NATO’s Response Isn’t Just About the Serbs

The Clinton administration claims that its policy in Kosovo will save lives and prevent a wider war in the Balkans. In response, the Republicans attack what they call “dithering and incompetence.”

There is truth on both sides, but these exchanges don’t amount to a foreign-policy debate. More important, they don’t help Americans understand the larger issues at stake in the Balkans and why American and allied power must be used in that region.

By defending autonomy for Kosovo within a greater Serbia, the United States and its European allies are defending the post-Cold War settlement in Europe. They are also defending the essence of their own societies, which is to settle disagreements by compromise within a legal order based on universal standards (civil rights derived rationally rather than communal rights based on blood and inheritance). Both are essential to the fundamental security and well-being of Europe and the United States. Painstakingly negotiated, the post-Cold War settlement in Europe stands on three legs: democracy, market economics and NATO. If it is to endure, all three legs must be preserved.

As welcome as it was, the post-Cold War settlement stranded millions of national minorities in countries all over Central and Eastern Europe. If the conflicts in the Balkans are not resolved, the grievances of national minorities could become the single greatest threat to the post-Cold War settlement and thus to democracy, capitalism and peace in Europe. Indeed, certain aspects of the post-Cold War settlement in Europe are eerily reminiscent of the Versailles settlement ending World War I, which also stranded minorities all over Europe.

In his recent book, “Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century,” Mark Mazower points out that minorities accounted for one in four citizens of the new states of Central and Eastern Europe after 1918. As part of their campaign against Versailles, Weimar and Nazi Germany appointed themselves the defenders of minorities, especially German minorities. As Versailles crumbled, the military and, increasingly, fascist governments of Central and Eastern Europe began to persecute their minorities. Using self-determination as his justification, Hitler destroyed the Versailles settlement and took Europe and the United States into war and the Holocaust.

The polyglot character of the Balkans and its tendency to lead to war have become familiar because of the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.

There are 18 independent countries in the area that lies between Germany and Russia. Approximately 170 million people live there. Ten percent to 15% of them, or one in seven, are national minorities. For example, the post-Cold War settlement stranded 27 million Russians outside their homeland. Of these, some 16 million live in Europe, 11 million in the Ukraine alone. There is a large Russian-speaking population (40%) in Estonia; several hundred thousand Poles live in Lithuania. Two million people of German descent live in Russia, Poland, Romania and Hungary. Some 40% of Europe’s Albanians live outside Albania, with the largest number in Kosovo, and hundreds of thousands in Macedonia and Montenegro. Twenty-five million non-Russians live in the Russian federation, including 6 million Tartars.

If the majorities in these countries conclude that they can kill and destroy without hindrance, and the minorities decide that they must launch nationalist uprisings or be destroyed, peace in Europe will vanish in ethnic warfare. What would happen to German-Russian relations, for example, if a new and stridently nationalist government in Russia began to pressure Ukraine and Estonia on behalf of the Russian minorities there? What would France’s reaction be if Germany took the lead in protecting the non-Russian majority in Ukraine and the Baltic states? NATO, the basis of American and European security, would find itself under extreme pressure and could disintegrate.

The triumph of ethnic nationalism in the Balkans would inflict wounds on democracy and market economics in Europe that might prove fatal. As in the 1930s, the Western democracies would once again have failed to meet crucial moral, political and military challenges. The ruthless leaders of ethnic parties in Europe, whether they represent majorities or minorities, have little use for the rationality and spirit of compromise that are the hallmarks of the industrial democracies. If the states of Central and Eastern Europe fall victim to ethnic warfare, the contagion of dictatorship and intolerance will spread. Until the United States puts forward an overarching and persuasive structure for American foreign policy, the West will continue to stagger unconvincingly from crisis to crisis, until it is powerless to act to prevent slaughter and, eventually, even to defend itself from the next round of great power barbarism.

In his book, “Diplomacy,” Henry Kissinger points out the perennial dilemma of statesmen: “When their scope for action is greatest, they have a minimum of knowledge” of the outcome of their policies. By the time they are certain, it is too late. The surface ambiguity of the crisis in Kosovo must not paralyze the West until the damage to the post-Cold War settlement has become too severe to remedy.

For now, the time and resources exist to stop the killing and to prevent the victory of ethnic nationalism. It is no exaggeration to say that everything good we have hoped for since the fall of communism is at stake.