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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 May 1999 Issue No. 428 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 May 1999 Issue No. 428
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Special Focus Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Back to the end of history
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
It is only by accident that NATO celebrated its 50th anniversary as the Kosovo crisis reached a peak. If the NATO celebrations and Kosovo had not been concomitant, would the 19 members of the NATO summit held in Washington last week have formulated the meeting's final statement in similar terms? After all, the commemoration was to highlight what should be permanent in NATO's conduct over the long term. Do the NATO leaders regard the present Balkan crisis as characteristic of the unfolding of history over several decades in the 21st century or, rather, as an event that should be overcome in the short terms and not assessed as "typical"?
NATO's "essential and enduring purpose" in the post-Cold War period was set out in the Washington Treaty of 1994. Why the need for new "strategic perspectives" only five years later? The summit's final document does refer to "an evolving strategic environment" where "uncertainties and risks" remain, and "can develop into acute crises". Article 15 acknowledges that the UN Security Council has "primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security and, as such, plays a crucial role in contributing to security and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area". But article 16 holds that the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE -- a regional arrangement that also includes the United States and Canada) "is particularly active in the fields of preventive diplomacy, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation" (our italics). The OSCE is described as having developed "close practical cooperation" with NATO, "especially with regard to the international efforts to bring peace to the former Yugoslavia". How then to reconcile the primary responsibility of the UN Security Council on the one hand, with preventive diplomacy undertaken by a subsidiary of NATO (the OSDE) on the other? All the more so when the Security Council was not even consulted on NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia -- in neither its diplomatic nor even military aspects.
Worth noting in this respect is the ambivalence surrounding how Russia is to be gauged. Article 36 declares that "Russia plays a unique role in Euro-Atlantic security". The article goes on further to assert that "a strong, stable and enduring partnership between NATO and Russia is essential to achieve lasting stability in the Euro-Atlantic area". But Russia is not a member of NATO, nor does NATO want it to be a member. Other East European states, former members of the Warsaw Pact, have become NATO members, namely, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland; but not Russia. If the latter is regarded as so essential to the NATO strategy, as indeed the deliberations now underway to find a way out of the Yugoslav crisis seem to confirm, why then is Russia still treated as an outcast? The document betrays inconsistency and the deliberate disregard of elements pertaining to the central issue of Russia's status in the New World Order.
When created in 1949 to confront Soviet Russia at the very peak of the Cold War, NATO described itself as a defensive organisation, one of its main goals being the collective defence of its member-states against the installation of Communist regimes in East Europe. Paradoxically, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and in the aftermath of the Cold War, NATO is now advocating a new doctrine which calls for the Alliance to assume an offensive posture.
The final document states that "NATO is now seeking to prevent conflict or, should a crisis arise, to contribute to its effective management, consistent with international law. The Alliance's preparedness to carry such operations supports the broader objective of reinforcing and extending stability and often involves the participation of NATO'S partners" (article 31). Thus NATO is called upon to operate beyond the Euro-Atlantic area. "Alliance forces must safeguard NATO's military effectiveness and freedom of action. The combined military forces of the Alliance must be capable of deterring any potential aggression against it" (article 41). Consistent with this logic, the NATO summit instructed the Alliance's military command to work out plans to interdict ships carrying oil to Serbia via the Adriatic sea. Obstructing oil deliveries in this manner was described by France's president Jacques Chirac as an "act of piracy".
Actually, the most outspoken advocate of this new, offensive, "doctrine" seems to be Britain's Tony Blair rather than America's Bill Clinton, the former being the NATO leader with minimum constraints on decision-making, thanks to the unprecedented weakness of Britain's present-day Tory opposition, and the former having lost part of his stamina in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. When the Russian envoy, former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, first proposed a compromise settlement of the Yugoslav dispute, Clinton did not reject it a priori; Blair did. NATO ultimately turned it down. NATO's new doctrine could well be labelled the Blair Doctrine.
A fundamental postulate of this new doctrine is that the Euro-Atlantic Alliance embodied by NATO represents "righteousness"; that, according to NATO members, the values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law are built into every act they (or their friends) perform, regardless of whether or not these values are actually upheld. To give one example, because Yeltsin represented the authority in Russia that brought down the Soviet Union, his reputation as a democrat was not impaired by the fact that he had no qualms about shelling his parliament to compel it to yield. It is the same logic that commands the present systematic destruction of Yugoslavia's infrastructure, not only military but also economic and social.
It seems that we are back to Francis Fukuyama's theory of the "End of History". According to the well-known American scholar of Japanese origin, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 symbolised the definitive defeat of Communism before the end of the 20th century, exactly as World War II signaled the defeat of Fascism half a century earlier. According to Fukuyama, the 21st century is to augur a new era, that of the unchallenged supremacy of Western neo-liberal capitalism.
Fukuyama's theory was for a long time the subject of heated debate. As conflict did not vanish with the vanishing of the Berlin Wall, another prominent American scholar, Samuel P Huntington, came forward with an alternative construct to Fukuyama's. With Marxism allegedly "proved" wrong, Huntington replaced "class struggle" with the "clash of civilisations". NATO's new doctrine, consecrated at NATO's Washington summit, actually rehabilitated Fukuyama. What is new is that his theory of the "End of History" is no longer regarded as mere academic speculation, but, whether falsifiable or not, as the doctrine backed by the full might of the only military organisation of global reach: NATO.
