Dracula As Ethnic Conflict

Framing a Just War

The shift in U.S. racial logics that took shape in the 1990s through the production of Balkan otherness is exemplified in Clinton’s address to the nation on his last night as president. Asking U.S. citizens to remember the successes of NATO’s air strikes against Serbia and Kosovo, he declared, “We achieve our aims by defending our values and leading the forces of freedom and peace. . . . We must remember that America cannot lead the world unless here at home we weave the threads of our coat of many colors into the fabric of one America.”14 Not only did the president’s reminiscences about the U.S. leadership of Operation Allied Force interpret U.S. national interests to stand for universal values such as peace, but his thoughts on Kosovo reaffirmed that over a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States still held its rightful position as leader of the free world. Using a common metaphor for multiculturalism—the image of the interwoven threads in a coat of many colors—Clinton’s justification of U.S. global interventionism defined and upheld a contrast between U.S. domestic race relations and ethnic conflict abroad. In this way, U.S. multiculturalism rewrote U.S. militarism as a benevolent force that spreads diversity and tolerance around the globe. Affirming the United States as a space of racial harmony that had earned the right to lead the free world by overcoming its own racist foundations through capitalist development meant locating the Balkans as a locus of conflict that represented the antithesis of contemporary U.S. multicultural ideals. The rise of multiculturalism as the predominant mode through which to envision a pluralist democracy during the 1980s and 1990s in the United States differed from the earlier European concept of the ethnic nation-state. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when discrimination along racial lines was rendered illegal, the myth of racial progress emphasized the nation’s evolution beyond its illiberal racist past. The development of the United States’ self-understanding as a multicultural democracy in the 1990s depended on contrasting its “diversity” as a symbol of democracy, modernity, and freedom with the so-called primordial ethnic conflicts in the Balkans, which conjured up premodern, tribal, and violent formations based in “blood and belonging.”15 In this context, the monstrosity of ethnic conflict that reminded the United States of its own past of genocide, slavery, and nativist violence was subsumed by the deployment of the “civilizing technologies” of the U.S.-led Western “humanitarian” imperialism to stop the bloodshed in the Balkans.

The violent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia can be attributed to a number of political and economic factors, none of which had to do with ahistorical ancient hatreds. The most important dynamic leading to the rise of nationalism in the Balkans was the end of Yugoslavia’s privileged non-Allied position in Cold War Europe, since foreign loans on which the country depended were no longer available. It is no coincidence that the election of Slobodan Milošević in the late 1980s coincided with the elections of nationalist leaders Milan Kucan in Slovenia and Franjo Tudjman in Croatia. As Jasminka Udovicki and Ivan Torov have shown,

in nationalism conservative forces found an instrument against fundamental social, political, and economic change that threatened their social privileges. . . . The propaganda Milošević, and later on Tudjman, set in motion appealed to the quite tangible legitimate grievances of the common person: the falling standard of living and the political void. The appeals evolved around the same core: the claim that current economic ills in each of the republics stemmed from the long practice of economic exploitation and political subordination of that republic by all others. . . . In both cases nationalism served objectives that had little to do with ethnicity or grassroots ethnic sentiment, were politically motivated, and were orchestrated from above.16

Although nationalism was not an isolated phenomenon in Serbia during the 1990s but an ideology that also held appeal for the other Yugoslav republics, during the violent disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Western attempts to comprehend the wars of secession focused all of the blame on the figure of Milošević as the rogue nationalist Serbian dictator. According to Susan Woodward, although Yugoslavia lost its significance to the major powers after the Cold War, the ideology of Cold War anticommunism continued to influence the United States’ reaction to the disintegration of Yugoslavia: “Anyone who opposed the Communist Party and Communist leaders was, by definition, supported.”17 She argues that the nationalist leaders of Slovenia and Croatia were able to win over Western public opinion by presenting themselves as democratic in contrast to “Communist dictators in Belgrade” and by downplaying instances of their own governments’ political oppression. Moreover, after the Cold War, the United States supported regimes that were willing to provide new markets for the West as opposed to ones that were resistant, such as the Milošević regime in Serbia.

Slobodan Milošević, known in the West as the “butcher of the Balkans” and as the primary architect of Yugoslavia’s wars of secession, rose to power in Serbia during the late 1980s on the basis of his regressive ethnonationalist policy toward Kosovo. After the death of longtime Yugoslav president Tito in 1980, ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, who constituted 80 percent of the population in that autonomous province of Serbia, began to demand greater self-governance.18 At the same time, the Serbian minority in Kosovo believed that they were gradually losing their civil rights and suffering harassment at the hands of Albanian secessionists. On April 24, 1987, Milošević, then the head of the Serbian Communist Party, was sent by Serbian president Ivan Stambolić to listen to the Kosovar Serbs’ grievances. In a now-famous speech on Kosovo Polje, Milošević told the Kosovar Serbs who claimed to have suffered attacks at the hands of ethnic Albanians, “No one should dare to beat you!” This was a statement that immediately assured him widespread support amid a growing number of Serb nationalists in Serbia proper as well as in Kosovo.

