EURO MOANS

Chartist, October 1999

Continental social democrats are deeply ambivalent about Britain’s Labour government – though their reasons vary widely. Paul Anderson reports

When Labour won the 1997 general election, there was barely concealed rejoicing throughout the continental European political establishment. Tony Blair was an unknown quantity the other side of the Channel. But few mainstream continental politicians doubted that he was an out-and-out pro-European whose accession to power meant the end of a decade of Tory obstructionism in Europe.

Today, the picture is rather different. The sense of relief that the Tories are gone is still just about palpable. But Blair is no longer an unknown quantity. And although he is still much admired on the continent, doubts about new Labour are now widespread, particularly among left-leaning social democrats.

There are several things new Labour is generally seen to have done well. Most important, Britain is now firmly established as a co-operative member of the European family, not its black sheep. The Blair government has signed Britain up to the social chapter of the Maastricht treaty, has given substantial impetus to west European defence policy integration and has played a constructive role in the gruelling process of reforming the Common Agricultural Policy in preparation for EU enlargement.

The most common cause for continental grumbling about Britain under Blair is the apparent cooling of new Labour's enthusiasm for participation in the single European currency. In 1997, hopes were high among other EU governments of all political colours that Blair would take advantage of his extraordinary popularity among British voters and his giant parliamentary majority to call a snap referendum on Britain joining the euro in the first wave. That didn't happen – and the British government subsequently decided to rule out a referendum during the current parliament.

In the wake of this June's European elections, the Labour leadership has wavered again on the euro. Blair has agreed to front the pro-European Britain in Europe campaign – but only on condition that it drops its focus on arguing for British participation in the single currency and instead emphasises the benefits of Britain remaining in the EU. Blair has continued to argue for British membership of EMU when the time is right, but sources close to Gordon Brown have indicated that the chancellor is no longer as favourable towards sterling joining the euro as he once was. With the opinion polls showing strong public opposition to Britain joining EMU, it would not be surprising if Labour decides not to hold a referendum even in the next parliament.

Euro-zone politicians who want Britain in are not impressed – and they are right to detect a failure of new Labour nerve. Yet the truth is that Britain's dithering on the euro, however damaging it is to the political credibility of new Labour, does not make a great deal of difference to them. The euro "ins" have to make the single currency work regardless of what Britain decides to do. If disappointment with the British stance is widespread, it is not intense.

By contrast, there is deep hostility among some continental social democrats to new Labour's enthusiasm for deregulation and flexible labour markets, which they see as part of an attempt to replace the European model of workers' rights and welfare provision with something akin to what prevails in the United States.

Since becoming prime minister, Blair has consistently proselytised for policies to encourage competitiveness, doing his utmost to persuade his fellow social democratic leaders – and some moderate conservatives – to sign up to the "Third Way" represented by new Labour in Britain and the Clinton administration in the United States.

There is something about the 'Third Way' initiative that gives it the air of a desperate attempt by Blair to secure influence over euro-zone economic policy that British non-participation in the single currency has denied him. And so far, the results have not been spectacular: a few seminars and conferences and a pamphlet launched jointly by Blair and German chancellor Gerhard Schröder just before the European election, Europe: The Third Way — Die Neue Mitte.

But enough social democratic party leaders have become involved in the 'Third Way' initiative to give it momentum – and this in turn has set alarm bells ringing, particularly in the French Socialist Party, on the left of Schröder's SPD and among German trade unionists.

'We are different, unique,' French prime minister Lionel Jospin declared when asked why he had not signed up to the Blair-Schröder pamphlet. "We are less free-market, less attached to transatlantic ties. We favour global economic regulation." In Germany, the SPD has spent much of the summer arguing about whether the Blair-Schröder pamphlet played a part in its miserable result in the European elections, with the left and prominent trade unionists attacking its free-market thrust.

