King—chap 30, excerpt
Introduction: the shrinking West?
Beginning around 1500, the West became dominant among the regions of the world. With its booming economy, innovative technology, dynamic cultural institutions, not least its printing presses, it surged ahead of all competitors. At the same time, its explorers, entrepreneurs and adventurers harnessed the promise of the Americas and pried open the ports of Africa and Asia (see especially Chapter 15).
But after 1900, the West began to shrink. Two devastating wars in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 consumed its European heartland. The Cold War that followed pitted against each other two powers on the peripheries of Europe: the United States and the Soviet Union (see Chapters 25-29). With the demise of the Soviet Union, the West shrank still more, as the once-colonized regions of the world demanded their place in the global enterprise.
Although Western cultural and political models remained vibrant in the post-Cold War era, the great issues of the age—economic, technological, cultural, and social—were global in scope. So, too, were the battlefields, located on the margins of the West, or in Africa and the Middle East. From here there erupted, as well, the terrorist campaign still ongoing against Western civilization of the West.
Readers of this chapter will explore:
how in the destabilized world of the post-Cold War era shifting power relations culminated in the outbreak of wars in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans and genocide in Africa, even as the European states moved towards unification;
how economic, technological and cultural innovation produced a globalized world that still faced problems of environmental degradation, overpopulation, famine, and disease;
how weapons of mass destruction proliferated in a post-Cold War world, in which struggles along civilizational divides threatened Western Europe, the United States, and Israel, and the civilization of the West more generally.
A new world order
The Cold War’s conclusion destabilized the international system, and major conflicts soon exploded in the Middle East and the Balkans. Meanwhile, instances of genocide in the Balkans elicited an inadequate response from a wary post-Cold War international community. Unwilling to intervene forcefully, it permitted on its watch the mass slaughter of innocents.
The First Gulf War: 1990-1991
The end of the Cold War shattered the balance of power in the Middle East. In the aftermath, the imperiled dictator of Iraq launched an aggressive war against his neighbors that summoned a swift response from the international community.
In 1988, a savage eight-year conflict between Iran and Iraq ended inconclusively. The Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein (1937- ) was left owing roughly $75 billion to the oil-producing kingdoms of the Persian Gulf—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. For much of the Cold War, Iraq was a client state of the Soviet Union. But the United States also aided Saddam during the conflict with Iran, while firms from France and Germany, eager for commercial expansion in the region, had been important customers of the Iraqi regime. The decline of Soviet power and the ending of the Iranian war left Saddam to fend for himself. He demanded that the Gulf States forgive the debt, arguing that the funds defended their territory from Iran’s theocracy. When they refused, he threatened to annex Kuwait, which he suddenly termed “Iraq’s 19th province.”
Western intelligence agencies believed that Saddam was bluffing when he stationed his army on his neighbor’s border. They were wrong. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, which fell within a matter of hours. By coincidence, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1925- ) was visiting the United States that day, and she reminded her hosts of the dangers of appeasing dictators. Bolstered by this advice, President George H.W. Bush (1924- ) publicly announced that the invasion “will not stand.”
On August 6, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd (1923-2005) formally requested military assistance. By the end of the year, more than half a million foreign troops were stationed on Saudi territory. Though the United States supplied approximately three-fourths of the coalition forces, countries from both Western Europe (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey) and the former Soviet bloc (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland) also contributed troops.
This degree of European cooperation, of course, could not have occurred during the Cold War. Indeed, for the previous 40 years, the threat of either a U.S. or a Soviet (or even occasionally a Chinese) Security Council veto effectively nullified the UN’s collective security provisions. But in Mikhail Gorbachev’s (1931- ) final years in power, the Soviets wanted cooperation, not confrontation, with the West. Meanwhile, China was eager to repair relations with the West frayed in 1989, when Chinese troops killed between 2,500 and 5,000 pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. By this stage, Saddam’s only support came from Jordan, which depended on Iraq economically, a few rogue states (such as Libya), and the PLO. On November 29, 1990, the UN Security Council passed a measure authorizing the use of “all means necessary” to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The Soviets joined the United States, Britain, and France in voting for the resolution; China abstained.
When Saddam still refused to withdraw his troops, war commenced on January 17, 1991. International forces began their campaign with massive aerial bombardment, designed both to limit coalition casualties and to soften Iraqi resistance. Cable News Network (CNN), the only Western media organization that retained a presence in Baghdad throughout the conflict, broadcast the war around the world. After more than 40 days of bombing, coalition troops routed the poorly trained and ill-equipped Iraqi conscript army.
The triumph might have served as a model for post-Cold War international cooperation, but coalition unity quickly broke down. President Bush encouraged the Shiite majority in the South and the Kurdish minority in the North to rebel, seeming to promise U.S. protection. But he then agreed to a cease-fire, allowing Saddam’s regime to suppress the Shiite insurrection. By the mid-1990s, nonetheless, the Kurds had established a de facto autonomous state in the north.
