Kosovo and "the Jewish Question"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

MONTHLY REVIEW, February 2000

>From Kosovo and "the Jewish Question"

by John Rosenthal

THE TROUBLE WITH "MINORITY RIGHTS"

If not, then, the victims or targets of a genocidal policy on the part of
the Yugoslav state, were the Kosovo Albanians subjected to a process of
political and civil exclusion analogous to that to which the German Jews
were subjected by the German State in the Third Reich? Here again, the
facts?and now we are dealing with straightforward institutional facts which
are easily verifiable by anyone?simply do not support such a conclusion.
The pivotal event in the conflict opposing the Yugoslav federal and Serbian
provincial states on the one hand, and the Albanian nationalist leadership
in Kosovo on the other, was the 1989 reform of the Serbian Constitution,
which reduced the autonomous powers of the province. This reform did not in
any way affect the political and civil rights of individual Kosovars as
citizens of the Yugoslav Federation and the Serbian Republic. These
continued to be guaranteed to all citizens of the Federation and the
Republic, regardless of self-proclaimed or ascribed nationality. Even this
guarantee, however, was not a concession, but rather an affront to the
aspirations of the provincial leadership. For these aspirations did not
concern the civil rights of Kosovo Albanians, but rather the communal or
"group" rights claimed on their behalf. It was the communal rights of
Kosovo Albanians inasmuch as a so-called "national minority" within Serbia
and Yugoslavia that the constitutional reform was perceived to have
infringed upon and their communal prerogatives, as created by the 1974
Yugoslav Constitution, that it did indeed reduce.?5

Now, the notion of national "minority rights" is a notoriously slippery
one. On a liberal interpretation of the expression? and this was the
interpretation which held sway in international jurisprudence until very
recently?such rights are strictly linguistic or cultural in character and,
in fact, belong to the individual. They are the rights of an individual who
so happens to form part of a linguistic or cultural "minority" freely to
employ her native tongue and to give expression to other aspects of her
cultural heritage. Obviously, when we begin to consider the concrete
institutional contexts in which such rights might be claimed?the school,
the courts, the legislature? the scope of their validity becomes itself a
complicated matter.

When, however, the subject of "minority rights" is understood as the
"national minority" itself, i.e., the group, and when the "minority" in
question in fact constitutes the majority on some part of the national
territory, then the content of such "rights" will invariably take the form
of communal self-government within the relevant region. Inasmuch, however,
as the population of the region in question is itself ethnically
heterogeneous, this will require either that the "group rights" of the
local "minorities" are guaranteed in turn or the degradation of the status
of the latter, in effect, to "second-class citizens" (or, more precisely,
provisionally tolerated "state-members," analogous indeed to the German
Jews under the Third Reich) with all the dangers of eventual expulsion or
worse which this comports. Indeed, the discrimination and insecurity
suffered by non-Albanians in Kosovo under the pre-1989 autonomous regime
clearly contributed to their agitation and to the agitation within the
Serbian Republic as a whole for a modification of the province?s status.

Though the western media, French nouveau philosophes, and NATO officials
have somehow managed to depict such ethnic-national minority politics as
the model for "multiculturalism," they are obviously rather the perfect
recipe for what could be more accurately described as juxtaposed
monoculturalism. Their immanent logic is such that the only stable outcome
to which they can lead is not in fact a regime of protected "minority
rights" within the framework of existing political structures, but rather
full-fledged secession and the creation of new ethnically homogenous
"microstates" under the banner of "national self-determination" (with the
prospect, in the case of "microstates" geographically contiguous to a
larger ethnic-national "homeland," of eventual attachment to the latter).
More exactly, where the population of each of the erstwhile national
regions is likewise ethnically "mixed" and their own "national minorities"
constitute in turn local "majorities," what can be expected is a nesting
pattern of secessions followed by civil war to determine what parts of the
fragmented national territory will pertain finally to which "ethnicities."
So-called "ethnic cleansing" is likewise a completely "normal" aspect of
this process, inasmuch as once the principle of ethnic-national
"self-determination" has been accepted, the spiral of dissolution and
intercommunal violence can only be halted when the populations of the new
national territories have obtained the requisite degree of homogeneity. The
dynamic here described is exactly the dynamic that has played itself out in
the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Even the much-vaunted and reputedly
"multicultural" Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is, in fact, a largely
fictive state invented by the western powers and masking the existence of
not two but, effectively, three independent and juxtaposed ethnic-national
"microstates" dividing the Bosnian territory. Those KFOR officials, media
commentators, and western political leaders who today denounce the violence
committed against the Serbian population in Kosovo and bemoan the exodus of
the latter from the region can hardly be supposed ingenuous in their
expressions of fellow-feeling. The "cleansing" of Kosovo of Serbs and other
"minorities" was a completely predictable consequence of the project of
ethnic-national state-building to which NATO lent its military support.

