[Translation of article by Peter Decker in Konkret, August 1999]
If critics declare that the reason and goal for the path to war is an economic advantage, then they deny the war's morality and reject the war’s higher motivations. Their objection is that the war is for money and the economic interests of those in charge of killing and death: "no blood for oil!" As criticism of a war, they publicly name its private beneficiaries. The armaments industry, which earns money from government orders, is for them its clients’ client. Whenever the weapons of the west strike, they always discover undiscovered sources of oil, rare raw materials, indispensable trade routes or ideal pipelines routes. The more difficult such an expose -- and in the case of the poorhouse in the Balkans it is very difficult -- the bolder the construction. But this harms nothing: the persuasiveness of their criticism depends not on proof, but on the beauty of their moral message. They proclaim the war’s dishonor: The government declares that it fights for the highest human principles and the values of the community, but it sends the young into the line of fire only for the wealth of the rich. This criticism does not deal with the criteria for a responsible national war, but uses it with a critical intention against the war. It recites the economic advantages the war pursues, and thereby can only disgrace it, because war is a fundamental mission of self-assertion by the nation in which petty profit and loss accounts have no place.
If the critics themselves already allude critically to the fact that war actually involves a higher form of state competition in which the question of money does not play a role, then they should stick to it in their explanation of the war goals. If they want to reject the lie of the unselfish humanitarian use of weapons and denounce their state’s interest in the subjection of another state, then it will not do to point to a (not at all existing) enrichment through war. The materialism of the warring state has yet to be clarified.
The question about a special economic reason and goal for this war is incorrect; there is probably no such reason, although there is actually an economic reason for the imperialism of capitalistic states. They have prepared an economy that constantly expands and must expand. The political power opens the use of markets, raw materials and workers for its capitalists beyond its own national borders. Of course, the government makes sure that their service to the growth needs of exporting or importing capitalists benefits itself and the national wealth as a whole: Transnational business must promote domestic growth, and its balances must not undermine national solvency in relation to the foreign country. Both are not a matter of course. Because only one of the two governments involved can always have a positive balance of trade, payments and capital. When capitalists chase profits over their borders -- buying, selling and investing – they make at the same time decisions about the one-sided enrichment or impoverishment of states. These do not bend easily to the judgment of the markets; they demand their enrichment from international trade at the expense of other nations and do not allow themselves to lose economic power from the results of the international competition of the capitalists.
Therefore, a state determines permissions and prohibitions, tariffs and investment conditions on external business so that it is protected from one-sided national success. With its political specifications a state meets the foreign state power -- today everywhere capitalist – which approves or forbids for their part all economic activity in its sphere of influence, calculating according to whether its economic power is thereby promoted or damaged. In the intergovernmental agreements about what the partners mutually approve for their businessmen, a conflict is negotiated -- between the highest subjects. If it searches for its advantage, the political sovereign does not have to hold itself like its subjected private individuals under higher laws; it makes its own laws and subordinates itself to nothing higher than its own egoism. The decision between antagonistic national legal claims is a question of force -- by no means only if states seize their weapons. Peaceful diplomatic interchange is only mutual extortion: Each partner makes clear to the other that it cannot afford to reject its demands; everyone threatens consequences for their entire mutual relations in the event of such a rejection and if need be openly reminds the dear partner of the military power that it has, thus which rights and privileges it has to respect. Peace between capitalist nations prevails if, and as long as, they recognize each other as the powers they are. Deterioration of relations up to the level of war lines up if one partner comes to the conclusion that the other one is not ready to recognize the extortionate power and legal claims which it attributes to itself from its position in the rank of powers -- when the violence, which is a state, must be proven again.
