AMERICA IN BOSNIA: SIGN OF THINGS TO COME

Michael Stenton

The present American inclination to support an Islamic micro-state in Bosnia against the Serbs, and against the Croats of Herceg-Bosna, would have seemed far-fetched and improbable to most observers in 1991. It is just conceivable that the trend will not continue to its logical destination, but to count on its alteration would be foolish. The existing state of European confusion will, in effect, continue to encourage the Washington ‘janissaries’ - their ranks swollen after Albright’s promotion - to push a strongly ideological policy in the name of ‘Amerian leadership.’ Circumstances permitted Washington to obstruct an early settlement of the war in Bosnia in order to compel Europe to consent to the American use force to end it.  Those circumstances have not changed.

Once it was clear that Alija Izetbegovic was an American client, no one wanted to pay the price of criticising his regime. If this inhibition still operates, as seems likely, one can expect the Muslim government in Sarajevo to carry out its threats in 1998. With American tax-payers’ money it is busy re-equipping and training its army. Once this is done it will attempt to destroy the Republika Srpska. The janissary element in Washington is well-disposed to this outcome and confident of media support in representing the destruction of the Dayton compromise as the enforcement of Dayton principles.

There is a tendency to speak of ‘Europe’ as an entity which opposes this trend, which regets the decision to arm the Muslims, and which wants the Dayton division of Bosnia to be the end of the story - apart from that necessary concession to State Department vanity, the ‘war crimes’ coda.  This pragmatic Europe does exist - in diplomatic circles, ministries of defence, and the minds of a few dissident journalists.  It can be glimpsed in British and Italian statements; it can be deduced as a French preference; and it is what the Kremlin wants the Russian public to believe is Russian policy. 

On the other hand, the Germans and Austrains have their own janissaries. Old-fashioned anti-Serb passion is stronger there than anywhere else.  German diplomats always wish to sound pragmatic, and their underlying commitment is to Croatia, but while the Bosnian Muslims retain American favour the German Government is likely to block a strong European response to 'janissary' tendencies in Washington. Bonn likes to inhabit whatever Washington defines as the high moral ground.  American goodwill has been invaluable - more so than French, British or Russian - as Germany quietly resumes its position as the chief military presence in Europe.

So far, so conventional. But these observations only state the surface problem. They explain something but not enough. There is another Europe. I do not mean real public opinion, which is almost as unexcited about Bosnia as its American equivalent, but the mirage of strong opinion created by the Serbophobic media and accepted as real by the politicians. For the liberal elites in the capital cities of the European Union, the Bosnian Question remains an ideological knot which has neither been untied nor cut. The anti-Serb faction in Washington have their soulmates in London, Brussels and Paris.

Balkan events of limited instrinsic importance have disclosed to Washington the weakness of European politics and how Europe can be lead. It was much harder in 1945. It is the ideological thrust of Serbophobia which is so important, because it helped weak European politicians to ignore their professional advice and ‘go global,’ just as in Washington it helped janissary professionals to override political (and Pentagon) doubts and stay uncompromising.  With the partial exception of Germany, the key to diplomatic action about Bosnia is not national interest. The concept of such interests - American, British, French, Russian - cannot be used to track what has been happening.

Let us consider not interests but the concept of policy.  Do modern states have policies?  A political insider, a witness to the chaotic process of lobbying, fixing and improvising may doubt it. Washington may seem to be a wholly non-strategic environment where the careers of leading politicians and the money of the bigger lobbies interact unpredictably. British diplomats were lamenting even fifty years ago that it was almost impossible to get policies out of democratic politicians. If this was true in Churchill's time, it was no less true in Thatcher’s. Margaret Thatcher could react to events energetically. However, she was no strategist, and she was pushed out of Downing Street precisely because she would not, probably dared not, work out a policy for Europe. Bill Clinton showed not the least relish for ‘Bosnia’ when it kept crawling up his presidential agenda. (A true janissary might have over-reached himself in 1992 and failed.)  Nevertheless, appearances are deceptive. The institutional weight of the interventionists in 1993, as of Britain’s Europhiles in 1990, ensured that Clinton’s doubts, and Thatcher’s Euro-scepticism, did not obstruct their desired goals.  Curious it may be, but policies do happen.