Not all the hostility to the Blair-Schröder pamphlet should be taken at face value. It is a moot point whether Jospin's differences with Blair and Schröder are much more than rhetorical. With the exception of its introduction of the 35-hour week, his government has been notably deregulationist, and his distancing himself from Blair and Schröder has more to do with his need to retain Communist Party support for his government than with anything else. Similarly, SPD left criticisms of the Blair-Schröder document have a lot to do with continuing resentment at the ejection of Oskar Lafontaine from the government in March and opposition to the austere budget package put forward by his successor as finance minister, Hans Eichel. The reality is that all the social democratic governments in the EU enthusiastically embrace the market even if they spurn the rhetoric of the "Third Way".

Nevertheless, worries that the Blair government is a Trojan horse for American-style labour-market and welfare practices are real enough, and they are unlikely to go away if it continues on its current course. If new Labour seriously wants to keep in with its social democratic sister parties in continental Europe — and they are in power in 13 out of 15 EU countries — it would do it no harm over the next few months to make it clear that it thinks trade unions, workers' rights and comprehensive welfare states are good things rather than impediments to enterprise. Come to think of it, that might even boost morale in Labour's own ranks. 

BROKEN DREAMS OF SALVATION

Paul Anderson, review of The Passing of an Illusion by Francois Furet (University of Chicago Press, £24.50), New Times, September 1999

In the 25 years before his death in 1997, the historian Francois Furet was one of the most influential intellectuals in France. His reinterpretation of the French revolution, based on a critique of the Marxist explanations put forward by the previous generation of French historians, played an extraordinary role in changing French perceptions of the past.

There was always a strong contemporary political thrust to his work. Most of the historians against whom he developed his reading of the French revolution were members of (or close to) the French Communist Party (PCF), to which Furet himself had belonged between 1949 and 1956. They celebrated the events of 1789-93 as an historically inevitable bourgeois revolution, excusing the Jacobins' use of terror on the grounds that the revolution was threatened from without – in line with the PCF's revolutionary ideology, its Marxist philosophy of history and its defence of the Soviet Union. Furet's arguments that the revolution was not 'bourgeois' and that terror was an integral part of the Jacobin ideology of revolution were direct assaults on the PCF's core beliefs.

So it was hardly surprising that, in his 60s, Furet turned directly to what Eric Hobsbawm describes as the 'short 20th century' – the period between the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 and the collapse of the communist regime in the Soviet Union in 1991. The Passing of an Illusion, published in France in 1995 but only now translated into English (by his wife Deborah), is the monumental result.

Furet explains in his preface that this is not a history of the Soviet Union or even of communism but 'a history of the illusion of communism during the time in which the USSR lent it consistency and vitality'. The 'illusion' was the notion, widely accepted in western Europe, that communism, as instituted in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, was a higher stage of civilisation than capitalism and one that was historically bound to prevail. 'It was a different type of illusion from one based on a calculation of means and ends or issuing simply from belief in a just cause,' he writes. 'For people lost in history, an illusion of this kind not only gives life meaning but offers them the comforts of certainty. Unlike an error of judgment, which, with the aid of experience, can be discovered, appraised and corrected, the communist illusion involved a psychological investment, somewhat like a religious faith even though its object was historical.'

This is a perfectly legitimate intellectual project. How the Soviet Union came to be seen as the salvation of humanity by a significant section of the western left – in some countries, by nearly everyone who was of the left – is one of the great puzzles of our century.

The Bolsheviks' contempt for democratic decision-making and working-class self-organisation was apparent to anyone who cared to take an interest long before Lenin came to power. By 1920, it was clear to astute left observers (including Bertrand Russell and the British Labour delegation with which he visited the country that summer) that Soviet Russia had become an extremely unpleasant police state.

Yet, somehow, by the mid-1930s – despite the regime in Russia becoming ever more brutal after Stalin's accession to power – the myth of the Soviet Union as the pioneer of the fate that history had laid down for the world was one of the core beliefs of much of the left throughout western Europe and north America. The myth retained its potency until well into the 1960s, despite the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Stalinist take-over in eastern Europe after 1945, Stalin's split with Tito, the 1953 Berlin uprising, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 . . .

