They extracted an "education fee" from those emigrating. This fee was
supposed to, at least partially, recapture the costs of educating and
training the immigrants. Romania and the USSR imposed such levies on
Jews immigrating to Israel in the 1970s. Others despairingly regard the
brain drain as a natural catastrophe. Very few countries are trying to
tackle the fundamental, structural and philosophical flaws of the
system, the roots of the disenchantment of those who leave.
The Brain Drain is so serious that some countries lost up to a third of
their total young and educated population to it (Macedonia in
South-eastern Europe, some less developed countries in South East Asia
and in Africa). Others were drained of almost one half of the growth in
their educated workforce (for instance, Israel during the 1980s).
Brains are an ideal natural resource: they can be cultivated, directed,
controlled, manipulated, regulated. They are renewable and replicable.
Brains tend to grow exponentially through interaction and they have an
unparalleled economic value added. The profit margin in knowledge and
information related industries far exceeds anything common to more
traditional, second wave, industries (not to mention first wave
agriculture and agribusiness).
What is even more important:
Poor countries are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this third
revolution. With cheap, educated workforce - they can monopolize basic
data processing and telecommunications functions worldwide. True, this
calls for massive initial investments in physical infrastructure. But
the important input is the wetware, the brains. To constrain them, to
disappoint them, to make them run away, to more merit-orientated places
- is to sentence oneself to a permanent disadvantage and deprivation.
This is what the countries in the Balkans are doing. Driving away the
best part of their population by encouraging the worst part. Abandoning
their future by dwelling on their past. Caught in a fatal spider web of
family connections and political cronyism of their own design. Their
factories and universities and offices and government filled to the
brim with third-rate relatives of third-rate professors and
bureaucrats. Turning themselves into third-rate countries in a
self-perpetuating, self-feeding process of decline. And all the while
eyeing the new and the foreign with the paranoia that is the result of
true guilt.
(Article written on September 8, 1999 and published September 27, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 14)
Return
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
(Who is Guarding the Guards?)
Izetbegovic, the nominal president of the nominal Bosnian state, the
darling of the gullible western media, denies that he and his cronies
and his cronies' cronies stole 40% of all civilian aid targeted at
Bosnia - a minor matter of 1 billion US dollars and change, in less
than 4 years. The tribes of the Balkans stop bleeding each other to
death only when they gang up to bleed another. In this, there are no
races and no traces - everyone is equal under the sign of the dollar.
Serbs, Bosnians and Croats divided the loot with the loftiest of
egalitarian instincts. Honour among thieves transformed into honour
among victims and their murderers. Mammon is the only real authority in
this god forsaken, writhing rump of a country.
And not only there.
In Russia, billions (3 to 5) were transferred to secret off shore bank
accounts to be "portfolio managed" by mysterious fly-by-night entities.
Many paid with their jobs when the trail led to the incestuous Yeltsin
clan and their Byzantine court.
Convoys snake across the mountainous Kosovo, bringing smuggled goods at
exorbitant prices to the inhabitants of this parched territory - all
under the avuncular gaze of multinational peacekeepers.
In Romania, Hungary and Greece, UN forces have been known to take
bribes to allow goods into besieged Serbia. Oil, weapons and strategic
materials, all slid across this greasy channel of the international
brotherhood of cash.
A lot of the aid, ostensibly intended to ameliorate the state of
refugedom imposed upon the unsuspecting, harried population of Kosovo -
resurfaced in markets, white and black, across the region. Food,
blankets, tents, electrical equipment, even toys - were on offer in
bazaars from Skopje to Podgorica and from Sofia to Thessalonica,
replete with the stamps of the unwitting donors. Aid workers scurried
back and forth in expensive utility vehicles, buzzing mobile phones in
hand and latest model, officially purchased, infrared laptops humming
in the air conditioned coolness of their five star hotel rooms (or
fancy apartments). In their back pockets they safeguarded their first
class tickets (the food is better and the stewardesses...). The
scavengers of every carnage, they descended upon this tortured land in
redundant hordes, feeding off the misery, the autoimmune deficiency of
the syndrome of humanism.
