FORMER YUGOSLAVIA: CONTEMPORARY REFUGEE-REGIMES AND THE POST COLD WAR ORDER
by Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Umeå, Sweden
Ex-Yugoslavia has become one of the testing grounds for new models aiming at "internalising" refugee situations to the regions of conflict. This general strategy of the post cold war global order is currently finding its rationalisation in public claims for allegedly more farsighted and rational solutions to the refugee problems of the world. Emanating conceptions of "temporary protection" in a number of European refugee-receiving countries have developed in conjunction with the Yugoslavian crisis and in particular with the challenges represented by the war in Bosnia and Hercegovina. The same is true for organised strategies to establish refugee centres in proxy areas (for Bosnian Moslems in Croatia, for example) or so-called "safe havens" in the midst of the zones of armed struggle.
If this reorientation is to represent more than short-sighted" strategies of cost reduction" (Suhrke), however, then schemes for resettlement and reintegration of displaced persons must be based on comprehensive and long term plans for conflict resolution and on broad regional socio-economic development strategies attempting to tackle the basic causes of the refugee flows. In global perspective "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans represents only one among series of consecutive political upheavals giving rise to forced migrations, since the end of the second World War. Each of these have been marked by specific combinations of "internal" and "external" political-economic causes. Intervening refugee regimes have given shape to their particular character and modelled their particular socio-political consequences. But while the 1970s were marked by vigilant discussion about alleged basic economic cum political "root causes" behind flight and exile, the post cold war 1990s' debates appear almost entirely to have left this type of general perspective. It has given way to an almost universal preoccupation with "human rights", most often defined in a narrow legalistic cum moralistic sense.
A onesided moral or legalistic perspective may, however, if at the expense of careful analysis of internal as well as external political and economic causes, have fatal consequences. This is reflected in a series of short sighted and often contradictory international interventions on the contemporary Balkan stage of conflict.
Ethnic cleansing is the indicator of deep dilemmas in the ex-Yugoslavian region connected with dismal processes of "balkanisation"; a term belonging to political science, which stems from the time of the Balkan wars in the beginning of this century and the break up of the multinational Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Like yesterday's, today's neo-balkanisation theatre is, however, run by global as well as local actors. The desolate political condition of a new-old Balkanism has developed in the complex intersection of local systems of government in the Yugoslavian region with global economic and political systems of power.
The latter are reflected in incapacitating debt traps, international super-austerity measures, misplaced forms of political intervention (as well as non-intervention) and the replication of old imperial projects. In a situation marked by intense external pressure, where no penetrating domestic reforms and a necessary transformation of a staggering real socialist system of government and resource-management were given a fair chance to solidify, the results became social disintegration, political chaos and internal war. At this point armed violence has itself come to act as an increasingly autonomous factor generating further economic disintegration, arid poverty and new sources of conflict. A necessary implication is a fundamental change of policy, from within, but also from without.
Violence and state disintegration
One of the most common forms of refugee-producing violence in the new post cold war era has become "a reversal of the state formation process which", under the auspices of one or the other of two opposed superpowers, "had earlier been a source of conflict" (Suhrke). We may today, in contrast, speak of "state disintegration" or an "implosion" of social conflicts, writes Astri Suhrke, as a major contemporary political feature and a new essential constituent of North-South and West-East relationships. We find a variety of regionally distinct manifestations of this actually or potentially refugee generating disintegration process in different parts of the globe: in Africa, in Latin America and in the post-communist world of the former Soviet Union, Eastern-Central Europe and on the Balkans. We are apparently dealing with a phenomenon contingent of global changes in the post cold war era. At the same time it is evident that these global trends articulate with a range of regionally and system specific conditions.
In an attempt to explain the dynamics of an ever expanding cycle of ethnic cleansing in today's ex-Yugoslavia Mary Kaldor (1993) contrasts today's ethno-nationalist movements with those of the 1930s. "The new nationalism is decentralising and fragmentative in contrast to earlier nationalisms which were unifying and centralising", argues Kaldor.
The current armed clashes between different Moslem factions in Bosnia-Hercegovina illustrates very well the segmentary character of the new nationalisms, which Kaldor speaks about. Similar tendencies appear to be imminent also in Croatia and Rump Yugoslavia and may well come to represent a second phase of warfare and fragmentation extending to other parts of the territory of former Yugoslavia.
The seemingly unbounded nature of current "ethnic cleansing" cannot be explained with reference to an elaborate and relatively coherent ideological system as for example in Nazism. It has to do rather with the particular character of the new nationalism, which, Kaldor argues, could best be identified as "a primitive grasp for power" based on an anarchic "war economy", - "a social formation dependent on continuous violence". Not a war economy in the traditional sense of sustaining strong states, she continues, but rather to "sustain a loose coalition of petty criminals, ex-soldiers, and power-hungry anonymous politicians all of whom are bound together" under the token of ethno-nationalism, "in a shared complicity for war crimes and a shared interest in reproducing the sources of power and wealth".
