The bulk of the book consists of four talks given by Barnes between June 1992 and the start of 1995, as rival factions of the bureaucracy that had ruled Yugoslavia waged brutal wars over territory and resources in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, and as imperialist powers in Europe sought to intervene to advance their competing interests in the region.
Footnotes explain the subsequent U.S.-led NATO bombing of Bosnia and describe how Washington rammed the Dayton Accords down the throats of the warring parties in Yugoslavia and asserted itself as the dominant military and political power in Europe - occupying Bosnia over the corpses of Yugoslav workers and peasants.
The Dayton Accords put a spotlight on the real aims of Washington and its imperialist rivals in using the conflict in Yugoslavia as a pretext for military intervention: to attempt to lay the foundations for reestablishing capitalist social relations throughout the formerly federated Yugoslav workers state and to tighten the imperialist encirclement of Russia. These remain their aims today, as the Clinton administration attempts to force what it describes as a "Bosnia-style" occupation force in Kosova, while portraying itself as defender of Kosovar Albanians.
Top officials of the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other NATO member states gathered in Washington April 23-25. The summit was called to celebrate 50 years of the NATO "alliance," imperialism's supposed victory in the Cold War, and the bringing into NATO membership of three former Warsaw Pact countries. But the celebration became a war summit, one that highlighted sharpening conflicts between the imperialist powers and within the newly anointed NATO members, the workers states of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, as they are pressed into military involvement in the Yugoslav conflict. Capitalism's World Disorder helps understand these developments as well.
The first excerpt below is from "Capitalism's Deadly World Disorder," the third chapter in the book. It is from the discussion periods following a talk presented April 10, 1993, to participants in a regional socialist educational conference in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the following day to a similar gathering in Des Moines, Iowa. The other two selections are from Chapter 2 of the book, "So Far from God, So Close to Orange County: The Deflationary Drag of Finance Capital." It is based on a talk and closing presentation to a regional socialist educational conference held in Los Angeles over the 1994-95 New Year's weekend.
Capitalism's World Disorder is copyright 1999 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
At the same time, there are politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties who are calling for air strikes by Washington right now. Whatever happens in the so- called peace talks, the war just keeps going on, the death toll mounts, and bigger forces keep coming into play. I was wondering how you read all this.
Response: I do not think it is in the interests of the United States ruling class to intervene militarily in Yugoslavia right now. It is not in their interests for one and only one reason. From their standpoint, and at a political price they are willing to pay, there is no better course than what is taking place right now.
The U.S. rulers and their spokespeople have some tactical disagreements among themselves, that is true. But those are arguments among the foxes guarding the chicken coop. They are arguing about how fast the tide might turn against their interests, knowing they will likely need to go into Yugoslavia sooner or later.
But there is no evidence that they are planning to go in right now. Most of the U.S. ruling class currently holds the view: "So what? So tens of thousands of people are being slaughtered and hundreds of thousands more turned into refugees. So the Serbs and Croats are killing each other and they are both killing the Muslims. So what?" The U.S. rulers don't lose sleep over "ethnic cleansing."
Some of their European rivals have vested interests in one or another of the warring gangs of the fractured bureaucratic caste in Yugoslavia. German finance capital in particular has an economic and political stake in the Croatian and Slovenian side. At the end of 1991, Bonn was the first imperialist power to recognize the governments in Croatia and Slovenia, following their public break from the Yugoslav federation a few months earlier. London, and also Paris to a degree, are trying to balance between the contending forces, each for its reasons.
And the imperialist powers as a whole worry that peoples throughout the Islamic world identify with the victims of ethnic cleansing in Muslim areas of Bosnia, and that there may be pressure for Iran or other regimes in the area to get involved. Moscow maintains ties to the Serbian regime in Belgrade as a way to maintain some influence in the region, and this will be a source of conflict and tension as well.
But the current administration in Washington and the bipartisan directors of U.S. foreign policy have decided it is not in their interests to intervene directly at the moment. They hypocritically lament the horrors and ask how anyone can stand by and watch it. But they do stand by and they have been watching it. They have been doing nothing but watching it for a year. They are content to let the warring parties themselves weaken the Yugoslav workers state, and to let their European rivals spar with each other and take on the precarious policing operation in Bosnia. They are teaching a lesson on "Europe," NATO, and Washington's indispensability as a European power.
It is not some special weakness that is preventing Washington from going into Yugoslavia. To the contrary. They are simply not going to risk the price they know they will pay in this country by sending in troops until they have good reason to do so. When they are convinced the bleeding has gone on long enough, and that a change in course is now to their advantage, the U.S. rulers will weigh the costs and act accordingly. They have no strategic vision for the Balkans. Their aim is to weaken and eventually destroy the Yugoslav workers state, and gain an edge on their European rivals in the bargain. They are following a pragmatic course, as they always do.
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc and Warsaw Pact, however, the rulers of the various European and North American capitalist powers no longer have any commonly perceived threat greater than their own diverging interests that would impel them to pay the price they once did to huddle under Washington's strategic nuclear umbrella. At the same time the imperialist rulers, and the masters of U.S. finance capital above all, want to place themselves in the strongest position militarily under these new conditions to someday roll back the remaining conquests of the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia and reimpose the unimpeded dominance of capitalist exploitation.