Policies are not formulated in the clean, crisp and lucid way that a good bureaucrat would like, but they emerge and by persisting develop a strategic force. If elected politicians do not think about strategy they should not be surprised to find themselves acquiring it like a fungal infection.  If the process is difficult to understand, it is because we look for positive, intelligent motives and pay too little attention to Rhetoric, Ideology and the manipulation of negatives. There is a post-modern media-centred political process which displaces professional diplomacy and informed debate.  By negatives I mean the ability to place others under pressure - not by doing something but by refusing consent to do something.  (Hence the value of the UN, the World Bank, and OSCE - even the World Health Organisation was used against the Serbs.)

America intervened in Bosnia by refusing so many things that it became indispensable. By Ideology I mean High Fashion in ideas about power and legitmacy: in this case, smart designer opinions supplied to the rich and educated.  By Rhetoric I mean the ability of a two or three news agencies and a TV channel to plant on hundreds of newspapers and TV channels both the terms of debate on a given issue and the relevant information.

We have a problem. We scan the skies for the Black Helicopters of World Government while the UN Secretary-General offers plausible denial.  With good will and closed eyes you notice nothing; with suspicion and open eyes the dark choppers are everwhere. In March 1997 a few American and German troops have turned up in Albania to jump and roll in front of the cameras and evacuate NATO nationals.  The Germans, in self defence, were shooting up local policemen.  My TV was telling me that the international community had to intervene in Albania to prevent ‘anarchy’ and a NATO spokesman in Brussels explained that NATO must have a ‘political framework’ before it can act.  Where did this rhetoric come from? There is nothing obvious about it. Other words and other meanings were possible. It is evident that this ‘anarchy-intervention-political framework’ was planted knowingly and then diffused willingly. Once inserted in media discourse such a story exists; it displaces possible variants, and cannot in the normal course of events be remade, though it can be dropped.  It is useful to call the planted story rhetoric because its function is both to indicate possible action and to exclude obvious questions.

This is the normal framework of modern politics. Globalism is not a conspiracy, it is a social system, a mentailty and an expanding wave of redefinitions. Formal legitimacy is becoming aside-issue. Functional legitimacy is redefined as less a matter of effective authority or even ballot boxes than of conformity to globalist precepts.  Rhetoric is not persuasion but the control of the media agenda. Ideology is the collective motivation (or the herd instinct) of Wealth. The points are familiar, the pattern is still under-recognised. European politics used to be different.

Only a decade ago Washington’s Big Business liberalism was considered something of a joke by Left and Right alike. Europe was more social-democratic, more anti-immigration, more atavistic and national. It still is. Yet Western Europe since 1945 has been less un-American than commonly supposed and it is getting even less so. It is striking that the immigration question - the great globalist Signifier - was always handled, in practice, on strangely American assumptions despite the unfriendly national contexts. The power of globalist ideology to freeze the national capacity for action, even reaction, was there for all to see.

Wealth is, today, no longer hampered by the regional, Cold War constraints which kept Europe different before 1989. The isolationist Right in America has long charged the liberal elite with being unpatriotic. In Europe the same argument is developing. The attack on the nation state is unrelenting and explicit. The more you resist, the bigger the siege engines used against you. The British attempt to be in Europe without capitulating to its institutions provokes a sort of cold fury from Euro-globalists and is regularly punished by the European Commission and Court.  The Swiss decision not to join ‘Europe’ (actually, not the EU but the regulated trade penumbra) was resented.  Suddenly, Swiss banks have no protection as they face the wrath of Jewish families whose pre-war deposits they confiscated. Is is coincidental that the Swiss banks are now learning that they are vulnerable and exposed? Very well, let it be coincidence. But this much is safe ground: the just demand for repayment was, sadly, ignored from 1945-95. Here we return to Rhetoric. Somebody has passed a note to Media Control and hey presto, it’s an issue.