A global shift of power
Kaldor describes conspicuous attributes of the new post cold war regimes on the Balkans and elsewhere. Yet, her reception of contemporary ethnic nationalism hardly takes us far beyond the level of moral condemnation and the distanced and spurious intellectual interpretations dominating Western receptions of the post-communist crisis in general. Global political and economic power relationships, and thus the West itself, remain in intellectual brackets in relation to the stages of ethnic warfare and ethnic cleansing. An analysis of the forces of disintegration at play entirely in terms of an alleged moral "Nihilism" of the new "ethnic nationalism" - reducing its ideological content to a question of "identity" - leaves out a necessary discussion on the fragmentation of multiethnic states like Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union in historical-structural and political-economic terms. In effect, it eaves us even with a rather shallow understanding of the apparent present inability of the new successor states to solidify.
In order to formulate a more inclusive perspective on contemporary ethnic nationalism and ethnic cleansing it would be worthwhile to spotlight some recent propositions of the Swedish economist, Kenneth Hermele (1993) who argues that increasing difficulties in establishing meaningful distinctions between a range of categories of refugees, is due to the fact that they all flee from the consequences and effects of a certain policy. We can observe a central and increasing role of the West in producing refugee fluxes during the 1980s and 1990s; a development closely linked to the debt crisis, which resulted in a shift of power towards the creditors.
This logic, being a latent tendency globally, has been particularly evident in Africa. Here, at the same time as the existing governments lost the international guarantees, they earlier had, as important pawns of the Cold War, "slow negative growth" has, during the 1980s "strained the capacities of states to provide even a rudimentary framework to support the functioning of civil society and made ethnic compromise more difficult" (Suhrke 1993).
But it has even come to increasingly comply to the situation in a debt ridden Yugoslavia, where Western creditors' enforcement of super-austerity programmes during the 1980s (as part of a general strategy of exporting the economic crisis to the periphery) was to function as one of the most important factors for delegitimising attempts of important elite factions at the central federal level to implement a policy of economic reform. What is happening today on the Balkans, in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is, quoting Hobsbawm (1993), "the sudden imposition of a theological dogma as unrealistic as the attempt to construct socialism by central command in a single country". Not that their economics did not need reform. But "the consequences of plunging them into the free market from one day to the next have ranged from the tragic to the fatal", asserts Hobsbawm.
In multi-ethnic Yugoslavia the results were truly fatal. This holds true, even though market economic reforms did not come "over night", and even though the country was the best prepared for a far-sighted reform policy among all the countries of real socialism.
The 1980s became dominated by the uncompromising imperatives of a series of super-austerity measures forced upon Yugoslavian federal governments by western powers, the IMF and the World bank. The federal reformers of ex-Yugoslavia could hardly, in a foreseeable future, offer the majority of the population much more than increasing unemployment and the gloomy marginalisation as "new helots" (Cohen 1987) of an increasingly unequal international division of labour. When the last Yugoslavian premier, Ante Markovic (1989-91), abruptly turned off the safety-valve of hyper-inflation, an explosive crisis of legitimacy ensued, which blew the federation into pieces. The ensuing vacuum was filled by the hegemony of nationalist populists promising welfare for "all of our nation", but at the inevitable expense of ethnic Others.
The fragmentation of a social compact
The reign of a militant post cold war ethno-nationalism emanated as the last distorted cycle of a form of authoritarian-etatist political mass mobilisation upon which the legitimacy of Yugoslavian post Second World War real socialism was built (Schierup 1991).
Its basis was a specific type of consensus politics (Schierup 1990). It could be seen as a less sophisticated real-socialist counterpart to Roosevelt's "New Deal" and the grand 20th century compromises between capital and labour in the core industrial states of Europe. It expressed a coalition between unequal partners, within the framework of which the patron (the elite) "protected" the "working class" or the "people" by guaranteeing full employment, a minimal basic income and extended state sponsored programmes of social welfare. "The protected" would, in turn, guarantee the political legitimacy of the elite.
This consensus politics represented originally a transethnic political compact. It was linked with a complex strategy to lift the Yugoslavian community of nations beyond the grip of internal forces of fragmentation and underdevelopment as well as with efforts to liberate the region from a crippling position within those days' unequal international division of labour. Since 1945 this consensus was repeatedly revived, reformed and transformed. This took, not least during the 1970s, dramatic forms marked by a stubborn "conservative-orthodox" reaction. This reaction was mounted against Yugoslavia's first sweeping federal (1960s) economic reform programme and a jeopardising attempt to enter the international division of labour on liberal market economic terms (Schierup 1990).
It remained (in fashion akin to what we can observe in the region of the former Soviet Union today) entrenched in the local strongholds of local state-elites within the individual republics. A number of mutually competing national-bolshevistic state-bureaucracies opted for a fragmented integration of Yugoslavia's individual units into world capitalism on unilateral terms of financial and technological dependency. They came to occupy a position reminiscent of that of "comprador bourgoisies" in, for example, middle America and the less powerful states of South America. But, combined with a successive revival of old "buried" national projects, popular legitimacy and political power remained dependent upon extended welfare programmes and commitment to working class protection.
