Three of these are particularly timely. The first concerns what we mean by the usage “ethnic conflict.” Let’s be truthful: “Ethnic conflict” has become a term of dismissal bordering on derision and contempt. In fact, the word “ethnic” itself has had quite a trot through our contemporary vocabulary as the euphemism and/or dodge of choice. For a long while, starting in the ’70s, people said ethnic" because they weren’t sure it was polite to say racial." “Ethnic,” in the shorthand, came also to designate hyphenated, largely Eastern European descended Americans. Internationally it became, as now, a way of describing-with a built-in, understood sigh-just about any tribe or culture anywhere in the world that bad the gall to assert a historical identity. Interestingly, people practically never refer to their own group this way: ethnics are somebody else.
This is, in other words, largely a term of condescension, and nowhere is that more the case than when we speak of “ethnic conflicts.” People in Washington believe those words alone dispose of the argument. To say a dispute (or a war) is an “ethnic conflict” in this city is akin to saving the children are fighting again (exasperated smile) or, as people did in pre-feminist times, that any conflict among women is a “catfight.” The implication is that there cannot possibly be a rational or moral basis for the dispute or any dimension to it that should engage us on one side or the other. It is invariably added as a clincher, whether true or not-our knowledge of history being awfully thin-that these people have been fighting each other for “thousands of years.” That is meant to finish off any residual thought we might have about the fitness of our even being concerned with the damnable business.
I don’t say that we should heedlessly or promiscuously involve ourselves in such conflicts. But I do believe there is a sense in which much of the dramatic, large-scale conflict of our time, some of its most traumatic aggression, could have been dismissed at the outset as being of ethnic origin in this way, a mere next phase in a continuous settling of ancient scores among neighbors-Russians and Germans and Ukrainians and Poles and Lithuanians and Alsatians and French and God knows who all else. And there is also a sense in which the Holocaust was an “ethnic” event, even as much of the conflict in the Middle East or South Africa could be so described now. We need to remember that saving a conflict has ethnic roots or an ethnic dimension does not automatically establish that all of its participants are equally blameworthy or that it cannot be of moral or even security concern to us.
That brings up a second uninspected idea, that of the “national interest.” We are rightly reminded all the time that we must act only when it is our national interest to do so, but all too often the admonition is left hanging at that-no definition or elaboration. Unadorned the phrase has a certain old-fashioned, pre-Internet quality to it, reminiscent of the days when the British Empire was colored pink on the map and everyone knew that national interest had something to do with protecting our access to tungsten and molybdenum, though few knew what they were. Nowadays, there are still paramount considerations of the protection of resources and shipping lanes and the maintenance of our physical and economic well-being, especially against the spread of nuclear and other mass-destruction weapons and so on. But there is also more to it than that, and unfortunately it isn’t often seriously discussed. The touchstone of whether we should get involved is sometimes playfully dismissed by pointing out that we are hardly in danger of military invasion by the Serbs, ha ha ha.
But to the extent that our own well-being depends on the orderliness, stability and at least minimally lawful and decent relationships of peoples around the world-especially those with whom we have important dealings-it seems to me our national interest is much broader than acquiring resources, getting good trade breaks and maintaining our territorial integrity. We have a role to play in creating and preserving such a world and our credibility rests not just on the number of weapons we have or the size of our GDP, but also on our willingness to try to achieve this.
Our politicians are shy as all get-out on this now; they love to talk, but hate to do, and the irony is that this bluster and retreat stuff is far more dangerous than saying nothing in the first place. That takes us to the last premise that needs work: the idea of military involvement. The Vietnamese may be in terrible shape, but they have certainly got their revenge. Merely mention the possible use of our military now any place on earth and you will hear the pessimistic refrain: it will mean 500,000 ground troops, the military will fail, the wily enemy will prevail, the terrain is inhospitable, we will be hated, etc. It is believed all this will be an inevitable outcome.
The limited threat and limited action in Bosnia and the fact that these things did manage to make a difference for the better and at a reasonable cost-at least for now-suggest to me that, like the concept of national interest, the prospective uses of the military could do with some national discussion. The way we think about them now. along with the way we tend to pronounce so much conflict “ethnic” and therefore neither remediable nor fundamentally worth our attention add up not to a new world order, but rather to a new and dangerous fatalism.