Furet's attempts to explain all this are fascinating but flawed. His account of the way that many in the west rallied to the Bolshevik revolution as the legitimate heir of 1789 is brilliant. So too is much of his discussion of the symbiotic yet antagonistic relationship between communism and fascism. On the Popular Front in France, the Spanish civil war, the Hitler-Stalin pact and a lot more besides, Furet has extraordinary insight.

Yet there are also all sorts of bizarre omissions. Furet has little to say about the 'illusion of communism' in Italy, Britain or the United States and nothing at all to say about its role in anti-colonialism. In France, he ignores Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the most influential postwar propagators of the illusion. There is little on the appeal of Soviet planning and industrialisation in the 1930s.

But the biggest problem is that Furet cannot resist going over the top. Time and again, he exaggerates the similarities of communist and fascist ideologies and regimes. Worst of all, he ruins a convincing argument that communism in the west really prospered only under the banner of anti-fascism by suggesting that anti-fascism 'was little more than a ploy by which communism cynically won itself credit in the eyes of gullible western liberals'. Tell that to the Russian survivors of Stalingrad or the veterans of the Resistance.

PRODI MAKES A MARK

New Times, August 1999

It is going to take a lot of work to restore the credibility of the European Commission after the scandal that led to the resignation of all 20 commissioners in March, but Romano Prodi, its new president, appears undaunted by the challenge.

He has used the four months since he was nominated by EU heads of government to put together a radical plan for strengthening and reforming the Commission, building on changes introduced in the Amsterdam treaty. All the signs are that – if the European Parliament approves his commissioners in the autumn – he has a good chance of overseeing the rehabilitation of a discredited institution.

Prodi wants a commission that 'will have the powers, the political awareness and the will to work as a team, to improve efficiency and transparency and to express a strong political programme'. In line with this, the central thrust of his reform programme is to make the presidency more powerful and the Commission much more like a cabinet government.

Before announcing his new team of 19 commissioners last month, he made a point of emphasising that he would not hesitate to use his powers to hire and fire – if necessary vetoing national governments' choices of commissioners. The new commissioners had to agree in writing that they accepted his right to dismiss them at will.

Prodi has created substantial new roles for his two vice-presidents and taken away their departmental responsibilities. The UK's Neil Kinnock will take charge of Commission reform, combating fraud, the budget and personnel; and Spain's Loyola de Palacio will deal with relations with the European Parliament and institutional reform. The agriculture and fisheries departments will be merged, as will those for justice and home affairs.

Prodi is also insisting that each commissioner's cabinet of advisers – hitherto generally treated as a private office and staffed by political allies from the commissioner's own country – become expert supranational bodies that 'serve as an instrument supporting the policies developed by the president and the commissioners'.

Finally, Prodi is moving most commissioners and their civil servants out of the central Brussels Breydel building, which will become the home of the presidency, the legal service and the head of the EU bureaucracy and will be run like the British cabinet office.

The main problem Prodi faces is the European Parliament, which has the power to reject the Commission – and might just do so. The June European election resulted in a change in the balance of MEPs, with the centre-right gaining at the expense of the centre-left. But 10 of Prodi's 19 commissioners are socialists, and the centre-right is not pleased.

There is also grumbling in the parliament about the reappointment of four of the members of the commission that fell in March – Kinnock, Italy's Mario Monti, Finland's Erkki Liikanen and Austria's Franz Fischler. None of them was implicated in the corruption scandals, but many MEPs insist that there should have been a clean sweep of commissioners as the parliament demanded. 

THE NUDIST POSITION ON IRELAND

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 23 July 1999

I'm afraid I came away from last Saturday's Tribune-sponsored conference, "Democratic socialism or 19th century liberalism?", feeling rather depressed.

It would have been the same whatever had been said. After more than two decades of going to left-wing conferences of one kind or another, I can no longer spend more than a couple of hours listening to even the best speeches without getting the blues. And it's always worse if it's a beautiful summer's day outside or if the speakers drone on or if most of the contributors from the floor are nutters.

