Nationalism,
it is often said, is the plaque of the
late 20th century. But the name of the
plaque anti-nationalism, when seen
against the backdrop of what has been
happening in ex-Yugoslavia. Someone out
there one of the great number of those
who have directly suffered from the war,
may be writing, or is going to write, a
journal of death and calamities that they
have had to endure. Yet they may choose
to try to forget the horrors which cannot
be conveyed to those who have not
experienced them, and they should be
allowed to forget as much and as well as
they can. What cannot be forgotten or
forgiven is the attitude of those who
call themselves the international
community: European governments and
supra-national political institutions, in
the first place but also, proportional to
their lesser power, non- governmental
organizations and a great part of the
public. Allegedly impartial spectators,
they have been major players in the so
called Yugoslav crisis; with their
"neutrality" they have taken
sides, and their "balanced
view" has only strengthened
"The fearful asymmetry of war."
Needless to say, the war in Bosnia has
its history. However, this history does
not reach very far back in time. It is
Europe which lives immersed in its own
not really glamorous history, which is
haunted by memories of the past wars, and
has not only not overcome, but
cultivates, historical animosities. In
looking for deep-rooted hostilities in
the Balkans, Europeans only project and
impose their tormented mind on those who
had been surprisingly free of the burden
of history. Of course, in the common
image of the wild Balkan tribes there is
a great deal of racism, too, yet this
itself is a crucial element of the living
European past. The Ubermenschen can only
sustain their understanding by
denigrating those whom they do not
consider to be of their own race. The
irony about the historicizing racist view
of Bosnia is that the medieval Bosnian
state gave shelter to many of those who
fled religious persecution in the West,
and it also appears that, since the
early-modern era, there has been less war
in the Balkans than in Europe.
The organizing principle of the discourse
in Europe on the Yugoslav crisis and the
wars that followed the dissolution of
Yugoslavia is nationalism. If nationalism
were better understood this might not be
a misleading principle. However,
nationalism is equated with ethnic strife
and with xenophobia, chauvinism, and
fascism. Because this understanding of
nationalism is fallacious, it distorts
the comprehension of what is going on in
the former Yugoslavia; and, consequently,
the West's policies, founded on an
opposition to nationalism-the politics of
anti-nationalism-are utterly destructive.
The sources of this anti-nationalism
anti-etatisme are diverse. Serbia, under
its present rule a fascism sui generis,
is an anti-state. In the years of
Yugoslavia's final crisis and war, it has
never striven to become a nation. The
truth of the matter is that Serbia cannot
be accused of nationalism. On the
contrary, power has developed to the
people: the Serbian nation has become the
"people." In the Germany of the
1930's, this process was termed the
Volkwerdung der Nation. In Serbia, the
people has become not the origin of power
but power itself- the ethnic immediacy of
national being. Consequently, it was
declared, with the authority of leading
Serbian intellectuals, that Serbia was,
and ought to be, not only where Serbs
live but also the soil in which they are
buried. In order to involve the dead in
the celebration of the new Serbian life,
the remnants of Czar Lazar toured the
land, graves were laid open and, among
other rituals, bones were- literally-
"sunbathed" (suncanje kosti).
Serbian dominion was to be founded on
blood and soil, extended so far as to
encompass all the living and all the dead
of that race, regardless of any existing
civil institutions, and this territory
was to be "cleansed" of the
"impure breed" of the
"inferior races." Croatia seems
to be tending to take a similar way
inasmuch as the nation, under the stress
of the war and inept leadership, is
turning into a "community"
(hrvatska zajednica).
I do not want to imply that the state is
an (much less the) ethical good. However,
it is a good in the sense that civil
order is a good. It is this good that
Euro-Serbian anti-nationalism is
effectively destroying. Slovenia seems to
have escaped the worst. Croatia is
becoming a ghastly place to live in. In
Bosnia, anti-nationalism has been most
successful. In proportion to the degree
to which national sovereignty has been
frustrated or destroyed, the politics of
ethnocentrism, chauvinism, xenophobia,
racism and fascism are gaining momentum.
