Self-Determination and Diplomacy

The beginning of Steve Shalom's article contains an extremely lucid anti-interventionist argument, which serves as an example to the left for how to present anti-imperialist arguments to the American people. The article is also very strong in its anti-Milosevic stance, and in its sharp criticism of many anti-war elements who whitewash Milosevic, wrongly thinking that an anti-intervention position is somehow weakened if one allows that Milosevic is a truly vicious, repressive and monstrous figure.

The problem with Steve's piece is in the way it approaches the question of self-determination and the KLA, and in its orientation toward the U.N. Security Council, diplomacy, and involving the Russians. Steve says that he favors self-determination for the Kosovars, yet he seems to see conciliating Milosevic and the Russians at the expense of Kosovar self-determination as the basis for a resolution of conflict. In March 1999, Steve suggests, the West should have gone beyond Rambouillet to pursue further diplomatic solutions, by which he means that the U.S. and Europe should have made Russia "a player," and should have built on the stated willingness of the Serb parliament to accept some kind of international presence in Kosovo. In March, however, the only meaning Steve's approach could have had was to further water down the Rambouillet agreement and make it even less consistent with democratic principles and even less palatable to the Kosovars than it already was. The Rambouillet agreement was already a reactionary solution: it quite deliberately excluded the right of the Kosovars to vote on their own status and called for the disarming of the KLA, while allowing the Serbs to permanently keep their troops in Kosova, even if in reduced numbers. No wonder Clinton begged Milosevic to accept the agreement with the argument that it offered the best way for Serbia to maintain its control over Kosova! Rambouillet was hardly the basis for a democratic peace, even if it weren't altered to give Milosevic even greater concessions. Steve's implicit suggestion that the U.S. should have offered to weaken it still further is a dead-end, or worse. (In the face of their brutal defeats, the Kosovars may now feel compelled to accept a terrible deal, and my argument is not that they should be condemned if they do follow this course. I simply want to argue that progressives should not contribute to or support the pressures that push them to make such a decision.)

Steve is absolutely right, of course, in arguing that for both general global reasons and because of the specific consequences in Kosovo, NATO military intervention -- whether from the air or on the ground -- is a disaster. His point is reinforced by Steven Erlanger, who in his May 2, 1999 New York Times article says that the Kosova war is becoming a "model for NATO's future" that projects the alliance as "an aggressive arm of U.S. foreign policy." Indeed, Kosova is widely seen an important precedent for the U.S. as it presses to expand NATO's "out-of-area" reach while preserving American preeminence. However Steve is mistaken in seeing either great power diplomacy or the U.N. Security Council as the source of a progressive alternative solution, though ultimately the great powers and the Security Council might be pressured from below to back a principled settlement of the conflict.

The practical democratic answer to Milosevic would have been, from the start, an alliance of the various targets of his aggression -- including Slovenians, Croatians, Bosnians, Kosovars, and Montenegrins -- who could have responded to Milosevic's force with combined forceful resistance. For short-sighted, or in the case of Tudjman in Croatia, reactionary, reasons, these immediate and potential victims of Milosevic's aggression never really came together, allowing themselves to be picked off one by one. (The case of Croatia is a grotesque partial exception of sorts: at first the U.S. strongly opposed its secession, as well as that of all the other breakaway republics, orienting toward Milosevic as the key to Balkan "stability." This position simply encouraged Serbia to attack first Slovenia, then Croatia and Bosnia. After several years of Bush and Clinton blaming the victims and shrugging over the alleged impossibility of stopping "centuries-old ethnic conflicts," the carnage in Bosnia so thoroughly discredited the crude pro-Milosevic "tilt" that the U.S. switched to backing Croatia, going so far as to actually help Tudjman expel virtually the entire Serb population of Croatia.

The responsibility for the failure of Milosevic's targeted victims to coalesce lies in part with the misguided victims themselves, each of whom thought they could do better without involving themselves with the others. It also lies with many of their supporters in the West, who encouraged them to believe that the U.N. or NATO would intervene to stop and reverse ethnic cleansing. Both failed to see the reality behind Western governments' humanitarian rhetoric: their worship of power, contempt for weakness, deep hostility to the principle of self-determination and hysterical fear of the disruption of borders -- i.e. disruption of the status quo. But Western governments bear the lion's share of the responsibility, since until yesterday (and perhaps even now and tomorrow) they viewed Milosevic as the "key to peace," and pressured his victims in the region to come to terms with him -- witness their imposition of the arms embargo against Bosnia in the face of Serbia's enormous military superiority, and their obscene disregard for Rugova and the Kosovars in their many years of struggle against Serb repression. (Croatia again, being a partial exception.)

