November 1992, Page 13, 86

Special Report

The Worldwide Consequences of American Indecision in Bosnia

By Cornell H. Fleischer and Edib Korkut

The genocidal horrors of Serbian nationalism in Bosnia-Hercegovina have begun to stimulate the public conscience in the United States. But the Bosnian disaster has provoked little genuine soul-searching in the world's last superpower. Our anguish over humanitarian issues, while morally laudable, diverts us from attending to the deeper question of what sorts of social structures we will promote, tolerate or legitimize in the 21st century, and for whom. The United States and it Western European allies shrug helplessly in the face of a conflict represented as an ethnic one that can be solved only by containment or by acquiescence to Serbian-created facts.

The American decision on what to do about Bosnia and Hercegovina, however, is really a decision about the sort of world we wish to live in. It is a decision that requires us to examine our commitment to what we call our democratic ideals.

Are these ideals parochial ones, just for us, or are we prepared to commit ourselves to effect the universality we, and others, impute to them? Bosnians-Slavic Muslims, Catholic Croatians, and Christian Orthodox Serbs-have rejected the ethnic nationalism of Serbian extremists who insist that Serbs cannot live in a state that is not ethnically homogeneous. Americans, by and large, have rejected the same notion. It is the Bosnian vision of a democratic society in which citizenship, not religion or ethnicity, is the guarantor of social and political rights that is the modern one.

The Soviet collapse revealed to Americans a new world of ethnic and national rivalries, daily described as venerable, immemorial, and insoluble. They are far from being so. What we see in the former Soviet Union, and in Eastern Europe, is the horrifying product of a recent invention, the nationalism of the 19th and early 20th century that tied newly constructed ethnicities to territories and made the monopolization of land and coercion the first goal of the nation state. This formulation of the nation, exemplified by current Serbian demands and excesses, is at once historically shallow and antiquated.

The Serbian desire to divide Bosnia into ethnic enclaves is the same logic that dictates segregation and apartheid. The version of democracy the U.S. seems prepared to tolerate in Bosnia, if applied to Los Angeles, would say that there will always be tension between African, Asian, Hispanic and Caucasian Americans and that the only response to rioting is to let them fight it out-until the television images cross the line from expected and acceptable levels of violence to unacceptable savagery. At that point, the population of the metropolis would be shifted and resettled into ethnically homogeneous enclaves with configurations determined by which ethnicity had the most firepower and most intimidating tactics.

For Us, But Not Others?

This is not the democracy we accept for our own society. Should we then accept it for others that see us as a model and look to us to support their own aspirations to build a pluralistic and equitable order that guarantees equal rights and protection to all citizens, regardless of origin and religion?

It is hardly surprising, given the extensive interpenetration of ethnically and religiously diverse populations, that the Bosnian government should have turned to American experts in constitutional law for help in devising the new constitution of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Not only Muslims, but also large numbers of Bosnian Croats and Serbs want to retain their homes and neighbors in a secular, democratic state. This is the dream of the democratically elected government of Bosnia, a new country with a long history of pluralistic tolerance symbolized in its capital, Sarajevo, by the proximity to one another of the main cathedrals, mosque and synagogue.

The division of Bosnia into ethnic enclaves without exacting punishment for Serbian aggression and war crimes would be a relatively easy solution that would stop the immediate carnage by substituting for it the more protracted suffering of expropriation, expulsion and resettlement. It would also send a powerful message to the rest of the world, and especially to its Muslim component.

The message would be that there is no room in the world for new nations that are diverse and democratic, and that outside the industrial democracies, military expansion, brutality and repression are legitimate means to form national states. That message leaves no room for Muslim Slavs, Croats and Serbs who do not wish to live in an archaic, ethnically pure state.

To Muslims, the message is both pointed and sinister. It suggests, in light of recent history, that the aggression of a Muslim Saddam Hussain is unacceptable, while that of a Christian Slobodan Milosevic is tolerable. Most Muslims live in developing countries and see in the United States the embodiment of those political values-broad political participation, democratic institutions and equality before the law-that they seek for their own societies.

Muslims are no more monolithic in their politics than, say, Catholics. American social ideals are as revered as specific U.S. political policies may be deplored. Our inaction, however, says that those widely accepted U.S. ideals are not for Muslims.

U.S. inaction only makes the case of militant fundamentalists who assert that the Western democracies are profoundly anti-Muslim, and that the only viable state is the homogeneous one in which conformity is enforced. This is a notion as repugnant to most Muslims as it is to most Americans.

Cornell H. Fleischer, a MacArthur Fellow, is a professor of Islamic history at Washington University in St. Louis. Edib Korkut, a physician, is on leave from the University Medical Center of Sarajevo.