Officially, Nato's war
against Yugoslavia was “a battle for the values of civilisation”(Blair). Yet
the proclaimed concern with the humanitarian situation in Kosovo is nothing but
war propaganda. Nato states back regimes worse than Milosevic's and the
purported sympathy for the refugees gives way to hostility as soon as they
enter Western countries. More fundamentally, the statesmen allegedly worried
about the Kosovo Albanians administer a form of society which with necessity
causes immense human suffering (and whose only possible legitimisation lies
therefore in the lack of any better alternative). In order to understand the war in the Balkans, we need to examine
the driving force behind Nato intervention.
Far from being simply dragged into the conflict, Nato
wanted war and instigated it. The so-called negotiations in Rambouillet were
obviously intended to spark off war. Yugoslavia was presented with a treaty it could not sign: it demanded free access
to the whole of its territory for Nato troops and would have thus meant the end
of territorial integrity and sovereignty. The point is not that we care about
the sovereignty of states, but simply that this treaty was obviously meant to be rejected by the Serb side as
it was a clear provocation. The Western powers were not unanimously
anti-Serbian before the war. While Germany revived its anti-Serbian policies
from the Nazi period in the early 90’s, promoted secession on ethnic-nationalist
grounds and consequently (though not overtly) supported the nationalist Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA), the US main concern was to avoid the Greater Albania the
KLA was aiming for, since that would de-stabilise the region even further[1].
Until December 1998 the US tried to prevent the arms supply to the KLA, and
labelled it a terrorist organisation, giving Milosevic the go-ahead to
militarily suppress Kosovar-Albanian separatism. However, this policy was abandoned when the US suddenly turned
against Milosevic, a shift confirmed at Rambouillet, thus making war
inevitable.
But why was Nato so keen on war? A common interpretation
of wars waged by capitalist powers is to point out “economic interests” in the
region concerned. Yet this is not the case with Kosovo. The war against Serbia
differs from the Gulf war 1991, in that there is no oil and nothing comparable
to it. The Rambouillet treaty in fact demanded that “the economy of Kosovo
shall function in accordance with free market principles”, but it seems unlikely
that this was the objective behind the bombing. Although Yugoslavia still has a
high level of nationalised industry (possibly an indication of working class
resistance to privatisation projects), it no longer seems necessary to initiate
bombing campaigns in order to open up markets. The last decades witnessed a
failure of all attempts at state protectionism, from the Eastern bloc to Latin
America. Furthermore, what has Western capital to gain in Serbia, let alone
Kosovo, by far the poorest part of former Yugoslavia? There is no shortage of
cheap and obedient labour around the globe. If this was the primary problem of
capital, it would queue up in Russia or elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Yet
investment in the former Eastern bloc is low and highly selective. Most parts
of Eastern Europe are very unlikely to become centres of investment; in fact,
it looks as if the bulk of the population is simply redundant from the
standpoint of capital. The carve-up of Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s followed
this trend in so far as those regions most likely to be integrated into
European capitalism -Slovenia and Croatia- broke away from the Yugoslav state,
leaving behind the less competitive regions[2].
A similar interpretation of the general rationale behind
the wars of the major powers was put forward in the “No war but the class war! Discussion Bulletin” from London. The
purpose of the war from this perspective is “…to open up these regimes'
economies to the free market. This is not so much done by overthrowing the government
but by decimating and demoralising the working class and wiping out the
rebelliousness that caused the problem for capital in the first place”[3].
This claim, however, is rather problematic. On the first hand, while the
pro-market restructuring in the 1980’s faced severe resistance from a working
class defending its living conditions (see article in this undercurrent), we have not come across any major signs of
proletarian “rebelliousness” in Serbia in the years following the civil war –
there was a pro-western, pro-democratic liberal opposition to Milosevic, but
this can hardly be termed “proletarian”. Of course, the fact that we have not come across anything does
not mean that there was nothing like that going on. But the only recent signs
of resistance mentioned in the ‘No war
but the class war’-Bulletin are desertions by Serb soldiers, which although
by far the most promising moments of this war, cannot be used retrospectively
to explain the emergence of the war in the first place[4].
