The Danger of Economic Collapse in Europe

No one in the punditocracy has raised the issue yet, but their are drastic dangers in the collapse of the Eurozone in Europe. The European Union (EU) voted an austerity rescue package for Ireland and Dublin accepted it. It then voted one for Greece, and Athens accepted it, but with the proviso of first holding a referendum on it. Commentators have even come up with an acronym for the danger of a Southern European collapse: PIGS--Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. If any of the three other PIGS defaults then Europe will be plunged into a depression, the Euro will collapse, and the effect will likely be felt across the Atlantic in America. Go here for a timeline of the debt crisis as it developed from late 2009 to the present. Go here for an article on the dangers of Italian default on their debt.

This is then the opposite of the Great Depression of the 1930s when the depression began on Wall St. and very quickly moved across the Atlantic to Europe and South Africa. America was providing the financing for the system of revolving finance in which America loaned money to Germany, which then paid that same money to the Allies as reparations for World War I, and then the Allies repaid American war loans. Once America could no longer provide the funding to Germany the system collapsed.

The best description of the link between politics and economics in the 1930s is The Dark Valley by British historian Piers Brendon. It demonstrates that as the decade began fascism was confined to Italy and Portugal and neither country was doing very well. The Nazi Party was polling under three percent in German elections and France was ruled by the Radicals (a centrist party despite the name). Soon the Nazis began to rise very quickly as most voters abandoned the parties of the center in favor of either the Communists or the Nazis. By the end of January 1933 Hitler was chancellor of Germany; eighteen months later he was a dictator. Fascist paramilitary groups began to dominate the streets of Paris and other French cities until they were finally outlawed following a bloody clash with the police in 1934. The depression led the Japanese army to invade Manchuria in 1931 and then much of the eastern half of China in 1937.  The military took over running the government from the civilians during the 1930s. In Eastern Europe traditional dictatorships gradually gave way to fascist parties, which then established their own more radical dictatorships. Fascism then spread to the Arab world--to Egypt and Palestine and then to Syria.

I think that Western Europe is safe from a return of fascism as democracy is well entrenched there after two generations since its introduction following 1945. But east of the Czech Republic and south of Slovenia it is another story. Fascism was introduced in Yugoslavia by Slobadan Milosevic in the late 1980s. Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and even Montenegro and Croatia remain at danger from an economic collapse.  In Serbia and Croatia democracy remains weak with ultra-nationalist challengers. In Bosnia politics is dominated by Serb, Croat and Bosniak ethnic nationalist parties. The central government is dysfunctional. In Macedonia there is the danger of demands by the Albanian minority and repression by the Slav majority. Nationalism could return to the Balkans in a big way if there were a Euro collapse. The Bosnian war of 1992-95 led to at least 100,000 deaths and a million refugees leaving the country for Western Europe and the United States. Unlike the Albanians in Kosovo, most never returned.

Central Europe north of the Balkans is safer but there are danger zones there as well. Democracy is probably quite safe in the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Baltic States. But in Slovakia there could be problems as the economy is dependent on heavy industry--military industries were very important in Slovakia. There is a Hungarian minority in Romania; if ill treated by the Romanian majority this could lead to a return of nationalism in Hungary with irredentist claims over Transylvania. Like Dracula in the Hammar films of the 1950s and 1960s, fascism could rise from the dead in Budapest.  

These are things that Angela Merkel, the Germans, the Greeks, and the Italians should all think about very hard.

Europe and the Middle East Peace Process

For a number of years I have advocated that the United States enter into a partnership with the European Union for the purpose of sponsoring a non-biased peace process in the Middle East that can engage with both the Palestinians and Israel and bring pressure on both of them. The model for this dual mediation is the Anglo-Irish peace process in Northern Ireland from 1993 to 2007.

But recently an article on the Real Clear World website pointed out that Stephen Wall, a former senior British Finance Ministry official responsible for policy towards Europe and author of a book on British European policy, said that as a result of the Euro crisis in Europe with both Greece and Ireland in trouble and Spain and Portugal threatening to go bad, he expected to see the whole European economic and political project to unravel within his lifetime. He is 64. So figure some time within the next 20 years at the outside. This is partly because Europe is forever trying to run before it can crawl properly.

