[from Peter Gowan, "The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tragedy," New Left Review 234 (March/April 1999), pp. 86-89, 96-105]
These manoeuvres by Austria and Hungary to break up Yugoslavia were, of course, then overshadowed by the German government's decision to grant recognition to Slovenia and Croatia. The German government's open championing of Yugoslavia's break-up did not occur until the early summer of 1991, but, long before that, both Slovenia and Croatia were getting encouragement from Bonn for their efforts.
The US Agenda
This campaign was not, of course, supported by the United States. It championed Yugoslav unity, as did Britain and France. But, for the us, unity was not the main goal: its policy was principally governed by its concern to ensure the imposition of shock therapy on the country as a whole via the IMF. In 1989, Jeffrey Sachs was in Yugoslavia helping the federal government under Ante Markovic prepare the IMF package, which was then introduced in 1990, just at the time when the crucial parliamentary elections were being held in the various republics. While Markovic bears responsibility for giving in to Western pressure, the practical consequences of implementation of the package were to deprive his government of most of its substance. By 1991, it was incapable of paying its soldiers, thus weakening the guarantors of the old state.
This was a critical turning point in the tragedy. Markovic, in the spring of 1990, was by far the most popular politician not only in Yugoslavia as a whole but in each of its constituent republics. He should have been able to rally the population for Yugoslavism against the particularist nationalisms of Milosevic in Serbia or Tudjman in Croatia and he should have been able to count on the obedience of the armed forces. He was supported by 83 per cent of the population in Croatia, by 81 per cent in Serbia, by 59 per cent in Slovenia and by 79 per cent in Yugoslavia as a whole. This level of support showed how much of the Yugoslav population remained strongly committed to the state's preservation. But Markovic had agreed to couple his Yugoslavism with the IMF shock therapy programme and EC conditionality and it was this which gave the separatists their opening. Their appeal to their electorates involved offering to repudiate the Markovic-IMF austerity measures and, by doing so, help their republics prepare to leave Yugoslavia altogether and 'join Europe'. The appeals of the nationalists in Slovenia and Croatia worked. As Susan Woodward explains: 'In every republic, beginning with Slovenia and Croatia in the Spring, governments ignored the monetary restrictions of Markovic's stabilization programme in order to win votes... "' After winning elections, they worked hard to break up the country. If Western policy for Yugoslavia had been a Marshall Plan, which the federal authorities could have used to rebuild the country's economic and cohesion, the whole story would have been different.
This is not a case of being wise after the event. Western policy makers were very well aware of the issue at the time. In 1989-9o, the us government faced an acute trade-off in its Yugoslav policy. The State Department was concerned in 1990 about Yugoslav political stability. In 1990, the CIA was warning the Bush administration that Yugoslavia was heading for civil war within eighteen months." The dilemma was well brought out by a journalist at a press conference given by Secretary of State Baker on 5 July 1990 in Washington. The journalist asked:
I noticed in the remarks that you made today that were distributed to us, you expressed some concerns about the situation in Yugoslavia. Now, how does conditionality apply to the kind of problem that you have described in Yugoslavia, which is less to do with the central government and more to do with the different republics. It is not clear whether Belgrade could deliver some of the things that you want. How will that be judged?
Baker, normally laconic, replied with some feeling but more evasion:
The question you raised is a very, very good question. There will have to be some serious thought given to the degree to which you look at the republic level as opposed to looking at the central government level. And you are quite right. There are some things in some countries with respect to which the central government can deliver on; and in other countries that cannot be done."
But the us government as a whole opted for the priority of the shock therapy programme. Thus was the internal dynamic towards the Yugoslav collapse into civil war decisively accelerated. The only European states which did have a strategic interest in the region wanted to break Yugoslavia up.
[...]
