Re: Kosovo and "the Jewish Question"

[Richard Fidler <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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.
>

For what it is worth, here are some thoughts on this piece,
excerpted from a recent letter to a friend who was critical
of it:

I have now read the Rosenthal article in MR 51-9, and am
wondering what you consider the "implications" and why you
think they are "disastrous". I think the article is on the
whole not bad, albeit not argued with the greatest clarity
(as the editors note, in their reference to its "legalistic
argument and difficult style").

The author's primary concern, of course, is to rebut the
false analogy of Serb oppression of the Kosovars with Nazi
persecution of the Jews that was used to justify the 1999
NATO bombing campaign. He does this in two ways: (1) by
placing the Nazi Holocaust in historical perspective, and
emphasizing that the Jews' struggle in Germany was aimed at
preserving their civil rights as German citizens, not
ethnic/national rights; and (2) by debunking claims of Serb
"genocide" of the Kosovars. I think these arguments stand up
well on historical and factual grounds.

Rosenthal is on shakier ground when he goes on to argue
against Kosovar self-determination. I imagine your concerns
are addressed to this issue.

A valid distinction is made between the national question in
Western Europe where, generally speaking, politically
constituted states gave rise to nations (by incorporating
and suppressing various precapitalist peoples), and the
national question in Eastern Europe, where, owing to belated
capitalist development, states arose out of ethnic nations.
The Marxist movement has long grappled with this
distinction, which underlies much of the debate over the
national question in the early years of the last century.

The "classic" Leninist position, with its emphasis on
language and territory (especially the latter) as key
defining characteristics of a nation, was not easily
transposable to the multi-ethnic, multinational reality of
the Balkans (or, for that matter, the Austro-Hungarian
empire). Tito's constitution in revolutionary Yugoslavia is
in my opinion extremely interesting for the way in which it
apparently combined the Leninist territorial concept with a
somewhat Bauerite approach to assigning nationality rights
to individuals within the territorial republics. There is an
excellent description of this arrangement in, inter alia,
Susan Woodward's book, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution
after the Cold War. As she states (p. 31):

"The six republics of the federation recognized nations as
historical-territorial communities. Individual members of
the six constituent nations (not fully coincident with the
territorial boundaries of the republics) had rights as
members of those nations as ethnic peoples (defined by a
common religion, language, and political consciousness).

"In addition, there were many citizens who identified
ethnically with a people who had a national homeland
elsewhere, called nationalities. These individuals... had
guaranteed cultural rights to preserve their sense of
community and its inheritance. Albanians and Hungarians, the
largest of these groups, were also given local
self-government in two autonomous regions in the republic of
Serbia where they predominated (Kosovo and Vojvodina,
respectively)."

Woodward refers to this constitutional order as a source of
stability and survival for socialist Yugoslavia. Of course,
it did not always function smoothly; in fact, it was
constantly being adjusted, and by the 1980s they were
working on the country's fifth constitution. But the primary
source of dislocation and disruption was the progressive
decentralization of the economy with the successive
marketizing reforms, which evolved into a major economic and
then state/constitutional crisis with the explosion of the
foreign debt crisis in the early 1980s. It was under the
impact of these tensions that, in 1989, the Yugoslavs
"reduced" (in fact eliminated) the autonomy accorded to
Kosovar under the 1974 constitution.

The point of all this is to say that the political situation
in Kosovo cannot be reduced to a struggle for
Kosovar/Albanian national "self-determination" in the face
of long-standing Serb oppression. In fact, Kosovo was a
relatively backward region for historical reasons long
predating the Yugoslav republic; during the Second World War
the majority of Kosovars fought with Mussolini against the
Partisans; for many years, and particularly since the
reforms of the late 1960s, Kosovo had received a
disproportionately favourable share of federal investment
and social spending.

Where I think Rosenthal's article can be faulted is in his
failure to make a clear case against recognizing Albanian
Kosovo today as a distinct nation, with the right of
self-determination. He makes a compelling case that the
Kosovo Albanians have not been 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". But he goes on implicitly to deny that they are a
national minority (he refers to them as a "so-called
?national minority'") within Serbia and Yugoslavia. His
reasoning here is not altogether clear, but he seems to
hinge his rejection of national minority status on the
alleged ethnic heterogenity of Kosovo. But in fact some 78%
of Kosovo was Albanian by the 1990s, and Serb and other
minorities were very sparsely distributed outside Pristina
and the section of the province immediately adjacent to the
rest of Serbia. Rosenthal seems to be analogizing from the
case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where three distinct ethnic
groupings were juxtaposed throughout the republic.

