THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  Humanitarian aid provided a kind of camouflage to disguise inaction on other fronts. In 1992, the secretary-general stated, “I know that international public opinion is frustrated, they want to see quick results. But we believe it's important to avoid an escalation…. [The situation in former Yugoslavia] is not as difficult as it appears,” he was reported as saying, pointing to the distribution of humanitarian aid.78 By January 1994, Warren Zimmermann, the former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia who was running the refugee relief effort for the United States, quit in protest. “I had reached the conclusion,” he said candidly, “that the humanitarian element for which I was responsible was being used as a cover for the lack of a real policy toward Bosnia.”*

  POLITICAL SETTLEMENT

  Because the Serbs had been so successful in the Third Yugoslav War, any political settlement had to come to terms with their occupation of more than two-thirds of Bosnia, despite the fact that they constituted less than one-third of the population. This fact led to a series of proposed redivi-sions of the Bosnian state. Lord Carrington had initially suggested “cantonization” on the Swiss model. This was succeeded by the Vance-Owen Plan, which divided Bosnia into seven to ten largely autonomous regions with a limited central government. Owen himself worked hard to win acceptance of a Muslim mini-state on about a third of the territory of Bosnia. The Contact Group map, which was similar to the Dayton Agreement, provided for a Bosnia divided between Serbs and a Muslim-Croat federation.79

  The difficulty with these various plans was that they violated the Statement of Principles agreed to by all parties at the London Conference in August 1992, which explicitly provided for the nonrecognition of territorial gains achieved by force and the restoration of the rights of persons driven from their homes. It may be, of course, that such objectives were simply unachievable in the face of a successful military conquest such as that by the Serbs, and that the authors of these plans were merely trying to put the best face on an unpleasant fact. But these proposed settlements, such as the Vance-Owen Plan, also were the product of the haunting notion that the Bosnian Serbs have some right, other than that earned by violence, to their own self-determination. If Bosnia had been allowed to secede from Yugoslavia with the consequence that its borders became the subject of international recognition and protection, then why wasn't this right also accorded to the Serbs within Bosnia, who had never wished to secede in the first place?

  The answer to this is a complicated one. “Peoples” are entitled to self-determination, which is not the same thing as an entitlement to a state. Where there are adequate protections for minorities and fair and free electoral processes, a “people” has no right to secede absent the consent of the people with whom they share the right of citizenship. Bosnia was driven from a federation it wished to preserve by the violent transformation of that state into a Greater Serbia. There is no evidence that a similar fate awaited the Bosnian Serbs at the hands of the Sarajevo government.

  Nevertheless, the recognition of Bosnian secession from Yugoslavia— pressed by Germany in the hope that recognition would provide some protection for Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia from Serbia—was unwelcome to most European states (and to the United States). In light of the breakup of the Soviet Union and secessionist movements in Spain, Northern Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere it is not hard to see why. Once the society of states accepted secession as a viable means of self-determination, something like “cantonization” became inevitable. Ironically, it was the military situation, which was presumed to have dictated this solution, that rendered the “solution” so objectionable. Whatever the advertising, most observers came to recognize that there would be no return for the displaced Muslims and that the Serbs had achieved by violence essentially what they sought.

  The point isn't simply that deciding what action to take in Bosnia posed some hard questions. Security decisions that put lives at risk involve difficult choices. Rather it is that the difficulties arising from the Bosnian emergency are deep and problematic because their source lies in the origin of the nation-state in violence and ethnicity, and because the arrival of a new form, the market-state, with its universal media presence, exposes these deep conflicts to great and novel stress. Notice that the option of a military response was intimately connected to the provision of humanitarian assistance, which was also connected to institutional neutrality, which dictated the nature of both the economic sanctions imposed and the political solutions proposed.

  In summary, as with the Darley-Latane description of bystander behavior in emergencies, it is the ambiguity of assessment that paralyzes action. Why didn't the great powers, and the United States, which purports to lead them, do more to stop the horrors in Bosnia? In Yugoslavia it was some time before the world noticed that something awful was happening; long before the massacres at Vukovar and Mostar the Serbian Communist leadership had embarked on a constitutional transformation of Yugoslavia that was accompanied by police terrorism and violent ethnic rhetoric. Once the world did notice, it wasn't altogether clear that the event was an emergency. There were many ambiguous interpretations that could be placed on events. Once the media had persuaded us that a true emergency was underway, it was very difficult to decide what to do as a consequence.80

  These ambiguities went directly to the legitimacy of the nation-state. For example, is the war in Yugoslavia a civil war between a central government in Belgrade and breakaway secessionist states with capitals in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Sarajevo? Or is it a series of civil wars between the Bosnian state and its Serbian and Croatian minorities and the Croatian state and its Serbian minority? Or is the entire affair simply the latest eruption of an intractable ancient conflict that was temporarily kept in check by the authoritarian regime that collapsed along with the other Communist states of Europe? Is what happened in Bosnia an example of ethnic cleansing or something else— a forced migration of the kind we have seen countless times before when new states are born?