The New German-American Partnership and the Road to Dayton
As the Bosnian war continued through 1993 and 1994, the rivalry and mutual suspicions between Germany and the United States over various broad European issues gave way to a new unity around a new political programme for Europe and the Atlantic Alliance. One vital step to this was the Uruguay Round Agreement-embracing a common vision not just for 'trade' in the usual sense of that word, but actually for the expansion of Atlantic capitalism across the world through the strategy of 'globalizing' national political economies. Another absolutely crucial step was the agreement at the Brussels North Atlantic Council meeting of January 1994 to expand NATO eastwards into Poland-the key country for both the us and Germany. This decision, taken essentially by the us and Germany, was actually about how to reorganize European international politics after the end of the Cold War. To understand the significance of this Brussels summit decision, we must look at the broader debates and political battles between the Western powers over the shape of the post-cold-war European order. This debate can be bisected analytically into its political side and its military side.
The Political Concept for Europe
The collapse of the Soviet Bloc had re-opened the question of how to structure and channel power-politics across Europe, There were three 'big ideas' in the early 1990s and two of them were absolutely unacceptable to the USA:
Option I: A pan-European collective security system, embracing Russia and the us as well as all the other states of Europe, in an institutionalized framework-a much strengthened and streamlined OSCE- that would be norm-based: clear rules which all should enforce and which would lead all to coerce any state that breached them.
Option II: A two-pillar power structure involving the EU and Western European Union (WEU) in Western Europe and Russia and the CIS in the East. NATO would fade into the background as an ultimate guarantor of its members security, while the WEU/EU would expand into East Central Europe-something Russia could have lived with.
Option III: NATO under American leadership would take command of European politics. The OSCE would be marginalized, the WEU/EU would not be allowed to have a policy-making authority and a command structure autonomous from us supervision-exercized through NATO- and NATO would expand eastwards but would exclude Russia. So Europe would be re-polarized further East between a us-dominated Western Europe and a weakened Russia. Germany would be expected to discuss Eastern issues first with the us and its Western partners, rather than having the option of discussing with Russia before bargaining with its Western partners.
Options I and II would have undermined the American power position in Europe. But, during the early 1990s, there was resistance to Option III, not only from the Russians but also from many European states. It became a vital issue for the us to translate this option into reality.
Yugoslavia may, at first sight, seem to have little to do with these security debates among the Western powers. But what was going on was not just a 'debate': it was a political battle over the future political shape of Europe. And such battles between the Western powers are fought not only in words but also by deeds and by creating facts. In this context, Yugoslavia was a central arena for winning arguments by these methods.
Thus, if the EU had successfully handled the Yugoslav crisis in 1990- 91 that would have given a great boost to Option II The fact that, during the Bosnian war, the United States found that it could not do without political help from the Russians meant the formation of the Contact Group and implied an inclusive collective security approach to European affairs-Option I.
But, with an agreement between Germany and the United States on making NATO the central pillar of the new European system and on expanding NATO eastwards, the way was open for putting that German- American approach into practice in the Yugoslav theatre. Success there would then feed back onto the wider European political field with the actual expansion Of NATO into Poland.
The Military Concept for a New NATO
NATO as a military structure geared to fighting a war with the Soviet Union became redundant with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. But American leadership of Western Europe depended upon the us being able to supply vital military services to its West European allies. The Yugoslav wars gave the us and the French and British states an argument as to a new role for their military capabilities: the argument that chaos in East Central Europe would require the Western powers to 'project power' eastwards. In other words, to take aggressive military action to defeat forces in the East which were undermining stability or threatening the new political economy of Europe.
This concept greatly favoured the us in its battle to rebuild its political leadership of Europe, because the West Europeans lacked key military resources for handling such aggressive 'power projection' on their own: they lacked military transport infrastructures and planes, they lacked battlefield satellite intelligence-gathering equipment, and they lacked key new technologies such as Cruise missiles and other such 'smart' weapons. The us could supply all these. For the West Europeans to supply them would involve big increases in military budgets at a time of fiscal strain-first the EMS, then the Maastricht criteria, against a general background of economic stagnation.
