Soros on Yugoslavia
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Subject: Soros on Yugoslavia
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Soros on Yugoslavia
Dear All
Enclosed is a commencement speech delivered on May 27 by George Soros
in Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at John
Hopkins University, in which Mr. Soros gave his personal opinions on
the current Kosovo crisis and war in Yugoslavia.
OSI Office of Communications
=================================================================
Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
John Hopkins University
Commencement Speech delivered by George Soros
May 27, 1999
I am honored to be your commencement speaker. A commencement speech is
meant to be an inspiration to the young people who are completing
their education and going out into the big world. I am not sure
whether I can deliver such a speech because as a citizen of that big
world, I am stunned and devastated by what is happening in Kosovo. I
am deeply involved in that part of the world and what is happening
there has raised in my mind a lot of questions to which, frankly
speaking, I don't have the answers. The results of the NATO
intervention have shocked me and forced me to reconsider some of my
most cherished preconceptions.
I am a believer in what I call an open society which is basically a
broader and more universal concept of democracy. Open society is
based on the recognition that nobody has access to the ultimate truth;
perfection is unattainable and therefore we must be satisfied with the
next best thing: a society that holds itself open to improvement. An
open society allows people with different views, identities and
interests to live together in peace. An open society transcends
boundaries; it allows intervention in the internal affairs of
sovereign states because people living in an oppressive regime often
cannot defend themselves against oppression without outside
intervention but the intervention must be confined to supporting the
people living in a country to attain their legitimate aspirations, not
to impose a particular ideology or to subjugate one state to the
interests of another. These are the principles I have put into
practice through my network of open society foundations.
Judging by these principles, I have no doubt that Milosevic infringed
the rights of the Albanian population in Kosovo. Nor do I have any
doubts that the situation required outside intervention. The case for
intervention is clearer in Kosovo than in most other situations of
ethnic conflict because Milosevic unilaterally deprived the
inhabitants of Kosovo of the autonomy that they had already enjoyed.
He also broke an international agreement into which he entered in
October of last year. My doubts center on the ways in which
international pressure can be successfully applied.
I am more aware than most people that actions have unintended
consequences. Nevertheless I'm shocked by the consequences of our
intervention. We have accomplished exactly the opposite of what we
intended. We have accelerated the ethnic cleansing we sought to
interdict. We have helped to consolidate in power the Milosevic regime
and we have helped to create instability in the neighboring countries
of Montenegro, Macedonia and Albania, not to mention the broader
international implications such as our relationship with China.
It is obvious that something has gone woefully wrong and we find
ourselves in an awful quandary. I am not going to discuss how we got
there and how we can extricate ourselves. I want to discuss the
principle of intervening in the internal affairs of a sovereign state
in order to protect its people. Because that is what we are doing and
it is not working. It is easy to find fault with the way we have gone
about it, but the problem that preoccupies me goes deeper. In the
case of Yugoslavia we have intervened in different ways. In Bosnia we
tried it with the United Nations and it didn't work. That is why in
Kosovo we tried it without the United Nations and that didn't work
either. We also tried it by applying economic sanctions but that too
had adverse consequences. The sanctions could be broken with the help
of the ruling regimes by shady businessmen who in turn became an
important source of support for the ruling regimes not only in
Yugoslavia but also in the neighboring countries. In short, nothing
worked. And we have a similar record in Africa.
The question I have to ask myself: is it possible, is it appropriate
to intervene in the internal affairs of a state in the name of some
general principle like human rights or open society? I did not want
to consider such a question and I certainly don't want to accept no
for an answer. It would be the end of the aspiration to an open
society. In the absence of outside intervention oppressive regimes
could perpetrate untold atrocities. Moreover, internal conflicts
could easily broaden into international hostilities. In our
increasingly interdependent world, there are certain kinds of behavior
by sovereign states - aggression, terrorism, ethnic cleansing - that
cannot be tolerated by the international community. At the same time
we must recognize that the current approach does not work. We must
find some better way. This will require a profound rethinking and
reorganization of the way we conduct international relations.
As things are now, international relations involve relations between
states. How a state treats its own citizens involves relations within
the state. The two relations are largely independent of each other
because the states enjoy sovereignty over their territory and their
inhabitants. Sovereignty is an outdated concept but it prevails. It
derives from the time when kings wielded power over their subjects but
in the French Revolution when the people of France overthrew their
king they assumed his sovereignty. That was the birth of the modern
state. Since then, there has been a gradual recognition that states
must also be subject to the rule of law but international law has been
slow to develop and it does not have any teeth. We have the United
Nations but the UN does not work well because it is an association of
states and states are guided by their interests not by universal
principles, and we have the Declaration of Universal Human Rights.
The principles which ought to govern the behavior of states towards
their own citizens have been reasonably well-established. What is
missing is an authority to enforce those principles - an authority
that transcends the sovereign state. Since the sovereignty of the
modern state is derived from the people, the authority that transcends
the sovereign state must be derived from the people of the world. As
long as we live in a world of sovereign states, the people need to
exercise their authority through the states to which they belong,
particularly where military action is concerned. Democratic states
are supposed to carry out the will of the people. So in the ultimate
analysis the development and enforcement of international law depends
on the will of the people who live in democratic countries.
