Subject: WHY IS NATO IN YUGOSLAVIA?
WHY IS NATO IN YUGOSLAVIA?
A Paper Delivered to the Conference on the
Enlargement of NATO
in Eastern Europe and the
Mediterrenean
Prague, Czech Republic
January 1314, 1996
Sean Gervasi
Institute of International Politics
and Economics
Belgrade
Introduction
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has recently sent
a large task force into
Yugoslavia,
ostensibly to enforce a settlement of the Bosnian war
arrived at in Dayton, Ohio
at the end of 1995.
This task force is said to consist of some 60,000 men,
equipped with tanks,
armor and artillery. It is
backed by formidable air and naval forces. In fact, if
one takes account of all
the support forces
involved, including forces deployed in nearby countries,
it is clear that at
least two hundred thousand
troops are involved. This figure has been confirmed by
U. S. defense sources. [
1 ] .
By any standards, the sending of a large Western
military force into Central and
lSastern Europe is
a remarkable enterprise, even in the fluid situation
created by the supposed end
of the Cold War.
The Ball:an task force represents not only the first
major NATO military
operation, but a major
operation staged "out of area", that is, outside the
boundaries originally
established for NATO
military action.
However, the sending of NATO troops into the Balkans is
the result of enormous
pressure for the
general extension of NATO eastwards.
If the Yugoslav enterprise is the first concrete step in
the expansion of NATO,
others are planned
for the near future. Some Western powers want to bring
the Visegrad countries
into NATO as full
members by the end of the century. There was resistance
to the pressures for
such extension
among certain Western countries for some time. However,
the recalcitrants have
now been
bludgeoned into accepting the alleged necessity of
extending NATO.
The question is: why are the Western powers pressing for
the expansion of NATO?
Why is NATO
being renewed and extended when the "Soviet threat" has
disappeared? There is
clearly much more
to it than we have so far been told. The enforcement of
a precarious peace in
Bosnia is only the
immediate reason for sending NATO forces into the
Balkans.
There are deeper reasons for the dispatch of NATO forces
to the Balkans, and
especially for the
extension of NATO to Poland, the Czech Republic and
Hungary in the relatively
near future. These
have to do with an emerging strategy for securing the
resources of the Caspian
Sea region and for
"stabilizing" the countries of Eastern Europe --
ultimately for "stabilizing"
Russia and the countries of
the Commonwealth of Independent States. This is, to put
it mildly, an extremely
ambitious and
potentially selfcontradictory policy. And it is
important to pose some basic
questions about the
reasons being given for pursuing it.
For the idea of "stabilizing" the countries which
formerly constituted the
Socialist bloc in Europe does
not simply mean ensuring political stability there,
ensuring that the regimes
which replaced Socialism
remain in place. It also means ensuring that economic
and social conditions
remain unchanged. And,
since the socalled transition to democracy in the
countries affected has in
fact led to an incipient
deindustrialization and a collapse of living standards
for the majority, the
question arises whether it is
really desirable.
The question is all the more pertinent since
"stabilization", in the sense in
which it is used in the
West, means reproducing in the former Socialist bloc
countries economic and
social conditions
which are similar to the economic and social conditions
currently prevailing in
the West. The
economies of the Western industrial nations are, in
fact, in a state of
semicollapse, although the
governments of those countires would never really
acknowledge the fact.
Nonetheless, any
reasonably objective assessment of the economic
situation in the West leads to
this conclusion. And
that conclusion is supported by official statistics and
most analyses coming
from mainstream
economists.
It is also clear, as well, that the attempt to
"stabilize" the former Socialist
bloc countries is creating
considerable tension with Russia, and potentially with
other countries. Not a
few commentators have
made the point that Western actions in extending NATO
even raise the risks of
nuclear conflict. [2]
It is enough to raise these questions briefly to see
that the extension of NATO
which has, de facto,
begun in Yugoslavia and is being proposed for other
countries is to a large
extent based on confused
and even irrational reasoning. One is tempted to say
that it results from the
fear and willfulness of
certain ruling groups. To put it most bluntly, why
should the world see any
benefit in the enforced
extension to other countries of the economic and social
chaos which prevails in
the West, and why
should it see any benefit in that when the very process
itself increases the
risks of nuclear war?
