Kosovo and the Economics of Attention
NATO and Milosevich are playing to different audiences
The Kosovo situation provides as good (or rather, as bad) an illustration as anyone is likely to need of the childhood adage "two wrongs don't make a right." The bombing rains down destruction (mostly economic) over what is left of Yugoslavia, but it has certainly not stopped the "ethnic cleansing" and rape of Kosovar Albanians by the Serb government and its supporters.
What led to this horrible mess? If we are to have any chance of ending it, and even more of not repeating it, now is the time to understand just how it began and what propels it forwards.
Some right-leaning American opponents of the bombing argue that it is not defending American vital interests - whatever these may be. Many left wing opponents to the contrary in effect take the bombing itself as proof US imperialistic interests are involved. Thus, it is argued that the US is interested in Kosovo because, unlike such places as Chechnya, Rwanda or Kurdistan, Kosovo is situated at "the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East." Others see the attack on Yugoslavia as part of a larger plan to control Central Asian oil. Some even hint at rumors that gold has been found in Kosovo itself.
As far as strategy goes, the US has long quite happily ignored Kosovo. How could it suddenly be at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East? In fact, for centuries it has been a backwater, and no more than the little traversed crossroads between Albania, Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia - a naught within a naught when it comes to strategic value to outsiders.
As for oil, since it is found just about anywhere, it can always be brought up as a reason for anything; but the fact is there is if anything too much oil on the world market, and even quite recently, the US demonstrated that its stand on oil could be subservient to other concerns. (American economic planners looked favorably on an attempt by OPEC to raise prices form their historic lows, since that would help prop up the tottering Russian economy.)
Gold is just as nonsensical a supposition,as a look at world gold prices over the past decade or so would indicate. The fact is that for quite some time now, securing access to natural resources hasn't made sense as a basis foreign policy. Raw materials can always be bought - even from enemies - or substituted for. In dollars the price of bulk resources of all sorts has never been lower than recently.
Why then the bombing? One could suppose that nothing but a concern for human rights energizes the NATO war effort, but that would not explain why out of all areas where human rights are violated Kosovo has been singled out. It would also not explain why, of all ways to support human rights, bombing has been chosen.
I believe that in part, there is an economic explanation, one that doesn't rule out the possible role of genuine compassion, but gives it context. And that same form of explanation helps in comprehending the actions of Milosevic and his Serb allies.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed my writings that my explanation is in terms of the new kind of economy I argue is coming to dominate the world, the economy based not on the scarcity of material goods, but rather on the unavoidable scarcity of human attention, the kind of attention that comes from audiences, increasingly often. This is the economy that has helped give rise to cyberspace. In old-fashioned geography, it is quite absurd to see Kosovo as strategically important.; in the current geography of cyberspace, such a hypothesis isn't absurd at all.
In the new economy, stardom is wealth - and power. Ronald Reagan helped complete the conversion of political power to an application of the principles of stardom, and now his advances have been burnished by Bill Clinton. Since the US audience is a stand-in for the world audience, it is not surprising that aspiring politicians in much of the rest of the world have adopted the Clintonian style, so as to snare their own share of this audience. Thus NATO is now dominated by Clinton clones, from Blair to Schroeder, who not only perceive things in the same way but who operate according to the same sort of principle.
This new type of politician must always move easily in a world of celebrity, including not only the world of movie stars, sports stars and the like, but the world of celebrity journalists, who of course gain their celebrity by constantly referring to the statesman-stars.
In this world, the President or Prime Minister must view everything that happens as a backdrop against which he must shine. Should someone win a sporting event, or set a new record, the President must be seen with her. If a natural disaster occurs, the President must be there, offering compassion to the injured or homeless, within a day or two.
It is in the nature of a successful star to appear to cater to the needs of the audience, and successful politicians of the American variety are those who cater to the largest sort of audience, refusing to do anything that seems particularly to wound anyone in that audience. And in this world, the audience is not confined by borders, in fact the audience is world-wide, following American stars and their imitators most closely.