The UN also imposed stringent sanctions designed to compel Iraq to disarm, but as the 1990s proceeded, this policy generated tensions among the coalition that had driven Saddam out of Kuwait. The United States and Britain consistently opposed any attempt to weaken the sanctions, citing Saddam’s refusal to cooperate with international arms inspectors. France, on the other hand, was the most prominent European state in calling for a new approach to Iraq. In 1998, French president Jacques Chirac (1932- ) unsuccessfully urged lifting the international embargo on Iraqi oil. Though Saddam had refused to fully comply with the UN resolutions that had originally triggered the sanctions, Chirac was eager for French firms to exploit a reopened Iraqi market.
The Balkan Wars: 1991-1999
The end of the Cold War also transformed conditions in the Balkans, leading to internecine warfare between the region’s restive factions. For 35 years in Yugoslavia, the independent brand of communism practiced by Marshal Tito (Josip Broz; 1892-1980) had maintained unity between the nation’s orthodox Christian Serbs and Montenegrins, Roman Catholic Croatians and Slovenes, Muslim Bosnians and Albanians, and other ethnic and religious groups. Tito’s death in 1980 shook the Yugoslav union. The country disintegrated entirely with the collapse of communism.
Seeking to avoid the fate of communists elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Slobodan Milošević (1941- ), leader of Serbia’s Communist Party, constructed a new power base. He deliberately stoked nationalist tensions, replacing the support of Communist apparatchiks with backing from Serbian nationalists. Under the constitution promulgated by Tito before his death, Yugoslavia consisted of six federated republics—Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia. The presidency rotated between the six on an annual basis, and each unit enjoyed considerable autonomy. The country also had two “autonomous regions”—Vojvodina, which contained a sizable Hungarian minority, and Kosovo, with an Albanian majority. Both lay inside Serbia.
Kosovo contained the site of the 1389 battle in which the Turks defeated the Serbs, ushering in five centuries of Ottoman rule. The area thus had deep historical significance for the Serbs. By the mid-1980s, however, 90 percent of the region’s nearly two million citizens were Albanian, and local Albanians possessed almost complete autonomy. In 1987, Milošević traveled to Kosovo to promise protection for the region’s Serbs. Two years later, he terminated Kosovo’s autonomy altogether. Repudiating Tito’s philosophy of downplaying nationalist tensions in the ethnically divided nation unsettled leaders in other provinces. In 1991, when it came turn for Serbia’s representative to assume Yugoslavia’s presidency, Slovenia and Croatia withdrew from the federation. After a brief ten-day conflict, ethnically homogeneous Slovenia won its independence.
Croatia. Croatia posed more complicated problems. Its new president, Franjo Tuman (1922-1999), embraced a platform as fanatically nationalist as that of Milošević. In his writings, Tuman defended the pro-Nazi wartime Ustaša government (see Chapter 27), and even questioned claims that the regime had massacred Serbs and Jews. Tuman’s political party, the Croatian Democratic Union, renamed Zagreb’s main square from the “Square of the Victims of Fascism” to the “Square of Great Croats.” During World War II, the square had housed the Zagreb offices of the Gestapo and the Ustaša security police.
Given this record, it came as little surprise that Serbs, who comprised one-eighth of Croatia’s population, refused to recognize Tuman’s authority. With support from Milošević and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav army, local Serbs rebelled. They eventually seized one-third of the new republic’s territory and devastated tourist areas along the Dalmatian coast. Serbs also drove Croatian civilians en masse from contested areas, a process called “ethnic cleansing.” But the tide of the war reversed in 1995, when the Croatian military forced most of the Serb civilian population to flee. Four years of fighting to create an “ethnically pure” Croatian state left 700,000 people, on both sides, as refugees.
Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Croatian conflict previewed the much bloodier battle that occurred over Bosnia-Herzegovina. Located in the geographic center of Yugoslavia, the history of the ethnically divided province (43 percent Muslim Slav, 35 Orthodox Serb, and 18 percent Catholic Croatian) intersected with broader international affairs throughout the 20th century. The assassination in its capital, Sarajevo, of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand by Serb terrorists in 1914 triggered the start of World War I (see Chapter 25). Bosnia suffered through some of World War II’s fiercest partisan fighting (see Chapter 27). The province experienced greater stability under Tito’s regime. Symbolizing its renaissance, Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics.
A decade later, Sarajevo encapsulated the horrors of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The withdrawal of Croatia and Slovenia from Yugoslavia left Bosnia exposed, since Serbia dominated what remained of the federation. Under international pressure to demonstrate popular support for secession, Bosnia’s government scheduled a plebiscite. Of those who went to the polls, 99.4 voted yes, but the province’s Serbs boycotted. When the Bosnian leadership nonetheless went ahead and declared independence, local Serbs, including many Yugoslav army veterans, established a separatist government. Serb paramilitary operatives waged a campaign of genocide, targeting for death Muslim and Croatian professionals, intellectuals, and musicians. Serb militants also destroyed Muslim and Croatian cultural sites, as if to purge the land of any memory of groups other than the Serbs.