Ask yourselves: how could one of every 3 dollars - 50% of GNP - be
stolen in a country the size of a tiny American state - without the
knowledge and collaboration of the international organizations which
ostensibly manage this bedlam? Why did the IMF renew the credit lines
to a Russia, which cheated bold-facedly regarding its foreign exchange
reserves? How was Serbia awash and flush with oil and other goods
prohibited under the terms of the never-ending series of embargoes
imposed upon it?
The answer is that potent cocktail of fear and graft. First came fear -
that Russia will collapse, that the Balkans will spill over, that
Bosnia will disintegrate. Nuclear nightmares intermingled with Armenian
and Jewish flashbacks of genocide. The west shut its eyes tight and
threw money at the bad spirits of irredentism and re-emergent
communism. The long arm of the USA, the "international" financial
institutions, collaborated in constructing the habit forming dole house
that Eastern and Southern Europe has become. This conflict-reticence,
these approach-avoidance cycles led to an inevitable collusion between
the ruling mob families that pass for regimes in these parts of the
planet - and the unilateral institutions that pass for multilateral
ones in the rest of it. An elaborate system of winks and nods, the sign
language of institutional rot and decaying governance, took over.
Greasy palms clapped one another with the eerie silence of conspiracy.
The world looked away as both - international financial institutions
and corrupt regimes - robbed their constituencies blind. This was
perceived to be the inevitable moral cost of stability. Survival of the
majority entailed the filthy enrichment of the minority. And the west
acquiesced.
But this grand design backfired. Like insidious bacteria, corruption
breeds violence and hops from host to host. It does not discriminate,
this plague of black conscience, between east and west. As it infected
the indigenous, it also affected their guardians. They were all
engulfed by raging greed, by a degradation of the inhibitions and by
the intoxicating promiscuity of lawlessness. Inebriated by their newly
found powers, little Caesars - natives and financial colonialists -
claimed their little plots of crime and avarice, a not so secret order
of disintegration of the social fabric. A ghoulish landscape, shrouded
in the opaque mist of the nomenclature, the camaraderie of the
omnipotent.
And corruption bred violence. The Chicago model imported lock, stock
and the barrel of the gun. Former cronies disappeared mysteriously,
bloated corpses in stale hotel rooms - being the only "contracts"
honoured. Territories were carved up in constant, unrelenting warfare.
One billion dollars are worth a lot of blood and it was spilled with
glee, with the enthusiasm of the inevitable, with the elation of
gambling all on a single spin of the Russian roulette.
It is this very violence that the west tried to drown with its credits.
But unbeknownst to it, this very violence thrived on these pecuniary
fertilizers. A plant of horrors, it devoured its soil and its
cultivators alike. And 120,000 people paid with their lives for this
wrong gamble. Counting its losses, the west is poised to spin the wheel
again. More money is amassed, the dies are cast and more people cast to
die.
(Article written on August 23, 1999 and published September 13, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 12)
Return
Herzl's Butlers
James Cook misled the British government back home by neglecting to
report about the aborigines he spotted on the beaches of New Holland.
This convenient omission allowed him to claim the territory for the
crown. In the subsequent waves of colonization, the aborigines
perished. Modern Australia stands awash in their blood, constructed on
their graves, thriving on their confiscated lands. The belated efforts
to redress these wrongs meet with hostility and the atavistic fears of
the dispossessor.
In "Altneuland" (translated to Hebrew as "Tel Aviv"), the feverish tome
composed by Theodore Herzl, Judaism's improbable visionary - Herzl
refers to the Arabs as pliant and compliant butlers, replete with
gloves and tarbushes. In the book, a German Jewish family prophetically
lands at Jaffa, the only port in erstwhile Palestine. They are welcomed
and escorted by "Briticized" Arab gentlemen's gentlemen who are only
too happy to assist their future masters and colonizers to disembark.
In between these extremes - of annihilation and assimilation - modern
Europe has come up with a plethora of models and solutions to the
question of minorities, which plagued it and still does. Two schools of
thought emerged: the nationalistic-ethnic versus the cultural.