In 1989, when Milošević assumed the Serbian presidency, he immediately revoked Kosovo’s autonomous status. Throughout the 1990s, Kosovo’s instability was manifest in occasional eruptions of violence between ethnic Albanian guerillas and Serbian authorities. The violence escalated in the late 1990s, and an estimated two hundred thousand ethnic Albanians were displaced from their homes. During 1998, the Contact Group nations designated by the United Nations to promote peace in the region organized a series of meetings between the Serbian government and ethnic Albanian leadership, and the United Nations Security Council demanded that Serbian hostilities cease. At this time, NATO members backed their threats against the Serbian government by mobilizing forces in the region. The Rambouillet peace negotiations, held in February 1999, represented the culmination of Western diplomatic efforts. Though the Albanian leadership agreed to both plans, Milošević refused to sign the treaty, which would have granted NATO forces full access to Serbia as a whole, not just the Kosovo province. For the Milošević government, the peace plan raised serious concerns about the nation’s sovereignty. Less than a month later, on March 24, NATO’s aerial bombing campaign began.

NATO was acting without the support of the United Nations and against NATO’s own founding charter. Russia and China, both members of the United Nations Security Council, had indicated their opposition to the air strikes. Nonetheless, U.S. political rhetoric stressed that its alliance with NATO countries represented a new global future. Clinton explained to U.S. citizens that while the initial formation of NATO following World War II “made possible the victory of freedom all across the continent . . . Bosnia taught us a lesson. In this volatile region, violence we fail to oppose will lead to greater violence we will have to oppose later.”19 Positing that the problems of the postsocialist era demanded a different solution from those of the Cold War, he noted, “At the end of the 20th century, we face a great battle between the forces of integration and the forces of disintegration, the forces of globalism versus the forces of tribalism, of oppression against empowerment.”20 Although Clinton emphasized that the United States could not intervene in every tragic instance of ethnic conflict, military action in the Balkans was essential because the meaning of fundamental Euro-American principles, such as freedom and tolerance, hung in the balance.

In U.S. political rhetoric, the geographic location of the Balkans on the European continent made it a privileged geopolitical site to be saved at all costs. Even though Clinton framed recent events on the peninsula through the analogy of a violent civilizational fault line, he also emphasized that securing democracy and harmony in the region was important to a unified and peaceful Europe. In his presidential address on the eve of the NATO attacks, he explained that “defusing a powder keg in the heart of Europe” was essential, because “if America is going to be prosperous and secure we need a Europe that is prosperous, secure, undivided and free.”21 The Balkans’ symbolic position as neither fully European nor fully other enabled the universalizing rhetoric that legitimized NATO’s Operation Allied Force as a just and necessary war for postsocialist restructuring. Meanwhile, because U.S. imperial ambitions within Europe itself seem unthinkable, the nation’s economic interests in the region were subsumed within the rhetoric of values. The U.S. administration repeatedly contended that NATO air strikes were not an act of war against the Serbian people nor even, ultimately, against Milošević. Instead, it was a grander war of ideals—tolerance, liberalism, and freedom against intolerance, totalitarianism, and religiously motivated ethnic warfare. Portrayed as a war that was not to be fought in the name of national boundaries or territory, U.S. national interests and European security were deemed to be selfless actions that “[advanced] the cause of peace” across the globe to protect “defenseless people.”22

Of course, the aerial campaign allowed the United States to reassert its economic and military leadership in Europe as a whole. NATO’s origins in Europe’s post–World War II devastation and U.S. economic gains from rebuilding the region through the Marshall Plan underwrote U.S. dominance in the alliance. For Clinton, the postsocialist era provided a similar opportunity for the United States, only this time economic prosperity was more clearly connected to diversity and tolerance. In his words, “the United States must do for southeastern Europe what we did for Western Europe after World War II and for Central Europe after the cold war. Freedom, respect for minority rights, and prosperity are powerful forces for progress.”23 Even as the post–Cold War enlarged NATO was refigured as a nonmilitaristic, universal, moral, and just alliance—a symbol for a Europe standing united against a single rogue dictatorship—the U.S. position as leader of that alliance during Operation Allied Force was based in the military superiority of the United States over the other NATO nations. As Michael Ignatieff put it, “Only the United States can muster the military might necessary to deter potential attackers and rescue victims.”24 Ignatieff’s statement makes it clear that in the contemporary U.S.-led global order, as in the earlier era of European imperialism, the “forces of progress” are determined and executed only by those nations that possess advanced military technologies.

