THE REASON WHY
By Tony Judt
New York Review of Books,
May 20, 1999
(Published April 22, 1999)
With the onset of war in the
Balkans, President Clinton has taken to wrapping himself in the cloak of Winston
Churchill. Defending his own decision to face up to Slobodan Milosevic and bomb Serbia, he
asked an audience on March 23: Wouldn't everyone be better off if people had listened to
Churchill and stood up to Hitler?
The implicit comparison does not
merit comment, but it prompts a different, more plausible historical reference. For there
was once another British leader and statesman. Like Bill Clinton, he came to office with a
long record of experience in local government and built his political coalition upon a
claim to competence in domestic management. Like Bill Clinton, he found himself faced with
an unexpected crisis in Eastern Europe. He too calculated that public opinion was not
interested in overseas military ventures, and he accordingly went to great lengths to
negotiate and compromise with a foreign dictator, assuring his fellow citizens that he had
no intention of dragging them into a ground war over a faraway country of which "we
know nothing."
When the foreign dictator finally
went too far and undertook the systematic bloody destruction of an Eastern European state,
the British statesman reluctantly declared war - a war that he pursued with such lassitude
and incompetence that he was finally replaced by Winston Churchill himself. That British
statesman, of course, was Neville Chamberlain - and his mantle fits all too snugly upon
the shoulders of our present commander-in-chief.
I invoke this comparison as a
reminder that we can indeed learn from History - but only if we choose the right examples.
The war in the Balkans has been the occasion for all manner of claims about the things the
past does and doesn't teach. We have been told that it is an "age-old" conflict
dating at least to 1389, and that our intervention would change nothing: a half-truth
invoked to support a self-serving falsehood. We have been told by leftists nostalgic for
cold war certainties that the US's own past misdealings overseas make us no better than
those we are attacking and that we thus have no business judging the behavior of others: a
sophistic assertion of moral equivalence that cuts the ground from under the very
universal principles upon which the left itself purports to stand.
We have been told by isolationists
of the right that we have no reason to care or react to overseas events that don't touch
our "vital interests": as though, since 1941, America's interests - however
amorally calculated - have not been intimately dependent upon developments around the
globe. And we have been reminded by realists of all stripes that we failed to stop mass
murder in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Kurdistan, and thus look rather odd taking a stand in
Kosovo: as though our past irresponsibility in the face of genocide were a warrant and
justification for repeating the mistake. Today, it seems, it is those who remember the
(recent) past who are doomed to repeat it.
If we must invoke the past, let us
not be quite so selective. What is happening in the Balkans did not begin six centuries
ago, but it does have a history. Ethnic cleansing was not invented by Slobodan Milosevic.
To confine ourselves to the present century, population clearances have a long pedigree.
After World War I an unsuccessful effort was made to leave people where they were and draw
new boundaries around them in the name of self-determination - leaving Poland,
Czechoslovakia, and especially the newborn Yugoslavia as multinational states under
nationalist rulers. The experiment failed.
World War II produced the opposite
outcome: with the notable exception of Poland, which was shifted westward in accordance
with Soviet dictates, frontiers were left in place and people were moved instead. By 1945
there were some 46 million people who had been forced to leave their homes in East-Central
Europe alone; most of them never returned. Ukrainians were expelled from Poland,
Hungarians from Czechoslovakia, and Germans from everywhere (there were 13 million German
"expellees" in the Federal Republic by 1949). The complex and conflicted social
and "ethnic" landscape of the continent had been radically simplified: by
involuntary emigration, expulsion, resettlement, imprisonment, and extermination.