Europe has always been torn between centrifugal and centripetal forces.
Multi-ethnic empires alternated with swarms of mini-states with
dizzying speed. European Unionism clashed with brown-turning-black
nationalism and irredentism. Universalistic philosophies such as
socialism fought racism tooth and nail. European history became a
blood-dripping pendulum, swung by the twin yet conflicting energies of
separation and integration. The present is no different. The dream of
the European Union confronted the nightmare of a dismembered Yugoslavia
throughout the last decade. And ethnic tensions are seething all across
the continent. Hungarians in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and Serbia,
Bulgarians in Moldova, Albanians in Macedonia, Russians in the Baltic
countries, even Padans in Italy and the list is long.
The cultural school of co-existence envisaged multi-ethnic states with
shared philosophies and value systems, which do not infringe upon the
maintenance and preservation of the ethnic identities of their
components. The first socialists adopted this model enthusiastically.
They foresaw a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural socialist mega-state. The
socialist values, they believed, will serve as the glue binding
together the most disparate of ethnic elements. In the event, it took a
lot more than common convictions. It took suppression on an
unprecedented scale and it took concentration camps and the morbid
application of the arts and sciences of death. And even then both the
Nazi Reich and the Stalinist USSR fell to ethnic pieces.
The national(istic) school supports the formation of ethnically
homogenous states, if necessary, by humane and gradual (or inhuman and
abrupt) ethnic cleansing. Homogeneity is empirically linked to
stability and, therefore, to peace, economic prosperity and oftentimes
to democracy. Heterogeneity breeds friction, hatred, violence,
instability, poverty and authoritarianism. The conclusion is simple:
ethnicities cannot co-exist. Ethnic groups (a.k.a. nations) must be
left to their own devices, put differently: they must be allocated a
piece of land and allowed to lead their lives as they see fit. The land
thus allocated should correspond, as closely as possible, with the
birthplace of the nation, the scenery of its past and the cradle of its
culture.
The nationalist school depended on denial and repression of the
existence of heterogeneity and of national minorities. This was done by:
a. Ethnic Cleansing
Greece and Turkey exchanged population after the First World War.
Czechoslovakia expelled the Sudeten Germans after the Second World War
and the Nazis rendered big parts of Europe Judenrein. Bulgarians forced
Turks to flee. The Yugoslav succession wars were not wars in the
Clausewitz sense - rather they were protracted guerrilla operations
intended to ethnically purge swathes of the "motherland".
b. Ethnic Denial
In 1984, the Bulgarian communist regime forced the indigenous Turkish
population to "Bulgarize" their names. The Slav minorities in the
Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were forced to
"Magyarize" following the 1867 Compromise. Franco's Spain repressed
demands for regional autonomy. Other, more democratic states fostered a
sense of national unity by mass media and school indoctrination. Every
facet of life was subjected to and incorporated in this relentless and
unforgiving pursuit of national identity: sports, chess, national
holidays, heroes, humour. The particularisms of each group gained
meaning and legitimacy only through and by their incorporation in the
bigger picture of the nation. Thus, Greece denies to this very day that
there are Turks or Macedonians on its soil. There are only Muslim
Greeks, it insists (often brutally and in violation of human and civil
rights). The separate identities of Brittany and Provence were
submerged within the French collective one and so was the identity of
the Confederate South in the current USA. Some call it "cultural
genocide".
The nationalist experiment failed miserably. It was pulverized by a
million bombs, slaughtered in battlefields and concentration camps, set
ablaze by fanatics and sadists. The pendulum swung. In 1996, Hungarians
were included in the Romanian government and in 1998 they made it to
the Slovakian one. In Macedonia, Albanian parties took part in all the
governments since independence. The cultural school, on the ascendance,
was able to offer three variants:
1. The Local Autonomy
Ethnic minorities are allowed to use their respective languages in
certain municipalities where they constitute more than a given
percentage (usually twenty) of the total population. Official
documents, street signs, traffic tickets and education all are
translated to the minority language as well as to the majority's. This
rather meaningless placebo has a surprisingly tranquillizing effect on
restless youth and nationalistic zealots. In 1997, police fought local
residents in a few Albanian municipalities precisely on this issue.
