by IGNACIO RAMONET
For the first time since it was established in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation is engaged in a war against a country that has not committed any act of
aggression outside its own frontiers. And for the first time since 1945, European forces
are bombing a sovereign European state. The decision to go to war, announced on 23 March
1999, was described by NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, one-time leader of the
Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, as a "moral duty".
Mr Solana is supported in this decision principally by the French, German, Italian and
UK heads of government, Lionel Jospin, Gerhard Schröder, Massimo d'Alema and Tony Blair -
all four of them eminent proponents of social democracy in Europe.
They all agreed to the military solution proposed by Washington as the "only
way" to break the deadlock in the Kosovo peace negotiations, even though it is common
knowledge - confirmed by US experience in Iraq since 1991 - that crises of this kind
cannot be settled by air strikes and any attempt to send in land forces to occupy Kosovo
would be extremely costly in terms of human life and might extend the conflict to the
whole Balkan peninsula.
The crisis is largely the result of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's refusal to
grant Kosovo a broad measure of political autonomy. But he has widespread support for this
stand among the Serbian population who believe Kosovo should remain within Serbia for
cultural reasons and feel a sense of solidarity with the Serb minority there. So this is
not, as NATO propaganda would have us believe, a clash between an isolated President
Milosevic on one side and the allied forces and the Serbian people, ripe for
"liberation", on the other. The situation is more complicated.
Mr Solana justified the decision on the ground that we must prevent an authoritarian
regime from continuing to oppress its own people in Europe (1).
Does this mean that we must resort to force to oblige Turkey, also a European country and
a member of NATO, to grant autonomy to Kurdistan and end an oppression that has already
caused thousands of deaths among Kurdish civilians? Is there by any chance a double
standard here?
How could the social democrat leaders, heirs to Jean Jaurès and a long tradition of
respect for international law, yield to pressure from Washington and embark on a military
escapade that has not a shred of international legitimacy? There is no UN Resolution
expressly authorising the use of force in the region and the UN Security Council, the
supreme arbiter on international conflicts, was not consulted before the first strikes
were launched and has not agreed to the use of armed force against Serbia.
And finally, it did not occur to any of these leaders to explain themselves to their
national parliaments before going to war, let alone ask their permission to commit their
armed forces to the conflict.
Thus socialism, one of the great unifying myths of mankind, has once again been
betrayed by the social democrat leaders of Europe. The resignation of German Finance
Minister Oskar Lafontaine on 12 March 1999 had already afforded spectacular proof of the
bankruptcy of social democracy and its inability to provide an alternative to the ruling
neo-liberal orthodoxy that now finds even the Keynesian approach that enabled President
Roosevelt to bring the US through the economic crisis of the 1930s too left-wing.
Oskar Lafontaine stood accused by his fellow-socialists of five cardinal sins: wanting
to re-launch Europe, advocating a fairer tax system, criticising the European Central
Bank, calling for reform of the international monetary system and, earlier, asking the
Bundesbank to lower interest rates in order to reduce the cost of borrowing, stimulate
consumption and combat unemployment.
It is impossible not to see his departure as yet another sign of the ideological
collapse of social democracy. The movement has completely lost its bearings. It is
steering a course as best it can, obsessed with the next crisis looming up and devoid of
any sound theoretical basis - unless you count those catalogues of renunciation and
reneging, The Third Way by Blair's adviser, Anthony Giddens, and The Right
Choice by Schröder's mentor, Bodo Hombach.
For social democracy, which holds undisputed sway in all the major countries of Europe,
politics means economics, economics means finance, and finance means the markets. That is
why it is keen to encourage privatisation, the dismantling of the public sector, and
concentrations and mergers of giant corporations. It is willing to renounce the social
compact and has abandoned all idea of full employment or eradicating poverty, of seeking
to alleviate the plight of the EU's 18 million unemployed and 50 million poor.
Social democracy won the intellectual battle after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The conservatives lost and are preparing to quit the field of history, as the aristocracy
was forced to do after 1789. The left now has to reinvent its place in the political
spectrum, while the mantle of conformism, or conservatism, has fallen on the social
democrats. Social democracy is the new right. It has taken on the historic task of taming
neo-liberalism in a spirit of vacuous opportunism. It is at war with Serbia today and may
be fighting its own suburbs tomorrow. All in the name of realism, not rocking the boat,
above all not disturbing the status quo.
Translated by Barbara Wilson
(1) Le Monde, 25 March 1999.
Document compiled by Dr S D Stein