Last Saturday was relatively nutter-free, and not too many people droned on, at least in the bits I caught. But it was a beautiful summer's day outside, which meant that the main hall in Congress House was stiflingly hot and stuffy. At one point during the morning, I dozed off — to be awoken with a start by a speaker demanding that the left take seriously "the nudist position on Ireland". "Hey," I thought, "naturism as the key to unlocking the peace process. That's novel." But then he mentioned the "new disposition" a second time and I drifted into slumber again.

My problem with left-wing conferences is that I find them for the most part brain-numbingly predictable. I'm pretty familiar with the British left. I've been around it for a while, and I read all its main magazines and newspapers. I don't want to come across as a know-all, but most of the things people say at left-wing conferences I've heard or read already.

So why do I persist in turning up to them? Well, it's always good to see old friends and have a natter during breaks, then down a few beers in the evening before going off for a curry. I suppose my ideal left-wing conference would have 15-minute opening and closing plenary sessions, 30-minute workshops, one-hour coffee and tea breaks and two hours for lunch, with a really massive party in the evening.

Of course, such an event would be useless as a means of attracting new people to the cause, forging new alliances and doing all the other serious things that left-wing conferences are supposed to do. But I'm not sure that the traditional-format talk fest is much better.

Last Saturday's do, for instance, was intended as a consolidation exercise for the Labour left. The organisers' idea was to bring together the constituency activists involved in the Grassroots Alliance's successful National Executive Committee campaign along with MPs and trade unionists critical of the Government's direction. And indeed, they all turned up — the stalwarts of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Briefing and Labour Reform, Barbara Castle, Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn, John Edmonds, Jimmy Knapp and a load more — and they all agreed that they didn't much like new Labour's control freakery and obsession with appeasing the Daily Mail-reading middle classes.

But what beyond this do they have in common? Enthusiasm for more union-friendly labour laws and opposition to various aspects of the Government's welfare reform programme, certainly — which is fair enough. But even on these issues there are massive differences over what should happen instead of what new Labour is actually doing.

Otherwise, there really isn't much to unite the disparate band that came along last Saturday. People pushing positive alternatives to new Labour policies were conspicuous by their absence. A lot of speakers expressed hostility to the Liberal Democrats and proportional representation, and there was a virulently anti-European tone to several contributions. Nearly everyone cheered wildly at Tony Benn's closing speech, reasserting the eternal verities of the old Labour left just as he did in the early 1980s.

But the truth is that these days the Lib Dems, PR and Europe divide the Labour left — particularly PR and Europe. 'Unity' on a platform of first-past-the-post and anti-Europeanism would be the unity of an impotent rump. And although Benn remains an impressive orator, sentimentality for the good old days when the left was a power in the Labour Party will not make it vigorous again.

So although the organisers did a great job, and although it was great to see everyone again, I don't think we're now on the brink of a great left revival. What last Saturday showed was that as much still divides the Labour left as unites it, and that it will be some time yet before it is able to offer a serious comprehensive project to rival New Labour's. Which is roughly where we've been since the late 1980s.

EXCUSES, EXCUSES ON THE EURO-ELECTIONS

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 9 July 1999

I suppose I shouldn't go back to the Euro-elections after all this time, but everyone I know is still talking about them — and I still have an overwhelming urge to have my say.

The reason is simple. The 1999 European Parliament election was a disaster for Labour. It saw the party running its most risibly incompetent campaign in a UK-wide election since 1983. All that was lacking was an election broadcast featuring a swaying Denzil Davies in a kipper tie, valiantly attempting to put his point to camera in a force ten gale.

Labour has come up with all sorts of pathetic excuses for its failure. The official line, it seems, is that the voters were simply too content to bother to turn out. Radical dissidents from the line — well, actually, Margaret Beckett and Pauline Green — have blamed the crisis in Kosovo. The first-past-the-post mob have had the temerity to claim that no one understood the new electoral system, which in fact was easier to grasp than the national lottery. It's only a matter of time before someone blames the miserable performances of various national sporting teams.

