The Primacy of Stability

The Soviet Union long sought to remove the American presence in
Europe, and to instigate instead a pan-European political and
military organization. The CSCE, which arose out of a proposal made
by Ceausescu to de Gaulle on Brezhnev's behalf in 1968, comes closest
to what Russia wants. This is because the CSCE--which in January
became the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe--is
not a military alliance like NATO. Instead, as the chairman of the
recent Budapest conference of the CSCE made clear, "The CSCE is a
unique organization, because it deals not only with relations between
states but also within states, with the relationship between the
state and the citizen." In other words, the CSCE blurs the very
distinction between friend and enemy by obscuring that between
internal and external affairs.

This is because the so-called "Moscow Document" signed in 1991,
introduced a series of commitments governing the relationship between
states and their citizens, including such things as the rights of
women, migrant workers and disabled persons, as well as more general
commitments to democracy and the rule of law. It also included an
important provision relating to the rights of minorities by making
reference to a report on national minorities which thereby achieves
normative status within the CSCE. That report declares that, "Issues
concerning national minorities...are matters of legitimate
international concern and consequently do not constitute exclusively
an internal affair of the respective State." States which are deemed
to have minorities problems might be required by the CSCE to do
anything from providing education in minority languages to
establishing local autonomy.

First, this interest in minorities is germane to Russia. The collapse
of the Soviet Union has been followed by the creation, not only of
the Commonwealth of Independent States and a forum for economic
"cooperation" between its "member states," but also by the rallying
to the CIS of initially recalcitrant states like Moldova, on the
pretext that the Russian minorities there need protecting. Similar
influence has been exerted over the Baltic states, especially
Estonia. Americans who are preoccupied with the rising problem of
"group rights," which seems to be undermining their own constitution,
will recognize the de jure classification of individuals into ethnic
groups as an instrument of state control and social management,
because groups are more easy to control and to speak for than
individuals.

Second, it is a consequence of the CSCE's unique combination of
internal and external competencies that, whatever the outcome of the
legal debate on the precise status of the Helsinki Final Act and the
associated documents, the CSCE in total is "the source of an
overarching European constitutional order which sets the standards to
which all national legal and political institutions in Europe must
conform."

Therefore, far from being a defense alliance like NATO, which is
directed against a potential outside aggressor and intended to
preserve the internal integrity and peace of the signatory states,
the CSCE's pretense that it can pacify the whole gamut of political
antagonism from workers' rights to national minority
questions--itself a mistaken aim, as anyone who has digested the
above argument about the nature of politics will see--risks making it
more like a transcontinental military police force. The use of CSCE
"peacekeeping forces" is one way in which it proposes to do this, and
a precedent was set in December when such a force was dispatched to
Azerbaijan. A moment's thought should suffice to realize the enormity
of this: imagine NATO troops being called in to impose a military
solution to a disturbance--or even to preempt a potential one--within
a NATO member state. Indeed, such principles, which attribute the
highest value to stability, might even legitimate the use of a
national army against its own citizens, as in Chechnya.

In case any of these fears seem exaggerated, it should not be
forgotten that three of the key architects of the Maastricht Treaty
on European Union, François Mitterrand, Jacques Delors and John
Major, have all made extraordinary remarks about the primacy of
stability over democracy. The two Frenchmen initially welcomed the
Moscow putsch in 1991, Delors saying that it could have "positive
aspects." Indeed, he even declared to the European parliament just
after it occurred that, "We cannot unite the states of Western Europe
and at the same time encourage the breakaway of Soviet Republics," by
which he presumably meant that the European Union and the Soviet
Union were similar institutions. The pro-Serb policy of London and
Paris is similarly predicated on a preference for large political
entities over the bothersome multiplicity of small nations. No
politician has given clearer expression to this than John Major, who
declared in 1993 that, "The biggest single element behind what has
happened in Bosnia is the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the
discipline that that exerted over the ancient hatreds in the old
Yugoslavia"--a grotesque contortion of the truth, not only because
Yugoslavia ceased to be under Soviet "discipline" in 1948, but also
because communist leaders like Slobodan Milosevic, Thodor Zhivkov,
and Nicolae Ceausescu, to name but the worst and not to mention their
contemporary epigones, were themselves rabid nationalists, whose
regimes--by virtue of their very collapse!--were not stable.

It is in exactly the same vein that the Russian foreign minister,
Andrei Kozyrev, has already said--and many have echoed his
thought--that the main threat to security in Europe is from
"nationalist extremists." He has realized, by observing his Western
counterparts, that if a politician can claim that "populism" is
likely to erupt at any minute, then he can justify almost endless
amounts of governmental control over society. Kozyrev's idea is that
the CSCE will quell any such threat. But, as we have seen above,
peace denotes an equilibrium of forces between parties. A legal order
cannot be maintained without authority, that is, without the
meta-legal force accorded to it by citizens or states. An
organization which pretends that such force does not exist is perhaps
merely trying to camouflage the inevitable fact that it does. In any
case, one man's nationalist extremist is another man's freedom
fighter, as the violent overthrows of democratically elected
Presidents Gamsakhurdia in Georgia and Elchibey in Azerbaijan have
shown.

To protest against all this is not to claim that sovereign states
have the right to abuse individuals or groups within their borders.
Rather, it is to insist, against the current drift towards the
internationalization of government, that international law or policy
is not necessarily any wiser than that made by national governments.
Very often it is far more stupid, as the debacle over Yugoslavia
shows. Indeed, the CSCE's conference in Budapest in December failed
even to mention the Yugoslav war in its communique, an illustration
of how surreal international bureaucratic government quickly becomes.
Nor is international policy any less political. Moreover, at least
national politics might be democratic, and controllable by a national
parliament, while international politics, by definition, never is. It
is the task of all states to maintain peace within their borders by
policing their citizens, and to defend that internal peace from
external aggression. The CSCE's confusion of these two roles means
that it wants to assume state-like power, but without explaining in
whose name it acts.

The CSCE is also the focal point of a series of bilateral treaties
signed between the Western powers and Russia, many of which require
that the relationship between the signatory states be governed by the
commitments laid out in the CSCE documents. This is a curious manner
of submitting free foreign policy decision-making to the say-so of an
international committee. But it explains why Kozyrev has called the
CSCE and the lattice-work of treaties a "net" in which the states of
Europe are to be "entangled," arguing that it is only through such an
entanglement that stability can be achieved. In other words, foreign
policy, which for many philosophers is a paradigm at the
international level of the kind of free political action that existed
in the Greek polis, where democracy was founded, is to disappear as a
forum for free action and instead be smothered under a bureaucratic
and pseudo-legal "mechanism."

Like other utopias, this one spells the end of politics and law, for
it assumes that foreign policy can disappear. It is absurd to think
that either domestic or foreign politics can be managed by a
committee, and that disputes can be resolved by
international-bureaucratic mechanisms. Such absurdities are in
reality little but the institutionalization of political cowardice,
for they all derive from a desire to shield politicians from ever
having to take a decision for whose unwelcome consequences they might
be held responsible. Courage, as Churchill said, is the greatest of
all political virtues because it presupposes all the rest. Political
existence requires a constant, courageous struggle. If a people loses
the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, this does not
mean that politics disappears from the world. It merely means that a
weak people disappears from the world, and that its constitution is
subsumed into someone else's.

Essay Types: Essay