The question of territorial coherence cannot be avoided. Otherwise communal differences get fought out over smaller and smaller patches of territory, streets even, and it becomes a question of burning out individual streets or houses.
Consider the situation of Canada, nearer to most LBO-talk subscribers than the Balkans. There has been a substantial loss of anglophone inhabitants of Quebec over the last 20 years. No doubt through a mixture of reasons, economic, emotional etc. Some with a perceived sense of discrimination against them, some with just a sense of discomfort, a few no doubt, after some ugly conflict in which they feel their civil rights were severely abused. No doubt some young men got killed in gang warfare as they always do.
Now not all parts of Quebec province are francophone. Perhaps, to be devil's advocate, the problem could be solved by shaving off the anglo-phone bits and let them join Ontario or the maritime provinces....
Or in Ireland, under occupation also by an imperialist power, on the excuse that there would be ethnic clearances by fire and gun from whole areas of Belfast and Ulster generally. Why not redraw the map, move 3 more of the counties of the historic province of Ulster, that have catholic majorities, into the Republic (Fermanagh, Tyone and Armagh) and let the sectarian Ulster Protestant statelet oppress its minority anyway it chooses and see if it can survive economically....
Unless you suspend the vote completely (and this was suspended in Kosovo) the time comes when there has to be a vote somewhere.
The unit has also to be related to the coherent economic life of the people and how much economic intercourse there is. It is not progressive from a marxist point of view, I suggest, to redefine the borders of the consitutional units ad infinitum.
I note that one of the pieces forwarded by Yoshie suggests that at its best (and it is worth noting demands at their democratic best) the Serbs in Kosoov now are not necessarily asking for a sectarian enclave that could then join Serbia, but are asking for the civil rights of Serbs to be respected throughout the whole of Kosovo. That is a just demand, and will have to be enforced ultimately by people at the point of a gun, called officials of the state power.
Where IMO democrats and marxists would differ from NATO, is that we would see this as only happening in a much wider context in which many measures were being fostered to promote the recovery of civil society, and in particular democratic economic initiatives of a cooperative nature. That, after all is what is in the most immediate interests of the people currently living in Kosov whatever their individual history and subjective loyalty, and psychological trauma.
BUT small democratic economic inititiatives, local markets, cooperative reconstruction projects etc, will not be fostered by NATO because the class ideology of NATO. That, of international finance capital, thinks in terms of maximising profits by moving capital around economic activity in which working people figure not in their organic interdependent complex richness but as fragmented isolated units of labour power or devices for the faster circulation of circuit money-commodity-money.
No - to brain storm an answer - British imperialist troops should not race up and down streets firing rubber bullets. (It did not work in Northern Ireland). Six of them should get some shovels, go to 3 Albanians of good will and 3 Serbs of good will and renovate a patch of territory for market place.
If they cannot do this very well, they should be replaced by other soldiers from another country (who might cost less anyway) ie consitute more of a peace corps than peace keepers.
But as I have argued consistently, the present dilemmas of NATO in Kosovo arise from paternalistically trying to solve the problem literally from on high, instead of supporting the rights to self determination in a geographically defined area, but only on condition that the rights of minority people in that democratic area are also recognised.
Chris Burford
London