America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

The civil war in Yugoslavia is more than just a tragedy for the people of one country. It is also the first test of whether the custodians of European security are up to the task of redefining their interests and obligations now that the old communist enemy is history. So far, they've flunked.

Two years ago, when the Iron Curtain was coming down, almost everyone in the West was celebrating -- except Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. In a speech at Georgetown University, he found the cloud in the silver lining. "For all its risks and uncertainties," he said, "the cold war was characterized by a remarkably stable and predictable set of relationships among the great powers." He foresaw the "danger that the change in the East will prove too destabilizing to be sustained." He was thinking particularly about Yugoslavia, where he began his diplomatic career. He knew what ancient demons lurked in the Balkans, waiting, along with decent folk, to be liberated from communism.

Since World War II, the very idea of a federal state uniting the South Slavs -- Serbs, Croatians, Slovenes and the rest -- has depended on an ideology that claimed to be more powerful than nationalism and on a common fear of the U.S.S.R. Now the Yugoslavs are free to fight among themselves, avenging old wrongs and seeking independence from -- or domination over -- one another. With Marx and even Tito in disrepute, the strongmen in Belgrade are exposed for what most of them have always been: Serbian imperialists, bent on maintaining control not only over their republic but over the others as well -- especially Croatia, where there is a large Serbian population.

Meanwhile, one well-intentioned emissary after another has tried to mediate. Twelve cease-fires have come and gone. At the end of last week, there was an attempt at No. 13. Governments across Europe have condemned Belgrade for trying to carve Greater Serbia out of the flanks of neighboring republics, and for systematically destroying the civilian centers and cultural monuments of other nationalities. The European Community has announced economic sanctions against Yugoslavia, aimed primarily at Serbia.

However, even as he reluctantly endorsed these measures, President Bush expressed doubt that they would work. Peaceful means, Eagleburger noted, rarely work against people "intent on killing each other." There is nothing the outside world can do to stop the carnage in Yugoslavia, he continued, unless it is prepared to intervene militarily, not with a peacekeeping force of the kind in which the United Nations specializes but with a peacemaking one.

Eagleburger was not advocating that course, but it is still worth thinking about. The E.C. could take the initiative, seeking the blessing of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which would bring in the new democracies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The CSCE charter can be interpreted as forbidding the kind of territorial expansionism that Serbia is now pursuing. Then the E.C. could use the manpower and firepower available through NATO for a difficult three-stage mission: 1) drive the Yugoslav/Serbian army, the Croatian national guard and the various other militias back into their barracks; 2) impose a truce that would lead to negotiations; and 3) back up international supervision of a settlement that guarantees the safety of minorities wherever they live: Serbs in Croatia, Croatians in Serbia, etc.

Bush has dismissed any thought of such action as premature. As Eagleburger has acknowledged, there is no stomach for it in Europe, much less in the U.S. -- and for good reason: it would be a risky and thankless task for any outsiders, no matter how numerous and well armed, to interpose themselves in Yugoslavia's tribal feuds and partisan warfare. But before dismissing intervention altogether, Western leaders should remember how they dealt earlier this year with the first great threat to the new world order. Global outrage, combined with diplomatic and economic sanctions, did not dislodge Saddam Hussein from that corner of Greater Iraq better known as Kuwait. It took a massive multilateral expeditionary force.

True, Saddam violated an international border, while Yugoslavia's misery is supposedly "internal." Well, just wait. Like all tragedies, this one has an air of inevitability, and the next act is all too easy to imagine: Serbian troops or vigilantes massacre Hungarian-speaking villagers in the Yugoslav province of Vojvodina, north of Belgrade, provoking Hungary to come to the rescue of its ethnic kinsmen. A senior leader in Budapest has privately warned the Bush Administration that his government is preparing for just that contingency; the Hungarian army is moving south. Something similar could happen on Yugoslavia's border with Romania, Bulgaria or Albania. Violence and refugees could spread throughout the region.

Meanwhile, European and American officials are dithering over the future of the Atlantic defense partnership and the preservation of peace on the Continent. They tend to treat Yugoslavia as an embarrassing distraction rather than the No. 1 challenge. They are fiddling with doctrine while Dubrovnik burns. If the Western alliance can't cope with the crisis in Yugoslavia, it doesn't deserve to survive the end of the cold war.