These requirements sharply limit the range of acceptable action, but they also create certain requirements to act. If a war occurs where war correspondents can set foot with their cameras, then that war will appear on the Internet and on TV. (This is one way reporters can achieve their own stardom, after all.) And if brutalities or war crimes take place, then they look as ugly on the nightly news as increased crime at home. No sane politician today can ignore such images, especially if there are parts of the audience that can especially easily identify with the victims.
(My tone may seem unduly cynical, but I am merely trying to show, as objectively as possibly, how attention economics influences political action. Most of the journalists and politicians involved, probably feel genuine compassion for the victims and genuine outrage at the perpetrators of war crimes. But their genuineness is less at issue than their success at seeming concerned, whether genuinely or not. Human rights organizations have played an important role too, continually bringing to attention issues that might otherwise fade more easily into the background, but their effectiveness too is a separate issue from the depth of their concern.)
There are two major sets of images involved in determining the Kosovo war. One is the wounded soldier, or worse yet the body bag, together with worried or grieving relatives and friends at home. (These latter images are the specialty of stay-at-home journalists, identical in form to traffic accident or crime reports.) This set has played a key role in making conventional warfare unthinkable under most circumstances. President Clinton discovered this in the case of Mogadishu, had he not recognized it before. "No dead American ground troops; and therefore under most imaginable circumstances - no ground troops inserted into danger at all." That is the rule, to be broken only at extreme peril to political success. Only if troop deaths are kept in the general range that would occur even without a war is the politician who put them in harm's way now safe.
Even keeping one's own casualties down is not really enough any more. Every "statesman" these days must play to an audience that also can watch the war and its consequences directly. While individual soldiers "in the field', that is stationed at faraway bases or on high-flying planes, can avoid any direct contact with the deaths and sufferings his or her actions bring about, a President or Prime Minister must expect to be juxtaposed on the evening news with grizzly pictures of the dead the maimed and the dying, of houses, hospitals, schools and apartment buildings up in flames. And that is to be avoided if at all possible, since enough of these pictures can turn even the most beloved head of state into a villain in very little time.
So why Kosovo at all then? Precisely because the dead look just as thoroughly murdered if someone else's troops did the firing, and one's own stood by, even if in so standing they were horrified by what they saw. In other words, no Western politician want a repeat of Vietnam, Mogadishu...., or Srebrnica. It is the fear of a new Srebrnica that explains why Kosovo has roused such concern in Western capitals.
Pristina is no strategic crossroads, but it not so far away that hand-held TV cameras can't get there and record atrocities. By fall of last year the western worry about it, second only perhaps to worries about the Lewinsky scandal, was that Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians would take place without the powerful western nations doing anything about it. That too would have made for unacceptable television.
Kosovo is neither Kurdistan nor Rwanda, for the simple reason that it is identified as within Europe, that it is easy for TV cameras to be in it or near it, and because its inhabitants resemble Western audiences sufficiently for close identification. (In all honesty, I must add that another reason atrocities in Tienanmen or Tibet, say, don't get the same treatment is that China is understood as too powerful to trifle with, whereas Serbia is not supposed to be much of a power. A President who is afraid of Serbia is therefore in trouble.)
Kosovo is also linked with the same Serbian government that sponsored what went on so disgustingly right before the eyes of Western (Dutch) soldiers in Bosnia so very recently. And since bombing of the Bosnian Serbs had finally brought about a painful but apparently workable cessation to atrocities in Bosnia, the threat of bombing, the only military card any Western government really holds anywhere, quickly became the only card seriously to be considered worth playing in the case of Kosovo.
Since Srebrnica and even before, Milosevic has acquired a reputation in the West of being tricky and untrustworthy, unless under the threat of force. Not wanting to be taken for suckers, the Western diplomats who planned the Rambouillet talks insisted that they be backed with the threat of bombing unless an ironclad agreement involving an occupation similar to that of Bosnia would guarantee the peace. And since threats must be carried out for their users to remain "credible," the bombing has inevitably but uselessly followed. A further requirement of collective diplomacy, of course, is that it make use of as little creativity and imagination as possible. "Don't try anything that hasn't already been tried and worked in similar cases," is this rule. Hollywood studio heads would be right at home.