2. The Territorial Autonomy
Ethnic minorities often constitute a majority in a given region. Some
"host" countries allow them to manage funds, collect taxes and engage
in limited self-governance. This is the regional or territorial
autonomy that Israel offered to the Palestinians (too late) and that
Kosovo and Vojvodina enjoyed under the 1974 Yugoslav constitution
(which Milosevic shredded to very small pieces). This solution was
sometimes adopted by the nationalist competition itself. The Nazis
dreamt up at least two such territorial "final solutions" for the Jews
(one in Madagascar and one in Poland). Stalin gave the Jews a decrepit
wasteland, Birobidjan, to be their "homeland". And, of course, there
were the South African "homelands".
3. The Personal Autonomy
Karl Renner and Otto Bauer advanced the idea of the individual as the
source of political authority - regardless of his or her domicile.
Between the two world wars, Estonia gave personal autonomy to its Jews
and Russians. Wherever they were, they were entitled to vote and elect
representatives to bodies of self-government. These had symbolic
taxation powers but exerted more tangible authority over matters
educational and cultural. This idea, however benign sounding,
encountered grave opposition from right and left alike. The right wing
"exclusive" nationalists rejected it because they regarded minorities
the way a sick person regards his germs. And the left wing,
"inclusive", nationalists saw in it the seeds of discrimination, an
anathema.
How and why did we find ourselves embroiled in such a mess?
It is all the result of the wrong terminology, an example of the power
of words. The Jews (and Germans) came up with the "objective",
"genetic", "racial" and "organic" nation. Membership was determined by
external factors over which the member-individual had no control. The
French "civil" model - an 18th century innovation - regarded the nation
and the state as voluntary collectives, bound by codes and values,
which are subject to social contracts. Benedict Anderson called the
latter "imagined communities".
Naturally, it was a Frenchman (Ernest Renan) who wrote:
"Nations are not eternal. They had a beginning and they will have an
end. And they will probably be replaced by a European confederation."
He was referring to the fact that nation STATES were nothing but (at
the time) a century old invention of dubious philosophical pedigree.
The modern state was indeed invented by intellectuals (historians and
philologists) and then solidified by ethnic cleansing and the horrors
of warfare. Jacob Grimm virtually created the chimeral Serbo-Croat
"language". Claude Fauriel dreamt up the reincarnation of ancient
Greece in its eponymous successor. The French sociologist and
anthropologist Marcel Mauss remarked angrily that "it is almost comical
to see little-known, poorly investigated items of folklore invoked at
the Peace Conference as proof that the territory of this or that nation
should extend over a particular area because a certain shape of
dwelling or bizarre custom is still in evidence". Archaeology,
anthropology, philology, history and a host of other sciences and arts
were invoked in an effort to substantiate a land claim. And no land
claim was subjected to a statute of limitations, no subsequent conquest
or invasion or settlement legitimised. Witness the "Dacian wars"
between Hungary and Romania over Transylvania (are the Romanians latter
day Dacians or did they invade Transylvania long after it was populated
by the Hungarians?). Witness the Israelis and the Palestinians. And,
needless to add, witness the Serbs and the Albanians, the Greeks and
the Macedonians and the Macedonians and the Bulgarians.
Thus, the modern nation-state was a reflection of something more
primordial, of human nature itself as it resonated in the national
founding myths (most of them fictitious or contrived). The
supra-national dream is to many a nightmare. Europe is fragmenting into
micro-nations while unifying its economies. These two trends are not
mutually exclusive as is widely and erroneously believed. Actually,
they are mutually reinforcing. As the modern state loses its major
economic roles and functions to a larger, supranational framework - it
loses its legitimacy and its raison d'etre.