Several months after NATO declared victory over Milošević, and Serbian troops withdrew from Kosovo, Clinton traveled to Kosovo for the first time. According to one news report, “for Mr. Clinton, the brief visit was the first to a tiny patch of Europe he had studied so closely on maps, on satellite images, and at countless briefings during the NATO air war.”25 The president’s now “humanized” vision of Kosovo legitimized the U.S.-led military occupation of the province. Building on the understanding that during the air strikes the United States was the only nation with the military and technological capability to win the war, after the war Clinton asserted that the United States was also the only nation that could exemplify multiethnic peace on a global scale. Addressing the U.S. peacekeeping troops, he urged them to “be a model to the people in Kosovo to show how different ethnic groups could coexist peacefully.”26 Singling out ethnoreligious hatred and violence as one of the world’s greatest problems, Clinton referenced U.S. leadership in Operation Allied Force to redefine the role of U.S. military interventions worldwide as being about racial and religious tolerance. Just as in the domestic context U.S. multiculturalism depended on erasing the sedimented histories of racial violence, slavery, and inequality, in Kosovo the U.S. vision of spreading multiculturalism covered over the violence of the fifteen hundred civilians killed as “collateral damage.” Adapting the rhetoric of multiculturalism to justify U.S. military aggression and occupation as humanitarian, Clinton concluded that “because of our resolve the 20th century is ending . . . with a hopeful affirmation of human dignity and human rights in the 21st century.”27

Dracula’s Imperial Technologies

As an emergent global morality embodied by the coalition between New Europe and the United States took shape against the atrocities of individual rogue nations, it became clear that transnational ideas about humanity and inhumanity would continue to be consolidated through warfare in the postsocialist era. Thus even as the vampire (and vampire nations) ruptured the ideal of a post–Cold War united humanity, claims to universal human values depended on reviving the vampire figure.28 As numerous Dracula scholars have pointed out, the adaptability of the Dracula narrative is a testament to modernity’s unfinished project, which has kept the West ever vigilant of “others” who might reemerge from the dead to strike at civilized lifeworlds.29 While Stoker’s novel can be read as contributing to British imperial discourses that justified British colonialism and exploitation in Asia and Africa as a manifestation of civilizing progress, Dracula also portrayed the ambiguity inherent in modernizing imperatives, which could risk reproducing monstrosity. Put otherwise, rather than simply reaffirming a hard boundary between European modernity and its others, the imperial Gothic frame and its political afterlife exemplify how knowledge and technology are constituted through the very horrors they seek to subjugate.

In an astute critique of the merging of Gothic frames and military and media technologies in Operation Allied Force, the Yugoslav Canadian artist and activist Tamara Vukov, known as “Pomgrenade,” created a web project entitled Balkan Mediations.30 The three parts of the site, “Proximal Distances,” “Ghostly Presences,” and “Disjuncture,” comment on how the North American God’s-eye view of the war as an act of “moralistic humanism against monstrous others” depended on the media staging of the Balkans as a distant set of digitalized targets. Balkan Mediations constructs a visual collage that assembles clips from NATO press briefings, televised scenes of the aerial bombardment, excerpts from print media analyzing the war, academic and theoretical critiques of American militarism, filmic constructs of Balkan otherness, and personal e-mails from the artist’s family and friends living in the former Yugoslavia. Through its cultural assemblage, the website links the literary, filmic, media, and military visions of the Balkans as a “staging ground for monstrous horror.”31

Balkan Mediations cites the Internet’s origins as yet another technology of the U.S. military to highlight the complicity between media and military technologies in justifications of contemporary U.S. violence. At the same time, Pomgrenade’s use of the World Wide Web as a stage for activism opens a space for critical intervention against the dominant uses for new technologies. In a digital image entitled “Cockpit,” which imagines a NATO bomber’s view of the enemy in the seventy-four-day aerial campaign, Pomgrenade connects the destructive violence produced by extreme assertions of Western military superiority to the cultural production of vampiric and monstrous enemies. The image highlights the interdependence of war and the field of representation. In the very center of the digitalized cockpit, a caption indicts the NATO bomber and presumably the Western viewer: “You construct elaborate technologies to make your killing seem rational.” The bomber’s console consists of five animated screens that alternately display radar target-location systems and scenes from the ground view that portray the human destruction resulting from the bombing: refugees; debris from civilian buildings; and the enemy’s media system, Radio Television Serbia, in flames. The ground views of the “targets” in Serbia and Kosovo are positioned alongside other “targets” of U.S. aggression in Iraq and in the United States itself. News footage of a rolling tank from U.S. Operation Desert Storm in Iraq implicates the U.S. media’s construction of composite and interchangeable enemies. Meanwhile, images of U.S. officers “securing” the border by preventing undesired others from entering condemn ongoing U.S. racism, as exemplified in its immigration policy. Indeed, the technologies used to police U.S. minorities and immigrants by the U.S.–Mexico border developed after the U.S. military defeat in Vietnam as part of a program to “perfect electronic warfare” and tracking devices.32

