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Euroslavia?
THE FEARFUL BALKAN INTERMEZZO By Tomislav Sunic
The former Balkan drama is a textbook example of how petty nationalism, once on the loose, can lead to surreal crimes. The past wars amidst similar European peoples, in what was once known as Yugoslavia, have sealed national romance
elsewhere, throwing a bad light on every ethnic group in search of its own mini-statehood. Today, ten years after communist Yugoslavia had crumbled away, its quasi sovereign bits and pieces, i.e. Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, the Kosovo, and
Macedonia, are shamefully looking at their recent past, and are gearing up to enter another multicultural fray: the European Union.
The indictments of Balkan ethnic cleansers by the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague are in full swing and their legal proviso is designed to further strengthen the tenants of the supranational New World Order, including its itinerant semi-kangaroo courts. The results of the past wars in the Balkans seem to have strengthened and already cemented the mandatory multicultural, i.e.
multiracial lessons all over the European Union.
The consequences of the Balkan disarray should not be mistaken for its causes. The safest way to explain away the former Yugoslav conflicts is by putting most of the blame on the former Serb president Slobodan Milosevic, some of the blame
on the former Croat president, Franjo Tudjman, and a little bit of guilt on the former Bosnian president, Alia Izetbegovic. But the movers and shakers behind Yugoslavia’s break-up were not just ex-Yugoslav nationalists, but to a larger extent are the architects of the New World Order and its communist disciple, the late Yugoslav dictator Marshall Josip Broz Tito. The Western-sponsored Yugoslav
communist multiculturalism had led to distorted misperceptions among different and neighboring ethnic groups. Sooner or later this multiethnic Tito-Western styled make-belief unity had to end up in a bloody war.
The Yugoslav multiethnic experiment demonstrated twice in this century that it could not last. In 1941, the first Yugoslavia broke up, with Croats and Slovenes flocking to their ancestral central-European neighbor Germany. Serbs continued to toy partly with the Allies and partly with the Axis. In 1991, Croats and Slovenes again bailed out of the predominantly Serb-oriented communist Yugoslavia. The lesson that follows is that if the forced unity fails twice, there is no reason to believe in the viability of a third reunion. Divorce sounds preferable to a bad marriage.
Yet, the demise of the Yugoslav experiment in 1991 could never be fully shrugged away by the European Union and the apostles of the New World Order. The multiethnic ex-Yugoslavia had for decades squared away with liberal and communist pseudo-academic role models of multiculturalism. In addition, Yugoslavia was a blueprint for the budding and nebulous Soviet-inspired European Union. It had provided intellectual fodder for the disabused leftist intelligentsia all over Europe, which is today converting to the more successful
drama of globalism.
Ex-Yugoslavia went up in sky-high flames in 1991 and could neither be forgiven nor forgotten by the advocates of New World Order. Hence now, a new need has arisen, espoused by left-leaning EU officials and their New York plutocratic acolytes to create a new multi-ethnic laboratory in the state of Bosnia-Hercegovina and in the NATO protectorate of the Kosovo. In fact, the present artificial statelets of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the Kosovo are basically designed and militarily upheld in an effort to demonstrate another third multicultural experiment –which should be used again some day as still more educational homework for ‹peaceful ethnic groups living side by side and happily ever after.” Recent developments though, in the Albanian populated Kosovo, the fractured Macedonia, as well as the ongoing turmoil in the Croatian parts of Bosnia-Hercegovina, all point to the impossibility of such dangerous global endeavors.
Most of the blame must be attributed to the Versailles treaty architects of 1919. Little did they understand the ethnic intricacies of the region, let alone foresee the consequences of their New World Order projects. What those world-improvers wanted was the creation of an artificial multiethnic entity that could contain Germany’s access to the South and the East. The unhappy subjects of the
Versailles-created Yugoslavia other than having the common label of “Southern Slavs” had little in common. Subsequently, each ethnic group in the region had to pay a heavy price. The Versailles doctored-up-get-together of Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, and Albanians led to the perception of each ethnic group being the prime victim of the other ethnic group. The decades-long war of misperceptions resulted in the killing fields.
