After the War in Yugoslavia:

What Next For Europe´s Left?

The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation*

It has become clear that, after the Yugoslav war, Europe will not be the same again.
Quite evidently, the strategic position is now transformed by the establishment of what may well become a permanent NATO base in the Balkans. This registers a significant shift in the relations between the United States and Europe, and between both of these and the Russians. In turn these convulsions will affect relations within Europe, and between Russia and its allies. For NATO to hold the gateway to the East, the Americans have been brought into a new state of hegemony in Europe. The new base symbolises these vast power changes, not simply the occupation of the province of Kosovo.

Whether or not this occupation will result in the pacification of internecine Balkan quarrels is rather uncertain, since new tensions appear to be emerging, and there is much scope for new atrocities, in the new feuds following the intervention itself. Yesterday’s guerrilla offensive by the Kosovo Liberation Army, and yesterday’s paramilitary counter repression by the Serbs, are already giving place to today’s new ethnic cleansing of Serbs by Albanians. And the ethnic and political divisions within the Albanian State, already evident, are likely, given time, to reassert themselves, exerting new disruptive influences in the territories now “cleansed” of Serbian influence.

It is therefore unlikely that a more humanitarian order will evolve in the region, in spite of the elaborate rhetoric which has been evoked to justify the recent bombardment. The distressing fate of Yugoslavia will continue to cast its shadow over European affairs. Even so, the new Balkan presence of NATO may have a far darker shadow to cast over a very much wider area.

There are a whole series of questions which must be answered by the European Left, if it is to make its proper contribution to our common future, first of all by avoiding any repetition of such mayhem, and secondly by restoring an option for common security and non-exploitative co-operation.

To begin with, we must face up to the geo-strategic implications of a North American military presence in the Balkans. The official explanation which is given for this is that it will serve to underpin the emergence of a new democratic order, establishing a protectorate for the Kosovars.

But although the military action may indeed establish such a protectorate, it has also been designed to achieve much wider objectives, which impact throughout the surrounding area.

In the immediate vicinity, there are dominoes which may fall in Macedonia and Montenegro. If they do there could be consequences in Bulgaria and neighbouring countries, possibly in Greece, and if so in Turkey. The turbulence which may be anticipated, and will need to be avoided, in this wider region will almost certainly reinforce demands for stronger militarisation of the initial base. Already, the British Defence Ministry is calling for higher military expenditure, and the modernisation of forces. This call will be likely to become louder and more repetitive. The subordinate allies will renew their dependence on the United States at every turn.

But far more seriously, the new base will hold the gates to the wider East, removing a large part of the initiative from Europe to the United States. Trilateral relations will become double bilateral communications: a closed Euro-American circuit, and another Russo-American one, instead of direct and open equal three-way communications. Now, the succession to Yeltsin, which inevitably preoccupies the United States, becomes a problem in which an interventionist American administration may feel prompted to join issue. The relations between Russia and the Ukraine, already the subject of significant American concern, can move from an agenda of analysis to an agenda for action.

Peter Gowan has warned us that Brzezinski, the key US policy-maker, has unambiguously signalled that any security pact between Russia and the Ukraine would require action.

“In such a case, when the West would have to choose between a democratic or an independent Ukraine, strategic interests – not democratic considerations – must determine the Western stance.”

With the prospect of American intervention if Ukrainians make the wrong decisions about their future, we come to the end of the peaceful option which was held out, however tenuously, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Once, we were to withdraw the threat of arms from East West relations, and stimulate the emergence of civil society. A new common security regime would replace confrontation. But after the war in Yugoslavia, with the systematic downgrading of common security organisations, the marginalisation of the United Nations and the OSCE, it is becoming obvious to the most trusting of statesmen in the East, that it is power, not humanitarianism, that drives forward American policy, which has now indeed become hegemonic in Europe.

The post-cold war settlement following 1989 provoked uneasiness in the relations between Europe and America. At the military level, this showed itself in a marked European reluctance to accept that NATO should act autonomously, independently of the United Nations. But the Yugoslav bombardment has ended this safety mechanism, because it was clear that the Russians and Chinese would inevitably veto the bombing of Yugoslavia. However, once NATO had agreed to act outside the UN framework, it put in jeopardy the entire machinery of global co-operation. The veto was an unwieldy mechanism, but its essential function was to make global action dependant upon the unanimity of the major powers in the postwar settlement. Once that was gone, international law could no longer rest on any agreed foundations. New foundations are arguably necessary, and might be negotiated: but they cannot be unilaterally imposed. The moral cost of this decision falls equally on the just and the unjust, on the victims as well as those guilty of infractions.

The Yugoslav war ratified raw power politics in Europe, and removed the pretence of obedience to a constitutional international order. Henceforward, the Americans will keep the gates between Europe and the East, and they will police them in the American, not the European, interest. If it is true that the gatekeepers will owe their position to the consent of their European partners, it is also true that these will find it difficult to invent procedures for withdrawing that consent.

What has driven these military decisions? There has been no geo-political threat from the East. Indeed, it has taken the triumph of confrontational politics in the United States to persuade the Ukrainian Parliament that it may have been premature in its desire to rid itself of nuclear weapons.

Evidently all these military reactions serve in some way the goals of economic policy. What are the economic policies which drive the Americans to seek direct control of relations with the East rather than joint influence through co-operation? How does the war in Yugoslavia relate to spheres of economic influence, and the accumulation of capital? In what ways is it connected with the relationship between the dollar and the Euro? And, in an age in which the Third Way is disabling the most important Labour movements, undermining the institutions of welfare, and moving towards a nakedly neo-liberal polity, how can the left recover the initiative, and begin to develop cogent alternatives to the politics of complicity in exploitation and endorsement of military aggrandisement?

Evidently, there are connections between the ideological Atlanticism of Tony Blair, and the tactical accommodations of the Third Way in the joint Anglo-German Declaration. There are connections between military politics and the liquidation of welfare. It is not difficult to see that the extrapolation of these policies offers an extremely bleak future to the rich capitalist states of the Western world: guns not butter, missiles not pensions.

I have raised this problem with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, and with the Confederal Left Group in the European Parliament. It seems appropriate to invite all those who are disturbed by these developments to consult together, and to work out an agenda of analysis and potential action, to begin to co-ordinate our efforts.

Throughout the eighties, we maintained a substantial pan-European peace movement, which showed that cross-frontier collaboration was not only possible, but could be highly effective. More recently, we have been able to initiate joint and combined actions against unemployment and in defence of welfare. But the postwar situation is different from what has gone before. The attacks are likely to be more insistent, and the democratic institutions more constricted. A great responsibility therefore falls upon us.

We would like to propose an open but combined meeting, if possible in the European Parliament, to consider a carefully agreed agenda which can help us to rise to meet the new challenges which determine the political space which has been shaped for the opening of the new century.