My bolshie side?!? OK, you asked for it:
...The social system of imperialism is the same today. Then as now, stern reality discredits the silly little fable of "non-governmental imperialism." The task is not to determine whether or not world war is possible, but to analyze the danger.
The Balkan wars of the 1990s are especially instructive. The imperialists may slaughter millions in Africa or Asia and not quarrel among themselves, but when they do the same thing in Europe it means that they are on a collision course. Indeed, the main thing in the Balkan wars is not the rivalries of the local factions, but the instigation and meddling of two big powers, the United States and Germany, in a fight for hegemony.
Germany and the United States: Instigators of the Yugoslav Wars
For more than forty years Yugoslavia had been a U.S. ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. The cover of Marshall Tito's false "socialism" was a useful prop. When the Soviet revisionists collapsed in 1991, Yugoslavia's sovereignty was no longer of any value to imperialism.
The Bush administration favored the continuation of a weakened Yugoslav federation. As a distant power, Washington probably felt the need for such a "convenience". Things were different in Bonn, then the German capital. The German imperialists wanted to break Yugoslavia into a number of small states that could more easily be manipulated. This has been the German attitude toward the Balkans for a century.
In 1988 the German imperialists stepped up their intrigues for the secession of Slovenia and Croatia. These are the two northernmost and most developed states of the former Yugoslavia, which historically have had the closest ties to Germany. The German imperialists offered financial, military, and political support for secession. Croatia and Slovenia declared independence in 1991. It was seen as little more than a paper declaration until Germany, against the wishes of the United States and the rest of the European Community, gave diplomatic recognition to the two. Belgrade took military action against the secessionists, more or less as Lincoln had in 1861, but was forced to stand down when Washington opposed it. (See Ludo Martens, "Great Germany Sets Fire to Yugoslavia")
The secession of Bosnia followed in 1992. Given its complex ethnic makeup, a partition of authority among Muslims, Croats, and Serbs was worked out in Lisbon in February of 1992 under the auspices of the European Community. Aliya Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader, wanted a unified state because his community was the largest. He expected to dominate an independent Bosnia. Also, at the time U.S. imperialism needed a client in the Balkans to offset the German success with Croatia and Slovenia. According to The New York Times,
. . .the Bush administration was pushing the Europeans to recognize Bosnia as a separate country, with a Muslim-led government in Sarajevo. . . On Feb. 23, 1992, in Lisbon, the three Bosnian leaders --Mr. Izetbegovic, Radovan Karadzic for the Bosnian Serbs and Mate Boban for the Bosnian Croats-- endorsed a proposal that the republic be a confederation divided into three ethnic regions. Mr. Izetbegovic's acceptance of partition, which would have denied him and his Muslim party a dominant role in the republic, shocked not only his supporters at home, but also United States policymakers. . .
Immediately after Mr. Izetbegovic returned from Lisbon, [U.S. Ambassador Warren] Zimmerman called on him in Sarajevo. The Bosnian leader complained bitterly that the European Community and Bosnian Serbs and Croats had pressured him to accept partition.
"He said he didn't like it," Mr. Zimmerman recalled. "I told him, if he didn't like it, why sign it?" . . . after talking to the Ambassador, Mr. Izetbegovic publicly renounced the Lisbon agreement.
Three years of war followed in which the United States secretly armed and funded the Muslim faction. The U.S. ran Soviet arms captured in Afghanistan through Turkey to the Izetbegovic forces. Clinton continued the Bush policy of sabotage of every European peace effort until finally he was able to broker a deal in Dayton, Ohio in 1992 --a partition agreement very similar to that agreed in Lisbon. A quarter of a million lives were needed for U.S. imperialism to count to its "profit" the recapture from Germany of the initiative in the Balkans.
The U.S. "success" was not one-sided, however. As part of the Dayton agreement, Germany stationed troops in Bosnia as part of a United Nations "peacekeeping" force. This was the first time since World War II that German troops had been stationed outside Germany, other than illegal covert operations. It was a further highly important step in the breakout of German imperialism.
In response to Dayton the German BND, the equivalent to the U.S. CIA, in 1996 began to arm and train the so-called "Kosovo Liberation Army", looking to unsettle the central Balkans area in which the U.S. had gotten its grip. In a pattern familiar from the U.S.-organized Contras in Nicaragua, the "KLA" has also been extensively funded with money from ethnic Albanian druglords operating in northern Europe. (See "Kosovo Liberation Army": Tool of Imperialism and Drug Money; see also, "Kosovo: How Germany Backed the KLA", by Roger Faligot, The European, 1 October, 1998.)
The NATO aggression has been Washington's initiative all along. The aggressors themselves proclaim that it is aimed against the sovereignty of Yugoslavia, the only state between West Europe and Russia with any claim to independence. The U.S. and German imperialists share this motive. Their contention shows up in the seizure by U.S. imperialism of the territory on which the "KLA", a German client, was operating. At this time it is still not clear whether or not the "KLA" will agree to disarm. In any
case, the German imperialists have already responded by announcing their determination to set up a European military force. It is only a matter of time until they make some further move in Yugoslavia.
Imperialist Aims in Yugoslavia
The question arises as to why the imperialists are fighting each other for the domination of Yugoslavia. Their reasons are the same ones that they had in both world wars. It is primarily a matter of geography.