Although the Western media has handpicked the Serb Slobodan Milosevic as the household demon, his Croat nationalist counterparts do not fare better. A number of high-ranking Croat military officers were hailed as heroes not too long ago, but are now scheduled for The Hague War Crimes Tribunal hearings. The new leftist-liberal governments in Croatia and Serbia pay loud lip service to Brussels bureaucrats, yet appear unable to grasp the trap of the New World Order
To counter mass psychosis, which has been a hallmark of the Balkans throughout centuries, all eyes are riveted on the magic wand of the European Union. The official opinion among the new ruling classes in Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia, or Bosnia is that the EU is the rich men’s club that will henceforth dispense enormous wealth to everybody. On top of all this, EU officials have enough of their local nodmen in the Balkans willing to sign any paper in order to implement some feel-good semblance of paper stability.
Although the Versailles-sponsored multiethnic Yugoslavia failed, ironically, the Brussels-based Euroslavia, appears now to be the far more dangerous game in town. The tired Balkan masses, in what used to be once communist multicultural Yugoslavia, think that the road to Brussels is the quick way to heavenly bliss. Yet the vaunted European Union may soon face the storms of its own violent
balkanisation
I don’t know who Mr.Sunic is. He is described as an ‘author who writes from Europe’ which is not very helpful.
I also possess no more than a sketchy knowledge of the recent tragic history of the Balkans and, judging from his name alone, I assume that Mr.Sunic is vastly better equipped than I to speak on these matters. (I am also aware that we have a redoubtable Balkan Blogger in the shape of Natalija Radic)
I will say, however, that from the bottom of this particular fishtank, the dark forebodings in the above article do have the ring of prescience about them
President Bush announced today that they have stopped a terrorist organization that has taken millions and millions away from the American people. Yes! The IRS is finished!
– Jay Leno
It is simple really… less, not more, public sending helps the economy. What is so hard to grasp about that? When the government taxes, it allocates resources in a way that would not have otherwise have occurred (and if it would have occurred like that, then why is that aspect of what government does being done by government at all?). If the government had not taken those resources and allocated them, the capital would not have just sat under a mattress… it would have gone elsewhere: that is what capital does.
So when the government proudly points to some wonderful things it has built and the alleged economic benefits they will bring, what you do not see is what that self same capital would have done if the state had not appropriated it from its previous owners… what they would have done, what they would have built.
So when Gerard Baker at the Financial Times says Bush may have harmed the US economy with his tax cuts, rather than saying he may have harmed the economy by not reducing spending, he is in effect saying that it is only deficits, rather than government spending itself, that hurts economies. By saying High-Tax-Tom Daschle has better economic policies, that must mean that government spending is actually better for an economy than private spending. How does that work? That must be why the many nations whose governments appropriate more of their national resources for spending are wealthier than the United States, you know, nations like…er…um…ah…
As the focus of events is less and less on Afghanistan, the focus of the blogger punditerati is likewise fragmenting in many directions… one of the interesting things about the many blogs over the last few months has been that many bloggers have been picking up the same news stories and it has been fascinating to see differing interpretations. With the advantage of many probing eyes, obscure on-line reports get picked up from more unusual regional newspapers or some out-of-the-way repository of cypherpunk web documents, and suddenly a new surge of interacting interpretations hits the blogs. I suspect this is what Glenn Reynolds meant when he once described himself as being part of a ‘hive mind’.
However as the focus of events becomes more fragmented and regionalized post-Taliban, the stories that get picked up and blogged becomes more regionalized as well. I am fascinated by Glenn Reynolds’ often innovative takes on geopolitics and other issues on Instapundit but when I get to his views on a US plagiarism scandal involving folks I have never heard of, I tend to wander off elsewhere after the third article on the subject, checking other blogs for war news or perhaps something more generally pan-Anglospherical in appeal.