The truth, however, is that Labour dug its own grave. Everything it did from the point at which it started to think about the 1999 Euro-elections might have been designed to undermine the enthusiasm of its activists and supporters.

First, it arranged an electoral system for the European elections that gave voters no option but to choose among lists dictated by parties, with no possibility of discriminating among individual candidates. Then it ensured that Labour Party members were given only the most nugatory role in choosing their candidates – and no role whatsoever in ranking them on the party's lists. The result was Labour lists in which independent-minded candidates, whatever their support in the party, had at best an outside chance of winning. What a brilliant way to enthuse the members!

Next, to put the icing on the cake, Labour decided to run a Euro-election campaign that was low-key and – insofar as it existed – entirely concentrated on domestic political concerns as divined by the focus group 'experts'.

The party put next to no effort into the campaign. It did little to mobilise its core working-class voters. It did little to persuade its middle-class voters not to vote Liberal Democrat, Green, Plaid or Scottish National Party. It did little even to persuade its members that the elections mattered.

I'm not saying that everything would have been OK if Labour had been a bit more traditionalist. PR means that every vote counts, so it's necessary to bring out the core vote. But by the same measure it's crucially important to hang on to Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman. Tony Blair is right to reject calls to adopt a "class against class" politics.

But something has to change. The Euro-elections showed the Millbank apparatus utterly incapable of handling its most basic task, of getting the party to mobilise for an election. It is amazing that heads have not rolled.

It is almost as incredible that the "solution" most touted for Labour's failure is the return of Peter Mandelson to overseeing the party's election campaigns. Party members know his role in instituting the regime of control-freakery and focus-group fetishism that led to the debacle.

As for the calls of the first-past-the-post lobby to ditch any thought of PR for the Commons, they are laughable. Labour's haul of seats in the Euro-elections would have been no better under FPTP than it actually was under PR, so dismal was the party's showing. The principle that you shouldn't win a majority of seats even when you don't have a majority of votes still applies as much as in Margaret Thatcher's pomp.

And it would be daft for Blair now to recoil from putting the case for British participation in the single European currency. Euro-sceptic parties did relatively well in the Euro-elections, but they managed to secure the votes of less than 10 per cent of the electorate. Rather than suggesting that the case for joining the euro faces is necessarily doomed to defeat, this should encourage supporters of British participation to increase their efforts to persuade the people.

The one heartening thing about the Euro-elections was the performance of the Greens. I am of course sad that they beat Carole Tongue and Shaun Spiers in London and Anita Pollack in the South East. They are three of the best MEPs Labour has ever had. But I have hopes that Jean Lambert and Caroline Lucas, the Greens who won in London and the South East respectively, will prove themselves just as forthright and just as independent-minded. And they'd better make sure they keep a finger on the Labour heartbeat. I voted Labour for Tongue and Spiers, but nearly everyone else I know, including Labour Party members, sneaked out to vote Green. The new Green MEPs have a lot of Labour hopes riding on them.

AFTER THE WAR

New Times, July 1999

Mary Kaldor talks to Paul Anderson about the implications of what happened in Kosovo

'It would be a big mistake to see what has happened in Kosovo as a success for bombing,' says Mary Kaldor, looking out of the window of her office at the London School of Economics. 'Nato has been presenting the Serbs' withdrawal as a vindication of all its actions. What we need to remember is that the bombing failed to prevent the ethnic cleansing in the first place. Indeed, it accelerated it.

'I'm not trying to be wise after the event, but there really were options that could have been taken before the bombing started that would have prevented the ethnic cleansing. No one can say that we didn't know long ago what Slobodan Milosevic wanted to do in Kosovo. If the international community had been committed to a policy of humanitarian intervention to protect civilians on the ground, he could have been stopped long ago without Nato bombing.'

Even as late as the beginning of the year, she says, it would have been feasible for there to have been a limited intervention on the ground in Kosovo organised by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe to give protection to the Kosovo Albanians. This OSCE force could have been supported by a Nato deterrent force in Macedonia which would threaten ground invasion in the event that the OSCE couldn't carry out its job.

