I still respect those people, but I've been a bit to lazily ironic with my y'alls, so I had better mind my manners.
3. I specifically bring up the Yugoslav question in relation, for example, to the decisions faced by the Bolshevik leadership in deciding whether to reconquer the Caucasus. They had a "national program" that was being screwed with by the White leadership in collaboration with the British and French (mostly) as well as the reactionary ayatollahs and Beys. Their decision to reconquer the Caucasus was I think correct, in the sense that the "right of self-determination" was interfering with their own right to self-determination.
I have suggested that the Serbian problem is linked to the fact that it is blocking the erection of bourgeois Europe, and in this sense the NATO elite faces a problem, and frustrations, similar to those faced by the Bolsheviks. As has been pointed out, their (NATO's) survival was not threatened. But there is little doubt that Milosovic is functionally equivalent to the Caucasus Ayatollahs and Beys who were definitely in the way and on top of it doing things that made them greatly unappreciated in Moscow. But Milosovic's right to self-determination doesn't seem, given the "quality" of his "program" to inherently trump the NATO-self-determination (of developing E. Europe). So I don't see a clear cut moral issue here except,
That it may be that more Kosovars will get killed than otherwise, which I'm not sure of, since Milosovic has a poor track record. After all, even accepting the logic that it's NATO's fault that more Kosovars are getting killed because they ought to have known, etc., it does not follow that this is what Milosovic *had* to do. Logically he should have dug down and protected as much war infrastructure as possible. Instead, like the Nazis who jammed prisoners off to the camps even as the Russians were closing in and the trains were needed elsewhere, he uses the bombs as a "last chance" to kill the enemy, which suggests that's what he wanted to do all along.
So the moral point may go to the "not bombing" option, but I'm not sure of it. But even so,
"Understanding" what is going on requires more than just taking a moral position. That is, does the bombing serve the material interests of NATO even if more Kosovars are killed than would have been killed otherwise? Probably, if my Danube thesis is correct. Is the inherent objective of a bourgeois Europe worse than the Milosovic objective of fascist Serbia? Well, no, in the long run, the bourgeois path might be the more progressive choice. But as I have said repeatedly, the "problem" is whether NATO has the courage of its own imperialism. If it doesn't, then the bombing is: bloody incompetence. But the question remains: what positive role does Milosovic have to contribute to Europe?
4. The drug question. I'm not surprised to learn that the Kosovars are carrying drugs. It seems to be the thing that resistance fighters do these days, whether in the Bekaa valley vs. Israel, in Afghanistan, or elsewhere. It does raise the question as to what extent "national liberation movements" are really drug lords trying to protect the cartels. But it also raises the possibility that the reason Milosovic hates the drug lords from Albania is that they are horning in on his own drug operations, which also would not surprise me. He's got the secret police, the strategic position for import-export, he would be ideally placed to do his own Noriega/S.Viet nam thing with drugs.
5. I am unimpressed. That means, I do not have a version of history which counts one set of people as victims and another set as heroes. Thus, when I read in a recent book about Chechnya what great guys the Chechens are, I note with particular interest the one-liner that sort of tosses out how the Chechens keep slaves in their mountain clans which they've abducted from elsewhere. This in a pro- Chechen book. They're scuzz, and Stalin knew it, and Lenin knew it; and perhaps they too were scuzz. But it raises the question of whether it is possible to have a non-scuzzy policy in some areas. Often times the reality seems to be choosing from among bad alternatives.
6. In particular, I note that in the evolution of western history, we are unique in the near total absence of clans (save in areas, like Scotland and Ireland where the penetration of the Roman Empire was weak). The slave system of the Roman Empire must have severely eroded the cohesiveness of clans. Similarly, the feudal system, with its inherited land tenure system, must have further weakened the communalist tendencies of whatever vestigal clan tendencies were left, notwithstanding the "sharing" of commons and the like. Finally, the period of forced modernization, leading to capitalism, once more created upheaval inimical to clans. In other words, I think the west went through a triple-sieve which tended to phase out tribes and their ways. So when we think of capitalism we think of non-tribal social organization.
7. But in other areas, such as Yugoslavia and the Caucasus, there were prolonged periods when the clans and mountain tribes coincided A) with feudalism and B) with capitalism. Paradoxically the clans can be reinforced under such conditions. Either through predation (organized raids) or cooperation (having members work in the system) resources raised "outside" the clan can be directed to the clan, paradoxically providing it with greater resilience in the face of a competitive system that ought to erode it. And a modern state is the ultimate resource which clans and tribes can co-opt, to their own benefit and to the detriment of others. Those left out have little but the resources of their own clan to keep them going.
The "modernization problem" presents itself in a particularly paradoxical way. The values of the Westenr left are derived from a relatively clan-less society that has evolved with nation states and classes. "Humanitarian values" are preached because every human is a kind of social atom and we are trained to see each other as "rights units" who are either privileged or oppressed in relation to the state, and the state is the principal agent for bringing equity into the world. But in a clan system there is, basically, equality for those in the clan (which is what was attractive to Engels). The down side is that everyone outside of the clan is shit, and hence, our Chechens have little compunction about keeping a Dhagestani as a slave. Or vice versa. When we apply our late 20th c Marxist, state-based notions of citizenship and justice to the activities of clans, we are proposing a system of moral judgment which has little to do with the operating values of that system.