The politics of anti-nationalism have
generated ethnic hatred and ethnic
strife. For the camarilla in Belgrade,
this was the starting point; yet it took
a couple of English lords and an American
politicus emeritus to elaborate the
ethnic strife thesis as the guideline for
official Euro-American policy. In March
1992. they first imposed a general scheme
for the ethnic division on Bosnia (the
so-called canonization plan), which
provided the blueprint for initial
Serbian aggression in that country. (As
if it needed one. What it needed was a
kind of authorization, and this was
given. The war broke out in a month.)
When the first wave of aggression
achieved its basic aims, the Western
diplomats drew a more detailed ethnic
map, signed by Vance and Owen, as it they
wished to set the objectives for the
continuation of warfare. Serbs and Croats
were eager to act and implement, or
correct, this map. It is inconceivable
that Eurocrats might recognize that their
"peace plan" is fueling the
war. They will continue to play the
obscene game: for the murderous
consequences of their "peace
policy"-for all that which in the
eyes of the old-fashioned and the naive
does not really correspond with the idea
of peace-they will blame the
"traditionally barbarous"
Balkan peoples. For Eurocrats, this
"peace plan" has become a point
d'honneur, and Bosnia may, and will,
perish only that Europe will save its
"honor". The European political
elite has been offering, as the peaceful
solution, the very same model that the
Serbian-and now also Croatian-military
and paramilitary forces are putting into
practice with a genocidal war.
This certainly not a formalistic approach
to politics. It has succeeded in finding
a substance. And it was also successful
in dismantling the existing formal
structures without which civil order is
inconceivable. The consistency with which
the West deconstructed the Bosnian
government can only be admired by
philosophers of deconstruction. Western
diplomats seem to have felt no discomfort
in promoting Serbian chieftains from
Bosnia as their equals in negotiations.
The French president even took the
trouble to fly to Sarajevo to have a talk
with them. Their setting up of a
hyperactive apparatus of rape and
slaughter obviously called for respect
Euro-American politicians also chose to
treat Bosnian Croats, who were
represented in, and by, the Bosnian
government, as a separate entity. As a
result, the government was declared the
representative only of Bosnian Muslims
and put on equal footing with the
self-styled criminals. Instead of
treating the latter as outlaws, the West
has outlawed, as it were, the elected
government, making it a problematic
"warring faction" and
compelling it to deal with those whose
aim is to destroy it-that is, it has been
forced to participate in its own
destruction. The plans of European
diplomats and Serbian fascists (as well
as Croats, who have been all too happy to
begin to participate in the partition of
Bosnia) coincided. The former were
dismantling the legal government ideally,
in their heads and around conference
tables; the latter materially, on the
ground; and both were treating the
government as a warring ethnic faction:
as warring Muslims.
With the progressive disintegration of
civil order, with "no Society; and
which is worst of all, continual feare,
and danger of biolent death; and the life
of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish,
and short", the anxieties of Western
anti-nationalists are materializing,
their politics have born fruit. Here they
have "nationalism" in actu. And
as the war continues, affecting all who
have come into contact with it, teaching
them the lessons of Serbian genocidal
practices, it will be all to easy to say
that there are no "good wuys"
in the conflict and to construe an image
of creatures who are totally alien to the
civilized Western race. In this way an ex
post facto justification is provided for
Western policies, suppressing the
embarrassing truth that these policies
have helped to create the facts. The
understanding of what the West has done
is so much easier to suppress because the
racial, if not racist, view of the
Balkans is proving that "nothing
could be done." (When convenient,
the Western power appears clad in
powerlessness.) And if "nothing
could be done," the easy and
fallacious inference is at hand that
nothing has been done-so much the more so
because it is believed that the West can
only do good. Since this crucial chapter,
on what the West has actually done, is
commonly missing in the story, the
irrationality of those who are supposedly
the sole protagonists, the indigenous
tribes, is laid bare and exaggerated to
the neutral Western eye.
Yet the self-congratulatory conclusion
that the West was right to have opposed
nationalism, from the outset is perverse
not only in the sense that it defines, as
the reality of nationalism, an ethnic
hatred which its own anti-nationalist
policies have generated. There is a
desper perversity involved:
anti-nationalism, the opposition to
national sovereignty, absolves
anti-nationalists from opposing ethnic
hatred, chauvinism, racism, and fascism.
