Perspectives on Serbia : Send ‘Carrots’ Along With the ‘Stick’ : Prosperity is the best cure for envy, as the rest of Europe knows. Everyone is waiting for a show of U.S. gumption.

Europe’s conscience is finally waking up over Bosnia and the worst fighting on the Continent since 1945. But this still does not mean taking the lead to stop the Serbian killers--all eyes look to Washington for that. At least if America acts, it will find Europeans prepared to follow.

It isn’t just the television pictures from the former Yugoslavia that are slowly eroding the reluctance of leaders here to get involved. A sense of shame has begun to emerge over the impotence of democratic states in the face of human tragedy so close to home. Other events have reinforced the point. In Germany, trauma over outrages committed by neo-Nazis reminds people that morality is a seamless web--indeed, that barbarism is contagious. European Community leaders emerged from last week’s conclave in Edinburgh with their precious experiment still intact, but with knowledge that indifference to political realities both within the EC and beyond can no longer be tolerated.

Boris Yeltsin’s travails in Moscow underscore what could happen if the Yugoslav disease spreads eastward. This took the form of a bad joke at a Europewide meeting in Stockholm this week, when Russia’s foreign minister deadpanned a speech replete with every Cold War challenge, just to let his audience know what could happen if reform in Russia is permitted to fail. Meanwhile, European awareness that something can be done to relieve suffering in Somalia makes people wonder why nothing can be done in Bosnia.

Throughout the Yugoslav crisis, creating the political will to act has been more important than devising a plan. Its outlines have long been clear and provide a good test about whether there can be a new world order. The goal is to extend the rule of law further than before. Getting there requires efforts that are two parts carrot, one part stick.

With all the dithering on both sides of the Atlantic, most statesmen have missed the essential point: that everyone in the former Yugoslavia needs to be shown that there is a better way to achieve legitimate human aspirations than the killing fields and ethnic cleansing. The fear that motivates Serbian butchers as much as anything else seems alien in Western Europe until it is understood that similar behavior here was abolished only in recent decades.

The first step, therefore, is to create a means for helping all the disparate peoples of the former Yugoslavia to sort out contending principles, such as self-determination versus protection of minorities, sovereignty versus the permeability of states that abuse human rights. The second carrot borrows from experience in the West. France and Germany did not bury the hatchet just because people were tired of fratricidal war and a few courageous leaders sought a better way of ordering European society. A critical ingredient was the most sustained burst of prosperity in history: The link between hunger and envy was severed, and a new generation of old enemies learned to live in peace. Nothing like this has been tried in the former Yugoslavia, or even promised. But democracy never developed where there was no hope of a better life.

The twin carrots of political principle and economic development need a stick: a message to Belgrade that the military method of pursuing ethnic ambitions is out of bounds. The hypocrisy has worn thin about a “no-fly zone” that is not enforced and would mean little if it were; about a quarantine of Serbia that is flouted by almost everyone; about an embargo that affects only arms-poor Muslims and not arms-bloated Serbs.

The simple fact is that the Serbian leadership has not been given a single reason to believe that it will pay the smallest price for aggression. Belgrade, untouched, is a million miles from the war. Not one Serbian military installation has been attacked by the vaunted might of Western air forces. The only lesson learned so far is that invoking terms like guerrilla warfare and quagmire is enough to scare great nations into ignoring their own interests.

The United States shows disdain for its allies’ inaction at its peril. We are the ones who claimed primacy for NATO in Europe’s security future and, thus, for our own leadership. We will be affected if the evil lessons of Yugoslavia spread to other post-communist societies. We will have to join our allies in picking up the pieces of European security “architecture” that proves to be jerry-built.

The mercy mission to Somalia can help usher in an age of increased respect for human rights and the rule of law. But it is also a distraction from necessary work in Bosnia and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia that is a hundred times more important for our future.

In its waning days, the Bush Administration should show some gumption, explain reality to the American people, and give the European allies no further excuse for not acting.