Carl G. Jacobsen is director of the Eurasian Security Studies Organised Research Unit of Carleton University, Canada.
Masters of the Universe; NATO’s Balkan Crusade
edited by tariq ali
London, Verso, 2000. 460 pages
Hardback: UK £40, US $65. Paperback: UK £15, US $20
Masters of the Universe is a powerful, compelling antidote to reigning global systems theology and Kosovo war apologias. The list of authors is impressive, comprising social critics, systems analysts, historians and, indeed, poets. Their general exclusion from debate reminds us of the prime war-reportage phenomenon of the 1990s, namely, the neglect of longer-established expertise in favour of new, instant-expert sycophantic commentary.
The book’s historical/analytical reviews of global power dynamics, now driven by Washington’s determination to cement and extend its hegemony (the defence spending of the United States exceeds that of its six nearest “challengers” combined), and the unveiling of the real history of Yugoslavia’s wars of secession and succession, are magisterial. The critique and logical deconstruction of the “humanitarian war” justification for NATO’s 1999 air blitz of Yugoslavia are devastating.
Augustine’s’ “just war” was proportional to ends, and was warranted only after all other alternatives were exhausted. As Robin Blackburn notes in a chapter entitled “Kosovo: The War of NATO Expansion”,
a war which causes massive harm to those on whose behalf it is undertaken, where a vital prospect of mediation has been shunned, which is in violation of treaties, and not put to the prior sanction of elected bodies, cannot be a just war. (P. 373)
Similarly, Gilbert Achcar cites Henry Kissinger as saying,
At every stage of the Kosovo tragedy, other mixes of diplomacy and force were available, though ... not ... seriously considered. A strategy that vindicates moral convictions only from altitudes over 15,000 feet … and in the process devastates Serbia and makes Kosovo unliveable ... has already produced more refugees and more casualties than any conceivable alternative ... would have. It deserves to be questioned on both political and moral grounds. (P. 85)
Such questioning is all the more necessary given the quintessentially non-democratic nature of the “Dayton process” and NATO’s Bosnian and now Kosovo protectorates, where voters’ verdicts have been arbitrarily overturned.
The dangers of Washington’s fixation on short- and medium-term power prerogatives are testified to in history’s lesson that overly punitive “victor’s terms”, as in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War and in the Treaty of Versailles, sow the seeds of future wars (Achcar quotes John Lewis Gaddis’s observation that American historians “were virtually unanimous in condemning the decision to enlarge NATO” [pp. 89–90]). The dangers are also evidenced in the potentially ominous Russian–Chinese alliance spawned by the two countries’ shared antipathy to American unipolarism. The dismissal of immediately relevant “international law” or its blatantly partisan manipulation provide haunting echoes of the precedents set by Japan and Italy in the early 1930s. The demonisation of adversaries such as Slobodan Milosovic (not undeservedly) and the sanctification of even the most disreputable of allies (Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman in effect denied the Holocaust; Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic accepted Islamic fundamentalist support; the Kosovo Liberation Army’s narco-terrorist origins and essence were acknowledged in US State Department reports) were unsavoury elements of the West’s propaganda drive to enlist public support for its Balkan crusade.
The humanist message of the then largely ignored “Professors’ Appeal”1 of May 1995, which called for fully equal human and civil rights for the now ethnically cleansed Serb majority of Croatia’s Krajina province, for the Albanians of Kosovo (or “Kosova”, as they prefer) and, indeed, for all minorities in the former Yugoslavia, permeates the book. That true humanism, so at odds with the perversions of the officially postulated “humanitarianism” of NATO’s campaign, resounds with particular vibrancy in the final pages of the book, written by the Albanian poet Gazi Kaplan.
One author gives unfortunate credence to the ahistorical Reaganite boast that America’s defence-spending bacchanalia sent the Soviet Union into its grave. In fact, the Soviet Union needed no help in self-destructing. In 1977, nearly four years before Reagan became US president, Mikhail Suslov, chief ideologist of the Soviet Communist Party, convened the first party conferences to address the admitted dysfunction between a previous-era superstructure and a society that found its dogmas antiquated, irrelevant and stifling. Delegates were told that the party had to reform itself fundamentally or find itself on the garbage heap of history. It failed ...
Also, while the documentation of most chapters is impressive, even exhaustive, the arguments of some might have been reinforced through reference to additional sources such as the in-depth coverage and commentary provided by Sweden’s Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research [www.transnational.org].
Nevertheless, for the thinking policymaker, commentator and student, Masters of the Universe constitutes an invaluable resource. Without a change of course by the United States and the NATO alliance it leads, Suslov’s obituary for an unreconstructed Soviet Communist Party might come to apply equally to the unreconstructed old world anchor that still so dangerously tethers new world hopes.
Endnotes
1. The appeal was signed by myself; by Professor Richard Falk of Princeton University; by Professor Johan Galtung of the University of Hawaii; by Dr Jan Oeberg, director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, Sweden; and by Dr Alex S. Trigona, ex-foreign minister of Malta.