They are anti-nationalists in order not
to have to be anti-racists,
anti-chauvinists, and anti-fascists,
although some would prefer to think of
inemselves ass anti-nationalists, and
anti-fascists. They are anti-nationalists
because, in their own opinion,
nationalism equals racism, chauvinism,
and fascism. But what they actually do
when they equate nationalism with racism,
chauvinism, and fascism is that they
create an imaginary enemy. These
phenomena, tied together into a fascio,
may not be necessarily easier to break
than each of them separately; yet it
surely gives a much greater satisfaction
to fight an opponent who is great,
unitary, omnipresent and unreal, than to
grapple with unpleasant, harsh, and
fragmented realities. Yet it is not only
that a crusade against an imaginary enemy
frees one from confronting real dangers.
it is that anti-nationalism-leaving
racism, chauvinism, and fascism actually
unchallenged weakens, or destroys, that
set of institutions which are the reality
of nationalism, that is, the state. And
when the state is weakened or destroyed,
the device is lost which alone could hold
ethnic hatred, chauvinism, racism, and
fascism in check. Without the state,
indeed, little or nothing can be done
against these sinister phenomena. There
is yet another important aspect of this
problematic. To oppose these thing would
necessarily involve some introspection,
some self-questioning on the part of the
West. To oppose national sovereignty most
often involves opposing an external
reality, confronting the
"other" and boosting one's own
identity. To confront ethnic hatred,
chauvinism, racism, and fascism would
mean recognizing that the sinister
phenomena are internal; it would mean
questioning the identity of the West, of
the best of all possible worlds-and that
is out of the question.
The Western incapacity to confront
Serbian fascism is telling, but not
unexpected. In the big "ethnic
strife" which has entered history
books as World War II, fascism was
defeated militarity. However, the West
has never deconstructed and destroyed it
symbolically, that is, politically. This
is why fascism is still alive. In the
policies toward the present Serbian
regime there is much that evokes memories
of the Spanish Civil War and the Treaty
of Munich; the traditions of the politics
of appeasement to fascism, so well
exemplified by Chamberlain, appear not to
have been abandoned. Much effort has been
made in the West not to describe the
Serbian regime as fascist but rather to
look for fascism elsewhere, where the
Belgrade gaze saw it (and never thinking
that fascism might be in that gaze). And
insofar as the Serbian regime and its
aggressive politics have been confronted,
they have been confronted as
"bolshevism",
"communism", or
"nationalism"-all familiar
enemies, which history has already
defeated and surpassed. Because
everything has been done not to confront
Serbian fascism as fascism, Serbia has
not been confronted at all. Not only is
Europe as far as ever from the symbolic
destruction of fascism; it currently even
shuns a military confrontation with it.
This may become one of the messages of
the "Yugoslav War", and Croats
seem to be the first to have learned the
lesson. paradoxically, as long as Croats
had been victims of Serbian fascist
violence, Europe called them fascist,
now, as they themselves have started to
fight Bosnian Muslims Serbian style, they
are no longer described as fascists. As
long as the Croatian population fell prey
to Serbian genocide, Croats were decried
as a genocidal nation; now, as thec have
started to "crease" the
territory, granted to them by European
peace-makers, of the Muslim
"rubbish", these accusations
have quieted down.
The Orwellian fiction which used to be
projected, without a second thought, on
the communist East, seems to have made
its way back home where it has come true.
European diplomats (and lesser pacifists)
argue that war is peace and peace is war.
Yet, in a strange way, this is a moment
of truth. The peace plan for Bosnia
belongs to a long tradition. European
peace has never parted from war. European
peace-seeking was only opposed to wars in
Europe, it only desired that baptized
blood should cease to be shed. The way of
freeing Europe from wars was to export
them to non-European territories, or to
the margins of Europe. Moreover, the idea
of European unity is intimately connected
to the idea of war, or a real war,
against an enemy from without, and as a
rule that enemy is the Muslim. The Muslim
is the symbolic enemy of Europe, and I do
not believe that it is by accident that
Bosnians. And whether accidental or not,
this is certainly not inconsequential.