Secondly, as argued above, the underlying assumption that capital has any
significant stake in the region seems at least doubtful.
The
theatre of imperialism
Far from following any “economic logic” in the narrow
sense, the role of the West in former Yugoslavia is that of the world police
monitoring the permanent crisis in this part of the capitalist periphery. Its
rationale is not, as was the case with old-style imperialism, to dominate
countries politically and militarily in order to exploit them, but to prevent
chaos and instability, to safeguard the capitalist centres against the massive influx of refugees. Another
dimension of the war was the clear strategy of the West to diminish Russia’s
sphere of influence in Europe, by edging it out of any post-war settlement,
something that Russia seems unwilling to accept, as the recent minor
confrontations between Russia’s and Nato’s ground forces suggest.
Yet whilst this is something of a common interest,
Yugoslavia has furthermore become the battle-field for strategic rivalries
amongst the powerful capitalist states. Ever since the collapse of the cold war
order, the whole system of world politics is in transition, the direction of
which seems uncertain. US hegemony has been questioned by the emergence of a
strong European bloc. Reunified Germany in particular clearly aspired to gain
more autonomy in its foreign policy. For example, it escalated the Balkan
conflict when it independently recognised Croatia and Slovenia in 1991, thus
signalling that any ethnic-nationalist secession will be welcomed by the new
powerful German state (see, again, ...in this undercurrent).
The massive US involvement in the bombing campaign
against Yugoslavia served the purpose of underscoring US hegemony and ensuring
that, in the future, the US will maintain its influence in Europe. The priority
is not so much to assert a certain policy, but to stay in Europe in the first
place. The main vehicle for this is Nato. The war provided Nato, deprived of
its former enemy (the USSR), with a new rationale, just in time for the 50th
anniversary celebrations of Nato in April. It is no exaggeration to say that
the war was actually fought over Nato's future: during the Rambouillet
negotiations, the Yugoslav side was willing to accept an international UN force
in Kosovo, while the West insisted on Nato presence. (And since now Kosovo is
ruled by a UN mission consisting of Nato forces, both sides can claim to have
won). Furthermore, it was an excellent opportunity for Germany to finally fully
re-militarise its foreign policy and thus gain the status of a completely
sovereign nation state. Britain, the most hawkish among the Nato states during
this war, could gain international profile,
and is now symbolically “rewarded” with getting Pristina, the capital of
Kosovo according to the plans for the military occupation. During the war,
British papers questioned the US capability of being the world power due to its reluctance to deploy ground troops,
while the US annoyed Britain with delaying the movement into Kosovo until the arrival of US troops –
to ensure their share of the “glory of liberation”. This way, the “humanitarian war” became the theatre for
international rivalries –although it happened in Serbia and Kosovo, it was not exclusively about Serbia and Kosovo.
Communism
or Barbarism
Kosovo will be a Nato protectorate under the formal organisation of the UN. Whether it will, in the long run, remain with Serbia, i.e. in Yugoslavia, become independent or join Albania is a matter of speculation and neither option will improve the situation of the people living there. The preoccupation with these formal-legal questions displaces the simple truth that whatever the political framework, the economic prospects for the region are grim and mass unemployment inevitable; and as long as capital exists, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited, i.e. being redundant.
This fate is one
Kosovar-Albanians share with most people in Serbia - already now, an estimated
40 per cent are unemployed in Serbia, and an opening up to the Western market
will simply speed up the process of slashing jobs in inefficient industries and
services. In the end, those with crap jobs will be the lucky ones, and this
real absurdity underscores the fact that capital deserves nothing less than
complete abolition. The current talk about a “Marshall plan” for the region
that invokes notions of the relative prosperity in Western Europe after World
War II merely seeks to veil the bleak future of the population of Kosovo. It
appeals to the equally common-sensical and non-sensical idea that with a bit of
good-will, hard labour and sufficient money, one can establish flourishing
capitalist production anywhere and any time - an idea shared by considerable
parts of the anti-war-movement that demanded economic aid (read: capitalist
development) for the Balkans.
