What is it about Bosnia? The war there, nearly two years old, is already much the bloodiest engagement on the European continent since 1945. The fighting that has raged throughout the territory of what was once Yugoslavia has now lasted longer than the combined length of the two Balkan wars earlier in the century, nearly as long as the Spanish Civil War. All observers agree that the war in Bosnia has been vicious and cruel, with mass rape, tortures that would have made the Inquisition jealous and the deliberate killing of civilians. And yet that part of the world which graciously calls itself “civilized” has singularly failed to impose a settlement. It has provided meals and medicine that have-no doubt-kept many alive. But the great democracies of Europe and North America have not introduced military forces on a scale sufficient to end the fighting.
This is a tragedy: that’s the easy part. But it is also a mystery. It is impossible to think of a single major conflict on the continent of Europe since 1815 from which the “Great Powers” have been so conspicuous by their absence-and this includes supposedly “civil wars” if that’s what the fighting in Bosnia is. What made Bosnia so peculiar?
Start with the obvious-that there has been little public demand in either Europe or America for military intervention. This, unnoticed, has blasted a piece of late-20th century conventional wisdom. Remember the global village? Time was when it was thought that the instant transmission of television pictures of horror would provoke an outcry that the world must “do something” to make the horror cease. Not in the case of Bosnia.
Oh, intellectuals have been horrified by the siege of a charming city like Sarajevo, to be sure; petitions have been signed, protests mounted, war diaries have had a fleeting success in the bookstores of Paris. But there has been no outpouring of support for Bosnia like that which rallied to the cause of the Republicans in Spain, no Lincoln Brigade, no George Orwell pricking the conscience of the slippered middle class. Haris Siladzjic, the prime minister of Bosnia, blamed Serbian “fascism” for the latest outrage, but words like that don’t have the impact they once did. “There aren’t any good, brave causes left,” wrote the British playwright John Osborne in 1956. He seems to have spoken not just for the postwar generation but for their children.
Why is this? The answers are different in Europe and America. Historians now recognize that for West Europeans the period after 1945 was less of a cold war than a long peace. For the first time in centuries, Europe’s young men did not assume that at some point in their lives they might be called upon to fight. The habits of war were lost to all but professional soldiers. Those leaders who were prepared to deploy force in the support of politics-like Margaret Thatcher were conventionally assumed to be a bit weird. bloodthirsty. premodern.
And there was a particular problem with the Germans. the most populous and most powerful of the West Europeans. Traumatized by the deeds of their fathers, the post-1945 generation of Germans took as their national ideology a pathological distaste for the use of force. Scrub one more bit of conventional wisdom. After the unification of Germany in 1990, it was common to worry about the destabilizing strength of a giant in the middle of the continent. The real problem is that Germany’s recent past has made it too timid to use its power in the support of what is right.
In America the distaste for the use of force had a different genesis. That was the fact that twice during the cold war, in Korea and more notably in Vietnam, young soldiers had been bogged down in a quagmire far away for reasons impossible to fathom.
This not only sapped public support for the use of force. It made professional soldiers, who had withstood polite society’s contempt during Vietnam, skittish of armed intervention for an uncertain political purpose and an indeterminate outcome. In a revealing interview in this month’s Washingtonian magazine, George Bush said that when he asked the military to assess what it would take to intervene in Bosnia, “they used the term Dien Bien Phu.” Sure know how to find the hot button, those generals.
Americans had one more reason for avoiding the use of force. They had not the slightest personal connection with Bosnia. There is no community of “Bosnian-Americans,” no collective memory of some great cultural achievement uniquely “Bosnian.” This was a “European” problem. Hadn’t the war in Bosnia begun in 1992, that year in which the countries of the European Community were supposed to be “united”? Had not the foreign minister of Luxembourg, no less, said of the Bosnia crisis, “This is the hour of Europe, not the hour of the Americans”? Then let the Europeans handle it.
Time to dump conventional wisdom again. For the purposes of international politics, “Europe” is just a place; a peninsula of peninsulas that is unlucky enough to be home to people who speak mutually incomprehensible languages and who worship their God in different ways. It is not an “idea,” not a unified or federal state. It does not have its own army or its own single leader. Its people know (and care) far less of what goes on in distant parts of their continent than Americans suppose. “Bosnia” in the West European imagination is not like “Nebraska” in the American one; more like Guatemala. To ask “Europe” to solve a problem like Bosnia is like asking the junior League to disarm the Bloods and Crips.
And that is why the tragedy of Bosnia comes slouching back to Washington once more, to a president who, as a young man, confessed to “loathing” the military, to a military that doesn’t like putting its troops in danger, to a State Department bereft of either ideas or passion, to a public that three years ago didn’t know where Bosnia was and doesn’t much care now. The absence of Great Power intervention in Bosnia may indeed be one of the oddities of modern times; but as the bloody images accumulate on TV, the task of imposing order on a violent world seems to get ever harder.
