The "Discovery" of America

Berlin

The unity of the West is a word that is increasingly difficult to cross the tongue - this is what the stubbornly conservative commentator of the German daily "Welt" Herbert Kremp concluded this month. Kremp's depressed conclusion reads: "The Russians are out of the game, the Americans can imagine Albania as their geopolitical support." Their choice is pragmatic and related to securing power. The role of ensuring internal peace in Macedonia fell to the Europeans."

Analyzing the impasse in which the European Union has fallen, in an effort to mediate between Albanians and Macedonians, the Berlin observer felt the need to point out in the title that "due to the loss of Russia's position in Serbia, there is a lack of balance in the Balkans." Leaving aside the debate as to whether such a position ever existed after Tito, the reader still has the question of whether the loss of geopolitical balance is also felt in other areas, including the whole of Europe.

Western Europe discovers America more and more, not as a proven reliable older brother with whom it went hand in hand through all the Cold War crises, but as an unpredictable and self-willed juggernaut for whom "pragmatic choice" and "power assurance" seem much dearer than "concerted action". of the Western alliance of democratic states based on "common values".

FAST DISTANCE: From the other end of the political spectrum in Germany, the liberal weekly "Spiegel" has also been throwing stones and stones at Washington's policy in the Balkans and, especially, in Macedonia since last week. Transmitting the opinion of unnamed deputies in the Bundestag, the newspaper accuses the USA of "supporting the creation of a great Albania that favors them in the Balkans for strategic reasons." The "crown proof" that Washington and the KLA are "two eyes in the head" is based on the German weekly's allegation that only the US knows what the group is preparing, because it allowed the Albanian rebels to use their own radio channel within the communication system of the American troops in the Balkans "in which Western Europeans and Russians have so far failed to penetrate".

The scandalization of Germans and other Western Europeans due to America's arbitrary and difficult-to-understand behavior in the Balkans is only part of the increasingly rapid mutual distancing of political shores in the "North Atlantic Partnership". There are also the decision of the administration of President George W. Bush to write off the so-called Kyoto Protocol on the protection of the global climate, the announcement that the US will cancel the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Arms Limitation Treaty with Russia, the refusal of the US to comply with the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court as well as the most recent threat that the US will boycott the United Nations conference against racism in South Africa (for putting Zionism as a form of racism on the agenda and demanding payment reparations to African states for taking slaves). The statement of Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that the US's international involvement is expressed through cooperation with the Europeans in the Balkans and through negotiations on a new security system with Russia, was nevertheless experienced by many as patronizing mockery. Now, along with the whirlwind on the New York Stock Exchange and the first recession of the American economy after almost a decade - all of which is painfully affecting the European Union on the threshold of the introduction of the euro, has the value of American "political shares" on the other side of the ocean permanently fallen?

PREPARATION SCENE: The old axiom that "the future begins in America" ​​should be recalled here for a moment. Although arrogant, this American saying is largely true, primarily due to new technical inventions, business models and financial operations, not to mention the supremacy of the American cultural industry. Western Europe and other political, economic and other world geopolitical centers continue to follow, rather than lead, new "global" movements. With the exception of Russia's spheres of influence in its "close neighborhood" in the area of ​​the former Soviet Union and a little "Francophonie" in Africa, the whole world, after the disappearance of the Cold War balance of fear, became the American sphere of influence. Even Madeleine Albright made public that, as she put it, "America stands tall and sees further." If so, what did Washington see in the outlines of the future and how does it reflect on current international political entanglements, including Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia?

New dangers, first of all: hot spots of violent conflicts in the Caucasus and Central Asia against which the ten-year Balkan war for the succession of Yugoslavia was a cat's cough. And then, much further, China, which, like Russia, does not like the "unipolar world", that is, American world supremacy. As part of preparing the stage for the emergence of new crises, the USA is making moves in the Balkans that are now angering its allies in the European Union, because they seem contradictory and harmful to the achievement of its task: the establishment of an ideal multicultural peace.

All wars on the territory of the former Yugoslavia during the past decade ended with American interventions. The Berlin commentator quoted from the beginning reminds us that the Americans "used Croatia, which resulted in the expulsion of the Serbs from Krajina" and that they used the KLA in Kosovo, "accepting that after the war the Serbs were pushed out of Kosovo". It is worth reminding that Western military support ruled in Bosnia as well. This is how American clients were born in Zagreb, Sarajevo and Pristina, convinced that they had finally become partners in the Western alliance.

That's why speculations about whether the USA would like a similar relationship with Belgrade, which would be expressed through the leasing of air bases and other strongholds, are not at all surprising. There is no contradiction in the fact that America would have a military presence in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia (including Kosovo) at the same time, even though, at least for now, they are opposing countries in many interests. The US has bases in Greece and Turkey (in the Seychelles, even alongside Russia), which may have been crucial for those two countries not to have gone to war with each other yet. A military presence in the entire former Yugoslavia more immediately eliminates the possibility of new armed conflicts in that area and in the long term prevents Russian or even Chinese influence (let's remember Mira Marković's amateur geopolitics). At the same time, the USA leaves it to the European Union - because it costs money - to take care of economic and social reconstruction in the long term as another way of building stability in the region.

Croatia is calm, Bosnia is pacified as a protectorate, there are more than tens of thousands of foreign soldiers in Kosovo, it remains to find a solution for some sort of peace in Macedonia. Some US flirting with the KLA in Macedonia is a small pledge in an incomparably bigger game, in which the suppression of the armed conflict in this country is currently the most difficult task. From a strategic point of view, military strongholds and political clients on the territory of the former Yugoslavia are useful above all for the construction of additional roads to the Caucasus and Central Asia - where future ethnic conflicts, disintegration of states and confrontations with Russia are looming.

REGULATIONS VALID I - NE VALID: The Prague Balkanologist Philip Tessar made the West accept that the Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia behaved like the German minority in 1938 in Czechoslovakia, when London and Paris, aware that they could not deal with Hitler, accepted the "justified demands of the minority for self-determination " and the destruction of that country. It is more likely, however, that Macedonia will not disintegrate in the foreseeable future, just as neither Bosnia nor Serbia have "disintegrated" - at least when viewed on a geographical map. The pacification of the Albanians without a foreign military presence on "their" territory is hard to imagine, which actually results in the division of the Macedonian state and ethnic homogenization.

Supporters of multi-ethnic coexistence (in other words, a normal European way of life) will watch all this with their hands over their eyes, because at least Macedonia has so far been considered as proof that multiculturalism in Southeast Europe does not have to lead to conflicts and disintegration. However, if any rule was established during the Yugoslav wars of the past decade, it is that the rules can sometimes be valid and other times not. Or, as Spain's conservative Prime Minister José María Asnar, who this week met for the first time in 13 months with the head of the Basque Autonomous Community Juan José Ibartez, criticized the demands of the separatists: the right to self-determination "is not recognized anywhere in the world" and it must be clear to everyone that "no part of Spain shall be seceded."