Yet I suspect this is a natural process, a cycle rather than movement towards some less interacting endpoint… the ‘hive mind’ will fragment into locally focused clusters only to surge back together periodically as a global story catches the imagination. At the moment the Canadian bloggers are all bouncing off each other in a quite interesting manner over largely Canadian issues. In a similar way, certain blogs seem to hit ‘hot streaks’ and the rest start reacting to that blog’s interesting views rather than just what the established media is reporting, setting up an interesting interblog harmonic for a while. It will be intriguing to see what dynamics take hold in the longer term when the majority of blogs stop thinking of themselves as ‘warblogs’. I suspect blogs, or something like them, are here to stay but they are sure to start mutating over time into… well, good question… into whatever comes next. We will just have to wait and see what that is.
I was pointed at this article about consensual incest in the Guardian and yet again the issues are the usual ones… on one hand social loathing of a relationship which translates into the force of law leading to destroyed lives… and on the other people freely doing what they want to do with each other.
Incest is such a taboo that it gets mixed up with all the other extreme taboos, like rape and pederasty, but which a moments thought shows are all quite separate things. If people want to have a relationship that is not coercive, how is that anyone else’s business? Violence within a relationship and rape are reasonably illegal but if those are absent, what is the problem? Does incest make you uncomfortable? Well it certainly does make me uncomfortable. So feel free to not associate with people who act in ways that make you uncomfortable. That is usually what I do.
Yet it is not so hard to understand how these things happen. I have repeatedly felt attracted to a cousin of mine and although it never came to anything, I can certainly understand how in other circumstances things might have happened differently. But is that something that justifies legislation? How can that be? Whose business is it which two adult people have relationships with each other and in what manner? As Dr. Sean Gabb says in the article, if it is because of the fear of birth defects, will we also forbid relationships to other unrelated people who exhibit a clear history of genetic defects with eugenic laws?
I cannot help thinking everyone would be a great deal happier if we all just minded our own damn business and left others to go where their hearts take them, no matter how strange other people might find it.
When Tony Blair and New Labour got elected in 1997 the understandable dismay among Conservatives manifested itself as dire warnings that ‘New’ Labour was a glossy sham and it was just ‘Old’ Labour dressed up in electable clothes. Soon, they warned, the public would realise that they had let the wolf back in the door and the days of Trade Union militancy and a crippled economy would return to haunt us again. You just wait and see, they said.
Mere sour grapes, said all the pundits. And, thus far, the pundits appear to have been proved right
Thus far, but maybe not much further. And it isn’t just transport that looks like grinding to a halt. Post Office unions are ballotting their members on a nationwide strike and mail in North London is already in chaos thanks to a local dispute
Those of us who are old enough to have lived in Britain in the 1970’s under ‘Old’ Labour remember only too well what it looked like. It looked a bit like this
I agree with ‘Johnny Student’ that one reason for the elite to want to present the world as complex is to keep them in jobs as the only people able to understand it. Another reason for wanting the same thing is as an explanation for the failure of their preferred solutions. They look around after decades of welfare/gun control/affirmative action and still see poverty/gun crime/blacks at the bottom of the heap. It is much pleasanter to bemoan the complexity and “stubborness” of poverty/crime/racism than admit that their solutions were just plain wrong. It also gets you a bigger budget.
Obviously in many ways the world is complex. But rather as physics can reduce multifarious phenomena to simple equations, I think you can dig down to some fairly simple ethical principles. The complexity comes in seeing what applies where.
David Carr pointed out that Euro Leader and superstatist Romano Prodi insists that membership of the Eurozone is for ever and irreversible
The president of the European Commission Romano Prodi believes that membership in the Eurozone is a “definitive marriage” and thus he feels the need for a good economic policy across the Eurozone, to keep the marriage solid. “You cannot leave the Eurozone once you’re in”, Prodi said on Wednesday.
Which is, of course, exactly what Tito said about Yugoslavia.
Israel and the Middle East
Take a look at Victor Hanson in his article about why Arabs have misunderstood Israel. In a nutshell, his thesis is that if Israel did not exist, then as far as many Arabs are concerned, they would have to invent it.
If Israel did not exist, the Arab world, in its current fit of denial, would have to invent somehting like it to vent its frustrations. That is not to say there may not be legitimate concerns in the struggle over Palestine, but merely that for milliums of Muslims the fight over such small real estate stems from a deep psychological wound. It isn’t about lebensraum or some actual physical threat. Isreal is a constant reminder that it is a nation’s culture-not its geography or size or magnitude or its oil reserves-that determine its wealth or freedom.