Wealth, of course, does not have a single interest, but that is like saying that investments are not all the same. Wealth seeks a favourable regime, reassurance and ideological satisfaction. It does so in Europe as well as in America.  This is less a post-Marxist accusation than a claim that as the ideological purchase of nationalism has receded the hyper-capitalist or globalist voice has grown stronger, and that as socialist internationalism has shrivelled the internationalism of the investing class, hardened by a rediscovered sense of manifest destiny, is unconstrained and rampant.  Nature abhores a vacuum. What is now facing us is the trend in the power centres in Europe towards American solutions - a United States of Europe with American-style politics and media dramas. ‘Bosnia’ is a bundle of straws in that wind.

European union has been a State Department demand since the beginning of the Cold War.  Washington seems remarkably complacent about the prospect of a serious European rival. There is plainly an ideological imperative at work. Washington needs a highly privileged ally - on the model of Britain forty years ago - to help the West face the Asian future with confidence. Washington needs to show that the American model can be reproduced outside America if China and Russia are ever to become global-democratic.

Europe therefore must be stabilised as a single liberal imperium, lest it reverts to nation-state unpredictability. Only a single Europe may be expected to help impose the World Trade Organisation on everywhere else, and without this extension U.S. intellectual property rights cannot become globally secure. If Microsoft is ever to universalise the use of its software protocols and then to tax every electronic transaction in and around our globe - Globalist Nirvana - the enforcing power would have to be tremendous.

          These assertions about the political process provide a framework for understanding Washington choices. It is not a question of presidential strategy, because there might be none. But what the European outsider senses in Washington is an imperial grasp of how to manipulate chaos, short-sightedness and brutal self-interest in the name of higher purpose. The invocation of high purpose, though remorselessly crude and infuriatingly tendentious, is not bogus: it is ideology. It is also traditional. Consider how the Isolationists were outmanoeuvred in 1939-41: dramatic crisis management, financial and trade embargos, safe zones, protected areas. This repertoire of techniques is now very familiar.

Roosevelt's actions may not have seemed very coherent. He was a politician fighting to prevent a suspicious Congress from strangling his preference - but his preference was war, and he got his way. God knows, the Cause was good, but we may consider how he reached his goal and then admit that even Studs Terkel’s ‘Good War’ had its downside. An ideological intensity was deployed not to justify but to facilitate a refusal to notice when an opponent was trying to meet America half-way. This was used to by-pass majority opinion, and Japan was successfully provoked.  Like nuclear weapons, that is a trick that cannot be unlearned.

In the quality of its parliamentary institutions Europe is now starting to resemble America: incredible and disfunctional at the quasi-federal sumit, still functional below. If we ever get to a real European High Parliament, the Tower of Babel will be reinvented. It would surpass Capitol Hill in the dreadfulness of its political debate. Speech itself might wither away. Euro-parliamentarians would surely dispense with oratory and earphones and express themselves by clicking on icons after viewing ‘presentations’ based on newsreels and artwork. In any case, Europe too is passing from the honourable estate of parliamentary government to the infernal condition of endless empathetic electioneering about next to nothing.

Half our politicians are Clinton-clones. We are set up for new ‘Bosnias,’ including Bosnia-Two, because we will need, from time to time, problems which can be bombed. There is a process of civic decay which leads to bread and circuses: humanitarian crisis, CNN and Intervention.  When a parliament tries to represent a continent, the region represented is too large and nothing else is possible except pork-barrel squalor, glutinous sentimentality and episodes of hysteria when media-nominated international enemies practice ‘defiance.’  No patria, no patriotism.