Yugoslavia lies between the highly developed imperialist states of northwest Europe and the much less developed regions of eastern Europe and western Asia. The Carpathian Mountains lie to the north of Yugoslavia. The southern region of the Balkans is likewise mountainous. The Danube River flows from northern Europe through Yugoslavia to the Black Sea, however. To get from northern Europe to the east on a water level route, one must have passage through Yugoslavia.
All of the imperialist countries want access to the east to get superprofits from its natural resources, cheap labor, and markets. There are, for instance, huge oil reserves around the northern region of the Caspian Sea in Russia. Germany wants control of the reserves because its domestic energy sources are insufficient; Washington wants control so it can keep a whip hand over Germany. This is only one aspect of the inter-imperialist struggle over the recolonization of the whole Eurasian landmass. Hence there is a desperate struggle in which control of Yugoslavia plays a part.
Michel Collon of the Workers Party of Belgium takes up these questions at more length in his article, Yugoslavia, a New War for Loot. He raises the hypothesis that the main tactical aim of the attack on Yugoslavia is to prepare for an attack on Russia. This is a very important hypothesis that should be borne in mind as events continue to unfold. On no account does it imply any lessening of tensions between U.S. and German imperialism, however, or imply that they can resolve their differences through an attack on Russia. The aim of inter-imperialist war is not to decide whether or not to plunder the dependent countries, but to redivide the world according to strength. It was for this reason that Hitler attacked his imperialist rivals to his west before he attacked the Soviet Union.
Of course there is a world of difference between the revolutionary Soviet Union of World War II and the prostrate bourgeois Russia of today. What remains is the violent nature of imperialism, the unevenness of the division of the spoils in relation to strength, and the consequent rivalries that result in world war.
The French Connection
Another aspect of the growing inter-imperialist rivalries is that the Anglo-French-American alliance of the first two world wars has come apart. Every indication is that France will side with Germany in any confrontation with the United States. France has been relatively independent of the U.S. in the postwar imperialist order. It has consistently complained about U.S. hegemony over Europe. In December of 1996 France put forth a proposal, with the backing of Germany, that the NATO Southern Command, including the huge U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet, be put under a European officer. Washington angrily rejected the proposal. France and Germany have become ever more tightly linked economically through the Euro Zone. Now they have agreed to participate in a European military alliance.
Something in the nature of a United States of Europe seems to be emerging. Lenin analyzed the implications in words that have lost none of their applicability:
A United States of Europe under capitalism is tantamount to an agreement on the partition of colonies. Under capitalism, however, no other basis and no other principle of division are possible except force. . . There is and there can be no other way of testing the strength of a capitalist state than by war. (On the Slogan for a United States of Europe)
Germany and France have been separate countries for thousands of years, with distinct cultures and languages. They were antagonists in two world wars. That they should form some sort of merged state is most unlikely. Nonetheless a Franco-German alliance would be a most formidable opponent for U.S. imperialism. The two countries have a combined landmass of about three hundred thousand square miles (about eight hundred thousand square kilometers), a heavily settled and highly developed region bigger than Texas. Their combined population is about one hundred and fifty million, their annual gross national product (GNP) about $3.7 trillion. They get nothing like their "fair share" of the swag from the existing imperialist order. The rest of continental Europe would be forced to go along with anything such an alliance would decide. Even Britain would be unlikely to take the side of Washington against such forces.
The current tone of the U.S. media is to pooh-pooh the possibilities of a European military alliance. The history of imperialism suggests otherwise.
The People of the World Are Stronger than Imperialism
Each time the imperialists launched a world war, the people returned the favor with revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution crowned the First World War. The people's democracies of eastern Europe and the People's Republic of China came out of the Second. World war will only definitely and finally disappear when the people of the world completely overthrow and destroy imperialism. This will surely happen. Revolution shows that the people have been stronger than imperialism from the start. They will remain stronger as long as imperialism exists.
The people of the world must delay the war preparations of the imperialists and prevent a third world war if at all possible. In any case the imperialists have the greatest fear of the masses. Despite its powerful weapons, imperialism is weak because the people of the world oppose it. Clinton had the greatest hesitations about a land invasion of Yugoslavia. He only got his way because his stooge, Yeltsin, sold out the people of Yugoslavia and the world.
Nowhere in the world do the people of any country have any interest in siding with imperialism. U.S. imperialism is neither better nor worse than German, French, Japanese, or British imperialism-just bigger.
The opportunist "theory" of "non-governmental imperialism" claims that imperialism is stronger than the people, that the United States is a country with almost no sovereignty, and that the first revolutionary duty of the U.S. proletariat is to defend the United States against imperialism!!! Nothing could be further from the truth. The principal contradiction in the United States is the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie. No compromise with some imaginary "national bourgeoisie" is possible.
The people's forces in the United States are greatly limited by the lack of any genuine, proletarian-revolutionary Communist Party. The intensification of the war danger lends urgency to the need to construct such a party. This entails tasks of theoretical preparation, newspaper, cultural and media work, organizational work on different levels, etc. One thing that readers of Unlimited News Service can do is to download the Marxist classics on this site with their associated study questions and set up study groups.
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From:
uns.org |