Thus, with this new military concept for eastward power projection outside the NATO area, the us could hope to gain the support not only of the UK-which was already on-side - but also of France, which was eager to use its military capacity abroad to gain political clout in Western Europe. The vital issue though, for the us, was to win over the Germans. In the early 1990s, the German government seemed genuinely interested in a more autonomous European military instrument, built around a Franco-German axis and the Euro-corps. This was also something that President Mitterrand had favoured. But, by 1994, Germany was coming round to the idea that the notion of an autonomous West European instrument was impossible: it had to be a us-led NATO instrument.
The Yugoslav Road to the New NATO
During 1994 and 1995, these shifts on the new political and military role of NATO in the New Europe fed back into the Bosnian conflict. There were, at first, acute tensions between the us and the British and French, because the us wanted to demonstrate its enormous air power with strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, but that threatened the safety of the British and French troops on the ground. The tensions reached the point where some thought NATO might even split on the issue. But, during 1995, an effective set of tactics emerged.
First, the us adopted the German approach to wrapping up the Bosnian war by building an alliance between the Bosnian government and the Croatian government against the Bosnian Serbs. This was a great success against the Serbs, effectively ethnically cleansing them from both Croatian territory and parts of Bosnian territory. Secondly, NATO could swing into action vigorously 'out of area', with British and French forces as well as us air power and the Caroatian and Bosnian Muslim forces driving the Bosnian Serbs back into defeat The whole
operation under us leadership was crowned with a European political triumph for the us in the form of the Dayton Agreement-no one at this time spared any thought for the people of Kosovo. The us tried to argue that the key to victory had been their air strikes, showing how central the us was to 'European security' as a result.
The fact that Dayton did not produce the original us-stated goal of . a sovereign, unitary Bosnia was a mere detail, largely ignored by Western European electorates. The us had taken command of Yugoslav affairs and of the high politics of Europe through the reorganization of NATO and the new German-American partnership, both of which could be blooded in the Bosnian war.
The US Approach to the New Balkan Backlash
To understand the us decision to launch war against Yugoslavia on 24 March 1999, we must understand how events have I progressed, in both the Balkan theatre and in the broader regional European context since Dayton.
The big change in the Balkan region was the Albanian explosion leading to the collapse of an effective Albanian state and the destabilization of both Serbia and Macedonia by the arrival of the KLA - itself assisted by the Albanian collapse.
The real politics of Dayton did not produce a viable independent state: it has been a two 'entity' NATO protectorate unable to collect 80 per cent of its tax entitlements and devoting a staggering quarter of its GDP to military procurement two years after Dayton. 17 Its future survival will depend on keeping the two main states in the area, Croatia and Serbia, in line. The Croatian government has not actually stayed in line, since it has integrated the Bosnian Croat population into Croatia. But the Milosevic regime did keep in line, though it could not keep the Bosnian Serbs themselves under control since a majority of them viewed him as a traitor to the Serb nation by agreeing to Dayton in the first place. What us policy did not wish to contemplate, however, was an Albanian mass irredentist movement, since this would menace the fragile but pivotal republic of Macedonia, as well as Albania. But decades of lack of concern to produce a solution in Kosovo, coupled with the collapse of the Albanian state in 1996-97, opened the door precisely to the such an irredentist movement for a Greater Albania.
The Sali Berisha government of Albania, which lasted until 1996, was a corrupt dictatorship which rigged the elections and imprisoned the leader of the opposition, but he served American policy well because he sealed off the border between Albanian and Yugoslavia and gave no encouragement to the national aspriations of the Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia. (Berisha seems actually to have been a find of British intelligence and, as a result, the British were very reluctant to see him overthrown.)
With the popular uprising that overthrew Berisha, the Albanian state was completely shattered, its security forces dissolved and their arms were seized by the population-some 750,000 Kalashnikovs were privatized. Despite Italian military intervention, the new Socialist government of Nano, just out of Berisha's jail, could not impose order on Albania's territory and could not seal the borders with Macedonia and Kosovo. This gave an opening to the Kosovo Liberation Army, an organization whose leaders had once admired Enver Hoxha but now opened itself to all those who rejected the reformist and pacifist stance of Ibrahim Rugova. The KLA offensive gained a very receptive response both in Kosovo and in Macedonia, where the national aspirations of the Albanians had long been repressed, The KLA offensive in Kosovo got under way in February 1998 and was very effective, targeting Serbian officials and security personnel across the province.