8. The ethnicity problem can be linked to clans, as I suspect it is in much of Yugoslavia, but it also can be a creature of national territoriality. In any case it is clear (reading from Arendt) that one of the distinctive features of the nation state system is the definition of "ins" and "outs" and the wholesale creation of refugees: People fleeing Germany, Germans fleeing poland, Hungarians fleeing the Czechs, and the Rumanians, Rumanians fleeing the Hungarians, Bosnians fleeing a Serbian state, Serbs fleeing a Bosnian state, and so on. Part of the problem here is not "capitalism" as such but rather an insufficiency of capitalism: the process has not been carried far enough to create true "citizens" who have little by way of "organic relations" than their nuclear family and who are all alike in the eyes of the state. Rather, when the state is captured by one Mafia-clan group, it works to the detriment of all other clan-groups, and even forces them to behave in a similar manner, since whatever it is to be had from the state and its management, it is not going to be made available to non-members. The opposition group threatens the state which threatens the network that supports the in-group. And from that point on, what you get is war to the knife.
9. The existence of outside capitalist powers can exacerbate these tendencies but the essential illogic of it all is seen by the fact that capitalists get blamed for intervening and causing massacres and also get blamed for not intervening and stopping massacres. Traditioinally "capitalism" has "solved" this problem through the creation of states, elimination of some groups where warranted, and bourgeois citizinship, in which the citizen confronts the state garbed in nothing but his skin and, if lucky a lawyer.
10. Thus I do not see the "solution" in Yugoslavia as Serb states, Croat states, Kosovar states, or whatever. The only way *out* of this problem is *through*. That means, in my view, capitalist development which erodes the basis of all these competing nationalities and their various smuggling gangs and extended family relationships. And this process, historically, wherever it has occurred, has *always* been brutal. It is only *not* brutal when you are *through,* as Western Europe and the US are. That is why I come back to the question: what are the goals of the NATO states. It seems to me clear that the goal of the NATO states is the creation of a bourgeois Europe, which will take politics to whatever capitalist phase it takes them: hopefully bourgeois democratic, hopefully not fascist. Which is why I repeatedly pose the question of *utility*, because ultimately, all these isms of independence are, as the Russian Marxists of 1919 realized, retrograde and counterproductive to pretty much anything except their own narrowly defined--and often, at the local level, equally brutal--games. I'm not expecting anything "good" out of Serbia or out of an independent Kosovar; but there remains the possibility that if bourgeois Europe succeeds in drawing these fellows into a work force they may become less virulent as ethnicities and start to function as more homoegenous classes. This can be a long process, as was shown by the warring tribes of Polish and Irish catholics in Lawrence, Mass, which was encouraged by the capitalists, back in the 1820s and 1830s. But Poles and Irish catholics are not warring now.
11. It does seem to me the case that whatever it is Milosovic has on its mind, it is an extremely virulent form of tyranny. And while it is perfectly clear that NATO can tolerate a tyrant it evidently wants a tyrant who won't be sending refugees off to Macedonia or Albania or wherever, on the obvious ground that mass movements of refugees tend to be de-stabilizing.
All that said, the question of whether NATO is acting in its own best interests, or making matters worse and unsolvable fast, is an open one, and bourgeois theorists have been posted on this list to the effect that it would be better to turn away from the slaughter and harbor the refugees elsewhere in Europe rather than do nothing. But even that view shrugs aside the development of the Danube basin, which in fact is central to the return of Russia to its pre-1917 status as in the orbit of Germany and Eastern Europe rather than Eastern Europe in the orbit of Russia, which was the long 1917-1991 anomaly.
12. I continue to think that much of the debate on this list is reflective of Max Weber's observations about Christian pacifism, that the views that there are "better" ways of doing business with this kind of problem are rooted largely in the historical perspective of being in a capitalist country where the primary problem of pre-capitalist social relations, especially those of the extended family variety, have been eliminated.
13. As for the observation that bombing Serbs is no good way to deal with a tyrant, the fact remains that in the history of warfare there never really has been a way of taking on a tyrant other than dealing with the army he fields. Belgrade has not been leveled in the manner of WWII fighting, and the fact that Belgradians can have demonstrations boasting about downing a fighter plane is indicative of the fact that our bombing strategy is not directed at them, except insofar as the technology screws up (collateral damage).
14. Nonetheless I remain open to the argument that even if your goal is bourgeois Europe organized around the Danube the bombing strategy is a stupid one. My answer is: I don't know, but I see why they want to take him out. This pragmatic goal is, after all, why this tyrant "matters" and other tyrants in other corners of the globe do not. What I object to are knee-jerk leftist reactions that come flying to the defense of one so objectionable (Milosovic).
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
Fax 518-442-5298