A Horizon Beyond Hatred? Introductory Reflections

A Horizon Beyond Hatred? Introductory Reflections

Description

With the collapse of communist regimes throughout central and eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, two competing interpretations of the post-cold war future gained prominence and influence in Anglo--American foreign policy circles. The first, propounded by Francis Fukuyama, sought to understand the collapse of communism as the universal triumph of capitalist liberal democracy. While acknowledging the possible resurgence of largely anachronistic conflicts of the past, including ethnic conflicts, as a short-term consequence of the end of communism, Fukuyama suggested that, once the dust had settled, liberal democracy would remain the only credible and viable social and political order in Europe. The alternative interpretation, that of John Mearsheimer, an adherent to the realist school of international relations, predicted a full-scale return to the instability of the past in the wake of the end of cold war bipolarity, including the inevitable resurgence of ethnic conflicts as potentially a major catalyst of instability and competition among the Western and, in particular, the European powers. Although these two views of the future appear diametrically opposed on the surface, I believe that either could justify the minimalist response of the Western powers to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the resultant civil war. In the Fukuyama view, the Yugoslav conflict was both inevitable and temporary, part of the transition to a new and permanent order of liberal democratic peace. Why sacrifice Western resources and lives to end a conflict that is a necessary growing pain for the new order? After all, Hegel, Fukuyama's model and guide, had described history (that is, historical progress) as a slaughter bench. In the realist view, national conflicts are inherent in the deep structure of international politics in the post-cold war era. These conflicts cannot be prevented or solved, but rather the major task is to prevent their escalation into unbounded and unstable competition between the major powers. This, for different reasons, suggested a minimalist response to the Yugoslav crisis, a response that would not require a hard choice between the differing traditional allegiances of the European powers in the Balkans (that is, Germany and Croatia, France and Serbia, Russia and Serbia) and would therefore prevent the Yugoslav crisis from escalating into a conflict among the major powers. Of course, an underlying assumption was that decisive intervention would require the intervening powers to choose sides. At the very least, the presence of Serbian enclaves in Croatia and Bosnia meant that there was no obviously legitimate territorial solution transcending traditional allegiances and interests of the major powers in the region that could serve as the goal of decisive intervention. Unless either of these main perspectives on the post-cold war world order have misunderstood the character of nationalism in the contemporary world, we are compelled, whatever our moral sensibilities and instincts, to view the Western response to the Yugoslav crisis as entirely reasonable. As for the sanctions against Serbia, UN intervention in the form of peacekeeping, negotiations, and so forth, these can best be seen as relatively low-cost, politically rational responses to uneducated public opinion, which demands that "something must be done." To decry the failure of these measures is to assume that Western statesmen or policy bureaucrats ever seriously believed that they would lead to a resolution of the war. In my view, the essays in this volume, all by scholars from the former Yugoslavia with a more or less liberal orientation, are of cardinal importance in reconsidering the various assumptions behind the predominant Western views of the post-cold war order and the place of ethnic conflict and ethnic nationalism in that order (or disorder). The essays offer no quick fixes and are remarkably free of simplistic criticisms of Western policy. Taken together, however, they certainly put into question, on the one hand, the inevitability of ethnic self-assertion degenerating into aggressive nationalism and, on the other hand, the assumption that nationalism is a kind of anachronism, a temporary phase or a product of the “Balkan temperament” rather than a dangerous, permanent ideological alternative to liberal democracy.

Source Publication

Yugoslavia, the Former and Future: Perspectives of Scholars From the Region

Source Editors/Authors

Payam Akhavan, Robert Howse

Publication Date

1995

A Horizon Beyond Hatred? Introductory Reflections

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