  V.

  Of course the murder of Kitty Genovese under her blood-stained stairway in Queens is not the same, legally or strategically, as the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the blood-soaked villages of Bosnia. If it were, then armed intervention (a strategic act) to protect the Muslims would be like police work (a law-governed act): that is, there would be no debate as to whether the benefit of enforcing the rules justifies the cost of their enforcement. Some international lawyers and diplomats behave as though there is a world order of nation-states that is analogous to the civil order of a society, and they argue that the international community must respond in the way that a domestic government responds to criminal behavior. This makes armed intervention into a kind of police work. If anyone still believed in this vision of world order in 1992, I don't see how that person could maintain such a view after Yugoslavia. One might say that the lifespan of the “New World Order” can be dated from its beginning in Kuwait City to its demise in Srebrenica. It would be more accurate to say that the society of nation-states that was forged in the Long War acted swiftly and with assuredness in Kuwait, where it offered a classic nation-state answer to a classic state problem of aggression to acquire resources; and that this sure-footedness vanished when that same society was faced with a more puzzling conundrum arising from its own identity: when does a “nation” get a state? What made this failure so significant—for it is hardly the first time this question has arisen—is that it occurred in the context of the emergence of the new market-states.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Death of the Society of Nation-States

  THE LEGITIMACY of the society of nation-states will not long outlast the delegitimating acts of its leading members. Srebrenica represents the final discrediting of that society because there the great powers showed that, without the presence of the Long War, they were unable to organize timely resistance even against so minor a state as Serbia when Serbia threatened the rules and legitimacy of that society. By contrast, in Kosovo, a U.S.-led coalition attacked Serbia to vindicat
e market-state concepts of sovereignty—specifically, the novel* conviction that a state's refusal to grant rights to an internal minority renders that state liable to outside intervention. The U.N. was studiedly ignored in the Kosovo war—the Fourth Yugoslav War—and what failures there were, in an otherwise highly successful air campaign, can be largely attributed to the structure of NATO and the unanimity requirements of the North Atlantic Council.

  In Bosnia, despite the presence of such mighty nation-state institutions as NATO, the U.N., the OSCE, and the E.U., states nevertheless did not dare risk the sacrifice of their soldiers on behalf of a cause whose relationship to the welfare of their own societies, and their citizens, was so attenuated. The Achilles' heel of the society of nation-states—the problem of self-determination for national peoples—provided the crucial ambiguity that invited the diffusion of responsibility that so consistently characterized the Third Yugoslav War. Armed with this ambiguity, the Serbs challenged the society of nation-states and humiliated it. But what had made that society more vulnerable than before? After all, the Italian attacks on Libya and Ethiopia and the Japanese attacks on Manchuria had been no less humiliating to the same society. Why was Bosnia of such great significance for the collectivity of nation-states?

  The globalization of (1) strategic threats (by virtue of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, which made states like the United States with no contiguous enemies nevertheless vulnerable to attack from anywhere on the globe), of (2) markets (owing to advances in computation, which permitted the rapid transience of capital), and of (3) culture (the result of a universal system of information that depends upon recent developments in telecommunications) put the nation-state under enormous pressure to enlarge. Only by expansion (such as NATO provided Western Europe by bringing the United States into the theatre of European security, or by means of the European Union, which broadened national markets into a single market of continental scope) could states hedge against the new risks imposed by globalization. China and Russia were compelled to open themselves to trade; North Korea did not, and starved. Yet lengthening the membrane that enclosed the State also meant thinning it, just as widening the membership of states in NATO and the E.U. put a stop to the deepening of political relationships among states within those organizations. Writing of the E.U., Charles Tilly cannily observed:

  Community-wide consumer protection, elimination of customs barriers, free movement of migrants, elimination of work permits for Community residents, participation of “foreigners” in municipal elections, transferability of university credits, Europeanization of driver's licenses and automobile standards, creation of a common currency, and establishment of Europe-wide television—all entailed by the Maastricht pact—will directly attack the capacity of any state to pursue a distinct and independent policy for employment, welfare, education, culture or military organization.1

  As the nation-state increasingly loses its definition, the sharp cultural borders that, for example, made the Danes different from the Dutch, are losing legal and strategic significance. The nation-state is less able to deploy law (or strategy) on behalf of national cultural values, yet there is no “Euro-identity,” for example, or similar transnational identity either. Instead, as Martin Wolf put it, globalization has undermined the collectivist values represented by the nation-state and turned attention to the benefit of individuals. Governments of nation-states are faced with the prospect of asserting national cultural identities against a fragmenting populace that takes its various identities from associational but largely non-national sensibilities. Indeed the nation-state may come to be seen as a kind of enemy of its people. Nation-states are too rigid, have too many rules for behavior (including economic behavior), have been captured by special interests whose welfare demands higher taxes with larger loopholes and more officious regulations (not limited to economic regulation but including also, for example, hate-speech laws, smoking bans, and the whole panoply of political correctness, as well as prohibitions against a wide variety of personal behavior).

