Depoliticising the Balkans? International intervention(s) and economic development in Kosovo

Abstract

Slavoj Zizek and Agon Hamza From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo, Kolektivi Materializmi Dialektik: Prishtine, 2013; 103 pp.: 9789951883528 (pbk) The charge of de-politicisation has long been a staple in leftist circles. Since John Harris coined the phrase, we often hear that the World Bank has been in the business of 'depoliticising development' (Harris 2002). Neoliberalism itself is frequently chided for denying or concealing its deeply political character. (1) At times, though, the argument from depoliticisation has been stretched to absurd proportions. In much of the post-modern literature, the study of development--or of anything else, for that matter--is reduced to a study of its 'discourse'. As a result, the material dimensions of international development --how developing countries are hardly benefttting from development interventions; how international capital has an axe to grind in this global 'industry'; how development practice may be redesigned to the benefit of the global South, etc.--are simply taken for granted, or even spitefully dismissed. The post-modern critique of ideology, just like the ideology it critiques, ends up obscuring, rather than illuminating, the social world. Loosely speaking, this punchy philosophical diptych steers clear of the fallacies of the post-modern turn. As such, it artfully demonstrates how the charge of depoliticisation can resonate also with those who maintain that materiality remains an important (if not the most important) dimension of the social world. Focusing on NATO's 1999 intervention in Kosovo and the process of post-war reconstruction, this book takes aim at the 'proliferation of discourses on the ethnicisation and culturalisation of ... injustice' (p. 76)--a phenomenon that Zizek and Hamza regard as an attempt to take politics out of the picture. According to the authors, the scholarship on the Balkans is overwhelmingly written by 'essentialists or culturologists' (p. 12), who explain virtually everything --from the dissolution of Yugoslavia to persistent economic underdevelopment--as a consequence of culture. Beginning in the late 1980s, pre-modern myths and neo-tribal passions supposedly resurfaced and re-ignited a long-simmering powder keg of interethnic strife and socioeconomic impoverishment. Engulfed by an irrational fever-pitch, the cultural imaginary of the Balkans stands in contrast to the rational-objective gaze of Western commentators--the likes of Noel Malcolm and Anna di Lellio--who set out to 'demystify' the Balkan spell of tribal myths, revealing the latter for what they really are, and explaining the supposed role of these phantasms in fuelling violence, conflict and poverty. The authors do not dwell on the intellectual origins of the culturalist discourse. Rather, their response is a call for re-politicisation: demystifying the very practice of 'myth demystification' (p. 79) in which Western intellectuals have engaged since the break-up of Yugoslavia. To their credit, Zizek and Hamza do not limit themselves to a critical discourse analysis. They also preoccupy themselves with the political economy of humanitarian intervention and post-conflict state-building, dissecting and re-politicising the irreducibly material dimensions of the social phenomena that the culturalist seeks to depoliticise and obscure. In particular, the authors set out to dismantle the two most influential arguments made in response to foreign intervention(s) in Kosovo: on the one hand, the liberal view that a well-meaning West violated Yugoslavia's sovereignty benevolently and legitimately in order to protect the human rights of Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian majority; and on the other, the view defended by the likes of Michael Parenti (2002), according to whom NATO--qua military arm of Western corporate capital--launched the 1999 intervention to bring down Europe's last line of resistance to neoliberal capitalism, namely Milosevic's Yugoslavia. …