'The problem was that the Americans were intent on bombing to teach Milosevic a lesson — a position that Milosevic was quite happy with because it would give him the excuse to expel the Albanians from Kosovo. So nothing was done to organise a limited military operation to set up safe zones in Kosovo, and when the Rambouillet talks broke down, there simply wasn't the capacity for ground intervention. To cap it all, Nato then made the huge mistake of ruling out ground forces when it started to bomb. The British government realised the mistake and started pressing for ground troops – I think sincerely – but the damage had been done.'

Kaldor has been a critic of western foreign and military policy, as academic and activist, for a long time. The daughter of Nicholas Kaldor, the eminent Keynesian economist and adviser to Harold Wilson, she first established a reputation for hard-hitting work on the military-industrial complex in the late 1960s as a young researcher on the arms trade at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which she joined after reading PPE at Oxford.

In the 1970s, back in Britain working at Sussex University, she was a key figure in the Labour Party's defence study group, which in 1977 (to the embarrassment of the then Labour government) put forward detailed proposal for radical defence spending cuts. The next year, she published The Disintegrating West, a path-breaking and prescient analysis of the transatlantic tensions over economic and foreign policy that exploded in the 1980s. During the 1980s, as well as publishing a string of books and articles, most notably her account of the military's fixation with technology, The Baroque Arsenal, she was one of the leading lights in European Nuclear Disarmament. (END was the pressure group that gave the movement against nuclear arms its intellectual dynamic and, more importantly, inoculated it against apologists for Soviet militarism.) Since 1990, while continuing to write prodigiously, she has played a major role in END's successor organisation, European Dialogue, the British affiliate to the Helsinki Citizen's Assembly, the transnational movement for democracy and human rights.

Until Kosovo, however, Kaldor was always a critic of western foreign and military policy from a perspective that emphasised the pursuit of policy by peaceful, political means rather than by military means. On Kosovo, her argument has been that Nato used the wrong military means – bombing not ground troops. Some of her former allies from the 1980s peace movement accuse her of abandoning her principles and becoming an armchair general.

She dismisses such criticism emphatically. 'I'm not a pacifist. I respect people who are, but a lot of the people who oppose intervention really don't seem to care very much about ethnic cleansing. They have been exclusively concerned with the effects of Nato bombing. I was at a big peace movement conference in the Hague in May where there were passionate demands for an end to the bombing – but people were nothing like as energetic in condemning what had been done to the Kosovo Albanians. The rest of the world could not have stood by and watched. Military intervention was essential. The problem was that the Americans were insistent on bombing, and the rest of Nato allowed itself to be pushed by the Americans.

'What I proposed in any case was humanitarian intervention, which is quite different from war-fighting even though it may involve use of troops. A weak version of it was UNPROFOR in Bosnia, which imposed safe havens and humanitarian corridors which were backed by the UN Security Council but not negotiated with the Bosnian Serbs. The mistake in Bosnia was that the troops were poorly armed and ordered not to use force even though they had a mandate to do so, and their lives were privileged over those they were meant to protect.'

So what should happen now that Milosevic has withdrawn from Kosovo and the province is under the control of foreign armed forces? 'The first thing is that it is essential to come up with a settlement for the whole Balkans region,' says Kaldor. 'The international community should recognise that it was a great mistake to deal with each of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia one by one. Every partial agreement covering one area has led to a war in the next one. The partial agreement on Slovenia was followed by the war in Croatia. The agreement on Croatia in early 1992 was followed by the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And the Dayton agreement on Bosnia was followed after a brief respite by the eruption of conflict in Kosovo. There's now a real danger of wars in Macedonia and Montenegro – and who knows where' they might spread to?' Some of the ideas for south-east European integration envisaged in German foreign minister Joschka Fischer's proposal for a stability pact are very relevant, she says.