Dealing With the KLA
This presented the Clinton administration with an acute dilemma. It had to do something, since a Greater Albania was out of the question, There was, of course, an obvious solution: for the us and NATO to take a firmer grip over developments in Macedonia and Albania while at the same time leaving the KLA In Kosovo to the operations of the Milosevic regime This could be accomplished through a combination of Milosevic offering Kosovan autonomy within Serbia, backed by the moderate Kosovan leader Rugova, along with a Turkish or Colombian- style counter-insurgency operation against the KLA, clearing out villages along the frontier with Albania and crushing the KLA militarily.
It would, in effect, involve an alliance between the us and the person whom the Americans had built up as the Saddam Hussein of the Balkans: Slobodan Milosevic. From March to September 1998, the Clinton Administration nevertheless pursued this strategy, combining rhetoric and cosmetic actions against Milosevic with effective acquiescence in the autonomy plus counter-insurgency approach. This was the line supported by the two Yugoslav experts of the Clinton team: Richard Holbrooke and Christopher Hill. It was also the line supported by many West European governments and by the Russian government.
The signal for this tactic was given when the us Ambassador in Yugoslavia publicly branded the KLA a terrorist organisation. According to the BBC, this was the specific go-ahead for Milosevic to launch his counter-insurgency in March, along with his offer of
provincial autonomy. This tactic continued through UN Security Council resolution 1199 in September and it was embodied in the 13 October Holbrooke- Milosevic agreement introducing American- led OSCE monitors into Kosovo. As far as the EU side of the operation was concerned, it continued right through into January 1999.
But, sometime in October, Madeleine Albright changed tack. The change involved instructing Hill to produce a new document that would form the basis for peace negotiations between the parties in Kosovo. And this new document contained the key change: Milosevic was to have to accept a de facto NATO protectorate over Kosovo. The document did not, of course, use these words: it spoke only of a NATO-led military compliance force to supervise the transformation of Kosovo while it remained, juridically, a province of Serbia. But politically that meant a NATO protectorate. Albright would have known that no Serbian politician could dare to accept such a diktat from NATO. This new line was supplied to the Yugoslav government in December and was met with outrage from the Serbian side. Why was the new line adopted?
Supporters of the subsequent attack on Yugoslavia tend to assume that the change of American line must have had something to do with a desire to relieve the sufferings of the Kosovo people, perhaps, according to Robin Cook, for example, because between October and Christmas 1998 Milosevic started to behave in a new and brutal way in Kosovo. Yet this was not the view of Cook and the other EU foreign ministers at their EU General Affairs Council meeting on 8 December when Albright had already changed strategy. The report of the meeting in the Agence Europe Bulletin the following day stated the following: 'At the close of its debate on the situation in the Western Balkans, the General Affairs Council mainly expressed its concern for the recent "intensification of military action" in Kosovo, noting that "increased activity by the KLA has prompted an increased presence of Serbian security forces in the region." This makes it very clear that the EU's analysis did not suggest any qualitative shift in the basic approach of Milosevic: on the contrary, it saw the KLA as the driving force behind the lack of a ceasefire.
Albright's Gamble
This unchanging local Yugoslav context in which the Albright strategy shift took place, suggests that the reasons for the shift did not lie within the Yugoslav theatre itself at all. As in the case of the us demarche of January 1992 leading to the Bosnian war, the source of the shift must therefore be sought in wider us European political goals. A military attack on Yugoslavia by the whole NATO alliance would, of course, have enormous pan-European political consequences, for more important for the state interests of all the great powers than the fate of the Kosovo Albanians. Success would decisively consolidate us leadership in Europe. Success outside the framework Of UN Security Council permission would ensure no collective security in Europe by the UN back door of a Russian veto. And it would seal the unity of the alliance against a background where the launch of the Euro-an event potentially of global political significance - could pull it apart.