National economic interests are the stuff of intergovernmental quarrels; its argument and decisive means is violence. Because all determination of all questions depends on it, the fight for the rank of highest power becomes an independent, actual competition of the nations. They always work to change the balance of power on the globe and struggle in principle for respect for their status: Which state may do what? Which can make different rules? Which can issue dictates? Hostilities are roused by refusals of respect, ambitions for armaments on the opposite side or one’s own arrogation of status advancement. A reinterpretation of the power competition of states into an economic contention is impossible -- in addition, unnecessary, because the materialism of the national advantage is perfectly rescinded in the moralizing of sovereignty: All use conditions can be regulated, if the super- and subordination between states is clarified. This applies even to conflicts and wars, which have their starting point in an economic quarrel. If states attempt to break the opposing state’s will and destroy the basis and means of its power, then the conflict is much more fundamental than the advantage to be obtained or lost from a market regulation. In economic matters the hostile powers have only discovered where their relationship was ill: The neighbor violates its rights and ignores their ability to extort; therefore, it becomes fundamental. The peace treaty, which a war brings about sooner or later, formulates the new basis on which the government authorities are ready to respect each other again, fixes the subordination and/or the privileges whose rights the weapons have proved. The tasks that are demanded of the war loser -- disarmament, evacuation of territory, reparation payments or industrial disassembly – are the security and lever for its lasting subordination under the winner, but not itself the purpose of the war.
The ten years of continuous destruction of Yugoslavia, up to direct war by NATO against the remainder of this state -- once the most important in South-east Europe -- offers from the beginning no occasion for mistakes regarding an "economic background" for the western intervention. The former Yugoslavia was long oriented economically toward the European Union and ready to accept their terms for the hinterland of Western European capital; for a long time it functioned as a transit country for European Union traffic to the Greek partner; as a cheap vacation country for wage-working European Union citizens, as a supplier for the auto and electrical industries and others as well. Yugoslavia never rejected any capitalist use by the western economic powers; rather it had already requested investments and a far greater inclusion into the Western European integration. The enmity, at first against the Yugoslav central power, later the remaining Serbia, took its starting point on the highest floor of the sovereignty question, without which limited conflicts of interests would ever have become important.
It was the luck of Tito’s state that its world-political self-sufficiency after the end of the Eastern Bloc and its internal structure -- multinational state -- came into crisis at the same time that Germany and Europe decided to harvest the fruits of their victory in the cold war and to implement a revaluation of their own status. First, reunified Germany used the dissatisfied nationalism in some partial republics to claim for itself a role like the USA exercises in their central and South American backyard: the role of the superpower, in relation to whose will the sovereignty of other states in their sphere of influence counts for nothing. Germany conquered this right by merciless demands: without being asked, Bonn decided that Slovenes and Croats are not Yugoslav separatists but their own peoples who are entitled to the right to their own state. It promoted -- from the Yugoslav point of view --- illegal state founding by diplomatic acknowledgment and thus proclaimed its requirement to decide internal points of contention in Yugoslavia. The question what the Bonn Minister of Foreign Affairs, at that time Genscher, thereby intended, forbids itself: nothing other than taking this role and positioning Germany with an imperialist status of equal standing with the victorious powers of the Second World War.
The European Union partners registered this attack on their traditional privileges versus the "economic giant" and rejected German intervention in Yugoslavia. Of course, not in general, but so that they made it the common cause of all European imperialists. Not Germany, but the European Union as a whole claims the right to rule over the existence and non-existence of other states in Europe. They did not have to stop Germany with a proposed solo effort, because it was about nothing other than German leadership in the development of the European economic alliance into an imperialistic power center. The Yugoslavia wars mark the beginnings of the "common European foreign affairs and security policy" (GASP).
It was the further bad luck of the Yugoslav state that the preeminent European powers only had to agree to the perception of their common supervision and their goals. They did not interfere in the Balkans because they wanted to reach something specific there, but they to develop ideas on organization because they wanted to intervene at all costs and be responsible. The supervising powers not only did not have economic intentions, they also had no specific strategic-political intentions. And if a party somehow had its national influence in mind, then the need to agree guaranteed the European Union partners that such things would not come about: the subjection of the backyard of the European Union had to be a subjection under very abstract, supranational principles – and how these principles would fit these conditions, only had to see on who they were imposed. Germany wanted the splitting off of Slovenia and Croatia; England and France wanted in the beginning to maintain Yugoslavia. They united over the requirements that the parties to the Yugoslav conflict had to obey. On the one hand, the right to self-determination of the peoples should apply; into the rank of peoples applied the constitutive nationalities of Yugoslavia -- thus the right was given to the principle of nationalistic re-assortment. On the other hand, new states were allowed to develop only within the old Yugoslav republic’s internal borders -- thus re-assorting state populations was directly forbidden according to the ethnic principle.
