Europe’s SOS

There is nothing quite as upsetting to international peace as a disgruntled potentate atop a dying empire. At the close of the last century, the empress dowager of China harnessed the violence of the Boxers to deal a blow at foreign influence in her country. The result was a short war, an allied military contingent and a U.S. president, William McKinley, promising “exalted justice and benevolence.” Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is not an orphan in history. His kind tend to be at the center of wars, big and little. Surrounded by weak domestic institutions and even weaker advisors, these sultans, emirs, shahs and kings lashed out at the great powers of their day to hold on to what they had.

The unwinding of empire is messy. It often has a moral dimension that tends to get bigger powers involved. When news reached London in the 1870s that the Ottoman sultan’s men were massacring thousands of Bulgarians in a Balkan province, a wave of public revulsion forced the British government to back away from its traditional pro-Turkish stance. “Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible way,” proclaimed William Gladstone, “namely, by carrying off themselves.” Seeing the lack of British support for Constantinople as an opportunity, the Russians beat up the Turks.

The slow death of the Spanish empire in the 19th century had a similar effect on U.S. public opinion. Long before Fidel Castro was the nemesis of the Kennedys, Americans clamored for intervention to stop atrocities in Spanish-ruled Cuba. But even if there aren’t any enraged foreign citizens in the region, the misbehavior of weak dictators usually poses enough of a strategic challenge to somebody powerful for there to be trouble. Memorialized in the fight song of the U.S. Marines is a mission to Tripoli, authorized by President Thomas Jefferson in 1801, to punish a local pasha for piracy against U.S. ships.

The strategic challenge posed by a nettlesome dictator can take more forms than the loss of a few ships. As they were creating their own empire, the British spent a lot of time trying to manage the disintegration of other regimes, to prevent chaos in regions of interest to London. In the 1870s, Prime Minister Benjamin A. Disraeli found himself figuratively mano a mano with the emir of Afghanistan. The British were sure the emir wasn’t strong enough to hold off the Russian advance toward India. But the emir wouldn’t listen to advice. He thought himself stronger than he was. To prove their point, the British invaded the emirate, deposed him and kept the Russians out of his ramshackle empire. The Mahdi of the Sudan confronted Disraeli’s successor with a similar problem. If not the British in Sudan, then the French. Another little war ensued.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that it only takes a little conflict to separate an emperor from his empire. Implicit in President Bill Clinton’s speech to the nation on Wednesday was a reference to the spiral of events that led to the outbreak of this century’s bloodiest war, World War I.

The former Yugoslavia lay athwart one of the great political and social fault lines in the world. Fortunately, the jockeying for position in the Balkans today does not look much like the picture in 1914. Then, three empires were dissolving simultaneously--the Austro-Hungarian, the Turkish and the Russian--while a powerful new German empire was determined to flex its muscles. The dissolution of Constantinople and Vienna’s power, in particular, set off a contest for influence in the Balkans. In that earlier struggle, the Russians felt a need to protect their fellow Slavs. Meanwhile, the Germans worried about their allies, the Austrians, whom they needed for support in future wars against France.

The one slight similarity between the mess then and what we see today is the position of Russia. With an uncertain executive and an enraged domestic parliament, Russia seems poised to intervene to shore up Serbia. The end of the Cold War has left this proud country searching for a mission.

But here, too, the similarity is deceptive. Russia has embraced the world in ways unimaginable in 1914. Foreign loans are as important to domestic stability as Slavophilia. Russia also feels far less threatened militarily today, despite an enlarged North Atlantic Treaty Organization, than she did next to Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. Moreover, it is not clear how she could realistically intervene.

Though the 19th century brims with examples of great powers drawn into the private dramas of lesser potentates, the Cold War also offers some lessons to keep in mind. Dictators can force intervention, even when they don’t themselves run empires. Soviet and U.S. leaders reacted time and again to the inability of a dictator to hold his own. A chief reason for the Vietnam debacle was that Ngo Dinh Diem proved a less capable leader in the early 1960s than he was in the 1950s. The recent release of Soviet-era materials shows the extent to which the Horn of Africa in the 1970s was a nightmare for the Soviets, who couldn’t settle the competing imperial claims of the various Marxists in power there.

Unfortunately for those making political decisions today, there is little hope that these people will accept their situation and desist. For every Ferdinand E. Marcos and Francois Duvalier, there are several Manuel Noriegas and Mahdis. These men have no future outside the world they construct. It is no wonder dictators don’t retire without a strong push. Moreover, though these men lack sufficient power to retain their empires, they still have enough to hurt their own people and destabilize international politics.

When great powers do decide to intervene, as the U.S. and NATO did last week, there remains the question of how to achieve success. Despite the new technology of the 20th century, it is hard to believe NATO leaders face any easier decisions than their 19th century predecessors. It remains to be seen whether an air campaign, of any size, can defeat a land army.

Even the moralist Gladstone understood he had to occupy a land to stop troublesome dictators. Occupying Serbia would be a bad idea; but Milosevic’s outrages in Kosovo demanded an answer from the Europeans, at least.

The near-future is not bright. We are trying to get a dictator to do our bidding. Without using great force and maintaining a tight noose around his country, that will be hard and probably will take some time. As we begin the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, it is worth recalling how unusual a leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev was. He let go of his Kosovo.*