The ethnic cleansing undertaken by
Hitler and Stalin thus "solved" the ethnic problem in Europe. The solution was
not one that the democracies of the West would have sought, nor were they in a position to
prevent it. But in conjunction with the enforced stability of the cold war, the radical
"tidying up" of Europe's interwoven nations and peoples prepared the ground not
just for the peace and prosperity of Western Europe but for the post-Communist trajectory
of Eastern Europe too (except, significantly, in Yugoslavia, where neither Hitler nor
Stalin had been in a position to enforce his writ during or after the war). The majority
of Eastern European politicians today have little interest in reviving memories of
injustices suffered at the hands of their erstwhile ethnic foes - Ukrainians in Poland and
vice versa, Transylvanian Hungarians in Romania, etc.; the prospect of a European future
trumps the demagogic advantages to be gained from invoking local pasts. The exception
proves the rule, and not just in Serbia: Slovakia's Meciar saw little hope of
securing early entry into the EU and thus felt no inhibition about exploiting nationalist
sentiment against the remaining Hungarians in his country. He was defeated in Slovakia's
last election.
But it is one thing to build a
postwar world on the unacknowledged foundations of someone else's crimes, quite another to
endorse those crimes for the future. Since 1945 we have set in place a plethora of
precedents (the Nuremberg and subsequent trials), treaties, charters (notably that of the
UN itself), and accords such as the 1948 Genocide Convention, whose purpose has been to
outlaw any further "solutions" of this kind and to provide legal and practical
grounds for intervention and punishment should someone seek to undertake them. At first
this framework of international disapproval for final solutions of one sort or another
was, correctly, understood to be an effective, realistic response to behavior that was not
only immoral but deeply disruptive of international relations, and thus a threat to
everyone's interests, however selfishly conceived. But the passage of time, and the fond
illusions fostered by the security of the cold war era and the fall of communism, have
returned us to an earlier perspective in which ethics and national self-interest have
parted company. We are now taught to think of foreign conflicts, in James Baker's
deathless phrase, as fights in which we have "no dog."
This is curious, and made curiouser
still by the occasional emphasis upon "national sovereignty." Like General
Pinochet's defenders in Chile and elsewhere, the critics of armed intervention in
Yugoslavia point to the inviolability of sovereign states. If Slobodan Milosevic wants to
do nasty things in the poor little country he rules, that's his business; even if it means
stamping roughshod over years of nonviolent attempts at conciliation and local self-rule
by Kosovo's Albanian representatives. But if he starts crossing frontiers, it becomes our
affair. Even if we don't want to refer to the dictators of the Thirties, we ought to find
this stance rather bizarre: we live today in a world where the "sovereign state"
is hemmed in by an ever-growing body of international laws, regulations, treaties, and
unions. "Globalization," if it means anything, means that the national state has
been forced to abandon many of the economic and fiscal instruments that once defined its
claim to autonomy. If a sovereign state can't make multinational companies conform to its
tax laws, can't ignore international regulations on air traffic safety or food
manufacture, and can't block the cross-border flow of money and goods without facing the
wrath of various international agencies and banking authorities, why are we so quick to
acknowledge its right to rape and murder its citizens?
The war on Slobodan Milosevic, then,
is a war we have to fight (albeit we are fighting it in the wrong way and under the most
inappropriate leadership). Our responsibility is not diminished by the fact that in many
ways we invented Milosevic - he was "our man" in the Balkans (Richard Holbrooke
built a second career on his assignment to "deal" with the Serbian dictator, a
project which required that the latter be accorded an appropriate level of recognition and
honor for many long years). The end of the cold war has not brought History to a close,
nor has it returned us to the starting point. But it has confronted our reluctant leaders
(political and military alike) with a reminder of something they either forgot or never
knew: that the extermination of minorities within national frontiers has many recent
European precedents. It is illegal, unethical, and threatens the interests of everyone.
But it works, as Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, and others well know. Unless we want
to collaborate not just in the slaughter of Kosovo's Albanians but also in the dismantling
of the fragile international system built on the ruined landscape of the last great
exercise in ethnic cleansing, this is our war, too, and we had better win it.
The author is Remarque Professor of
European Studies at NYU.