If this was the Western calculus, what of Milosevic's? His acts too can be parsed in attention economic terms, but one must begin with the premise that he is not playing to the same world audience. There are two basic routes to stardom in the world. One is to follow what may be called the Hollywood rules, playing to the common denominator, offering something for everyone possible. The other option is to reject this mass appeal in favor of a special appeal to a smaller audience that in itself feels, or can be made to feel, somehow disenfranchised. In the best case you manage to soothe this audience while simultaneously accentuating its feelings of difference and grievance. It will then be exceptionally loyal to you while your fortunes as star will be closely tied to it.
Finding himself in power in Serbia, then only one republic of six in Yugoslavia, at the end of the Cold War, Milosevic had little chance to appear as basically a westernizing hero, in the mould of Gorbachev or Yeltsin, say. Serbians were less entrepreneurial than Slovenes or Croats or Bosnian Muslims, and already felt victimized by the partial opening of Yugoslavia to the West under Tito. Since Yugoslavia was not a Soviet satellite to begin with, one could not hope to gain stardom by simply shaking off the yoke of Communism.
The obvious course for Milosevic was to take the Serb feeling of victimization and run with it, in the process risking his appeal on the world stage, in favor of greater loyalty among Serbs themselves. In this, he resembled numerous others who have played the "identity politics" card. In those terms, Milosevic has played his card very astutely, by now becoming a star for Eastern Orthodox Christians everywhere. Orthodox Christians as a group are much more bitterly anti-Muslim than other parts of Christendom, It was the active center of Orthodoxy, Constantinople, that fell to Islamic rule in 1453, and it is also the Orthodox who thus far have done least well of all Christians in the market economy.
From the standpoint of holding on to such an audience it actually helps if it is turned into a pariah in the eyes of outsiders. Milosevic is probably the last leader in Europe who has chosen such a stance, rather than seeking a more mass-based, widespread popularity and celebrity, which now inevitably means as a kind satellite star to American leaders, such as Clinton. It is no coincidence that he is also the European leader who has held power longest.
As is widely known by now, Kosovo was where Milosevic began the whole process of appealing to Serb resentment. And, inevitably, by removing Kosovar Albanian autonomy a decade ago he instigated a reciprocal set of moves on their side. After his losses in Bosnia, he has only increased support for himself by resisting the West as he has done.
In the course of this, presenting the Serbs as embattled and outnumbered he has certainly created a climate in which desperate, even genocidal measures - such as those taken at Srebrnica can be construed by Serbs as simply necessary for survival. Unlike Germans under Hitler, the serbs are not holding themselves up as a master race, but rather as perpetual victims, whose victimhood confers the right to do anything. It is a dangerous and ugly stance, but not one unique to the Serbs, unfortunately.
Kosovo and the bombing campaign thus represent a dangerous new trend in the future direction of interstate relations, ironically occurring at a time when the state is loosing its purpose and function. If we are to prevent this sort of war, those of us who are against both sides must find new means of getting attention, the attention of the very audiences now fixated on the wars, yet not wanting really to become involved.
The Yugoslavs have come up with the idea of protecting property such as bridges from bombing by offering themselves up as prospective casualties, knowing full well that civilian casualties, even if they are enemy casualties cannot be tolerated by political leaders in the West. In a future incipient Kosovo, celebrities and other volunteers might simply move into contested territories to be prospective casualties, more dangerous dead than alive in the eyes of the world.
That is but one possibility. The challenge to would-be peaceniks, who almost certainly cannot be expected to be governments, is to come up with attention-getting ways to make the war-fighters look bad that can compete with war itself in media effectiveness, meaning in timeliness and attention getting capacity. This is not an easy task but it is one worth attempting.