And that is where the problem lies. People who live in democratic
countries do not believe in democracy as a universal principle. They
tend to be guided by self-interest, not by universal principles. They
may be willing to defend democracy in their own country because they
consider it to be in their own self-interest but few people care
sufficiently about democracy as an abstract idea to defend it in other
countries, especially when the idea is so far removed from the
reality. Yet people do have some concerns that go beyond
self-interest. They are aroused by pictures of atrocities. How could
these concerns be mobilized to prevent the atrocities? That is the
question that preoccupies me.
I have attended a number of discussions about Kosovo and I was shocked
to discover how vague and confused people, well-informed people, are
about the reasons for our involvement. They speak of humanitarian
reasons and human rights almost interchangeably. Yet the two are quite
different. Human rights are political rights. When they are violated,
it may lead to a humanitarian disaster, pictures on CNN that arouse
people's emotions but by then it is too late. The damage is done and
the intervention is often counterproductive. The humanitarian
disaster could have been prevented only by protecting the political
rights of the people. But to achieve this, people must take an
interest in the principles of open society. Prevention cannot start
early enough. To be successful it must be guided by a set of clear
objectives. That is what the concept of open society can provide.
For instance, if the people of the world had been sufficiently aroused
by the atrocities in Kosovo to impose a ban on Yugoslav basketball
teams, the eventual bombing of Yugoslavia might have been more
effective. The Serbs would have been aware that the people of the
world are revolted by the behavior of the Milosevic regime. As it is,
the Serbs simply fail to connect what is done to them with what they
have done to others. It fits their self-image as victims, and those
who think of themselves as victims are often the worst victimizers.
Unfortunately, the people of the world were not aroused by Kosovo. The
atrocities started more than a year ago, and the principles of open
society were violated ten years ago. But people did not even know
where Kosovo was until we started bombing Yugoslavia.
Suppose that the people subscribed to the principles of an open
society; how could those principles be translated into effective
institutions? It would require the cooperation of democratic states.
We need an authority that transcends the sovereignty of states. We
have such an authority in the form of the United Nations, but the UN
is not guided by the principles of open society. It is an association
of states, some of which are democratic, others not, each of which is
guided by its national interests. We have an association of democratic
states, NATO, which did intervene in defense of democratic values, but
it is a military alliance incapable of preventive action. By the time
it intervenes it is too late and we have seen that its intervention
can be counterproductive. It needs to be complemented by a political
alliance dedicated to the promotion of open society and capable of
acting both within the UN and outside it.
Such an alliance would work more by providing rewards for good
behavior than punishment for bad behavior. Belonging to the alliance
or meeting its standards should be a rewarding experience. This would
encourage voluntary compliance and defer any problems connected with
the infringement of national sovereignty. The first degree of
punishment would be exclusion; only if it fails need other measures be
considered. The greatest rewards would be access to markets, access to
finance, better treatment by the international financial institutions
and, where appropriate, association with the European Union. There
are a thousand little ways that diplomatic pressure can be applied;
the important thing is to be clear about the objectives. I am sure
that the abolition of Kosovo's autonomy in 1989 could have been
reversed if the international community had been determined enough
about it. In Latvia, international pressure had led to a reform of
the naturalization law which could have caused conflict in Russia. In
Croatia, the international community did not do enough to assure the
existence of independent media. Nor is it sufficiently aroused by
proposals in various Central Asian republics to introduce lifetime
presidencies. We shall not be able to get rid of Milosevic by bombing
but if, after the war, there is a grand plan for the reconstruction of
South East Europe involving a customs union and virtual membership in
the EU for those countries which qualify, I am sure that the Serbs
would soon get rid of Milosevic in order to qualify.
A political alliance dedicated to the promotion of open society might
even be able to change the way the UN functions, especially if it had
a much broader membership than NATO. NATO could still serve as its
military arm.
Ironically, it is the US that stands in the way of such a political
alliance. We are caught in a trap of our own making. We used to be one
of the two superpowers and the leaders of the free world. We are now
the sole remaining superpower and we would like to think of ourselves
as the leaders of the free world. But that is where we fail, because
we fail to observe one of the basic principles of the open society.
Nobody has a monopoly of the truth, yet we act as if we did. We are
willing to violate the sovereignty of other states in the name of
universal principles but we are unwilling to accept any infringement
of our own sovereignty. We are willing to drop bombs on others from
high altitudes but we are reluctant to expose our own men to risk. We
refuse to submit ourselves to any kind of international governance.
We were one of seven countries which refused to subscribe to the
International Criminal Court; the others were China, Iraq, Israel,
Libya, Qatar, and Yemen. We do not even pay our dues to the United
Nations. This kind of behavior does not lend much legitimacy to our
claim to be the leaders of the free world.
To reclaim that role we must radically alter our attitude to
international cooperation. We cannot and should not be the policemen
of the world; but the world needs a policeman. Therefore we must
cooperate with likeminded countries and abide by the rules that we
seek to impose on others. We cannot bomb the world into submission
but we cannot withdraw into isolation either. If we cannot prevent
atrocities like Kosovo we must also be willing to accept bodybags. I
hate to end on such a note, but that is where we are right now.
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