V.

 

Of course the murder of Kitty Genovese under her blood-stained stairway in Queens is not the same, legally or strategically, as the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the blood-soaked villages of Bosnia. If it were, then armed intervention (a strategic act) to protect the Muslims would be like police work (a law-governed act): that is, there would be no debate as to whether the benefit of enforcing the rules justifies the cost of their enforcement. Some international lawyers and diplomats behave as though there is a world order of nation-states that is analogous to the civil order of a society, and they argue that the international community must respond in the way that a domestic government responds to criminal behavior. This makes armed intervention into a kind of police work. If anyone still believed in this vision of world order in 1992, I don't see how that person could maintain such a view after Yugoslavia. One might say that the lifespan of the “New World Order” can be dated from its beginning in Kuwait City to its demise in Srebrenica. It would be more accurate to say that the society of nation-states that was forged in the Long War acted swiftly and with assuredness in Kuwait, where it offered a classic nation-state answer to a classic state problem of aggression to acquire resources; and that this sure-footedness vanished when that same society was faced with a more puzzling conundrum arising from its own identity: when does a “nation” get a state? What made this failure so significant—for it is hardly the first time this question has arisen—is that it occurred in the context of the emergence of the new market-states.