The Revival of Gunboat Diplomacy?

March, 1999

At the beginning of the 20th Century, President Teddy Roosevelt reminded Americans of the old adage to speak softly and carry a big stick. Few sticks come larger than a squadron of F-15E Strike Eagles with LANTIRN pods and GBU-15 bombs, especially if they follow a wave of Block III TLAM-D cruise missiles and have AWACS and J-STARS to guide them. While the modern penchant for acronyms mitigates against Homeric narratives, there is no way to hide from this stick. Neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night, nor active air defences can keep these deliverymen from their appointed rounds.

One trait of modern airpower (insofar as US/Western technologies go) is that it is virtually unstoppable and risk free. The temptation to use it appears to be a very strong one indeed.

There was a time, not so very long ago, that whenever Western sensibilities or interests were irritated by truculent locals, a gunboat would be anchored off shore. Then, a brisk bombardment would serve notice that someone had been misbehaving. The morality of gunboat diplomacy has been questioned throughout this century and often with good reason. However, the use of bombardment to send a message was typical of an age when Western nations were far more confident about their own morality.

Admittedly, the days of gunboat diplomacy had mixed effects. The Anglo-French thumping of an anchored Turkish fleet at Navarino in 1827 told the Turks to clean up their act (which they did for a while) and get out of Greece. Modern Greece owes its existence to gunboat diplomacy. Some 13 years later, the same fleets bombarded Beirut to protect Turkey from a rebel sultan from Egypt. The shortest war in history was a 30 minute affray in which the thrifty Royal Navy first shelled the palace of the Sultan of Zanzibar and then made him pay for the expended ammunition. This helped finish off the slave trade in East Africa.

On the other hand, the French bombardments of Cochin China in 1858 and Madagascar in the 1890s were straightforward exercises in imperialism. The bombardments that attended the 1st and 2nd Opium Wars in China might be said to have been a desirable action by the most callous of free trade economists, but others may harbor major reservations. Other episodes of gunboat diplomacy (the 1863 shelling of Kagoshima for example) served a simple message to local malcontents -- keep your hands off the Europeans.

Gunboat diplomacy really is a simple exercise. The one with the gunboat has to have an Olympian self-confidence in his own moral superiority. It also helps to have a helplessly weak target that has been misbehaving and is virtually friendless. Then, the rod of correction can be used to send a message to the target, telling him that he had better mend his ways or real trouble will follow.

After a long hiatus, it appears that gunboat diplomacy is back.

After many fruitless months of speaking softly, NATO unleashed the stick on Serbia in late March 1999. Of course, the American portion of the stick was the largest, but aircraft from 11 different NATO partners were involved. This presented some historic ironies. The Turks were thumping on the Serbs again, as they had done in days of yore, and the Luftwaffe was firing its first shots in anger since 1945; but this time it was done in partnership with 17 other nations. Strangest of all, to some, might have been the idea of Canadian CF-18s dropping laser guided bombs, but Canadian soldiers had shot at several local parties earlier in the 1990s.

The hapless targets of all this attention are the Serbs. The London Times' Guide to the Peoples of Europe (a well-thumbed reference book here) does not treat the Serbs charitably. Descendants of 7th Century Slavic invaders, the Serbs converted to Orthodox Christianity, thus sealing themselves off from Western cultural currents. These Slavic invaders were highly fractured by local geography and tribal distinctions, but history was going to compound the problem.

In the late 14th Century, the Turks started to overrun almost all of what was recently Yugoslavia. This further isolated the Serbs from the European mainstream. A great many Serbs, including the repressed descendents of the heretical Bogomil sect, converted to Islam. Most of these were concentrated in the area of Bosnia-Herzegovina and are now called Bosnians.

Two of the other major factions of the Southern Slavs, the Croats and the Slovenes, came under the influence of the Catholic Church, the Venetians, and later the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many Serbs resettled in Bosnia and Croatia as the Turkish Empire began to wane after the 16th Century.

Victims of history, the Serbian national character only really began to gel in the early 19th Century. They were conscious of being a restive Christian minority under Turkish rule, and from this came a tradition of stubbornness, militancy and a twisted pride in persecution. Their revolts against the Turks in 1804 and 1815 led to a quasi-autonomous Serbian state that only became fully recognized after the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The early 19th Century's nationalistic and romantic ideologies found a ready chord among educated Serbs and kindled many of the problems that still affect the region.