In response to Will Willkinson on the The Fly Bottle taking our esteemed generalissimo Perry de Havilland to task for supporting the conjectural objective epistemology of Karl Popper, the Samizdata Team decided that we should wheel up the big guns for our response. Rafe Champion a noted Australian independent scholar of Popper replies to Will.
Will Wilkinson has invoked a number of weary and worn out arguments against Popper’s theory of inquiry and his theory of knowledge. First of all it is helpful to understand that Popper is concerned with understanding the way the world works, with learning by imaginative problem solving and making the best use of our critical faculties. It is also helpful to understand how Popper has emancipated us from some dead ends in philosophy, and not just the philosophy of science. Many of these dead ends arise from the theory that scientific knowledge is a form of belief, to wit, justified true belief. The source of justification in the empiricist tradition is supposed to be the evidence of our senses. In the Continental rationalist tradition the source of justification is the intuition of clear and distinct ideas. In each case the same fatal flaw arises: there is no way to decisively (certainly) justify the beliefs that are supposed to be true.
Popper has provided an alternative to the failed theories of justified true belief. The alternative is a theory of conjectural objective knowledge. This does not mean giving up on truth, or the search for it. Truth is a regulative standard for statements. A true statement corresponds to the facts. In our search for the truth we form critical preferences for the theory (or the social policy) which best solves its problems and stands up to all kinds of tests (the test of internal consistency, consistency with other well tested theories, and experimental or observational tests). Our preferences can change in a rational and controlled manner in the light of new evidence or new arguments. Our knowledge grows through our creative response to problems, including the problems that are created by effective criticism.
The Popperian scientists is like a free market entrepreneur, seeking opportunities (unsolved problems) in the marketplace. The scientist forms a conjectural solution to the problem (invests or offers a product in the marketplace) and it is then subjected to critical appraisal, including experimental tests (the product is tested by the market). All this goes on in the flux of time and is subject to radical uncertainty due to the inherently open-ended nature of theoretical knowledge (and the dynamic marketplace).
All of this is simple common sense until David Stove and the proponents of justified true beliefs confuse the picture.
Will wrote:
“Popper argues that one can only disconfirm a theory–prove that it is false”.
In logic, that is the simple truth. A general or universal theory, stated in the form “All swans are white” is falsified by a single (true) report of a black swan.
“But then what do you say of a theory that has been subjected to huge numbers of potentially falsifying tests, but has passed with flying colors? Isn’t not being falsified by many tests a lot like being confirmed?”
That was the case with Newton’s theory which passed many tests and explained so many things that many people thought that the final truth had been found. But it was not so, even before Einstein offered a viable alternative there were known to be problems with Newton’s theory. If you want to limit confirmation to repeatable observations, like sunrises and falling apples, then that is scientifically trivial and uninteresting because science is concerned with general explanatory theories, (which apply to both apples and sunrises).
“Pace Popper, induction works just fine, and it works pretty much the way people intuitively think it does (i.e., The more horses you encounter, the surer your knowledge about horses in general.)”
Not really. To learn about horses you need to approach them in a receptive, inquisitive or problem-solving way. If you merely encounter them “in passing” you may learn nothing more than to get out of their way. Learning is an active process of sifting and evaluating ideas and evidence, that is why so many people can go through school and higher education and learn next to nothing (exept about things that they really find interesting, which may be horses and not their academic studies). When you understand where Popper is coming from, David Stove is just a bore, despite his wit and his verbal pyrotechnics. Stove and his fellow inductivists apparently think there is some way to attach a numerical probability to general theories, but it has not yet been done despite being an academic industry for about a hundred years. This renders their position absurd by their own standards.
Rafe Champion
Remember, children, joining the Eurozone is for life not just for Christmas
I, for one, would like to applaud Signor Prodi for his candour about the real nature of the Euro-project. Mind you, it would have been more useful had it come before 1st January 2002…oh, but I’m probably just quibbling. Let us all hope that the policy of Glasnost continues and that we shall be treated to yet more spine-tingling and amazing revelations from Europes First Citizen
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
– Lord Acton
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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