On a narrower front, successful military operation against Milosevic before the Washington summit to agree NATO's new role would have been a stunning political triumph for Madeleine Albright, whose term of office had, hitherto, been marked by a long catalogue of failure, most notably in the Middle East.
There were obvious political problems for Albright in gaining her triumph. First, the Russian problem, but, following the rouble collapse in Autumn 1998, the Russian state was hopelessly weak. No less difficult was the resistance of the West Europeans. Albright overcame that with three tactics. First her tactic of pre-empting meetings of the Contact Group by holding press conferences in advance, staking out her position publicly with extremely bellicose and militarist language against Milosevic - she had been pursuing this tactic for many months. Second, these incessant threats from Albright created the conditions in which she could argue that NATO's very credibility was at stake: after all the threats she bad made, NATO could not back down I now'. And, third, the Clinton administration spread two pieces of supposedly insider intelligence information: one was that Milosevic actually wanted a NATO attack so that he could sell the NATO compliance force domestically; and second, that the Yugoslav military would in any case soon overthrow Milosevic. Such stories could full the West Europeans into thinking the NATO attack would swiftly be over. In fact, as we now know, the relevant us agencies, notably the Pentagon and the CIA were actually providing quite other information: it would be a very long and difficult air campaign; and there could be a huge refugee crisis." But, the only specifically Balkan issue that mattered to the administration was the avoidance of any commitment to a Greater Albania through self- determination for the Albanians of Kosovo and Macedonia.
Albright had allies in France and, of course, Britain by early January and they were the co-chairs at Rambouillet. With them on board, the option of Germany standing aside was unthinkable-Germany cannot act without France, for fear of being branded with hegemonist ambitions. As for the rest of the EU states, they could not remotely afford to exclude themselves.
Conclusion
There is a powerful impulse within the electorates of the NATO States for their governments to give a lead to the world and really help the less fortunate overwhelming majority of humanity to improve their lives and strengthen their security and welfare. But we must bear in mind two unfortunate facts: first, that the NATO states have been and are bellbent on exacerbating the inequalities of power and wealth in the world, on destroying all challenges to their overwhelming military and economic power and on subordinating almost all other considerations to these goals; and second, the NATO states are finding it extraordinarily easy to manipulate their domestic electorates into believing that these states are indeed leading the world's population towards a more just and humane future when, in reality, they are doing no such thing.
The fate of Yugoslavia in the 1990s has been a classic case of this general story. NATO electorates thought their states were trying to help in Yugoslavia, even if they were not 'doing enough'. In reality, Western policies promoted the descent into barbaric wars. There are occasions when advanced capitalist countries will help the populations of other states. But these occasions are rare, namely when the welfare of the populations of these other states is a vital weapon in a struggle against another powerful enemy. This applied to us policy towards Western Europe when it was threatened by Communist triumph in the early post- war years. The welfare of the people of Yugoslavia has been irrelevant to the NATO powers in the 1990s because these powers have faced no effective enemies whatever.
The Bosnian war produced terrible atrocities, reminiscent of those perpetrated in the Spanish Civil War, in Ireland in the 1920s by the Black and Tans, by the Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern front in the Second World War, by the Americans in Vietnam or by the Turkish security forces in Eastern Turkey today. These atrocities were not perpetrated only by the Bosnian Serbs, but theirs were the most visible cases. No doubt, more such massacres have been Perpetrated in Kosovo by the Serbian security forces who are, at the time of writing, being targeted for annihilation by the NATO powers.
It is surely right that institutions should be built that can put a stop to such acts of political violence and can punish their perpetrators. But we face an acute dilemma when we confront this task because we know enough about the dynamics of politics to be able to identify not only the perpetrators of atrocities, but the international actors who helped and continue to help create the conditions in which such perpetrators arise. And, in the Yugoslav case, the Western powers, by their deliberate acts of commission and omission, played a central role in creating the conditions in which barbaric acts were bound to flourish. There is something deeply disturbing about a system of Western power- politics which can casually and costlessly make a major contribution to plunging Yugoslavia into turmoil arid wars, can then use these wars to further their geopolitical ends and then seek to make political capital out of War Crimes Court judgements of perpetrators of atrocities, while themselves refusing all responsibility.
