Book Reviews: Once Upon a Time, Trade Unions TBA
On 24 March 1999, at 8.00 p.m. local time, NATO began dropping bombs on Yugoslavia from high altitude. Almost instantly, the Western media, with the partial exceptions of Italy and Greece, developed a sophisticated agenda demonising Slobodan Milosevic, who was held responsible for the genocidal policies of the Serb paramilitary forces in Kosovo against ethnic Albanians. Milosevic’s propaganda apparatus in Yugoslavia retaliated by doing exactly the same thing. It demonised NATO and the West as neo-imperial powers, whose sole aim was to guarantee the interests of the Anglo-American entente in central and eastern Europe; at the same time it intensified the process of ethnic cleansing as a military response to the bombing. In the event, the strategy developed by the media of both conflicting sides was rather successful, although, ironically, Milosevic’s propaganda was substantially assisted by the bombing itself. ‘Third way’ politics and political solutions, for that matter, were not tried at all.
At a the chateau of Rambouillet, outside Paris, in a period of meetings lasting from 6 February to 18 March, NATO powers did not seek a compromise between the Serb and the Kosovo Albanian agendas. Rather, they pursued a coercive type of diplomacy, threatening either to bomb the Serbs or dismiss the Kosovo Albanian cause for independence altogether, if one of the two sides disagreed to sign what was on the table. There was no political will to pursue a peaceful solution to the problem of Kosovo. The idea of compromise had not been part of the political culture sustaining the Rambouillet negotiations.
The merit of Judah’s objective and descriptive book is that it leaves readers to draw conclusions rather than imposing them from the beginning of the narrative, as is usually the case with international relations and professional defence analysts. The author’s account reminds us that contemporary wars are too important to be left to the academics alone and that the journalist’s documented narrative deserves its place.
Having given a brief and impartial historical background concerning the roots of the conflict between the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians, Judah understands that the Kosovo war was not about human rights but about and over territory. He argues that the human rights argument was a strategy deployed by the Kosovo Albanians to win over Western sympathies. In essence, Judah says, ‘at the heart of the matter was a fundamental struggle between two people for control of the same piece of land’ (p. 84). Judah discusses with clarity NATO’s and Milosevic’s objectives before and during the war, detailing their political miscalculation. Dismissing conspiracy theories, the author maintains that NATO wrongly thought that Milosevic would bow after three days of bombing. Milosevic’s ruling group, in turn, was wrong to assume that NATO’s united front would not last and that Russia would supply him with sophisticated air defence. And, as every serious analyst or historian of international relations would do, Judah recognises that we cannot know the full story ‘until the archives are opened’.
Judah’s account is informative and timely (the book was published on the first anniversary of the war), but I have the impression that the author overlooks two significant dimensions of the Balkan crisis in the 1990s. The first concerns the dismemberment of Yugoslavia as such; the second has to do with the so-called ‘double standards’ policy pursued by the West.
Judah’s argument that Milosevic ‘provoked the destruction of the old Yugoslavia and held much of south-eastern Europe captive to his policies’ is blatantly wrong. Susan Woodward, in her path-breaking The Balkan Tragedy—not cited in the bibliography—argued convincingly that the break-up of Yugoslavia was not the result of rival nationalisms and quasi-‘Balkan barbarism’, but rather was brought about by the intervention of the IMF and the World Bank, which demanded constitutional centralisation and abolition of the rights stemming from the 1974 constitution, a policy required for the implementation of a neo-liberal reform package in order to stave off the fiscal crisis of the Yugoslav state. This, in turn, led the wealthier republics, such as Slovenia and Croatia, to seek independence as they felt that they would carry the financial burden of the reform.
A good parallel, for that matter, might be the growth of the secessionist movement of Umberto Bossi in Italy—the Northern League—which sought, in the 1980s and 1990s, to build its agenda on similar grounds, arguing that the centralised partitocrazia of Rome transferred cash and resources from the rich north to the poor south for clientelistic purposes. At that time, Italy, as Yugoslavia, was going through a serious fiscal crisis. Bossi was using the threat of secession as a bargaining tool to achieve an advantageous political position in Italy. Slovenia and Croatia had used nationalism and secessionism throughout the federal disputes over constitutional centralisation and economic reform. A wider comparative and analytical angle invalidates aspects of the Western stereotype which characterise Balkan and east European peoples as incorrigible jingoists, warlike, uneducated and ‘trouble-makers’.
Rightly or wrongly, the Charter of the United Nations drafted after the Second World War deemed that inter-state conflict was the major issue to be dealt with in international relations, thus failing to address the problem of intra-state violence. In this context, NATO’s campaign against Serbia was bound to violate international law and border on ‘double standard’ politics, inasmuch as several other cases of human rights violation (in Kurdistan, Cyprus, Chechnya, Armenia) have triggered no such response on the part of the West. Although Judah discusses the legal problem by seemingly adopting a pro-interventionist point of view, he refers to the issue of ‘double standards’ only in passing, towards the end of the book. Yet this issue is worth considering, for it is interesting to examine the genuine roles played by practicality and by morality in NATO’s global strategy. This perspective would enable us to speculate on the geostrategic interests of NATO, linking up these interests with the broader agenda of the alliance to expand towards the east. It would also enable us to speculate on the distinctive policies (if any) of the European Union vis-à-vis both NATO’s policies during the crisis and the issue of the reconstruction of the region. Judah is not able to comment on these issues, because he did not take seriously the role of Western ‘double standards’ policies.
On the whole the military establishments on either side were not able to achieve their aims. The Serbian Third Army withdrew from Kosovo without being given the chance to defend it. NATO backtracked from the demands it put forward at Rambouillet (one of which was that the alliance should have a free run not only of Kosovo but of all of Serbia). In addition, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 that terminated the war (10 June 1999) stipulated that ‘an agreed number of Yugoslav and Serb military and police personnel will be permitted to return to Kosovo.’ This resolution constitutes now a great hope for the Serb military in the future. It also, more significantly and disturbingly, contributes to fuel the continuing bloody conflict between the Serbs and the Albanians in Kosovo.
In his previous book on Yugoslavia (The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia) Judah predicted a bleak future for Kosovo. He was proved right. At the end of Kosovo: War and Revenge Judah notes that peace has not been restored in Kosovo and that the province is a lawless and brutalised landscape. He also says, quoting Djilas and Stendhal, that the Serbs are not a ‘forgive and forget nation’ and that ‘if they have remembered the 1389 defeat for 610 years, why not this one?’ To prevent this prediction from being fulfilled and establish lasting peace in the region, the West should adopt different policies towards the Balkans. Instead of constantly searching for friends and foes, it should aim to help both the Serbs and the Albanians become ‘forgive and forget’ nations.
