You write:
>In broad terms the Serbs have thoroughly defeated the Kosovo Albanians and
>driven all but a few of them from their homeland. The NATO coalition even
>without the use of ground troops is clearly well set to defeat Serbia. The
>attacks on electricity, water, and fuel make this inevitable, even if
>Milosevic may have an interest in hanging on for a few months and the West
>may give him a face-saving formula.
Whilst I agree NATO has ensured a historic defeat for Albanian Kosovars, I'm not nearly as sure as you are about NATO beating Milo's mob. Milo *knows* NATO won't walk in mob-handed now. And he's always *known* he won't give up all of Kosovo. If he keeps the salient bits, he'll claim a win, and Serbians will grant it to him. The people of Coventry and London never held the destruction of their infrastrusture against Winston Churchill, preferring rather to blame the Luftwaffe. So shall it be in Serbia - to a decisive extent anyway. Whatever the agreement that comes out of this, Milo comes out of it politically enhanced, and the West comes out of it smelling like shit - from Beijing to Salonika. 'The politics of peace' will revolve around Milo and the arrangements he'll enter into to rebuild Yugoslavia.
>Ultra-leftists object to sober assessments of the balance of forces on
>principle, but the reality is if we want not just to analyse the world
>however bitterly, but to change it, we must assess where there may be a few
>openings to influence events in a more rather than a less progressive
>direction.
Yugoslavs are gonna cop a mode of being that is gonna tend to some changes in consciousness, I suspect. There are gonnna be a lot more very poor and politically disenfranchised Yugoslavs, and there'll be a lingering nationalist resentment. There's potential in that, I suppose. Hitler would have thought so, anyway. And NATO will never be the same. Potential there, too. I suppose. And mebbe the UN might rethink its internal structure. Modest potential there, mebbe. And Russia and China will be antagonistic to the West like they haven't been in a decade - the former with a three-star general in the chair and the latter with some nice shiny new warhead delivery gadgets.
Loads of potential ...
>Clearly socialist revolution is impossible in any of the countries of the
>Balkans. (The Albanians had the arms en masse and the will recently but
>they simply did not know what to do with them.)
It's never that clear, I'd suggest. Serbia ain't Albania. But, yeah, NATO's emasculated Milo's extant domestic rivals for now. There'd be nascent rivalries in train - perhaps some from the genuine left, but fairly predictably something from the further right, too.
>A system of apartheid in the Balkans? Kosovo split? Macedonia split? A
>corridor for Greater Serbia to the sea through whole of part of Montenegro
>tied more inescapably as part of Serbia itself? Major transport routes
>across the mountains to link Albania to the Albanian rump of Kosovo?
A partitioned Kosovo (more Serbs and fewer Albanians overall than before), the impoverished nation state of Montenegro, and new generations full of loathing. 'Balkanisation' par excellence. Well, that's my guess, anyway.
>Is being left wing all about observing the world with a morally sharp eye,
>without ever attempting to change it?
Don't ask me, I wouldn't have a bloody clue. When I was in my yo-yo-toting years, western leftism had proven to itself it had serious clout on an international scale - and before I got to the willy-tugging stage, the left had fizzled away, bereft of any shared notion as to what to do with that clout. Now we've all reached the keyboard-tapping phase, we don't even know how to recover that widespread sense of solidarity, impetus and historical significance (but then, I don't get the impression we'd be any the wiser on step two than we were in 1968).
Keep beavering away and await those tectonic moments that might bring us into social relevance, I s'pose ... maybe the character of that moment will help make step two a little clearer - y'know, open up some room for some collective practice so that we might arrive at some shared theory about all this. Something that helps us frame our differential sites of struggle into the same frame.
Not very satisfactory, I know? But then, those tectonic moments do at least seem in the offing.
Heaps of 'em.
Waddya reckon? Rob.