Today, when the options have narrowed, the best hope for an acceptable peace still lies in the empowering of Milosevic's victims and in strengthening their power to resist with force. That's why the question of arming the KLA is so important. Of course if the KLA is itself a determined and intractable force for ethnic cleansing, then arming them would be problematic. But no one has provided evidence that this is the case, though Milosevic makes the claim. The real complaint of the U.S. against the KLA has been that it has demanded the right of the Kosovars to vote in a referendum for independence. The U.S. has never said that it would support and arm the KLA on condition that it would guarantee democratic rights to the 10% Serb minority in Kosovo. In effect, the KLA position has never been probed or tested.

While there is no rule that one must support any given military resistance to aggression -- the clearest case in point being one imperialist power resisting another -- nonetheless, the "tilt" should be toward giving such support. In the case of the KLA, we clearly have a broad, popular movement. Its supporters include nearly all those Albanians who want to fight for their freedom. Our best information tells us that the KLA's leadership is composed of a fluid combination of nationalists, Stalinists and ex-Stalinists, and an uncertain number of fundamentalists. As far as we can tell, no one group has gained decisive control -- which leaves the ultimate nature of the KLA up for grabs. That the KLA has killed Serb policemen tells us nothing about whether they are committed to ethnically cleansing Serbs from Kosovars -- after all, those police were the instrument of vicious repression and were used to keep ethnic Albanians totally subjugated for more than ten years.

Steve asks for super-guarantees that the KLA will do the right thing, rather than trying to see if it would be possible to arm them. Many of his arguments against giving weapons to the KLA have highly conservative implications. He suggests that to arm the KLA is necessarily to give the Kosovars the impression that military intervention will follow. Rather than saying that the U.S. and other potential arms suppliers should make it very clear that they do not plan to send troops or air power into the conflict, Steve says don't arm the Kosovars at all because they will inevitably believe that physical intervention will follow and will therefore engage in adventurous confrontation. This approach takes decision-making away from the Kosovars themselves; they need to be armed, and to make their own judgments about how to conduct themselves and whether the supplying of weapons means that troops and air intervention will be sure to follow if things get tight.

Steve makes another argument against arming the Kosovars: that it is dangerous because the U.S. has its own sinister motives when it provides weapons. Steve is certainly right about the motives, and has a point about the dangers. But taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean that no resistance movement in the world should ever take arms or material support from any of the great powers. The classical socialist reply to such an approach is the case of Lenin accepting a ride in a German train in order to get back into Russia in 1917. In this case it was argued, and in my view convincingly, that regardless of their motives and hopes, the Germans did not gain control over Lenin or succeed in making him an instrument of German imperialism. To the contrary, the Germans' scheme completely backfired on them, as Lenin believed it would, since the Bolshevik Revolution inspired mutinies and revolts in Germany and led directly to the overthrow of the imperial government. Clinton is not as naive, or desperate, as the Kaiser: generally the U.S. knows (not always, e.g. Afghanistan) that simply arming resistance movements, rather than going in and taking over, runs counter to its interest in domination and global control. Applying this same method of thinking to the question of weapons, there is, as a rule, an important distinction between great power weapons and great power troops. While the powers will always try attach strings to their weapons, they are often not successful -- whereas great power troops inevitably call the shots. In cases where it seems possible to maintain a significant measure of independence -- which is more likely to be the case if arms come from multiple sources -- it is generally wise to take the weapons and take the risk. (Tragically, if understandably, the KLA may be so battered by its recent experiences with the Serbs and so disoriented by the position it finds itself in that it does not even try to assert its independence from Western governments when and if those governments give weapons. They may end up as mere puppets of NATO. If this were to happen, it would, of course, no longer be possible for progressives to support them.)

Steve holds the KLA morally responsible for the repression that came upon the Kosovars because the KLA killed Serb police and has gathered its resistance force in areas over the Albanian border. Steve goes so far as to analogize the KLA's moral culpability to U.S. and Serb responsibility for suffering in the region. But whether or not these KLA actions were unwise -- and I would argue that they were integral to any kind of resistance against Milosevic's forces -- they are of a very different nature from those of the U.S. or the Serb leadership, who are not wrestling with decisions of how to resist injustice against terrible odds, but rather are weighing how to carry out their respective reactionary agendas.