The largest and most prominent screen in “Cockpit,” which is positioned above the five smaller views of Western military destruction, frames the narrative of Western violence through a slide show of stills from F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu, the first surviving screen adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula. Since Dracula, the undead Transylvanian count, is the foremost figure of Balkan monstrosity in the Western imaginary, the Nosferatu film stills symbolize the cultural discourses and Gothic imaginary that mediated contemporary representations of “the enemy.” The undead Count reemerges at the center of the war engine’s console, yet the image of his looming shadow leaves ambiguous whether he is the one hunted or whether his shadow represents the fighter jet’s own shadow. The “Cockpit” image suggests that the 1999 Gothic visions of “the enemy” were an instance of “Balkanism,” a Western discourse that, according to the website, has produced the region “as a liminal space between Europe and orient, a zone of ethnic impurity, instability and irrationality, a staging ground for monstrous horror.” As Maria Todorova has shown, the Balkans have never been viewed as totally other to the West because they are geographically in Europe. Instead, Western popular and political discourses have, over time, imagined the Balkans as the “incomplete self” that has yet to be enlightened.33 In the Western imaginary, the distant and the more recent history of Balkan violence and hatred makes manifest the (im)possibility of transition from East to West, from primitive to enlightened, and from barbaric to benevolent. Like the looming shadow visible from “Cockpit,” Western depictions of the Balkans reveal more about Euro-American self-perception than they do about the human landscape in the countries of the Balkan Peninsula. Indeed, inhuman geographies are necessary for the continued affirmation of Euro-American values and humanitarian ethos.

In Stoker’s Dracula, vampirism is geographically rooted, emerging in the fault lines of the Balkan landscape. As the novel’s Dr. Van Helsing explains to the vampire hunters in the Balkans, “there is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces which work for physical life in strange way.”34 Stoker’s geological explanation for the origins of vampirism has hauntingly reverberated in the contemporary discourses about Euro-American humanitarianism and the ethnoreligious threat of “Balkanization.” Pertinent to the instantiation of postsocialist imperialism is the fact that the count’s vampirism originates in the violence of imperial conquest. Dracula tells the British solicitor Jonathan Harker that he had to redeem “that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova.”35 In his undeath, the count continually reenacts his redemption of Kosovo, which was lost to the Christian world when the Ottomans defeated the medieval Serbian Empire in the fourteenth-century Battle of Kosovo. Dracula’s state of Balkan “undeath” only begins to threaten the “teeming millions” of London once his own landscape has become completely “barren of peoples” (what contemporary discourses have called “ethnically cleansed” landscapes).36 The vanquishing of the count foreshadows the possibility of bringing modernity to the Balkans and making it truly European, which was a desire expressed by Western European politicians throughout the twentieth century. For this reason, the vampire hunters are necessarily a multinational group, representing Britain, the most powerful modern empire; the Netherlands; and the United States, a rising empire allied with Western Europe through its origins in British colonialism.

The nineteenth-century Gothic production of the modern European human and the characteristics of humanity that came to be imagined against the horrors of Balkan inhumanity took shape in the cultural opposition between knowledge and superstition. In Dracula, the meaning of Europe at its outer limits was asserted through advancements in British technologies, particularly those of documentation and the law. Material documents of monstrosity, produced through scientific methods that include observation and representation, at once gave life to horrific otherness and sought to vanquish the evils of superstition and tradition. In this vein, new media technologies that could more quickly and accurately produce a record of monstrosity were portrayed as the foremost imperial weapons that could vanquish the evils of vampirism. The novel assembles a collage of journal entries originally written in shorthand, newspaper accounts, telegrams, and phonograph dictations, all of which are transcribed by the competent “new woman,” Mina Harker, on her typewriter. Thomas Richards notes that textual archives were central for building and imagining empire in Britain.37 He argues that because “in a very real sense, theirs was a paper empire,” turn-of-the-century British fiction both (re)presented and (re)produced the unprecedented “alliance between power and knowledge.”38 Stoker’s novel can be thus read as a paper archive that documents the vampire hunters’ knowledge of Dracula in order to justify his destruction in the name of protecting Western modernity against past horrors. The documents exonerate the vampire hunters and legitimize their vigilantism.39

