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A spate of post-mortems on the Balkan war appeared in the press in the last few weeks. Two in particular caught my eye. One, by Gwynne Dyer in the Toronto Star, describes three disasters (Dyer's word) that are being prepared in Kosovo.
Disaster one: instead of NATO's ostensible war aim of ethnic harmony, it's now the Serb minority that's being cleansed from the territory.
Disaster two: this will discredit what was supposed to be an important new precedent in international affairs, namely that the war was fought for human rights, not just Albanian rights.
Disaster three: Kosovo is being handed over by default "to the worst elements of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), people who have no mercy for Serbs and no love for democracy."
I agree with Dyer about the likelihood of these events coming to pass. I agree they're unfortunate. But why call them "disasters"? That word denotes an ill-starred, unexpected calamity, a failure of a hopeful project. The three events Dyer describes have been foreseeable from the word go. They were entirely, even boringly, predictable.
Politicians or pundits naive enough to think a) that the Balkans is the right region in which to build a multi-ethnic democracy, and b) that missiles are the right instrument with which to build it, should consider a different line of work. True, Yugoslavia doesn't lack ethnic groups, but building multi-ethnic democracies also requires some democrats, and there aren't many of those in the region.
There aren't many democrats in the world, come to think of it, not even in NATO's headquarters. The former flower children now running the show are cocksure social engineers, not democrats in any Jeffersonian sense.
This is no news to Charles Krauthammer writing in the Washington Post. He calls a confederated Bosnia or multi-ethnic Kosovo "figments of the western imagination. Lofty figments," he adds, "but figments nevertheless."
But I'm reluctant to even concede the word "lofty." What's lofty about multiculturalism? It's one possible way of organizing a realm. The ethnic nation-state is another, and no less legitimate. What's illegitimate about unicultural Norway or Japan?
In other post-mortems commentators express surprise at the Serbian people's seeming indifference to the suffering of the Kosovars. Some suggest Serb support for the brutal policies of Slobodan Milosevic was due to a government-controlled Yugoslav media failing to show its viewers footage of Kosovar refugees.
I wonder. For one thing, this doesn't explain the persistent protests against NATO's bombing by Serbs who live in the West. It doesn't explain Greek or Russian protesters either. Greeks, Russians, and western Serbs had been seeing a steady stream of footage featuring Albanian refugees on TV, but NATO's action still outraged them.
I suspect blood (or religious kinship) may be thicker than videotape.
Anyway, to turn the question around, suppose TV coverage does decide all sympathies. In that case, it would be fair to ask if support in NATO countries for the campaign against Serbia wasn't due to the fact CNN (or CBC Newsworld) carried next to no footage of the Serbs who were ethnically cleansed from Croatia, Bosnia and, eventually, Kosovo.
Should TV coverage play as big a role in determining popular feelings as some pundits would have us believe, we'd live in an eerie world in which support by definition goes to the cause that provides the best photo opportunity, and all reflection, judgment, morality - maybe even prejudice or self-interest - yields to media hype.
This would be a dismal prospect if true, except I think it's at most a quarter-truth. Mainly it's an expression of the media (especially TV) suffering from delusions of self-importance.
Finally, I'd like to put in a plug for benign neglect in international affairs.
It seems one of the best ways to incite, prolong, or aggravate some conflicts is to delude one (or both) warring parties into believing they can enlist the United Nations or the United States on their side. Why should groups settle their quarrels, if with patience and persistence they might get NATO to launch cruise missiles or $2-billion Stealth bombers against their opponents?
The flip side is self-evident. A good way to encourage the parties to find a peaceful solution - from Kosovo to the Middle East - is to make it unmistakable to them that they're on their own.