The image of the warring Muslim invokes
both the Urangst of the Christian,
cultured, and civilized West, and the
more recent specter haunting Western
politicians and intellectuals, that of
"Islamic fundamentalism." Once
the were styled "Muslims, the
Bosnians who refused to join, or
surrender to, either Serbian of Croatian
ethno-fundamentalist formation, became
total aliens to Europe. That the have
been, as Muslims, excluded from Europe
religiously, culturally, and politically,
was to be expected. More surprising is
the form of their racial exclusion.
Because the Bosnians are Slavs, the often
used argument against giving effective
help to the Bosnian government-that this
would upset the Russians who feel deeply
with their "fellow Slavs," the
Serbs-is actually nonsense. Yet out of
such matter is European policy
"composed and made." The Slavs,
it is true, are only second class, or
potential, Europeans, but Muslims simply
do not belong to Europe. That is why it
is assumed that the Bosnians are not
Slavs.
Not much effort has been made in the West
to explain the nature of Bosnian society,
that it was a largely secular society and
that the Bosnian towns which are failing
victim to the urbicidal mob were
historical centers of cultural pluralism
and tolerance. And even if such efforts
were made, it would not make much
difference. For to argue against
anti-Muslim feelings and images is as
futile as to argue
anti-Semitism-arguments cannot change
anything. A further difficulty is that is
impossible to prove in concrete that
anti-Muslims is a constitutive moment of
Western policy in Bosnia. The very
suggestion that this may be the case is
energetically refuted. Yet outcomes of
the policy-whether it is conscious or
unconscious, spelled out or denied,
intended or unintended, originating in
idiocy or malice-cannot be misread. And
this is the writing on the wall.
The obvious fact is that there is a
genocide of Bosnian Muslims taking place
and that its perpetrators have not been
countered in any effective way, much less
stopped. The masterminds of the genocidal
practices are distinguished quests at
European diplomatic conferences, equal
(if not more equal) negotiators, and are
given full access to the media to
disseminate their lies. It is sometimes
said that European governments lack the
will to confront Serbian fascism, but I'm
afraid that the premise of this
explanation is false-it would first have
to be proved that they want to act in any
different way. It takes a strong will to
endure the horrors of the war in Bosnia,
to sustain the genocide, and the West has
not lacked this will. Its policy is one
of anti-nationalism in the guise of
anti-Muslimsm. The Bosnian nation, the
sovereign Bosnian state, has to be
destroyed not only because
state-building, as a principle, is
perceived as a nuisance, but also because
the danger of a Muslim political presence
in Europe has to be averted. The
"shortest way" is to
sufficiently reduce the number of Bosnian
Muslims so that they will give up hope of
ever being anything but an ethnic group.
I would not call this a conspiracy. It is
much more like a dream coming true. To
chase the Muslims out of Europe is the
European dream. To cleanse Europe of
"the Turks" was the dying
thought of the greatest figure of the
Enlightenment. "It is not enough to
humiliate them, they should be
destroyed," urged Voltaire.
"Beat the Turks and I will die
content," he confided to the Russian
Emperess. This dream is still very much
alive, living as dreams live.
The war against the Bosnian state and the
genocide of Muslims is the execution of
the Enlightenment testament. The Sadean
soul of European enlightened rationalism
reigns free. Serbian fascists are
fulfilling the European dream. It the
dream is too dreadful for Europeans to
live it themselves, it is nevertheless
their dream. If it is coming true with
the heap of Serbian and Croat fascists,
this only gives to Europeans double
pleasure; the pleasure of the fulfillment
of the dream and the pleasure of not
having soiled their own hands with blood.
They have the pleasure of realizing their
barbarity and, in the face of barbarity,
preserving their civility. While their
wildest political imagination is
materializing, they can at the same time
maintain the position of horrified
critics of this wildlife. Their racism
can take a sublime and respectful turn as
they condemn the Balkan tribes.