A Western policy which put the human security of the people of East Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe first would involve a new Marshall Plan for the entire region entailing a development-oriented framework for the region. But that would involve scrapping the whole mercantilist and imperial economic programme of the EU and the IMF/World Bank towards the region. There is not the slightest sign of a preparedness of the Western powers to change course on these issues. Instead, the successful extermination of the Yugoslav conscripts in Kosovo will, no doubt be followed by 'aid' for gangster mafias of the kind which flourish in the aftermath of any devastating war, as is evident in NATO's Bosnian protectorate today.
A Real Solution
A solution to the plight of the various Albanian and Slav communities in the region also requires an entirely new political framework of a regional kind which breaks with the Western powers' drive in the region in the 1990s which has, in effect, fragmented the populations into small, and often largely non-viable statelets. Bosnia survives only as a paper-state which is, in reality, a NATO protectorate. Macedonia survives through us determination to prevent the Albanian minority there from either separating or gaining a federal state structure. A separate Kosovo would have to be a NATO protectorate, not least to prevent a KLA government from achieving the goal of a Greater Albania. The Serbian population is divided into the Srbska Republika 'entity' and in what will be a defeated and embattled Serbia. Montenegro's future Is at risk. And every one of these statelets must devote desperately meagre resources to large military budgets while most of their populations cling to nationalist leaderships in the hope of some minimal safety. The only genuine winner among the states in the Yugoslav theatre-apart from Slovenia, which has escaped the scene-is Croatia, thanks to its great power support. Yet Tudjman's triumphs have only increased his appetite for new conquests, in particular a slice of Bosnia which he has already, de facto, swallowed."
The search for a new regional political framework which can provide all the Albanian and the Slav communities with a new unity and security must involve a new programme for Balkan confederation or federation. Such a new project can come only from social and political movements
among the peoples of the region. Before the current NATO aggression against the region's largest nation, it was still perhaps conceivable that the Western powers could have gained sufficient trust to have had a semblance of being a 'pouvoir neutre' that might encourage such an endogenous popular movement for reconciliation and partial reunification. Now that is impossible in the short- or even medium-term. Any such endogenous movement of reconciliation will now have to repudiate this NATO aggression to have any credibility.
Some may imagine that the NATO powers may actually take responsibility for the lives of the people of the region and may itself engineer a new politics and a new start. But this is to completely misunderstand the basic premise of the whole operation of the Western powers in the Yugoslav theatre since the late 1980s That premise is that not a single one of the NATO powers had a vital state interest in ex-Yugoslavia. For the European Union, their only vital Interest is containment of conflict, above all containment of refugee movements. The us does not even have that stake in the region's future.
A NATO 'victory' in this war could promote the Clinton administration's central objective in waging the war: the winning over of Western Europe's political systems to us leadership of the new, aggressive NATO. After all, the political elites of all the main parties of Western Europe now find themselves justifying, day-in and day-out the vital necessity and enormous human value of the new NATO: Western Europe is being won to the idea that attacking damaged sovereign states is legitimate; shattering their military forces, infrastructures and economies is permissible; ignoring the UN Charter and the checks built into the UN Security Council structure is unavoidable; marginalizing and excluding a currently weak Russia is necessary; humiliating and ignoring the interests of the largest nation in former Yugoslavia, the Serbs, is vital. And we Europeans could never have achieved all these things without the generous leadership of the United States.
The story of Western involvement in the region is obscured by a poisonous Western imperial propaganda which turns reality on its head. It says that the Balkans cause the West no end of trouble because of the appalling characters who live there. The reality is that the Western powers have caused the Balkan peoples no end of suffering because they continue to use the region as a theatre for their power politics.