The purposes of this paper are to describe what lies
behind the current efforts
to extend NATO and
to raise some basic questions about whether this makes
any sense, in both the
narrow and deeper
meanings of the term.
NATO in Yugoslavia
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in
1949 with the stated
purpose of protecting
Western Europe from possible military aggression by the
Soviet Union and its
allies.
W'th the dissolution of the Communist regimes in the
former Socialist bloc in
1990 and 1991, there
was no longer any possibility of such aggression, if
there ever really had been.
The changes in the
former Communist countries made NATO redundant. Its
raison d'etre had vanished.
Yet certain
groups within the NATO countries began almost
immediately to press for a
"renovation" of NATO
and even for its extension into Central and Eastern
Europe. They began to
elaborate new rationales
which would permit the continuation of business as
usual.
The most important of these was the idea that, with the
changes brought about by
the end of the
Cold War, the Western countries nonetheless faced new
"security challenges"
outside the traditional
NATO area which justified the perpetuation of the
organization. The spokesmen
for this point of
view argued that NATO had to find new missions to
justify its existence.
The implicit premise was that NATO had to be preserved
in order to ensure the
leadership of the
United States in European and world affairs. This was
certainly one of the
reasons behind the
largescale Western intervention in which the
participation of US NATO
partners was
relatively meagre in Kuwait and Iraq in 1990 and
1991. The coalition which
fought against Iraq
was cobbled together with great difficulty. But it was
seen by the United States
government as
necessary for the credibility of the US within the
Western alliance as well as
in world affairs.
The slogan put forward by the early supporters of NATO
enlargement was "NATO:
out of area or
out of business", which made the point, although not the
argument, as plainly as
it could be made. [3]
Yugoslavia has also been a test case, and obviously a
much more important one.
The Yugoslav
crisis exploded on the edge of Europe, and the Western
European nations had to
do something about
it. Germany and the United States, on the other hand,
while seeming to support
the idea of ending
the civil wars in Yugoslavia, in fact did everything
they could to prolong them,
especially the war. in
Bosnia. t41 Their actions perpetuated and steadily
deepened the Yugoslav crisis.
It is important to recognize that, almost from the
beginning of the Yugoslav
crisis, NATO sought to
involve itself. That involvement was obvious in 1993
when NATO begari to support
UNPROFOR
operations in Yugoslavia, especially in the matter of
the blockade against the
Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia and the enforcement of a nofly zone in
Bosnian airspace.
That involvement, however, had much smaller beginnings,
and it must be
remembered that NATO
as an organization was involved in the war in
Bosnia-Herzegovina at a very early
stage. In 1992,
NATO sent a group of about 100 personnel to
BosniaHerzegovina, where they
established a
military headquarters at Kiseliak, a short distance from
Sarajevo. Ostensibly,
they were sent to help
United Nations forces in Bosnia.
It was obvious, however, that there was another purpose.
A NATO diplomat
described the
operation to INTELLIGENCE DIGEST in the following terms
at the time:
"This is a very cautious first step, and we are
definitely not making much noise
about it. But it
could be the start of something bigger...You could argue
that NATO now has a
foot in the
door. Whether we manage to open the door is not sure,
but we have made a start."
[4].
It seems clear that NATO commanders were already
anticipating the possibility
that resistance to
US and German pressures would be overcome and that
NATO's role in Yugoslavia
would be
gradually expanded.
Thus NATO was working to create a major "out of area"
mission almost from the
time that the war
in BosniaHerzegovina began. The recent dispatch of tens
of thousands of troops
to Bosnia,
Austria, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia is thus simply the
culmination of a process
which began almost
four years ago. It was not a question of proposals and
conferences. It was a
question of inventing
operations which, with the backing of key countries,
could eventually lead to
NATO's active
engagement "out of area", and thus to its own
renovation.
The Eastward Expansion of NATO
NATO had never carried out a formal study on the
enlargement of the alliance
until quite recently,
when the Working Group on NATO Enlargement issued its
report. No doubt there
were internal
classified studies, but nothing is known of their
content to outsiders.
Despite the lack of clear analysis, however, the engines
for moving things
forward were working
hard from late 1991. At the end of that year, NATO
created the North Atlantic
Cooperation
Council. NATO member nations then invited 9 Central and
East European countries
to join the
NACC in order to begin fostering cooperation between the
NATO powers and former
members of
the Warsaw Pact.