Of course, if "self-determination" is interpreted simply as rule "with the
consent of the governed"?as according to Lloyd George?s famous formula from
1918?then the demand for "self-determination" need not lead to the
consequences described above. In this case, "self-determination" is barely
more than a synonym for democratic government, with the added connotation
of local rule when the demand is raised against the claims to authority of
a colonial or imperial power. The problems arise, however, when the
"nation" whose "self-determination" is in question is construed not as a
politically constituted community, but rather as an ethnic group whose
communal character is supposed in principle to pre-exist the state. In this
latter case, the "right of national self-determination" is transformed into
the ostensible right of each "nation" in this ethnic sense to form its own
state.

In any event, the struggle of German Jews following the rise to power of
the Nazis was a defensive struggle to protect their civil rights as
individuals against the discriminatory and exclusionary policies of the
Nazi state. It was not a struggle to protect any "minority rights" that
they might be supposed to claim or enjoy as a group, much less to assert
any supposed collective right to "national self-determination." (There
were, of course, Zionist groups in Weimar Germany, but it is highly
implausible to suppose that even the most optimistic of them expected to
secede from the German Reich with some part of German territory!) The Nazi
state did not seek to withdraw from Jews any "minority rights," since they
had never been ascribed nor, for the most part, had they demanded any such
rights in the first place. In fact, the opposite is the case. It was
precisely the Nazi state?s withdrawal of their political and civil rights
and its exclusion of the Jews from ever widening domains of normal civil
activity, as noted above, which led to the formation within the now
isolated or "abgesonderten" Jewish community of just those institutions
typically associated with self-government under a regime of "minority
rights." Thus it was only in the autumn of 1933 that a political
organization supposed specifically to represent the interests of German
Jews, the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland, was founded.
Similarly, in 1933, as an emergency response to the School Law of April 25,
which established a numerus clausus on Jewish enrollment in high schools
and universities, Jews were, in effect, forced to establish independent
?Jewish" schools. By the end of 1936, there had likewise developed an
independent Jewish welfare system, an independent Jewish healthcare system,
and a full-fledged, if shrinking on account of immigration, ?Jewish
economic sector." There were even now the rudiments of a ?Jewish" judicial
system, drawing on the tradition of rabbinical courts, which offered
arbitration of civil disputes among Jews and hence allowed them to
circumvent the hostile environment of the German courts.17

The founding of almost every one of such autonomous "Jewish" institutions
bears a clear, if superficial, resemblance to developments among the Kosovo
Albanian community of the 1990s: the establishment of an independent Kosovo
Albanian government in 1991, the founding of specifically "Albanian"
educational and healthcare systems, the application of the Kanun, the
traditional unwritten law of the Albanian clans, and so on. But, in fact,
the contrast between the two cases could not be starker. Following the 1989
re-assertion of Serbian sovereignty over the territory of Kosovo, the
political leadership of the Kosovo Albanians chose to boycott the
institutions of the Serbian state and to establish parallel, ethnically
specific "Albanian" institutions. This does not lessen the repressiveness
of the Serbian state?s response to the national aspirations of Kosovo
Albanians: a response that was inevitably all the more repressive in light
of the fact that the Yugoslav federation, under the provisions of its 1974
constitution, previously had largely catered to these aspirations. But we
should be clear, at least, that this response was directed precisely at
national aspirations which, in principle, rejected the authority of the
Serbian state and which, even before 1989, had aimed to organize the
institutions of public life in Kosovo along ethnic lines.

German Jews under the Third Reich were, by contrast, forced to establish
parallel institutions by virtue of their being excluded from the
institutions of the German state. In effect, it was the Nazi regime that
transformed German Jews into an ethnic "community" with a special status as
such under the law. They did not themselves demand this status. For German
Jews, whose newfound institutional "autonomy" was not matched by any claim
to territorial sovereignty, this process was the prelude to expulsion and,
for those who did not succeed in escaping beyond the borders of the Reich
and the occupied territories, extermination. For Kosovo Albanians, the
process of political affirmation of their autonomous status was rather the
prelude to defacto secession?and indeed to the expulsion of non-Albanian,
ethnically "foreign" elements from the newly "liberated" national territory.

PRECEDENT AND PERSPECTIVES

It can only be regarded as the symptom of a severe deterioration of
historical consciousness that amidst all the allusions to the Second World
War and the Third Reich which accompanied the public treatment of the
Kosovo crisis, a more obvious analogy for the latter, from exactly the same
historical context, was almost completely ignored: namely, the Sudetenland
crisis of 1938. The similarities between the two cases can be appreciated
from the comments of a contemporary, written on September 23, 1938:

"For almost two decades now, and among various other nationalities, also
Germans in Czecho-Slovakia have in the most unworthy fashion been abused,
tormented, economically ruined and above all prevented from realizing the
right of self-determination of nations also for themselves. All attempts by
these oppressed people to alter their fate have failed on account of the
brutal will to destroy of the Czechs. The latter possessed the state?s
means of repression and did not hesitate to use them in a ruthless and
barbaric manner."

