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Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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?????????????????????????????????????????????????Sunday, May 7, 2017
‘Schindler List’ for Southeast Europe
Pakistanisation as the Final Solution for the Balkans?
( May 6, 2017, Vienna, Sri Lanka Guardian) A few days ago Observer published a column under the title Putin-Proofing the Balkans: A How-To Guide, written by John Schindler.
In this article the author advocates some new geopolitical redesigns of
the Balkans which are actually far from being a novelty. As a matter of
fact, these ideas represent a pale copy of the ideas recently published
by Foreign Affairs in the article under the title Dysfunction in the Balkans, written by Timothy Less, a
former British diplomat who served as the head of the British
diplomatic office in Banja Luka, the capital of the Serb entity in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as the political secretary of the British
Embassy in Macedonia. Less advocates a total redesign of the existing
state boundaries in the Balkans: the imagined Greater Serbia should
embrace the existing Serb entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but also the
entire internationally recognized Republic of Montenegro; the Greater
Croatia should embrace a future Croatian entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina;
the Greater Albania should embrace both Kosovo and the western part of
Macedonia. All these territorial redesigns, says Less and Schindler
agrees, would eventually bring about a lasting peace and stability in
the region.
Of course, it is easy to claim that both Schindler and Less are now only
freelancers whose articles have nothing to do with their former
employers’ policies. However, the problem is that certain circles within
the foreign policy establishment in both Great Britain and the United
States, in their numerous initiatives from 1990s onwards, have
repeatedly advocated the very same ideas that can be found in these two
articles, such as the creation of the imagined monoethnic greater states
– Greater Serbia, Greater Croatia and Greater Albania – as an alleged
path towards lasting stability in the Balkans, with Bosnia’s and
Macedonia’s disappearance as a collateral damage. Of course, these ideas
have always been spread below the surface of official policy, but they
have never been abandoned, as the ‘coincidence’ of almost simultaneous
appearance of Schindler’s and Less’s articles in the renowned mainstream
magazines demostrates.
Ostenstibly, the ideas advocated by Schindler and Less are rooted in the
plausible presupposition that, as long as the existing nationalist
greater-state projects remain unaccomplished, the nationalist resentment
will always generate ever-increasing instability. However, the history
has clearly demonstrated, both in the Balkans and other parts of the
world, that such a presupposition is nothing but a simple fallacy. For,
the very concept of completed ethnonational states is a concept that has
always led towards perpetual instability wherever applied, because such
ethnonational territories cannot be created without projection of
extreme coercion and violence over particular ‘inappropriate’
populations, including the techniques which have become known as ethnic
cleansing and genocide. The logic of ‘solving national issues’ through
creation of ethnically cleansed greater states has always led towards
permanent instability, never towards long-term stability. Let us only
remember the consequences of the German ruling oligarchy’s attempt to
create such a state in the World War II. And let us only try to imagine
what the world would be like if their geopolitical project was
recognized and accepted in the name of ‘stability’, as now Schindler and
Less propose in the case of some other geopolitical projects based on
ethnic cleansing and genocide.
What is particularly interesting when it comes to ‘solving national
issues’ in the Balkans is the flexibility (i.e. arbitrariness) of the
proposed and realized ‘solutions’. First, the winners in the World War
I, among whom the British and American officials occupied the most
prominent positions, advocated the creation of the common national state
of the Southern Slavs at the Peace Conference in Versailles. Then, more
than seventy years later, Lord Carrington, the longest serving member
of the British foreign policy establishment, chaired another
international conference in The Hague where he oversaw the partition of
that very state in the name of ‘solving national issues’ between
ethnonational states which constituted it. Together with the Portugese
diplomat, Jose Cutileiro, Lord Carrington then also introduced the
first, pre-war plan for ethnic partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina (the
Carrington-Cutileiro Plan), again in the name of ‘solving national
issues’ between the ethnic groups living in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which
was eventually sealed, with some minor changes, at the international
conference in Dayton. And now, here is yet another plan for
fragmentation of the Balkan states, again in order to ‘solve national
issues’. What is needed in addition is yet another international
conference to implement and verify such a plan, and thus turn the
Balkans upside-down one more time. Therefore it comes as no surprise
that such a conference on the Western Balkans has already been scheduled
for 2018 in London.
Yet, how the proposed dismemberment of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia,
as well as the absorbtion of Montenegro into Greater Serbia, can be
made politically acceptable to the population of the Balkans and the
entire international community?
What is required to accomplish such a task is a scenario that would make
an alternative to dismemberment and absorbtion of sovereign states even
less acceptable. It is not difficult to imagine that only a war, or a
threat of war, would be such an alternative. However, its feasibility is
limited by the fact that no state in the Balkans has the capacities and
resources – military, financial, or demographic – to wage a full-scale
war, and their leaders are too aware of this to even try to actually
launch it. In such a context, the available option is to create an
atmosphere that would simulate an immediate threat of war, by constantly
raising nationalist tensions between, and within, the states in the
region. Of course, such tensions do exist since 1990, but it would be
necessary to accumulate them in a long-term campaign so as to create an
illusion of imminence of regional war.
Significantly, following the appearance of Less’s article, and
simultanously with Schindler’s one, the tensions within
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia have begun to rise. This growth of
tensions can hardly be disregarded as accidental, given the fact that
the Balkan leaders can easily be played one against another whenever
they receive signals, no matter whether fake or true, that a new
geopolitical reshuffle of the region is being reconsidered by major
global players. Since they are already well-accustomed to raising
inter-state and intra-state tensions as a means of their own political
survival, it is very likely that they will be able to accumulate such
tensions to such a level as to gradually generate a mirage of imminent
regional war. Also, a part of the same campaign is the systematic spread
of rumours, already performed all over Europe, that a war in the
Balkans is inevitable and will certainly take place during 2017.
In the simulated atmosphere of inevitable war, a radical geopolitical
reconfiguration of the entire Balkans, including dismemberment of the
existing states proclaimed as dysfunctional and their eventual
absorbtion into the imagined greater states, may well become politically
acceptable. All
that is needed is to juxtapose this ‘peaceful’ option and the
fabricated projection of imminent war as the only available
alternatives, and offer to implement the former at a particular
international conference, such as the one scheduled for 2018 in London.
What is required for implementation of the proposed geopolitical
rearrangement of the Balkans is to spread the perception that the
permanent rise of political conflicts in the region inevitably leads to a
renewed armed conflict. In that context, all the proposed fallacies
about usefulness of geopolitical redesigns in the Balkans may easily
acquire a degree of legitimacy, so as to be finally implemented and
verified at the 2018 London conference on the Western Balkans.
Of course, if that happens, it can only lead to further resentment and
lasting instability in the region and Eastern Europe, and that can only
lead to growing instability in the entire Europe. One can only wonder,
is that a desired ultimate outcome for those who promote greater state
projects in the Balkans as an alleged path towards its stability?
About
the author: Zlatko Hadžidedić is Assistant Professor at the Sarajevo
School of Science and Technology, Bosnia-Herzegovina. He received his
PhD from the University of Sarajevo, Faculty of Political Science, his
MPhil from the London School of Economics and Political Science and MA
from the Central European University, Budapest. He served as political
adviser to several Bosnian ministers and political leaders. His book
Forced to be Free. The Paradoxes of Liberalism and Nationalism was
published in 2012 by Deutscher Wissenschafts-Verlag (DWV).