It has instituted a common currency without having a common monetary policy or economic policy binding on all member states. This has led to the present crisis.

Since 1979 it has been issuing policy statements on the Arab-Israeli conflict and trying to get its foot into the door of regional diplomacy. But in the early 1990s when a crisis--or more correctly, several interrelated crises--occurred in Europe's backyard in the Balkans, Brussels was asleep at the wheel. The Bosnian civil war was finally resolved by American mediation in late 1995 after Washington grew tired of Europe's empty claims of preeminence. Tens of thousands died in the killing fields of Bosnia--many under the noses of European peacekeeping troops--while Europe struggled unsuccessfully to come up with a common problem. This was because Germany supported the Croats in Bosnia and Croatia while Britain and France favored the Serbs for historical reasons dating back to World War I.

It may be another decade before the region is again ripe for a peace process. Before the Palestinians are united around a common negotiating position that would allow a solution with Israel. A decade before the Arabs in the surrounding countries have dealt with the issues arising out of the Arab Spring. That will give Europe and the United States a decade to work out a solution and implement it before Europe collapses. In Northern Ireland it took nearly fourteen years to do this, and the conflict in Northern Ireland is much simpler than that in the Middle East without hundreds of thousands of refugees, without holy sites in Belfast sacred to three of the world's major religions, and without a massive ongoing settlement effort by unionists on nationalist land. 

So maybe all the pessimists are right and the conflict is unsolvable.

Ratko Mladic and the Cost of Genocide

I was stationed as a military policeman with the stabilization force (SFOR) in Bosnia from October 1997 to April 1998. When we arrived in country we were given a debriefing by the outgoing unit. I was told that the members of the unit had had Serb war criminals pass through their checkpoints unhindered because the Army wasn't interested in risking the safety of its soldiers to enforce that policy. I vowed to myself that if I ever encountered any war criminals that I recognized as such (we had their faces on posters) I would risk my life and career rather than let them go. If they resisted I would give up my life rather than let them go free. This is because I knew the history of the region from intensive reading before deployment.

In World War II some 1.5-2 million people had been killed during an internal civil war within Yugoslavia as terrorist Ustashe Croatians took over control of Croatia under fascist protection and Serbia was torn between the communist Partisans of Josip Broz Tito and the nationalist Chetniks of Gen. Mihailovic. Because there were no war crimes trials or prosecutions after the war, those who had personally suffered by having had family killed, like Ratko Mladic, thought that it was alright to take personal or national vengeance by ethnic cleansing and massacres. I was determined that war crimes trials have a chance to avoid another round of genocide in the future.

Over the fifteen years since the civil war in Bosnia ended at Dayton, Ohio in December 2010 the most important successor states to the old Communist Yugoslavia have given up nationalism. First Croatia in the early 2000s as Franjo Tudjman died and was followed in office by a pragmatist Western-oriented politician rather than another Communist turned nationalist. Then Boris Tadic replaced the Serb nationalist who had overthrown Slobadan Milosevic in 2001. With the handing over of Mladic to the Hague for trial, Serbia removes the main barrier to entry into the European Union. Now only Macedonia and Bosnia remain. Macedonia with its ethnic strife between Muslim Albanians and Christian Slavs and Bosnia with its barely-suppressed conflict among Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs. The Office of the High Commissioner, the office responsible for the implementation of all economic and political reform in Bosnia since Dayton, is set to be abolished in less than a year. If that happens the chances of any further reforms being achieved becomes remote. And Bosnia will remain a ticking time bomb within Europe--if not in its heart than maybe in its groin.

While I was on leave from Bosnia in early 1998 I went on leave to Poland. I visted Oswiecim (Aushwitz). I remember distinctly looking into a display case of spectacles taken from those who had entered the gas chambers at Aushwitz. I wondered if they added up to the 6,000 then thought to have been murdered at Srebrenica in 1995. The number since then has been scaled up to 8,000. I remember thinking how short the direct distance was between Srebrenica and Aushwitz and the wonder that it had only taken half a century to travel from one to the other. Srebrenica, unlike Rwanda or Cambodia, was not located someplace in the Third World. It was in Europe. Non-Christians were still not welcome there.