The author of these words is, of course, Adolf Hitler. In his letter to
Neville Chamberlain, written during a break in their consultations at Bad
Godesberg, one week prior to the signing of the Munich Agreement, Hitler
goes on to cite a figure of 120 thousand refugees having already been
forced to flee the region, and demands the immediate severing of the
Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia?in the absence of which the German
Wehrmacht would take control of the Sudetenland by force. Hitler?s grim
depiction of the urgency of the Sudeten Germans? plight drew support from
the crescendo of atrocity stories which Goebbels? Propaganda Ministry had
disseminated in the German press over the previous weeks and which appeared
under headlines such as "13 More Blood-Witnesses for Sudeten-German Right
to Self-Determination: Arson Attacks, Murder, Martial Law, Foreign [i.e.,
Czechoslovak] Police and Soldiers with Tanks Rage Against the German
Population;" and "Bloody Butchery in Halbersbirk: With Tanks and
Machine-Guns Against a Sudeten-German Village;" and "Czech Orgy of Murder
in the Sudetenland;" and "Bestial Abuse of Sudeten-Germans in the Prisons;"
and even, dramatically portraying the putative threats of the "bestial"
Czechs, "We Will Play Football with Your Heads."19

But while it was the alleged atrocities committed against the
Sudeten-Germans which were used as propaganda to hasten the intervention,
Hitler also insisted upon a quasi-legal justification for the severing of
the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia: namely, the very "right of national
self-determination" which is so often invoked today (even indeed by critics
of the NATO attack!) in connection with Kosovo. Of course, Hitler claimed
to be especially concerned for the "right to self-determination" of the
Sudeten-Germans, but he presented himself in his meetings with Chamberlain
also as the advocate for the other allegedly "oppressed national
minorities" in Czechoslovakia: Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, and Slovaks.
Just a few months later, he would appear yet again as the patron of
aspirations to national "self-determination" in orchestrating the secession
of Slovakia from rump Czechoslovakia.

Hitler?s letter to Chamberlain rehearsed much of the same content as his
closing speech to the Nazi Party Congress on September 12. "I demand," he
said there (in somewhat unusual German), "that the oppression of 3 1/2
Million Germans in Czecho-Slovakia come to an end and that the free ri~ht
to self-determination take its place [an dessen Stelle bitt] ." Indeed,
already in a Reichstag speech of February 20, 1938, Hitler had made clear
his plans for the Sudetenland. The Reichstag speech is especially
interesting for our purposes, since in it Hitler explicitly recognizes that
the "right to national self-determination" could only be fulfilled at the
cost of the violation of international law, understood in the customary
sense as the law guaranteeing the rights of and governing the relations
among sovereign states. Speaking of the Sudeten-Germans and their relation
to the German Reich, Hitler comments: "The juridical separation from the
Reich as far as international law is concerned [die staatsrechtliche
Trennungvom Reich] cannot lead to a national-political lawlessness [zu
einer volkspolitischen Rechtslosmachung] , this is to say that the
universal rights to national self-determination ... cannot be ignored
simply because Germans are here concerned."21 The Nazi legal theorist Carl
Schmitt, writing just after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and shortly
before the German invasion of Poland, called the idea of
ethnic-nationhood?of "each and every people [Volk] as a form of life
determined by kind and origin, blood and soil"?the "great political idea"
which it would be the vocation of the German Reich to disseminate
throughout Europe. "The deed of our Führer," Schmitt concluded, with
obvious reference to Hitler?s "solution" of the "Sudeten question," "has
infused this thought of our Reich with political actuality, historical
truth and a great future in international law."22

The "great future" that Schmitt foresaw in 1939 turned out to be a
catastrophe for Europe that lasted exactly until May 1945. However, in the
wake of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia, political leaders of the NATO
alliance, so-called "human rights" advocates and leading political
theorists in both Europe and the United States have all been displaying a
notable enthusiasm for the subordination of states? sovereignty to the
alleged "rights" of ethnic-nations or "peoples." The "great future" of
Schmitt?s "great idea" might well be now, and there is no reason to expect
that its current realization will prove any less catastrophic than its
first. One thing, in any event, is certain: the struggle of German Jews
under the Third Reich was not a struggle for "self-determination" in the
ethnic-national sense. It was, on the contrary, the application of the
ethnic-national "principle of self-determination" under Nazi hegemony that
eventually made the very existence of Jews and other "stateless peoples" in
occupied Europe untenable.

(notes available on request)


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/