Despite being fully informed of the Serb atrocities, the Western community responded meekly. In general, the Bush administration opposed using the U.S. military for humanitarian ventures. Moreover, the United States considered the Balkans a European problem. For their parts, Britain, France, and Germany adopted a policy reminiscent of the democracies’ response to the Spanish Civil War. They imposed an arms embargo against all factions in Bosnia, ostensibly to contain the conflict. Since the Bosnian Serbs received a regular supply of arms from Serbia, the strategy effectively harmed the victims of Serb aggression, the Bosnian Muslims, by denying them the means for self-defense. During the 1992 campaign for U.S. President, Democrat Bill Clinton (1946- ) criticized Bush’s handling of the crisis. But once in office, he maintained his predecessor’s approach.
Massacre at Srebrenica. Between 1992 and 1995, Bosnian Serb paramilitaries starved and bombed Sarajevo. The siege and the resulting atrocities regularly appeared on the world’s television screens. In a campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” Serb forces persecuted, expelled, raped, and killed Bosnian Muslims. Eventually, responding to popular outrage, the UN stationed peacekeepers to protect several Muslim cities in southern Bosnia. The Serbs ignored the action. On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb troops overran the “safe city” of Srebrenica. Six hundred lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers offered no not resistance. General Ratko Mladić (1943- ), commander of the Bosnian Serb army, ordered all males aged 12 to 77 taken into custody for “interrogation for suspected war crimes.” Only a handful were ever again seen alive; Serbian forces murdered at least 7,500 Muslim men and boys. In 2005, a video surfaced showing Serb paramilitary officers shooting six Bosnian boys and men. Before the atrocity, the killers had received a blessing from an orthodox priest.
The Srebrenica massacre, the largest mass killing in Europe since World War II, at last galvanized Western leaders to act. Under threat of a U.S. military intervention, Milošević agreed to attend peace negotiations in Dayton, Ohio. The Dayton Peace Agreement of November 1995 divided Bosnia into Serbian and Muslim–Croat entities, each to be ruled by a single parliament, elected under the eye of 60,000 NATO peacekeeping troops. In practice, after a war that cost 200,000 Bosnians their lives, the republic existed as three ethnically pure statelets.
Kosovo. The financial cost of the Bosnian conflict, coupled with international sanctions against Milošević’s regime, produced an economic crisis in what remained of Yugoslavia. Milošević responded by again stoking nationalist sentiments, returning his attention to Kosovo. In January 1999, Yugoslav army forces occupied the province. This time, with the region’s ethnic Albanians under grave threat, the United States and NATO acted quickly. After 34,000 sorties by NATO planes and a well-conceived attack plan from U.S. General Wesley Clark (1944- ) that targeted Serb security installations but minimized civilian casualties, Milošević withdrew his troops from Kosovo. The province then regained its autonomy. Instability in the former Yugoslavia ended only in October 2000, when a spontaneous coup in Belgrade deposed Milošević.
Events in Bosnia stimulated calls to prosecute those guilty of crimes against humanity, including massacre, torture, and military rape, all considered illegal by international conventions. (The explicit criminalization of rape occurred in 1996.) The UN International Criminal Tribunal, seated in The Hague, has to date indicted 80 suspects. This total included 51 Bosnian Serbs; 18 Bosnian Croats; 8 former Yugoslav officials, including Milošević; and 3 Bosnian Muslims. The prosecution of those who in positions of political or military leadership committed acts the world no longer deems acceptable is a new feature of the European and international landscape. British and Spanish courts, for instance, held former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1915-) responsible for human rights violations committed following the 1973 coup that brought him to power. The courts reached these rulings even though Pinochet had committed the relevant acts not in Europe but in his native country.
The Former Soviet Bloc
In 1989, a Hungarian opposition leader lamented, “With the erosion of communism, ethnic problems are bursting out all over Eastern Europe.” Yet only in the former Yugoslavia did war result. Like Yugoslavia, Hitler partitioned Czechoslovakia along ethnic lines during World War II (see Chapter 27). Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia while establishing a protectorate in Slovakia. Unlike Yugoslavia, Czech leaders did not respond with force when a revival of Slovak nationalism accompanied the end of the Cold War. Instead, in the “Velvet Divorce,” the country split into two, with Bohemia and Moravia becoming the Czech Republic and Slovakia receiving its independence. The Czech Republic and Poland moved toward a peaceful resolution with Germany of another wartime legacy—the forced resettlement of at least 11 million ethnic Germans from their lands (see Chapter 28). Even Hungary and Romania avoided armed conflict, despite the continued abysmal treatment of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania (see Chapter 29).