Rosenthal seems to fault the Kosovars for rejecting the
authority of the Serbian state (p. 36), a position that he
considers unwarranted because Kosovo's reduced autonomy
after 1989 "did not in any way affect the political and
civil rights of individual Kosovars as citizens of the
Yugoslav Federation and the Serbian Republic". He apparently
thinks they are not entitled to claim communal or "group"
rights. I find this reasoning unconvincing. After all, the
Kosovars have admittedly been subject to pretty severe
repression under Milosevic's regime, and there is an
historically constituted Albanian nation of which they are a
part, with an Albanian homeland adjacent to Kosovo.

The underlying problem with this part of the discussion is
its abstractness. I wonder whether Albanian Kosovo may have
had a legitimate claim to national state status or secession
once the Yugoslav state had itself unravelled and the
constitutional order described earlier had disappeared. This
view is supported by Woodward (p. 341): "By 1994 both
Serbian and Albanian leaders in Serbia entertained the idea
of a territorial partition of Kosovo as a possible
alternative to the outcome in Bosnia-Herzegovina."

I also question whether NATO even today favours an
independent Kosovo. The European and NATO powers have
shamelessly fostered, bolstered and manipulated competing
national aspirations throughout the Yugoslav crisis, from
the overriding perspective of destroying the workers state.
But notwithstanding their "human rights" and
"self-determination" rhetoric, it cannot be said that they
have any commitment in the abstract to national
self-determination or independence, whether based on ethnic,
territorial or any other characteristics. I think they are
genuinely (in their own interests) concerned about the
implications of Kosovar independence on Macedonia and
Montenegro, not to mention Albania and, more generally, the
stability of the region as a whole.

Rosenthal may be reacting to the position taken by many
people on the left who saw the primary issue in 1999 as
Kosovar self-determination (or gave it equal prominence with
their denunciation of the NATO bombing). I am thinking here,
for example, of the state-capitalist types associated with
Against the Current, or the left-Shachtmanites of New
Politics (with which Elaine Bernard is associated). Of
course, if you think Tito's Yugoslavia was not qualitatively
different from any other "capitalist" state (or was a
bureaucratic collectivist state, not a workers state),
practically any movement in opposition to that state, or its
successors, may be justified. But this means doing violence
to the facts ? as in Against the Current's absurd notion
that the NATO powers had a pro-Serb, pro-Milosevic tilt, or
New Politics' pathetic attempts to paint the NATO-aligned
and NATO-fostered KLA as a progressive liberation force! In
each case, these groups are determined at all costs not to
given any credence to the legitimacy of the Serbian/Yugoslav
state. They also tend to ignore the historical context and
have failed to analyze the evolution of national and ethnic
relations in Yugoslavia prior to 1989.

That being said, I think Rosenthal is right to criticize the
tendency to assign an automatic right of self-determination
to any ethnically defined group, irrespective of its
relationship, if any, to a politically or historically
constituted community. He points out (p. 34) that

"[O]nce 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."

Indeed, in so far as the nation (and the right of
self-determination) is defined on primarily ethnic grounds,
there is this dynamic. It is inherent in the claims of the
English "rights" partisans who advocate partition of a
sovereign Quebec. That, to me, is one of the "implications"
in this approach. Most Quebec sovereigntists (and
nationalists for that matter) correctly define their nation
on territorial/political/historical grounds.

So, while Rosenthal's abstract theoretical argument against
ethnic nationalism is generally valid (although not clearly
argued), I think he has failed on the factual level to probe
more deeply into the possible concrete basis for recognizing
a Kosovar nationality and with it a right to
self-determination in today's context. Ironically, I think
he got into this problem by somehow confusing the argument
over Kosovar nationality with his ostensibly original
argument over the nature of genocide and the treatment of
the Jews in Nazi Germany. That is, the Nazis did not
suppress the Jews because they were a nation, but because
they were a race. So the argument on genocide stands
independently of the national question per se. ...

Richard Fidler