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July 5, 2000New
World Order:
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THE WRONG DIVERSITYBosnia, unlike some countries created through international conferences, at least had some history of being an entity – the kingdom or principality of Bosnia-Herzegovina during the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire – with boundaries similar to its current boundaries. Zagreb was a cultivated, refined city when Washington, DC was swampland. It was incorporated into Yugoslavia, the artificial, inherently unstable country created by diplomatic fiat after World War I and virtually guaranteed to be broken apart later. After the death of communism and the beginning of the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnia devolved into civil war among Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, ended by NATO bombing and the threat of more. The Dayton Accords forced on the country by the bombers created something resembling a de facto partition along ethnic lines, and since the three ethnicities are approximately equal in numbers, that might be the arrangement that offers the closest thing to a realistic hope of stability – three ethnic enclaves with a weak central government that mostly leaves them alone. But for members of the international nation-building brigade, leaving people alone and weak central governments don't compute. They saw Bosnia as an opportunity to create, through judicious use of state power and appropriate civil-rights laws, a model multiethnic state simply dripping with tolerance and mutual respect. The way to do that, in modern statist theology, is not to let people to work out living arrangements (as people in Bosnia had done for decades until politicians stirred up simmering ethnic resentments while maneuvering for advantage in the wake of Yugoslavia breaking apart) but to extirpate reactionary attitudes, re-educate people into the joys of multiethnic harmony and force people to face their prejudices and get rid of them. That way the new society would be the product of the nation-builders and their abstract theories rather than something that grew from the bottom up. International bureaucrats and diplomats are nothing if not top-downers. What the builders faced, however, was a situation in which most of the active expression of political and/or social attitudes and opinions tended to be along ethnic or what might be viewed as nationalist lines. There was diversity among the media, but it was the wrong kind of diversity – all kinds of people expressing views and attitudes the international bureaucrats just knew were reactionary, backward and not constructive at all. Worst of all, many of those media expressed doubts – can you believe it? – about the supreme wisdom and desirability of the agreement cobbled together at Dayton and the guardians of righteousness sent out by the international community to enforce them. MUZZLING THE MEDIASo the process of taming the media and introducing the kind of diversity the nation-builders wanted (as opposed to what the people who would have to live in the nation might prefer) began. This wasn't sold as censorship, of course, but as increasing pluralism. "The conduct of international officials, however," Ted Carpenter explains, "suggests that media pluralism is a synonym for media enthusiasm for the Dayton Accords and the objective of a united, multiethnic Bosnian state." So the international bureaucrats created a Media Experts Commission to develop politically-correct standards for Bosnia's media – end then enforce them. Independent journalists were chastised for using the "rhetorical jargon of war" when they referred to the "Bosnian Serb entity" rather than the Bosnian nation as a whole. Media outlets that resisted these enlightened standards were first pressured into compliance and in some cases physically shut down, with military force. Media that would parrot the internationalist line were created and/or subsidized. The media monitors either didn't notice or didn't care that such media were mostly despised by the population (of all ethnicities) as mouthpieces for the occupying powers. RIGGING THE ELECTIONSThe subversion of media freedom in the name of media diversity – a cruel caricature of Western ideals – was mirrored in the international bureaucrats approach to political expression and electoral processes. Dr. Carpenter details how the international bureaucrats disqualified candidates of whom they disapproved, subsidized candidates they wanted to win, changed the rules to make it more difficult for parties of which they disapproved to qualify for electoral participation. "Routinely harassing and disqualifying candidates they dislike is not the only method international authorities have used to attempt to manipulate election results," writes Dr. Carpenter. Indeed, skewing the voter registration lists has been an even more pervasive tactic." Allowing people to vote either from their current residence or from their prewar residences "amounted to the creation of 'rotten boroughs,' since most of the refugees had little prospect of ever returning to their prewar homes." The ploy "is seen by many in Bosnia as a cynical ploy by the West to dilute the power of the nationalist parties." POTEMKIN DEMOCRACYThe result of all this international meddling – let's be kind and assume it is to some extent well-intentioned – is to create a sham democracy with sham freedoms, all tightly controlled by an authoritarian band of nation-building mercenaries. "What is occurring in Bosnia today," writes Dr. Carpenter, "is not the evolution of a democratic system but the ugly face of new-style colonialism. The officials who implement this new, multilateral colonialism may have better motives than their predecessors in the now dead European colonial empires that once dominated Asia and Africa, but their charges do not enjoy more meaningful political rights." Even worse, the model evolving in Bosnia is being applied in Kosovo and is likely to be the model used after future interventions create future dependencies destabilized more than they were originally by intervention and management. Congress should face the question: Do we want to show, by example, that when the United States and the West talk about media freedom we really mean media suppression and censorship? When we speak of the virtues of democracy and civil society, do we want to make it clear that what we mean is democracy that comes out the way autocratic authorities imposed from the outside prefer? If not, we need to rethink our foreign policy down to the roots. Please Support Antiwar.comA contribution of $50 or more will get you a copy of Ronald Radosh's out-of-print classic study of the Old Right conservatives, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism. Send contributions to Antiwar.com or
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