'Secondly, as everyone now admits, it was a terrible mistake to negotiate with Milosevic. He should be totally sidelined. As long as he remains in power, the violence is bound to spread because sooner or later he will need an international emergency – that's the way he rules. He is at the apex of a system involving extreme nationalists and a mafia who have a vested interest in continued violence. There is an urgent need to provide assistance for democracy in Serbia: there should be support for independent media to counter official propaganda and also support for bottom-up political initiatives – non-governmental organisations, city twinning and so on. And a way has to be found of giving economic aid to Serbia without dealing with Milosevic.'

In the long run, however, what is required is nothing less than a complete reorientation of foreign and military policy to take account of the changing nature of warfare. Kaldor's most recent book, New and Old Wars, gives a panoramic overview of the way that war has changed in the second half of the 20th century. Her thesis is that war in the sense of large-scale organised violence between states is becoming an anachronism. Instead, armed conflicts today are likely to be fuelled by ethnic hatreds and be fought by paramilitary groups, mercenaries and warlords as well as regular forces.

'What I call "new wars" are in practice a mixture of war, organised crime and human rights violations,' she says. 'In all of them, it's possible to identify islands of civility where local groups have defended an inclusive set of social arrangements. Any international effort to solve these wars has to build on these islands of civility. Politically the aim has to be to strengthen those groups offering a real alternative to the politics of exclusive identity. Militarily, peacekeeping has to be rethought as international law enforcement, as the protection of civilians.'

HARD CHOICES

New Times, June 1999

Paul Anderson assesses Nato's war over Kosovo and looks at the options for what happens next

The war over Kosovo has not turned out as Nato's political leaders expected or wanted. Their assumption was that Slobodan Milosevic's assault on the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo could be stopped quickly with air strikes and air strikes alone. So far – nine weeks into the air strikes as we went to press – there has been no sign that he has any intention of backing down.

Milosevic was given a look at Nato's hand when, at the same time as announcing the bombing raids, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton made it clear that deployment of ground troops was not planned as part of the Nato intervention.

The Serbian dictator then upped the stakes. Instead of pulling back his forces from Kosovo, as Nato demanded, he unleashed a ferocious pogrom against the ethnic Albanian population of the province – a pogrom that appears to have been eagerly executed and widely supported by ordinary Serbs. Within a week of the air strikes starting, more than half the 1.9 million Kosovo Albanians had been forced from their homes.

Nato responded to this brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing by increasing the scope of its aerial bombardment. But in doing so it started to kill civilians, including Kosovo Albanians, in significant numbers. Pictures from Serbian television showing casualties and bomb damage were beamed around the world. What little there was of a democratic opposition in Serbia rallied to Milosevic's side.

Now, after two months, a substantial part of Serbia's military capacity and much of its communications and industrial infrastructure have been 'degraded', as the Nato jargon has it. Yet Milosevic has not yielded. There are currently 1.6 million Kosovo Albanians in exile or 'displaced'. Thousands have been massacred. Milosevic's support at home – insofar as it is possible to measure it – has apparently remained solid. Ethnic cleansing has continued unabated in Kosovo. The number of refugees has risen inexorably. Ethnic tensions in the main countries the refugees have fled to, particularly Macedonia and Greece, are at crisis point.

Russia, which was from the start opposed to the Nato action, is now so antipathetic that serious commentators are talking about the danger of a new cold war. China, after the bombing of its embassy in Belgrade, is more strongly set against the Nato intervention than ever.

All in all, it is an extraordinary mess. It is tempting to respond simply by saying that Nato should not have acted as it has done – that the intervention should have been organised by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe rather than Nato, that more time should have been given to diplomatic efforts, that Nato should have planned from the beginning to deploy ground troops in some role or other.

The trouble with such arguments, however, is that they are wholly counterfactual. They might be useful as contributions to general debates about the sort of security structures that should exist in Europe, about the purposes of foreign policy and about the legitimacy and efficacy of military force. But they are not much use in helping to determine what should happen next over Kosovo. Like it or not, what has been done has been done.

So what should happen next? For Nato, there are three options.