However, this dream, the Bosnian's
nightmare, is bound to become a nightmare
for Europeans themselves, a nightmare not
filtered through TV screens. The denial
to Bosnians of the right to defend
themselves is immoral. To state this may
not be completely out of place here, even
if moral arguments do not have as much
weight these days. They are with great
confidence dismissed by the spineless
political animals who rule Europe. They
adhere to what they take to be
Realpolitik, yet this
"Realpolitik" of theirs is
realistic only insofar as they are
successfully creating a reality after
their own image. In any conventional
meaning of the term, this is not
Realpolitik but a politics of
Realitatsveriust. However, the denial to
Bosnians of the right to self-defense is
not only immoral. It is as also the
destruction of the one certainty on which
the security of modern European order has
been based: the right to self-defense, If
Bosnians are slaughtered like sheep, one
should be aware both of the hand that
slaughters them and the hand that ties
them to be slaughtered. The hand that
ites them is tearing the fabric of
international law in its most vital
place.
Humanitarian aid is not a remedy-with all
due respect to those who, in the UN
straitjacket, deliver it, It is a lie:
the hand that feeds the Bosnians is the
hand that ties them to be killed. The UN
Secretary General was greeted in Sarajevo
by a crowd shouting "Assassin!
Assassin!" Those in the West who are
not completely happy with the UN
performance in Bosnia (and can afford the
luxury of not being
"emotional") would rather speak
of a humiliation of the world
organization in Bosnia. However,
humiliation can only take place where
there is dignity-a quality which has been
impossible to discern in the UN Bosnian
policy. The Arab countries are also
mistaken when they accuse the UN of
having double standards, for this
organization appears to have no standard
at all.
It is part and parcel of the policy which
has not only refused to stop, but has
itself contributed to, the destruction of
civil order and the reduction of Bosnians
to a state in which they have to depend
on such help. Humanitarian aid is the
reverse, the noble face of the denial of
civil existence. All that is left to the
victims of the war is the obscene
recognition that they are humans. Yet if
one recalls the "si non est civis,
non est homo" maxim of European
political tradition, they are not. Thus
the Western policy of humanitarian aid is
a policy of dehumanization-and and final
blow to humanism. (This is not something
Serbo-Croatian fascists worry about they
are clear that Muslims are not humans.
And whatever they do to them, they are
not violating human rights. The
"culture of human rights" - a
self-glorious shorthand for Western
political culture-is not endangered).
Humanitarian aid has also served as an
excuse to avoid Western military action
in Bosnia. And because this is called
peace-keeping, one can only say that of
all the weapons Europe has yet invented,
"peace" appears to be the most
lethal. Thus humanitarian aid has
probably saved time contributing to the
dehumanization of life in Bosnia; at the
same time, peace negotiators, imposed and
led by Eurocrats, have cost more lives
than the war itself, properly speaking.
One of the reasons why Bosnians are dying
is that they believed in Europe. They
thought that the recognition of their
state involved some kind of
responsibility on the part of the
"international community". They
were utterly wrong, and they were wrong
not to have armed themselves when there
was still time. They were also naive to
think that their adherence to European
values mattered-instead of solidarity,
they met racism; instead of support,
humiliation. Their betrayed hopes reveal
the hopelessness of Europe. Amidst the
horror and devastation of the war, a
senior UN official in Bosnia has recently
expressed his hope that Serbian war
criminals (those guilty of the massacre
in Srebrenica) will burn in the hottest
corner of Hell. This appeal to Heaven is
most telling. Is appears that there is no
Earthly instance left to appeal for
justice. And if, in the
"international community",
there is no justice, then this community
is latrocinium (a marauders' realm), and
its leaders latrones (brigads). This
appeal to Heaven is also telling because
it is not the popular Lockean
"Appeal to Heaven." This tells
us, by implication, that liberalism has
little, or nothing, to say. Indeed,
against the background of the Bosnian war
it appears that liberalism has collapsed.
This is the end not of history, but of
liberal history.
There may be more appeals to Heaven in
the future, in a different context. The
Mene, tekel, parsin (the writing on the
wall, in Bosnian blood) has been spelled
out for Western democracies: for Europe. |