Eastern state capitalism has imploded, and all
Western-style free market capitalism has brought about is an exacerbation of
the living conditions which nurtured ethnic barbarism. Although, in contrast to
the bulk of the impoverished population,
the elites in the Balkans certainly benefit from nationalism, it is
misleading to deduce from this that nationalism was a mere “tool” used by them
as a means of manipulation, a view that invokes a false image of the Yugoslav
population as passive and malleable. In fact, nationalism was only the last
resort for many; in a world of abstractions, the eternity of “ethnic” identity,
of blood, seems to promise security and survival. The less the market provides living prospects, the more desperate the
ideological need to seek refuge in the good nation
state that ‘truly serves its people’. That the Yugoslav state has nothing
much to offer to its inmates except poverty and repression, appears not as the nature
of peripheral states per se, but as a
malignancy stemming from the “wrong ethnic” basis of that state. Just as the
new Palestinian quasi-state has brought about the replacement of Israeli police
by Palestinian police, a future Albanian authority in Kosovo – possibly to be
provided by the KLA - would differ from the Yugoslav one only in its uniforms
and victims (Serbs are already leaving Kosovo in their thousands). The
practices of the KLA, aspiring to run the ruins of Eastern state capitalism,
anticipate the essence of the state they plan to establish. The KLA began its
career with attacks on Serb refugees in Krajina, and then on Serb police and
civilians in Kosovo[5].
Yet the violence of the state-to-be is also directed against its future
subjects: during the mass exodus of Kosovar Albanians in the last of couple
months, the KLA intercepted the refugees’ convoys and recruited men for its
heroic “liberation struggle” -with force, if necessary. Freedom for Kosovo is precisely the opposite of freedom for those
living in Kosovo. For in reality, “National liberation consists of the
liberation of the guerrilla chairman and its national police from the chains of
powerlessness”[6].
Contrary to the
rhetoric of Western civilisation vs.
barbarism, capitalism and ethnic slaughter go hand in hand. Ethnic
cleansing is just another form of the generalised competition in capitalism,
marking the transition from decaying capitalism to a society of gangs and
rackets. Genuine communism - not the caricature the Eastern bloc was, but a
society beyond wage-labour, state, and the market - is at the same more
necessary and less likely than ever.
“The irrationality of the existing society changes all
partial 'rationality' into irrationality and turns rulers and ruled alike into
prisoners of circumstances beyond their control. Obviously, the war...makes 'no
sense' even to the capitalist, for it cannot serve as an instrumentality for
arresting the historic decline of private-enterprise capitalism. It only
attests to the fact that capitalism has become a purely destructive social
system and that it will remain such until the people of the earth put an end to
it”[7].
The independent US-American communist Paul Mattick wrote this 33 years ago
about the war in Vietnam, yet its relevance remains disturbingly intact.
[1]
One should not forget the Albanian revolt of 1996/7 that led to the collapse of
the Berisha government which the West highly favoured for keeping the borders
between Albania and Yugoslavia/Kosovo well –policed.
2 This process is
analysed in the article “The Workers Have no
Fatherland…”
3 No war but the class war! Discussion Bulletin, No. 1, London, April
1999. C/o PO Box 2474, London N8 OHW, or e-mail escape6@hotmail.com
4 A good account of
these desertions which started in mid-May can be found in No war but the class war!
No. 3
5 Le Monde Diplomatique, Paris, May 1999
6 Breakdown Notes, Nightmare and hope in the Balkans, London, April
1999
7 Paul Mattick, 'The United States in South
East Asia', International Socialist
Journal, Rome, March 1966