The one enduring achievement of the state was the replacement of
allegiance to a monarch, to a social class, to a region, or to a
religion by an allegiance to a "nation". This subversive idea comes
back to haunt itself. It is this allegiance to the nation that is the
undoing of the tolerant, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, abstract modern
state. To be a nationalist is to belong to ever smaller and more
homogenous groups and to dismantle the bigger, all-inclusive polity,
which is the modern state.
Indeed, the state is losing in the battlefield of ideas to the other
two options: micro-nationalism (homogeneous and geographically
confined) and reactionary affiliation. Micro-nationalism gave birth to
Palestine and to Kosovo, to the Basque land and to Quebec, to
regionalism and to local patriotism. It is a fragmenting force. Modern
technology makes many political units economically viable despite their
minuscule size - and so they declare their autonomy and often aspire to
independence.
Reactionary Affiliation is cosmopolitan. Think about the businessman,
the scholar, the scientist, the pop star, the movie star, the
entrepreneur, the arbitrageur and the Internet. People feel affiliated
to a profession, a social class, a region, or a religion more than they
do to their state. Hence the phenomena of ex-pats, mass immigration,
international managers. This is a throwback to an earlier age when the
modern state was not yet invented. Indeed, the predicament of the
nation-state is such that going back may be the only benign way of
going forward.
(Article written on September 5, 1999 and published September 20, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 13)
Return
The Phlegm and the Anima
An Impressionistic Canvass
The Calamity
It often rains in Skopje nowadays. Sudden, thunderous outpourings of
acidulous and gluey fluid. People say it is the pollution from 12,000
tonnes of bombs dropped 20 km from here. The unions warn of a hot
autumn. The omens are ominous. It looks like an economic crash rather
than a soft landing. Tony Blair was here a while ago. He photo
opportunities with photogenic refugees and promised the soft spoken and
dreamy eyed Prime Minister of Macedonia 20 million British Pounds. The
money never came. Blair's promise went the way of thousands of other
promises made by the good and the mighty throughout the history of this
melancholy part of the globe.
Emir Kusturice compared the Balkans to an island, drifting listlessly,
receding wedding music in the background. It is heart rending and often
provokes in me a tsunamic pity, an earthquake of goodwill. The locals
are adept at using this resonance, at taking advantage of foreigners
vulnerable to their music, to their costumes, to their rustic
shrewdness.
In 1963, upon the occasion of a particularly malicious earthquake,
which levelled Skopje - they rebuilt it from generous foreign
donations. The message sank in: foreigners love disasters, natural and
manmade. Foreigners are willing to shell hard currency for this
indulgence. The harder the catastrophe - the harder the currency. Thus,
calamities became an export industry, a major earner of foreign
exchange, the opportunity of a lifetime for a few in exchange for the
misery of the many.
The Aftermath
Music drifts in with the fragrances of decaying blossoms and with
corpulent mosquitoes. The fragmented echoes of animated discussions.
People here talk with their whole bodies. They lean forward and touch
their conversants. When they meet or depart they kiss each other on the
cheeks and hug passionately. It was, therefore strange to see the body
language of the octogenarian president of Macedonia with his much
younger Albanian counterpart. They stood apart and made diametrically
opposed declarations about the future of Kosovo. Watching the old
communist apparatchik Gligorov, I was reminded or Milosevic when he
announced the Serb victory in operation Allied Force. He stood so
rigid, as though about to break and leaned towards the camera, creating
an eerie fish lens effect. Balkanians are not proud people, they are
adaptable. But, in an effort to compensate for a deep-set inferiority
complex, they react with vanity and narcissism. Co-existence here has
never been an easy proposition and the Americans forced strange
bedfellows upon each other. Accustomed to the imposing ways of
superpowers, the Balkan bowed its head. But it is a contemptuous
gesture. Balkanians aim to win through their surrender. They always
harbour hidden agendas. Knowing this, they are also paranoid but, as
distinct from the classic pathology, they do have enemies. The Balkan
will wait until America joins Rome and Turkey. The only commodity it
has aplenty is time. So now Gligorov and Mejdani shake hands but they
both know the long knives are drawn. They both will wait for the
intruders to depart, which will them go on with that traditional
pastime of Balkan rulers: slaughtering each other.
The War Chests