[Marxism] The European Dream: Victor's Justice at the Hague

[Suresh <borhyaenid@xxxxxxxxx>]

"The indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and four of his
military and security officials for murder,
deportations and persecutions--the first such
indictment of a sitting head of state--is a giant step
for human rights, on the order of Gen. Augusto
Pinochet's arrest in London this past October, and has
the integrity missing from NATO's war. The indictments
give human rights the highest priority and make it
clear that they must not be subject to diplomatic
concerns." - The Nation, June 3, 1999

It appears that the kangaroo court at the Hague has
finally settled upon the option of muzzling former
Yugoslavian ?strongman? Slobodan Milosevic by obliging
him to accept counsel and to cease serving as his own
defense, for allegedly health-related reasons.
Apparently the ex-President is so ill-fit that he
cannot be allowed to defend his rights, but not so ill
as to drop the case entirely. It's been commented
frequently enough, that the precedent set by this
fiasco had already been taken to heart by the U.S. led
coalition in Iraq and by Allawi's Quisling regime with
regard to Saddam's trial - in establishing its secrecy
and unilateral  nature. It would seem that the lessons
are already being applied by the judges in this
particular war crimes tribunal, in order to prevent
anymore embarrassing disclosures.

Perhaps this might be an appropriate occasion for
Europe bashing - from the left, as opposed to what we
hear at the Republican National Convention. There's a
great deal of salutary Kerry/Democrat bashing on this
list, already - even to excess.  But, in addition to
exposing the roots of the ABB phenomenon, we might
identify an Anywhere But America dogma, that is
subscribed to by sections of the intelligentsia and
academia both in the U.S. and Europe. Thus, the war in
Bosnia and aerial bombardment in the Kosovo war, along
with the European Union, and (declining) welfare state
are models for a kinder and gentler, post-modern
capitalism which has somehow transcended the
nation-state. The NY Times has a review of a book
written in this vein, called "The European Dream", by
Jeremy Rifkin. This a conservative, free-marketeer's
critique, as is to be expected from the Times, but
this much we can agree with:


"The European Union includes Poland and Portugal,
Britain and Greece, which are as different from each
other as each is from the United States. Those
differences call into sharp question many of Mr.
Rifkin's assertions, like this one: "The U.S. foreign
policy is light-years away from the foreign policy
orientation of the 25 member states that make up the
European Union."
Surely, there are some ways in which the international
orientation of a collection of small and medium-sized
countries will be substantially different from that of
a superpower. But that phrase "light-years away" is a
typical Rifkinian overstatement, even when applied to
countries like France and Germany, which vigorously
opposed the United States on Iraq. These same
countries, after all, cooperated with Washington
during the last decade or so in Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo
and Afghanistan, including regarding the use of force
in every instance. Beyond that, a solid majority of
the 25 members of the European Union supported the
United States on Iraq and contributed troops, wisely
or not, to the coalition.
Some of what Mr. Rifkin describes as important
European-American differences have been shrinking even
in recent weeks. Powerful German labor unions have
agreed to work longer hours without additional pay, a
recognition that Germany, Europe's economic engine,
may be in for more "unrelenting toil" and less "deep
play" (what Mr. Rifkin means by that profound-sounding
concept remains vague) if it is to restore its damaged
competitiveness. German unemployment has been more
than 10 percent for several years, even as
unemployment benefits have been shrinking; that
country's budget deficits have exceeded the levels
allowed by the European Union for three consecutive
years; and its leftist government has been cutting
back on social welfare."


Indeed, the SPD-Green government of Gerhard Schröder
is now in the process of force-feeding the Hartz IV
"reforms" down the population's throats, even as
massive demonstrations are mounted by workers in
numerous cities across the country. Meanwhile, Der
Spiegel and the Chamber of Industry and Commerce
demand that the reforms continue unabated. Just as it
took a courageous British Prime Minister to defy his
own people on Iraq, it takes a principled Chancellor
to stick to his guns on the latest anti-labor
legislation. In Germany, as elsewhere in Europe and
the world at large, "painful but necessary reforms" is
the phrase that sums up the political landscape today,
with precious few exceptions.

What's revealed in this social conflict is the basic
problem with the customary liberal analysis of
countries like Germany or France: that it suffers from
the tendency to substitute snap-shots and a crude
empiricism for the understanding that comes from a
historical view, the perspective of a class society as
an ongoing process. This kind of myopia led someone
like New Deal devotee Thurman Arnold to write about
Europe during the post-war boom as if it had found an
economic elixir in dirigisme and state intervention,
just as today we have intellectual superstars like
Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas pontificating upon
the new international model being pioneered by the EU.


One particularly outrageous idealization of the
European project and social model and of the new
international order which is supposedly exemplified by
the Milosevic trial, was provided by the Blairite
diplomat Robert Cooper. He writes:


"The postmodern system in which we Europeans live does
not rely on balance; nor does it emphasise sovereignty
or the separation of domestic and foreign affairs. The
European Union has become a highly developed system
for mutual interference in each other's domestic
affairs, right down to beer and sausages... It is
important to realise what an extraordinary revolution
this is...

The conception of an International Criminal Court is a
striking example of the postmodern breakdown of the
distinction between domestic and foreign affairs. In
the postmodern world, raison d'ètat and the amorality
of Machiavelli's theories of statecraft, which defined
international relations in the modern era, have been
replaced by a moral consciousness that applies to
international relations as well as to domestic
affairs: hence the renewed interest in what
constitutes a just war."


If the quasi-Kautskyist, ultra-imperialist alliance
between European and American capitalism (against
socialism and the Third World) is ever truly severed,
for example in a confrontation between a "core Europe"
versus the U.S. and it's remaining allies, we will
probably be inundated by both sides by tidal waves of
propaganda illustrating their own unique virtues. If
the United States, Great Britain, France, and
(incongruously) czarist Russia were collectively the
self-avowed democracies of World War I, then one might
imagine a rump EU reclaiming this mantle vis-à-vis the
U.S. in any coming hypothetical (and perhaps still
fanciful) conflict. In the meantime, we're left with a
world of continued imperial interventions against
small, weak semi-colonial nations and of sham trials
conducted under the auspices of the U.N. - in this
instance, designed to cover up the decidedly
multi-lateral dismembering of the former Yugoslavia -
all layered beneath generous-sounding platitudes about
human rights and basic freedoms.

Links:

?Milosevic barred from conducting own defence?
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/yugo/article/0,2763,1296482,00.html>

The European Dream
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/01/books/01bern.html>
<http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2004/08/20040818_b_main.asp>

Postmodern Imperialism
<http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,680095,00.html>

The Fall of France
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n17/ande01_.html>

Habermas and Derrida on 9/11
<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/066649.html>



                
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