If we recognize that fact, then we can understand what is behind the current tussle among various imperialist powers about how rapidly to extend NATO membership to certain former Warsaw Pact members in Central Europe, especially Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. The debate over that aggressive move represents a further weakening, not a strengthening, of NATO. It deepens the divergence among NATO members, with the U.S. rulers in their big majority at the head of those pressing for eastward expansion. And, of course, it sharpens tensions between Moscow and Washington and other NATO governments.(1)
All this has been happening in Yugoslavia. It is a war that has brought to the surface the deepest conflicts among the imperialist powers in Europe and North America since the collapse of the Stalinist apparatuses at the opening of the 1990s. It is a war that has exposed the increasing contradictions in what continues to be called the NATO alliance.
And what do we find right at the center of this European war? We find that one of the combatants, the Bosnian government, presides over a majority Islamic population. We find the terror squads of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic agitating against "Islamic fundamentalism" as the pretext to promote murderous "ethnic cleansing" along national and religious lines among working people who had lived and worked alongside each other for decades since the Yugoslav revolution in the aftermath of World War II....(3)
NOTES
1. At Washington's initiative, the April 1999 NATO summit
meeting scheduled in Washington celebrated the 50th anniversary
of the imperialist alliance by adding Poland, the Czech
Republic, and Hungary to the current sixteen members. U.S.
president Clinton initiated the proposal for an eastward
expansion of NATO at a summit meeting four years earlier. In
pressing this course, Washington has flatly rejected Moscow's
repeated protests, including the Russian government's proposal
that NATO pledge not to deploy nuclear weapons or build
military bases in the new member countries. Clinton's second-
term secretary of state Madeleine Albright pulled few punches
in stating Washington's aim in an article written for the
weekly Economist of London on the eve of her first European
trip in February 1997: "Now that democracy's frontier has moved
to Europe's farthest reaches, what logic would dictate that we
freeze NATO's eastern edges where they presently lie, along the
line where the Red Army stopped in the spring of 1945?"
It has been over the corpses of Yugoslav workers and peasants, first and foremost, that the U.S. rulers have asserted their position as the world's dominant "European power" since the early 1990s. As rival capitalist governments in Europe wore themselves out seeking to emerge the winner in the new Balkan wars, Washington sabotaged their various "peace initiatives" in Yugoslavia. Then, in 1994-95, the Clinton administration organized several rounds of sustained bombardment of Serbian forces, culminating in the NATO military occupation of Bosnia since late 1995 under the terms of the so- called Dayton Accords. Washington pushed for the April 1999 NATO summit to formalize the U.S.-dominated alliance's authority to deploy military forces beyond the borders of its member states.
These U.S. moves have sharpened conflicts between Washington and its European rivals. In December 1998, on the eve of the NATO summit in Brussels, Paris and London announced agreement on a course toward giving the European Union for the fist time the authority to deploy combat forces abroad. Given the British government's post-World War II "special relationship" with Washington, the U.S. rulers were especially alarmed at London's concurrence in this initiative. In response, U.S. Secretary of State Albright warned that "European decision making" must not come "unhooked from broader alliance decision making."
2. By late May 1995 U.S. and NATO forces had conducted eight bombing assaults. The most massive bombing came in August and September 1995, as some 60 NATO planes carried out some 3,200 sorties over a two-week period. The air strikes were combined with shelling from NATO positions on Bosnian hillsides and the launching of Tomahawk cruise missiles from U.S. warships off the coast. In October, in the wake of this sustained bombardment, Washington announced a cease-fire by Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian forces. Talks at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, later in the year laid the basis for Washington to spearhead sending an occupation army of some 60,000 NATO troops -including 20,000 U.S. soldiers - into Bosnia. As of early 1999, the U.S.-organized occupation force, initially scheduled to depart in late 1996, remained in Bosnia with no settled departure date.
Washington once again threatened NATO air strikes against Serbia in 1998. The Clinton administration backed off this threat in October 1998, after the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav government agreed to begin talks on the withdrawal of its military forces from Kosova, a territory populated by ethnic Albanians. The Serbian regime, whose forces remained in Kosova at the opening of 1999, has carried out a military offensive in that region, driving as many as 300,000 Albanians from their homes; in 1998 alone some 2,000 Albanians were killed or disappeared. While opposing the Kosovans' demand for national self-determination, Washington has exploited the conflict in Kosova - as it continues to do in Bosnia - as a pretext to maintain the NATO military occupation in Yugoslavia.
3. Among the major activities of the U.S.-organized NATO "Implementation Force (Ifor)" in Bosnia in 1996 was pressuring Bosnian Muslim authorities to deport volunteer fighters from Iran and other countries with large Islamic populations and to cut off further military aid and training from the Iranian government. The first widely publicized NATO military operation was a February 1996 raid on what Washington labeled an Iranian- run "terrorist training camp" near Sarajevo.