The first is to continue the 'air strikes alone' strategy in the hope that it will eventually have the effect of forcing Milosevic to stop the military assault on Kosovo, let the refugees return and allow a Nato-led peace-keeping force into Kosovo. The second is to stop the air strikes and reopen negotiations with Milosevic, with a key role for the Russians. The third is to escalate the use of military force.

Each has implications. Sticking to 'air strikes alone' – until now the position of the US government and most of its west European allies, though support for it is much more fragile than hitherto – has two advantages for western politicians. It does not appear to be a capitulation to Milosevic, and it does not involve major western casualties.

The problem, of course, is that it has not worked so far, and it is questionable whether it will ever work except at an unacceptable cost in Serbian civilian lives, economic devastation and environmental damage. As the strategy is currently conceived, no ground deployments will take place until after Milosevic sues for peace – which he does not appear likely to do, not least because an admission of defeat would be the end of him politically.

Stopping the air strikes and reopening negotiations before Milosevic is defeated would certainly mean fewer dead and maimed Serbian civilians. And it would have the advantage for western politicians of repairing diplomatic relations with the Russians and Chinese, as well as placating domestic anti-war opinion and providing a way out of a quagmire.

But it would also amount to conceding victory to Milosevic, who would not only survive in power but, at least in the first instance, would be left in control of a depopulated Kosovo.

On previous form, it is extremely unlikely that he would subsequently make meaningful concessions from this position of strength. In particular, it is likely that he would try to block introduction of the substantial and effective peace-keeping force that is essential if the refugees are to be persuaded to return. He might change his mind in certain circumstances, for example if there were a deal on the table favourable to Serbia on partitioning Kosovo. At present, such a partition is unacceptable to the west because it would reward Milosevic for his aggression, but it might suddenly become an option if the Americans get cold feet.

The third option, escalating the use of military force, could take two forms: a Nato ground invasion or concerted support for the Kosovo Liberation Army. Although Nato ruled out a ground invasion at the start of the campaign and again early last month – when Clinton effectively over-ruled Blair's case for keeping open the option – the signs are that it is again being seriously considered.

The argument for a ground invasion is simple: if successful – and few doubt that, in military terms, it would be a success – it would force Serbia out of Kosovo and allow the institution of a protectorate. It would also be a decisive defeat for Milosevic that he would be unlikely to survive.

It is also, however, the most difficult option for western governments to sanction. It would mean brushing aside Russian and Chinese objections and ignoring opposition among west European Nato governments. Most important, it would mean risking substantial western casualties – which is why the US has blocked it so far. How many casualties there would be is necessarily a matter of conjecture. Opponents of ground invasion say that the Yugoslav army is well dug-in, well armed and highly motivated and that an invasion would be bloody and protracted. Supporters claim the opposite. Either way, there is no doubt that a ground invasion would take time to organise. A decision to go ahead would have to be made soon to avoid the danger of a campaign being bogged down by the onset of winter. The first snows in Kosovo fall in September, and a ground invasion would take six weeks at least to prepapre.

As for supporting the KLA, the advantage for western politicians is that it would not involve the body bags coming home. The disadvantages are that backing the KLA would mean loss of face – only last year, the west was denouncing it as a terrorist organisation – and, more importantly, loss of any control over the outcome of the war. Western backing for the KLA would almost certainly mean the end of any hope (already slim) of recreating a multi-ethnic Kosovo and would further destabilise already unstable Macedonia.

At present, it is difficult to work out what the western powers will do. The final decisions will inevitably be made in Washington, for the simple reason that only the US has the hardware and service personnel to sustain a prolonged military campaign. Which way the decisions will go is impossible to tell. Clinton has been extraordinarily inconsistent during the Kosovo crisis – sometimes comparing Milosevic with Hitler, at others appearing willing to talk on Milosevic's terms – and his administration is divided.

The line from the US administration in the week before New Times press day appeared to be that combat deployment of ground troops is unthinkable, which suggests that the most likely scenario is that Clinton will try to fix a deal with Milosevic to extract the US from the mess. But the British government was reported to be urging on him the option of at least threatening a ground invasion. All that is certain is that this show is set to run and run.