to add…what can the Balkan experiences of the 1990s teach us about the current world situation, the roots of terror, the causes of state failure, and the path toward peace and stability.
The 1990s in the Balkans have taught us, above all, that sustainable peace is a last resort. Peace among nations is the result of attrition and exhaustion, of mutual terror and actual bloodletting – not of amicable agreement and visionary stratagems. It took two world wars to make peace between France and Germany. By forcing an unwanted cessation of hostilities upon an unwilling populace in the early stages of every skirmish, the West ascertains the perpetuation of conflicts.
Wherever possible and applicable, the West should dangle economic carrots (such as EU membership) in front of the bloodied pugilists (although not ram them down their reluctant throats in shows of air superiority, as it did and still is doing in Serbia). Humanitarian aid should be provided and grants and credits for development to the deserving. But the military succor afforded by the likes of Germany to the likes of Croatia and by the benighted Americans to the most extreme elements in Kosovo served only to amplify and prolong the suffering and the warfare.
The West obstinately refused – and still does – to contemplate the only feasible solution to the spectrum of Balkan questions. Instead of convening a new Berlin Congress and redrawing the borders of the host of entities, quasi-entities and fraction entities that emerged with the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation, the West foolishly and blindly adhered to unsustainable borders which reflect colonial decision making and ceasefire lines. In the absence of a colonizing power, only ethnically-homogeneous states can survive peacefully in the Balkans and elsewhere. The West should have strived to effect ethnic homogenization throughout the region by altering borders, encouraging population swaps and transfers and discouraging ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation (“ethnic denial”).
But the West’s missteps in the Balkans were not confined to the political and geopolitical realms.
The West (actually, America) has many long arms, the IMF and World Bank being the most prominent. These ostensible multilaterals have committed yet another strategic blunder. Instead of weaning their clientele – the post-Communist countries in transition – off central planning and command economics, they engaged in Washington-based micromanagement of their economies. The Bretton-Woods institutions have become all-pervasive, multi-tentacled approximations of the Communist party. They dictate policy, involve themselves in the minutest details of daily management, veto decisions (economic and non-economic), cajole and threaten governments, block private sector lending and compete in the international credit and investment markets.
The post-Communist countries in transition – and Iraq today – are like infants taking their first steps in the demanding world of free markets and capitalism. The multilateral financial institutions are the mother figures. Good mothers let go, encourage in the child a sense of independence, self-reliance, learning by mistakes and the predictability of just rewards and punishments. Bad mothers refuse to acknowledge the emerging boundaries of their off-spring. They reward clinging behaviour and punish every act of separation and individuation. They are overweening, doting, crushing figures. In short: they micromanage.