Serbia was not by any means the common enemy of Europe from the outset. However, it necessarily grew into this role because it was the center at whose expense the European-supervised dismantling of the Yugoslav state took place, and because it was the main inheritor of the traditional instruments of power; with those it opposed the ever further dissolution of the federal republic. If the Yugoslav army always withdrew ever more from other parts of Yugoslavia, so the remaining independent part became more Serbian and as a result of the European intervention became more anti-western to save its state reason. The only state in the Balkans that did not originate from the grace of the European Union and which still calculates from its own rights on the dictations of the imperialistic supreme power becomes the obstacle to the European Union competence in the region. Therefore it was not over the retreat of the Yugoslav army from the other partial republics. In the Kosovo war it was a matter of destroying Serbian power and the economic basis of its independence in order to destroy the Serbian capability for war.
consists first of the fact that money plays no role and also must not play one; war is not business, it does not earn money but destroys huge amounts of capitalist wealth. There it checks itself into, as the fascists would say, the "crematorium" of capitalism. The opponents no longer want to earn money, they do not seek relative advantage in gains and winnings; rather it becomes a matter of principle: Either one’s own will takes effect or the other’s. In order to break the foreign state’s will, its instruments of power -- human and material -- are destroyed as effectively as possible. The transition to enmity between states destroys business and ruins the profit opportunities of the capitalists engaged in mutual trade or who have invested in the country now declared an enemy – for example, the Yugoslav Telekom was bombed and belongs to Telecom Italia. Oil and technology exporters find that their businesses, legal as of yesterday with Yugoslavia, are now illegal because of the ally’s embargo.
All military-technical achievements are then used in the bombardment. The expenditure is calculated, first of all, by how much means of war a NATO country can apply and contribute to destroy as many of the enemy’s weapons, infrastructure, factories, and people as possible; secondly, it is measured by how intensively and how long the bombing must last until the enemy throws in the towel. Afterwards, the billions are added up: the stationing of soldiers, the operation of bomber fleets, the replacement of lost equipment and ammunition fired all costs money -- even if costs play no role, they must be raised and paid.
After the victory the Serbian industrial nation is thrown back for decades. Use of the country as a trading partner and investment site for foreign capital lies far in the future; it is also no longer suitable as a cheap wage country and "extended work bench." In Kosovo half of all the buildings were destroyed, and there was not much of an economy even before the war. The neighboring states, which were given short shrift as deployment zones before the collapse, and the periphery of Southeast-European states (Bulgaria, Romania) have to register a catastrophic breakdown of the anyway already meager regional course of business.
There is nothing in the entire region for European capitalism – on the contrary. With their own people and their own means, the winners themselves must restore state order and living conditions so that the destroyed Balkans, for which they have taken responsibility, becomes halfway "stable." For an estimated 20 years an occupation regime will have to force upon the hostile groups of peoples in Kosovo a multi-ethnic peace that they do not want. That costs. The same applies to the reconstruction of the destroyed houses and a minimal infrastructure. The talk is already of a "Marshall plan" for the destroyed region. If nothing in the historical parallel is correct and the victims of the war cannot expect benefits, nevertheless one remains: Their supervision over the Balkans costs the EU states a certain amount of money, without which their own spokesmen would promise themselves a "blossoming of capitalist landscapes" and an increase in European growth. The imperialistic departure of the European Union costs tax funds and at the same time damages the tax sources, business and growth in Europe. Minister of Finance Eichel knows why war taxes must be increased and pensions lowered because of Kosovo. It is thus the opposite to those who believe in the search for an "economic background" to the Kosovo war: the recklessness with which states, which prescribe themselves the growth of capital, put business in the service of war and the destruction it causes, is the most perfect proof of how much violence peaceful profit-making is based on.