But if the great nations cannot have patriotism, shall it be allowed in the others? If not, matters must be pushed to a conclusion. There is a dominant ideology: hedonism, victimology and anti-tribal correctness; and of these parts the greatest is the first. Standing against it, or forced to do so, there is what can be rustled up as the nationalist opposition. Among the post-patriotic consolations of the New Order is the growth of a metropolitan chauvinism, a new self-righteousness more unreflective than anything known even in the age of imperialism. The nationalists are not really defiant: those that cannot play to the Global Gallery as victims prefer to get along with their cantonalised existences without exposure to world-wide media scrutiny. But the Dominant Trend will not allow them off the hook without a display of deference. The dominant ideology needs episodic challenges and will boldly seek them out. Once a note is passed down from Media Control, journalists will duly turn over the designated stones to expose nationalist toads.

During the recent war in Croatia and Bosnia, many Serbs were undoubtedly in the grip of patriotic emotion, but in front of foreigners they choked up and hardly dared speak the name of their passion. The Croats and Muslims knew that they must tell polite lies. Their own chauvinism - their reckless attack on Serbs, Serbian interests, and Serbian pride - was very lightly masked as a principled objection to constitutional innovation or as an undying attachment to multi-ethnicity. But the only lies that the Serbs could remember were the Yugoslav lies, and Media Control had decided at the end of 1991 that the Yugoslav Lie should be replaced with the Bosnian Fiction. So, when confronted by the international media the Serbs were struck dumb. An enchantment deprived them of the capacity to say anything except that the media were unfair. The enchantment was ideological: the combined magic of old Yugoslav taboos and the threat of New World Order disapproval. The globalists’ psychoanalysts said that the Serbs were sick with self-pity. The truth is rather that they were shocked and confused that it was so difficult and dangerous to be patriotic.

If the Serbs had really been a peasant people untouched by modernity, they could have declared and secured the Great Serbia their rivals feared most. But despite pretending otherwise the Serbs were remarkably vulnerable to disapproval. Confused both by the old communism they had not quite escaped and by the new globalism they wanted to treat with, their nationalism adopted a strangulated and offended tone which was new to them and incomprehensible to others.

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first strike dumb. That was the great ideological achievement: the presentation of nationalism -- by the liberal media machine to the Euro-American audience -- as pure delinquency and foam-flecked inarticulacy. (Asia did not matter at all.) For the Anglo-French liberal media, as for CNN, the fact that the nationalism was Serbian was almost incidental. The Milosevic regime acted out a debased role to perfection. Its domestic propaganda switched from gutter nationalism to censorship and Stalinist absurdity and its foreign apologetics never rose above low-brow mendacity. It made, voluntarily or under inducements yet to be uncovered, a signal contribution to the New World Order it purported to oppose, and it fed, by its crimes and criminal incompetence, the confidence of interventionists on both sides of the Atlantic.

The handling of the Bosnian question came at an extraordinary time and was rich in implications unguessed at in 1991. When the Yugoslav crisis first broke, a Europerson called Jacques Poos (Luxemburg) declared that the ‘hour of Europe’ had struck. We were soon invited to consider this ridiculous, and to acknowledge the continued vitality of American leadership. But Poos was half-right. American leadership is not quite American as it was. The hour that struck was the hour of Euro-America: the central alliance of the New Order. America had no entry into the Balkan game except as Germany's enforcer. When the Anglo-French pragmatists detected the ideological strength of the globalist power-play, they backed off until there was no alternative to bombing the Serbs. This does not mean that the story is over, or that Europe is fully signed up for continental union, Media Control, a convergent Euro-American politics and a common ideological platform; but that is the trend. Bosnia was handed to Holbrooke with only the smallest pang of Euro-grief.

The Zeitgeist is not about to be challenged by a Right which has embraced high capitalist recklessness or by a Left which will swallow anything to be allowed to crawl back into the ideological limelight. Yet the demoralisation of the national elites - or their global moralisation - has been exaggerated by the shock of 1989. The architects of the European super-state are over-reaching themselves in the push for monetary integration and they will need to be very deft to deflect the nationalist counter-stroke. Europe remains rich in national variety. A continent briefly unified under the globalist legitimism of the super-rich might be rebroken by a revival of spirit in the patriotic lower orders and by political parties which explore new inter-national alliances. I do not ‘believe’ in the Internet, any more than in the International Postal Union, but the work of Media Control might well become much more difficult than it is now. It is even possible that the educated classes will stop watching television.