The European and Western indifference to the ethnic cleansing that took place in Bosnia helped to pave the way for the fundamentalist growth in the country since 1992. As it was mainly the Arab Gulf countries and Iran that provided Bosnia with financial aid and arms, the population grew to accept that the most backward countries in the Middle East were their natural allies. Just as the betrayal at Munich in September 1938 paved the way for the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia a decade later, the Western indifference helped to pave the way for fundamentalist Muslim inroads into Bosnia and Kosovo. Hopefully, London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna won't pay the full price for their policies in the 1990s.

Coping with the "Peace Process"

You are someone who is deeply interested in peace in the Middle East. Imagine that it has just been revealed that Israel turned down serious Palestinian offers during talks with a lame duck Israeli government, that the Labor Party after a decade of constant downsizing has now split in two, that Kadima is divided into two rival factions struggling for control of the party, and that the Palestinians are divided between one faction in Gaza that doesn't want peace under any conditions that Israel could offer and that the other faction in the West Bank probably cannot deliver on any peace agreement made. Just think how you would feel! Oh, all of that actually did happen, so you better pay attention to my step by step guide for maintaining your sanity.

Step One. Choose two other peace processes that are ongoing and that can be followed in the news. In the early 1990s I chose South Africa and Northern Ireland. I chose South Africa because I had written my doctoral dissertation on the country, but I could have chosen El Salvador.

Step Two. Find a good internet site where you can get daily or weekly updates on the state of the peace process and analysis. In the 1990s I had to rely on the press and had to make weekly trips downtown to buy The Irish Voice from New York to follow what was going on in Northern Ireland. In 2001 a prominent Belfast journalist told me about Newshound, an internet site that carried links to articles in the British, Irish and Ulster press on the peace process and events there in general. This made it much easier to follow along.

Step Three. Read as much general literature as you can about the other two peace processes and the conflicts that preceded them. Be sure to read from multiple perspectives.

Step Four. Read some of the theoretical literature on international mediation and conflict resolution. Just deal with a few simple concepts like ripeness, leverage, and bias.

Step Five. Apply these concepts to the peace processes that you are following. Who is mediating? Why are they mediating? Was the situation ripe for resolution when the peace process began? What leverage does the mediator have over the belligerent parties? Is the mediator biased? Does this affect his leverage? How?

Step Six. By now a couple or more years have passed and two of the peace processes have gotten bogged down. Analyse what went wrong.

Step Seven. Peace has actually occurred in one of the three processes. Celebrate!

Step Eight. Continue to monitor events in the country of the successful peace process to make sure that things stay on track.

Step Nine. Read all the editorials proclaiming that we should just do in the Mideast what they did in South Africa, Northern Ireland, etc. Start to seriously compare the conditions in the one success story to those where the peace process has bogged down or failed.

Step Ten. Think back to all the obstacles that the negotiators overcame to make peace in the one success story. Whenever things go badly in the other two situations, just tell yourself that things were just as bad in South Africa, El Salvador, etc. Think back to when the ANC did a forced march over the Ciskei border and a massacre resulted or about the continuing killings in Natal throughout the peace process.

Step Eleven. Find another peace process to replace your success story. I picked Bosnia and Kosovo. Being in the U.S. Army and being deployed there helped with some of the research.

Step Twelve. Repeat steps two through ten.

Step Thirteen. Decide if you want to become a professional peace processor or get a life!

This process can also be applied with slight modifications to other things like observing regional democracy revolutions. But I cannot guarantee the one in three success rate in regions undergoing democratization or political turmoil for the first time, second time, third time, etc. particularly in the Middle East.  If you have time you might want to go back through the microfiche or microfilm at your local public library and reexamine the revolutions in the Philippines, in Eastern Europe, and in Africa. If you have access to internet databases of newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post you can pick one of these historical revolutions to study along with those you are currently observing.