  The State has always depended on getting people to risk their lives for it. Each constitutional order found a way to do this. The nation-state persuaded people that a state whose mission was the improvement of their own welfare provided a valid justification for enduring personal jeopardy. If such a state is no longer able to enforce and sustain national cultural values (“family values” they were called in some states, “basics” in others), its claim on the sacrifice of its citizens weakens. Indeed, the new cultural values, precisely because they are so fragmented and promote such individuation, are not readily suitable to promotion by the State, which is too clumsy and moves too slowly and with too little discernment to shore them up. The popular sense of identity is becoming both too large for the nation-state (as with “Green” movements) and too small (as with breakaways like Catalonia or Lombardy or Guangdong). For nation-state conservatives, this means a nauseating loss of sovereignty to new transnational institutions (like the P8*); for nation-state liberals, this development threatens to remove the regulation of capital enterprises from the hands of states and surrender national life to the pitiless imperatives of the globalized market.

  The shift to the market-state does not mean that states simply fade away, however. If the acquisition of more territory is less important than before to garnering wealth, the luring of people and capital by the most attractive state policies is absolutely crucial. For China, holding on to Tibet may someday become almost irrelevant, but incorporating Hong Kong increased Chinese GDP by 26 percent at a single stroke. Only a state could have done that. Assuring financial and legal stability, an educated workforce, and tax-friendly havens for investments are all state-governed activities, even when some of these operations are privatized by law. The real shift is simply from public purposes to private purposes, from a state that takes its legitimacy by assuring the common welfare to one that instead relies on providing the broadest possible opportunity for the satisfaction of individual interests.

  In the face of such an historic shift in the constitutional order of states, the society of states also had to change. There is some movement—in Brussels, but also elsewhere—for larger, super-nation-states to cope with the challenges described above. In my view, this is a move in the utterly wrong direction. It would recapitulate on a continental or even global scale the transformation of the Zollverein (a nineteenth century German economic union) into the German nation-state at a time when the model itself—the nation-state—is less and less viable. Moreover, a super-nation-state, like the organizations of the society of nation-states, hypothesizes a world made of law that is incompatible with variations in sovereignty. Yet just such variations are the main method by which market-states will develop different forms in order to create a pluralistic society of states by some other means than simply granting states to desiring nations. The society of nation-states attempted to suppress such variations in sovereignty because of that society's basis in the equality of states. Its international law is universal and grows all the weaker because of this essential premise. Perhaps most telling of the impotence of the society of nation-states has been the fate of the United Nations.

  The major institutional result of the idea of a world constitution of nation-states was the creation of the League of Nations. Among the most important of the many features of the League was the guarantee by member states of the political independence and territorial integrity of each member against aggression. This guarantee of sovereignty is repeated in the U.N. Charter. The Charter, like the Covenant of the League of Nations, assures states their independence and the undisturbed enjoyment of autonomy within their territory. This goal is built on a premise—the opacity of sovereignty—that will increasingly hobble the society of nation-states as that society attempts to deal with transnational threats to the environment, to its critical information infrastructure, and to its humanitarian ideals. The air war in Kosovo was a decisive step in recognition of this fact, and it was, in its
way, just as deadly an event for the society of nation-states, which depends upon the premise of state sovereignty, as were the crimes at Srebrenica.

  It is easy to see how the societies enmeshed in the immense agonies of the Long War would want to ensure international tranquility at all costs. Doubtless this desire lay behind the failure of the League to stop Mussolini's aggression against Ethiopia. It is difficult to forget the scene of the small Ethiopian emperor appealing in vain to the great powers for aid. But it seems to be equally difficult to remember the Italian aggression against defenseless Libyan tribes that occurred several years earlier. Then Italian planes strafed and waged, systematically if incompetently, a modern war of ethnic annihilation; this was when the first concentration camps were set up by a European power in the twentieth century.2 Libya was, however, unlike Ethiopia, governed by Italy and thus these acts of aggression were veiled by the cloak of sovereignty. This failure to act by the society of nation-states was not simply a lapse of will, and so it is seldom associated with the League's other public failures. Rather such a failure was built into the idea of a world community composed of sovereign nation-states. The League was irrelevant to allegedly domestic disputes. Perhaps we should be grateful that Hitler invaded Poland, for otherwise we might have been treated to the spectacle of the society of states standing by while the Holocaust efficiently proceeded as an “internal matter.”

  Indeed the U.N. Charter under Article 2 (7) specifically precludes the organization from intervening “in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” Similarly, the Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention into the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty provides that “[n]o State has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State.”