Not since the 1930s have the official statements of Western leaders been so at variance with the obvious, unmistakable realities of a disintegrating continent.
The pictures out of Brussels impress, but only the way ceremonies do, not realities. Once again the hollow men gather around a green-baize conference table and issue solemn utterances (“Partnership for Peace”) with the practiced air of profundity that marks the most superficial of political performances.
Brussels is not the only newsmaker. The other half of the split screen shows the usual carnage in Sarajevo and other points East. Irony has become so integral a part of European history that it scarcely seems worth noting. But at Brussels the irony is so exquisite that some examples deserve attention for their sheer aesthetic value:
Speaking of a Western alliance whose indifference-not to say indecision and ineffectiveness-has been made unmistakably clear month after futile month, year after another lost year, the president of the United States solemnly warns:
“We must not let the Iron Curtain be replaced with a veil of indifference.”
If that figure of speech does not quite rank with “Peace in Our Time” on the irony scale, it is not far behind. Yet no one around the table at Brussels laughs a bitter laugh, or smiles a cynical smile. Protocol is still protocol.
In Sarajevo, the killing goes on, as if in tandem with the ceremonies in Brussels. Point, counterpoint.
C.S. Lewis said it in 1941: “The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid `dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
There is a simple rule for performances like those in Brussels: Whatever happens, the new world disorder must be politely ignored. When there is no choice but to admit the growing disintegration of Europe, it must be minimized. The positive must be emphasized and, if necessary, invented. New shibboleths must be parroted (“Partnership for Peace”). And when doubts prove unanswerable, the subject can be changed.
Who better for the leading role in such a performance than the new president of a new, uncertain America? If the West has no troops to deploy, his excuses stand fully mobilized, well practiced, arranged in serried ranks, subject to his command, and ready for instant deployment. Asked why the NATO alliance has not acted against aggression in the Balkans, the president explains: “That was never the purpose of NATO. The purpose of NATO was to guarantee peace and security in the countries that belong to NATO.”
And no one else? Not little countries like Bosnia? Not lesser breeds without the law?
Then why, when Kuwait was overrun, did these same Western nations draw together and, uniting with other allies and tacit allies, drive Saddam Hussein’s legions back into the desert?
The North Atlantic has turned out to be an expansive region; both Greece and Turkey are now members of the North Atlantic alliance. But not before now had one thought of Kuwait as a NATO country. Yet the West rallied to its defense-and liberation.
“I have come here today,” the president told a cheering audience in Brussels, “to declare and to demonstrate that Europe remains central to the interests of the United States. You remain our most valued partner. . . . The core of our own security remains in Europe.”
Even as the core of Europe disintegrates.
“We cannot control every event in every country every day,” the president complains, like someone who really can’t be bothered. The vivisection of Yugoslavia commenced 21 months ago. How many days is that? How many have been killed, maimed, displaced? The death count is loosely estimated at 200,000. The refugees have reached a million and counting. The chaos ebbs and flows. And the leader-by-default of the free world says: “We cannot control every event in every country every day.”
He makes it sound like a traffic accident.
The familiar faces of leaders nod for the television cameras and solemnly agree that, yes, the world should have intervened earlier, a year or two ago, when something might have been accomplished in the abatoir Yugoslavia has become. The implication: It is too late now.
Perhaps a year from now they will all meet again under some other ornate chandelier and solemnly agree that, yes, the world should have acted last year, when the fighting might have been contained.
What was lacking at Brussels? There are various nominations:
Churchill, commenting on another international gathering, the one at Munich in 1938, spoke of a quality the Western democracies had to regain if they were to triumph. He called it “moral health and martial vigour.”
Vico, the neapolitan seer of the 18th Century, spoke of “the heroic mind.”
A contemporary observer, Vanni Cappelli, says: “Europe’s tragedy in the 20th Century resulted from a failure to recognize that any abdication of the will in the face of evil not only invites the triumph of darkness, but also an identification of the abdicator with it, for light exists only insofar as it confronts darkness.”
In one of his periodic bursts of irritation and insight, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, senator and seer from New York, summed up what American (non) policy in the Balkans is accomplishing-“we are legitimating genocide.”
Does that sound too harsh? A year ago, this country placed the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, on a list of suspected war criminals; now we’re negotiating with him.