It is time for the old Right and old Left to speak to each other and be conciliatory, for Buchanan and Chomsky to notice what they have in common, for the real Tories and real Gaullists to stand back to back and to make their peace with Scandinavian Social Democracy. Without new alliances no one will escape the global snakepit demanded by law firms, oil companies and media corporations. The patriotic understanding of authority, law, democracy and economic self-determination needs a louder voice. Synthetic globalism can best be opposed by a genuine internationalism, a civilised respect for the patriotism of others which offers the only true and just approach to the Serb-Croat problem or the Northern Irish problem. The black helicopters assisted the Croat destruction of the Serbian Krajina because the globalists cannot get their minds around this possibility.  It is they that insist that there must be zero-sum games and fairy stories: victims and fiends; Croats and Turks to win and Serbs and Kurds to lose.

The ideological capacity of Media Control is not strong but weak. The West did not win the Cold War on the ideological front. On the contrary, capitalist democracy was in all sorts of trouble among the educated classes of the First and Third worlds, and it was unable to supply much inspiration to the few struggling for freedom inside the communist world. Marxism, like the Soviet economy, deconstructed itself well before 1989. But it had been almost unscathed by capitalist polemic.

The rediscovery of the market, which is a genuine milestone for the European Left, is a belated recovery of knowledge which the Left abandoned, despite Keynes's warnings, when European intellectuals started grasping for a pseudo-religious absolutism after the First World War - the greatest disaster known to our culture. What saved the West in the aftermath of Nazism was not the atomic bomb but working-class dislike of the anti-patriotism and compulsion visible in the Marxist recipe.

Any serious New World Order needs to change the U.S. a bit, the European Union a lot and Japan a great deal. That is the trilateral vision. What has been learned recently is how internal opposition to its military shape - Nato expansion and activism - can be disabled and distracted by 'Bosnian' episodes. An overwhelming superiority in high tech weapons, and high confidence in Media Control, will, if uncontested, make plausible a military intervention in Russia or China if one or the other shows signs of breaking up or going through episodes of Balkan 'anarchy'.

We don't want to fight,

But but by jingo if we do,

We've got the bombs, we own the rules

We'll have Siberia too.

Or Manchuria.  The heart of this world order would be, essentially, an alliance of capital investing states made stable by their materially well-rewarded middle classes. But will the United States remain stable enough, can Europe (not just Serbia) be denationalised, and can the rigid patriotism of Japan really be conscripted by Euro-America?

The janissaries of the New Book confront vast problems. But the worst is that they have nothing to offer the masses - anywhere - except the policed and pitied presence now available to blacks in New York, London and Paris. This alone should be their undoing. But let us not seek comfort in the prospect of apocalypse; let us hope, instead, that the rebalancing of world power takes place sooner rather than later. Until then the survival of good sense will depend on a revival of critical energy on the patriotic Right and the anti-imperialist Left and an accommodation between them so chaste, serious and accurate that the Dominant Trend will know itself to be challenged.  The globalists do not relish real debate. They have little flair for ideology and will trust to Media Control. Whomsoever the Trend wishes to destroy, it must first strike dumb.

If the history of patriotism cannot survive in the universities it must survive on the bookshelves of bookstores. J.G.A.Pocock, a good historian writing in the London Review of Books, warned recently that new immigrants - in this case to New Zealand - might be content to do without a history, and join themselves to the forces demanding that nobody shall have one. But his broader point is convincing: ‘We face a future in which it cannot be guaranteed that histories will supply identities any longer; but in that world, powerful inputs will continue to be made by those people who have histories and are not afraid to write them.’ 

The Serbs are now virtually disbarred by their critics, crimes and enemies from patriotic action on their own behalf. But they can still write, speak and sing; and they must, even if the enemy returns to the Field of the Blackbirds riding black helicopters.

Dr Michael Stenton, Director of Studies of The Lord Byron Foundation, teaches modern history for the Board of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge.

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