Furiously in all directions: NATO wasn't set up for handling situations like Bosnia - and it isn't - ceasefire plan

National Review, March 7, 1994 by Noel Malcolm

WHEN Western leaders try to deal with the problem of Bosnia, a terrible dilemma confronts them. Is it desirable to try to keep together an artificial grouping of nationalities that seethe with conflicting aims and values? And, even if that is desirable, is it not possible that the very act of pushing them back together again may actually strengthen the hostilities among them?

The grouping of nationalities I refer to is called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Threats to use NATO warplanes to bomb Serb artillery positions have brought this organization, for the first time, into the very heart of the Bosnia debate. For some politicians and military men, this is a chance for NATO to remind us of how indispensable it is: there is simply no other organization that can do the job. For others, it is an ill-conceived venture from which, given the lack of clear aims at the outset, NATO may emerge tarnished and politically weakened.

It is a hard judgment to make; the stakes are very high. As one senior British officer puts it: "Frankly, I don't care very much about what happens to Yugoslavia. But I care a hell of a lot about what happens to NATO." That officer is in favor of taking action, but only for the most reluctant of reasons: he fears that if NATO stands back any longer, it will become an international laughing-stock. "Our governments have spent billions of pounds giving us the best equipment and the best training," he says. "People are going to start asking what it was all for, if we say we're incapable of knocking a few drunken Serbs off a hillside."

Bosnia poses a type of problem very different from the problem the North Atlantic alliance was originally created to deal with. NATO, the most successful (one could say, the only truly successful) international organization of the last half-century, was created to counter a single and unmistakable strategic military threat. Although that threat has not evaporated, it has become shrouded in a fog of other more nebulous security concerns since the alleged ending of the Cold War five years ago. Recognizing this, the Alliance issued a new "Strategic Concept" in late 1991, in which it tried to redefine its role: "In contrast with the predominant threat of the past, the risks to Allied security that remain are multi-faceted and multi-dimensional, which makes them harder to predict and assess .... These risks are less likely to result from calculated aggression against the Allies, but rather from the adverse consequences of instabilities that may arise from the serious economic, social and political difficulties, including ethnic rivalries and territorial disputes, which are faced by many countries in central and eastern Europe."

Europeanizing NATO

WHAT THIS new doctrine implied was that in the future NATO would be concerned less with defense (the straightforward matter of protecting NATO members against possible attack) and more with security--a far more open-ended and uncertain concept. And it was not obvious that a transatlantic military alliance was the ideal piece of machinery for dealing with the delicate matter of security arrangements within Europe. Would it not be better, perhaps, to entrust this task to a new Europe-wide forum for discussion and negotiation, such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe? Or to a purely European political formation, such as the European Community (now renamed the European Union)? Or even to the Western European Union, a grouping which might roughly be described as the European sub-section of NATO but which, according to the Maastricht Treaty, might one day become the European Union's very own military machine?

All these suggestions sounded reasonable, until the war in Yugoslavia. Then, one by one, the grand-sounding European organizations tripped and fell. First to go was the CSCE, whose "Conflict Prevention Center" had been set up in Vienna in 1990, just in time to demonstrate that it was incapable of preventing conflicts. With its membership now nudging fifty (including such typical European countries as Tadjikistan) and its offices scattered among various European capitals, the CSCE resembles Nicholas of Cusa's definition of God: a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere. Like the Almighty, it has remained, for the most part, invisible.

Next was the European Community. Though it seemed at first almost to welcome the chance to display its peacemaking skills ("Now is the hour of Europe!" cried its representative, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, at the outbreak of the Yugoslav war), its most decisive action was to supply a small number of "monitors" in white coats---christened "ice-cream men" by the bemused Yugoslavs whose deaths they proceeded to monitor.

As for the Western European Union, this body did indeed send a small flotilla to the Adriatic in 1992 to enforce the arms embargo against Bosnia and the other ex-Yugoslav republics. But the WEU, having no assigned forces of its own, has to borrow them off member states, which are almost all members of NATO. And since NATO was sending a flotilla to patrol the Adriatic anyway, this parallel action by the WEU had an element of redundancy bordering on the farcical.