Iljia Garasanin (1812-1874) was the Serbian minister of Internal Affairs in 1844 when he outlined a program to unite all Serbs within a Serbian state. This was immediately embraced by Serbian nationalist ideologues. The first element of the program was that Serbian identity rests with their language and the Orthodox faith -- thus those Macedonians, Bosnian Muslims and Montenegrins who had "lost" their true Serbian identities could be returned to the fold (with some prompting of course). The second element was that the Serbs were entitled to a great kingdom of their own because of their resistance to the Turks. The idea of Serbian leadership was taken for granted, and the Serbs retained a hostility to the West second only to that held for the Turks.

Like many ideological constructs, the Serbian nationalist version of history overlooks too many inconsistencies -- like the point that a large portion of the Turkish Army of 1389 (at the "legendary" battle of Kosovo) was made up of Serbs. Moreover, Serbia remained independent until the 1430s, and many Serbs cooperated with the Turks after that.

Around the turn of the 20th Century, many Croatian nationalists were promoting a separate idea; that the South Slav identity could supersede specific religious identities and form the basis of allegiance to a new unified kingdom. As it turned out, this idea was the one implemented at the end of the First World War. Of the hodgepodge of peoples who formed the new Yugoslavia, the Serbs were the most numerous and soon dominated the political structure -- largely to their own benefit. This rapidly converted the barely suppressed nationalist instincts of their new compatriots into the poisonous hatreds that exploded during World War Two and again (after Tito had reconstructed Yugoslavia) in the 1990s.

The two attempts to create Yugoslavia both failed for the same reason -- in a multicultural state full of sensitive minorities, too many Serbs clung to their 19th Century manifesto of supremacy.

What has been left to the Serbs are two major problems: Their nationalist agenda has been frequently thwarted by outside powers, and their own self-image rests on a sense of historic persecution. To compensate for what they perceive as injustices, they have been aggressive in the creation of a Serbian state at the expense of others. As the Guide points out: "Serbian nationalists portray the Serbs as victims throughout their history, from their defeat by the Ottoman Turks in 1389 and subsequent victimization to Turkish rule, to their perceived victimization by the regime of Tito from 1945 to 1980. Past offences are remembered, and grudges harbored over centuries. The international isolation of Serbia during the Balkan crisis of the 1990s served only to bolster Serbian defensiveness and sense of only being able to rely on themselves."

When left to their own devices, Serbian nationalists will pursue their long-sought goals at the expense of other people. Outside opposition to this validates their belief that the world is against them. A clinical psychologist might have a name for this condition, and a very frustrated parent might recognize the willfulness of a destructive toddler who must be supervised and resents it. Or, in the dynamics of a school yard, one might think of a small bully who remembers every slight, seeks to take out his frustrations on others, and interprets every attempt to rein him in as bullying in itself.

This left NATO in the role of a liberal teacher in a climate that disapproves of corporal punishment -- who cannot ignore the problem but already has taken every reasonable measure that she can. In the end, everything else having failed and with no other recourse, the teacher is left with the stick. However, the wider community is even more uncomfortable with using the stick than is the teacher. Even worse, the stick probably won't work and the teacher has no real idea of what a dose of corporal punishment would achieve anyway.

One almost immediate result of the bombing was the validation of the ideological notion that the world is against the Serbs -- proof being immediately available. Whatever else transpires from the conflict, it has given Serbs a whole new grudge to nurse, preserve, and pass down through the generations. It is also telling that the bully immediately became worse, and the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo accelerated.

In the defence of the Serbs, it must be said they live in a schoolyard full of other bullies, sniveling tattle-tales, and sneaks. In the Yugoslavian conflicts of the 1990s, the Serbs might have been the most murderous, but when it cape to rape, slaughter, arson and pillage, they really didn't have much to teach the Croats about technique. When it came to double-dealing and duplicity, the Bosnians were their equals. When it came to letting gangsters wear the guise of patriots, Arkan (or Mr. and Mrs. Milosevic for that matter) had nothing to teach the Albanians. Even today's NATO intervention in Kosovo cannot be thought of as a black-white issue. In the Balkans, everyone wears soiled gray.

Still, NATO's stick is hitting hard. Air strikes have caused enormous material destruction. The Serbs have lost billions of dollars in military hardware and billions more in hard-won infrastructure. By early May, they will probably lose hundreds of soldiers and tens of civilians. But the bully in the Serbian nationalist tradition will treasure the slight. It will confirm his belief that the world is against him and he is therefore justified in being a bully to look after his own interests.

In the 19th Century, gunboat diplomacy rarely solved anything in the long run. When the smoke cleared and the survivors crawled out of the rubble, they would accede to the gunboat's immediate demands. However, those who were bombarded harbored their resentments until they could repay the shelling with interest -- and some accounts have yet to be settled.

The problem in the rump of Yugoslavia is that speaking softly never worked, and the stick had to be applied. The next problem is that the stick really won't work either. So what comes next?