The economic basis for a reworked leftist national-populist consensus in the single republics should, essentially, come to be foreign loans taken up on a conflated global petrodollar market. This was combined with large scale remittances from Yugoslavia's numerous migrant workers. Later (during the 1980s) their role was, increasingly, taken over by a hazardous policy of hyper-inflation. A mounting contradiction, consisting in the apparent impossibility of reconciliating locally established vehicles for mass political and ideological integration with increasingly uncompromising imperatives of global economic cum political embraces, reached a critical breaking point in the post cold war 1990s. It led to economic collapse and uncontrollable political eruptions. It spawned - as the latest cycle of populist legitimation politics - militant ethno-nationalism and ethnic cleansing; a grim populist reaction following upon a havocked liberal reform policy and the harsh international super-austerity measures of the 1980s. Civil war became the final source of legitimacy left for local state elites and the last political outlet for increasingly impoverished populations void of apparent alternatives.
Perspectives for the new international refugee-regime
The perspectives for the new refugee regime set up on the ruins of Yugoslavia' multiethnic community of nations in the post cold war era are dependent upon a solution to the central dilemmas of this unlucky part of Europe. Distinctive for a chaotic present and determinant for an uncertain future is that the dominant political powers of Europe represent not only indispensable parties to a solution, but an integrated part of the problem.
An inglorious "scramble for the Balkans" between the Central and Western European powers, Turkey, the United States and Russia will provide no basis for a projected policy of peaceful resettlement and reintegration of refugees. The basic strategy of the post cold war refugee regime, presently based on so-called "conflict resolution" provided by the "international community" and the extended provision of humanitarian aid, is apt to fail in a situation where the representatives of "the international community" are essentially themselves parties to the conflicts. Rather it will mean a situation where proliferating numbers of "internalised" refugees themselves will become an increasingly extremist party to a never ending spiral of ethno-national violence. "Safe havens" will develop into "Gaza strips". But also the artificial ghettoes, about to be created in the receiving states of Europe based on a dubious conception of "temporary protection", will come to form ideal breeding grounds for so-called "fundamentalisation" and continuous "terrorism". Thus a second cycle of forced exodus and hideous return will be closed in an ex-Yugoslavia, where much of the extremism and ferocity of contemporary ethnic nationalism is being carried forward (in Serbia as well as in Croatia) by the sons and daughters of post World War political refugees and labour migrants; the products of revanchist diasporas based in Europe and overseas.
The Yugoslavian crisis has, more than anything else, revealed the precarious political configuration of the united Europe, but even of its individual member states, divided as they are between political forces favouring a continued European integration and those pressing for the reassertion of individual national interests.
But it is even, above all, the strength of a self-assertive nationalism, and not the federal bodies of the community, that has propelled the kind of closure which we call "Fortress Europe". This has manifested itself in the new post cold war refugee regimes' policies of containment. These policies do not only mean measures to prevent refugees from crossing borders. They are designed to fundamentally reduce the rights of asylum seekers and refugees; to obstruct them from achieving significant political, economic or legal empowerment, once they have arrived. Measures to reduce the right to work, access to education and welfare benefits, and guarantees for family reunion are introduced in state after state. The European response acts to make asylum seekers and refugees third-class citizens. It marks substantial cuts in the humanitarian principles of the 1951 Geneva Convention. All of these trends are propelled, not only by new fascist or extreme populist movements, but by an intolerant ethnicist imagery of the media and a broad section of the political spectrum. The paradox is, writes Gorana Flaker (1993), that refugees exposed to ethnic cleansing in ex-Yugoslavia "come seeking safety but instead are exposed to other forms of violence".
One may, at present, only speculate concerning the long term effects of this discriminatory regime on the refugees themselves and on their Balkan lands of origin. But their exposed situation in the so-called "host" countries is hardly likely to function as a proficient school for learning "democracy" and inter-ethnic tolerance and co-operation. Rather it may generate revanchism together with ethnic absolutism and exclusivism. Hereby the "Fortress Europe" syndrome will, on the Balkans, act to further perpetuate the evil historical circle of ethno-national violence to which old politically marginalised diasporas from the Yugoslavian region have already amply contributed. Hence, political stabilisation on the Balkans will, in more than one sense, be contingent upon a "debalkanisation" of Europe in general. This is the juncture from where any proficient politics for the integration of displaced populations must set out.
A complete list of references mentioned in this piece, as well as a more comprehensive version of the above article, The Logics of Balkanism - Ethnic cleansing, state disintegration and the ex-Yugoslavian refugee question, (June 1994, 14 p.) can be ordered from the author.
Contact: Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Sofiehemsvägen 2 A, S-907 38 Umeå, Tel: +46/90 126405, or +46/90 166309