Instead of looking to resistance forces in the region, Steve looks to the UN Security Council for a resolution of the conflict. But while we agree on condemning U.S. and NATO military intervention, and while it is conceivable that the Security Council could, under pressure, come up with an acceptable solution, Steve seems to go beyond this to argue that Council approval ought to be necessary to legitimize national governments' course of action. Given the nature of the Security Council, this should not be the case. Take, for example, the arms embargo on Bosnia. For typical great-power reasons, the members of the Security Council, including the U.S., imposed this undemocratic and unfair embargo, thus depriving the Bosnians of the right to defend themselves and perpetuating the military advantage of the Serbs. Many of us campaigned in this country for the U.S. to stop complying with the embargo, unilaterally and against the will of the Security Council if necessary. (As it happened, a majority of U.N. members also opposed the arms embargo, and took votes to that effect several times in the more democratic body, the General Assembly.) Does Steve think that our campaign was a mistake?

Steve concedes that "...the Security Council is a terribly undemocratic body, with five countries having permanent membership and the right of veto," and goes on to add: "But the answer to the undemocratic nature of the Council is not to resort to an organization that is even less accountable to world opinion, namely NATO." And of course he is right that the elite-dominated NATO holds no progressive answer to the problem of elite domination of the U.N. But he goes beyond that to suggest the need for all to respect those aspects of international law that elevate the Security Council into a lawful power -- except in extreme cases requiring civil disobedience. However, for socialists and democrats, Security Council measures should have absolutely no force of law or moral legitimacy, though we might favor particular measures. We need to encourage people to see the Council as a mechanism for strengthening and perpetuating the hegemony of the Big Powers -- even if we appreciate the fact that at times the Council has the beneficial effect of reigning in one or another of those powers.

In arguing for the primacy of the Security Council, Steve says "the story of democracy has been the struggle to get governments to obey the law, both domestic and international -- not because the law is unproblematic, but because the alternative is arbitrary power. We don't want the government to protect us from crime by engaging in illegal searches or by denying defendants a fair trial -- not because we fetishize law, but because we fear arbitrary power." But what is the permanent core of the Security Council except for arbitrary power? It does not have even the problematic legitimacy of courts and laws within a bourgeois democratic nation, since it was elected by no one and is accountable to no one.

Closely related to Steve's U.N. Security Council argument is his suggestion that the answer to the dreadful situation in Kosova lies in diplomacy with the Russians and Milosevic. He laments that the Russians have been "slapped in the face"but what can one say about the campaign to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia, or many other principled positions such as support of the independence of Chechnya or, in the days of the Cold War and to an extent even today, the self-determination rights of the Baltic states. These all are, in a sense, a "slap in the face" to the Russian government and to reactionary Russian imperial popular sentiment. But why should we cater to either? In the case of Kosova, "involve the Russians" was shorthand for saying "deny the Kosovar Albanians their right to self-determination." There is no way to secure popular power from below without slapping the powerful in the face. The problem in the current confrontation over Kosova is who is doing the slapping, and to what ends. (Of course the brunt of U.S. foreign policy: relying on bombs and missiles, pushing for the preservation and expansion of NATO, and imposing a catastrophic market-driven agenda on the former Communist countries along with the Third World -- is legitimately seen as dangerous by ordinary Russians and other people around the world. A democratic and peace-oriented U.S. foreign policy would be a very different one, and might have succeeded in averting Milosevic's successful rise to power. But this is not the point that Steve is making when he castigates Clinton for not bringing in the Russians as another great power to resolve the Rambouillet stalemate with Milosevic.)

A democratic resolution of the crisis in Kosova would require giving the Kosovars the right to self-determination, which the Russians don't support (and neither did the West, for that matter.) The fact is that Milosevic can only be stopped by force, and the question for us is how to go about gathering the right kind of force, one that doesn't strengthen U.S. and Western imperialism.

Steve says "The people of Kosovo still need self-determination. That they are less willing than ever to be part of a Serbian dominated Yugoslavia is understandable. The international community should use its diplomatic efforts to encourage this result in a way that causes the least harm to the Albanian and Serb people of Kosovo." My sentiments exactly -- but we should not fool ourselves or others into thinking that making the Russians "players," giving the Security Council the last word, or (as others have suggested) unleashing NATO, are the way the accomplish this.

Admittedly, I don't have a solution to offer the Kosovars, apart from a general perspective of strengthening their hand in shaping whatever solution is arrived at. But at least I am not looking for progressive answers to originate in the Security Council, which has played such a retrograde role in the region, or from the Russians, who are likely either to give up any real opposition to NATO's role in exchange for IMF assistance, or to propose a carve-up of Kosova that once again rewards Milosevic for ethnic cleansing, and in so doing will once again empower him to go on to the next victim.

Despite my disagreements, I am glad that Steve wrote this piece. I think it provokes an important discussion of critical issues. And again, let me repeat, I thought much of the article was really very fine and an example to all of us about how to make basic anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist arguments while at the same time sharply condemning despots like Milosevic.

-- May 5, 1999

Contents of No. 27

Kosovo/a Discussion