The Times (London)
April 22, 1999, Thursday
HEADLINE: ‘The war is being fought to destroy the very principles which constitute the West. This is not moral: it is megalomaniac’
BYLINE: John Laughland
Among the charred corpses and smoking ruins of Kosovo there lies an unreported casualty. It is not one of the hundreds of physical victims of Nato’s bombs but instead a metaphysical one. In 1999 as in 1389, the Blackbird Field has witnessed the defeat of that spiritual body of values which in the postwar period used to be known as the West.
This is because the war is being fought to destroy the very principles which constitute the West, namely the rule of law. Unlike in 1389 however, the enemy is not the Sultan but rather the leaders of the Western nations themselves. It is false to claim, as Tony Blair now does, that Serb mistreatment of the Kosovo Albanians, is the casus belli. Instead, the bombing started because President Milosevic refused to allow hostile foreign troops on to Yugoslav soil.
Overturning this refusal remains Nato’s overriding purpose. Yet this demand is completely incompatible with the logic of a system of sovereign states, which for the past 350 years has formed the basis of Western politics, liberalism and the rule of 1aw. To be sure, state sovereignty is not an absolute principle. It can be overriden in certain extreme cases. But the present war is being fought in order to override it in all cases, and to remove it completely as a relevant factor in the new world order.
Mr Blair has said the war is being fought for “a new internationalism”. Javier Solana, the Nato Secretary-General, has said that its purpose is to establish a precedent for the “new strategic concept” of Nato, namely that it should be able to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign state for humanitarian reasons.
Nato, by definition, never had this role when it was set up, as a defensive alliance, protecting the sovereign territory of its members. If the war is post-national in its aims, it is also post-national in its implementation. Nato, an anonymous international apparatus based in Brussels and acting outside the terms of its own charter, is colluding with a group, the Kosovo Liberation Army, whose structures and goals owe very little to any political programme of national liberation for Kosovo and instead a great deal to the needs of its mafia activities and extensive drug-running network.
The only nation involved is Serbia, whose wholesale destruction is certainly going to be the outcome of the war, though not its stated aim. This is why all the war’s main protagonists are old enemies of nationhood, Nato and the West. Bill Clinton, Mr Blair, Joschka Fischer and Senor Solana form “the new generation of politicians who hail from the progressive side of politics” of which Mr Blair boasts.
Commentators have been wrong to chuckle at the apparent conversion of these one-time opponents of US power, for the truth is much worse. This war represents the most complete fulfilment of their deepest internationalist convictions. Like the conversion of the New Left to the market, its new warmongering should give no comfort to conservative supporters of economic liberalism or the Atlantic alliance.
Instead of being systems for the protection of national liberties, both these have now been subverted into vehicles for their destruction. Mr Blair has even compared the four weeks of bomb attacks on Yugoslavia to the process by which “globalisation is opening up the world’s financial architecture for discussion, re-evaluation and improvement”. War, it seems, is now the continuation of economic integration by other means.
In place of the old system of national legal systems creating free markets and national liberties, a new world order of universal human rights is being set up. The problem is that the bogus notion of human rights can never provide a basis for either the rule of law or morality.
Whereas a national system of justice is a self-contained entity which grows with and defines the society in which it inheres, universal human rights are detached from any rootedness in time or place. Their application therefore inevitably flails around capriciously, according to the latest whim of outrage or the latest fad for victimhood.
It is therefore inevitable that the brave new world of universal human rights is, in fact, a topsy-turvy world of gruesome moral relativism. Why support the KLA, while sidelining the moderate Albanian resistance under Ibrahim Rugova?
Human rights are, by definition, antithetical to the concept of national sovereignty. The idea that there can be such a thing as universal human rights implies that there can be a single global system of civil law with Nato playing the role of world government. But for its sins, mankind has been divided up into different peoples. Any attempt to behave as if this were not so is not moral: it is megalomaniac.