Without the new technologies of the Victorian era, such an extensive collection and preservation of textual evidence would have been impossible. For instance, shorthand notation used by both Mina and Jonathan Harker enabled a novel and more efficient method of notation; the Dictaphone into which their ally, Dr. Seward, dictated his journal entries represented the technological capability to record voices; and the typewriter allowed Mina, even when on the road, to speedily collate evidence of Dracula’s existence, which ultimately legitimized his destruction. In addition to these technologies of documentation, the technologies of communication, such as the telegraph, and transportation, such as the efficient British rail system, emblematized the possibility of instantaneously transmitting knowledge and information that facilitated mastery over great distances. At the very end of the novel, even though Dracula had destroyed the original handwritten texts, Mina Harker’s triplicate typescripts remain. Although Jonathan Harker doubts that these copies carry the same legitimacy as the originals or that anyone could believe the story told within their pages, the image of Dracula’s multiple copies with which the novel concludes invokes the reproductive power of Gothic horror and the reproductive capacities of modern technology.

Just as Dracula’s textual archive simultaneously produces monstrosity and legitimizes the Western right to vanquish the monstrous, modern law is also based on a system of textual citation that simultaneously produces the exception and establishes the rule. Dracula is initially able to establish himself in London and to acquire property there through his knowledge of British law. It is therefore important that the vampire hunters be able to reestablish their command over the metropole by asserting the spirit of the law over the letter of the law. As Carol Senf points out, it is ironic that Jonathan Harker and Dr. Van Helsing, who are both solicitors, “repeatedly violate the laws which they profess to be defending: they avoid an inquest of Lucy’s death, break into her tomb and desecrate her body, break into Dracula’s houses, frequently resort to bribery and coercion to avoid legal involvement, and openly admit that they are responsible for deaths of alleged vampires.”40 Within Dracula’s logic, however, it is only by operating outside the law that the vampire hunters can restore law and order to the imperial metropole. In spite of the fact that the count uses the letter of the British law, the vampire hunters establish evidence that he is fundamentally a criminal type who commits vampirism by turning the British law against itself. To do so, they contend that though Dracula is “not of nature” he must still “obey some of nature’s laws.”41 By appealing to natural law as preceding contractual law, Van Helsing urges an understanding of the vampire hunters’ vigilantism as superseding modern law. As Van Helsing says in preparation for the hunt, “What is to be done is not for police or of the customs. It must be done by us alone and in our own way.”42 In other words, since the count’s actions are unnatural and outside the bounds of what modern law can account for, the vampire hunters’ technically illegal actions are nevertheless represented as necessary for maintaining the law.

It is no coincidence that the Gothic frame proved so apt for narrating NATO’s imperial military, media, and legal technologies as a humanizing force in the Balkans during the 1990s. Operation Allied Force was a war based in the extreme technological disparity between the NATO and Yugoslav militaries, which was evidenced in the fact that NATO ground troops were never deployed during the conflict.43 Because NATO’s campaign was exclusively aerial, in spite of flying over 31,000 missions, there was not a single Western-alliance casualty. While NATO pilots undertook minimal risk by maintaining a “safe distance” at 15,000 feet and deploying smart bombs and missiles, about 10,000 Yugoslav soldiers and 1,500 civilians were killed.44 Additionally, NATO bombings so exacerbated the dire situation of the ethnic Albanian refugees in Kosovo that by May 1999 over half a million people were displaced.45 NATO made use of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration program, relying on remotely piloted unmanned surveillance aircraft such as the Predator, a system designed to detect camouflaged enemy targets through Precision Targeting Identification and Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites that guide missiles to designated enemy targets.46 Even the indictment of Slobodan Milošević as a war criminal during the NATO campaign, the first such indictment of an active head of state in modern history, was justified by Western technology. While NATO continued to act as a warring party, the symbolism of Milošević’s indictment refigured the alliance’s military technologies as a benevolent surveillance mechanism used to “witness” human rights violations and to gather evidence against Milošević for the International Criminal Tribunal. As civilian casualties in Serbia and Kosovo mounted, Milošević’s indictment legitimized the alliance’s military operations through the very institutions of international law that NATO air strikes had bypassed by defying the United Nations’ processes. Although the ideals defended by the U.S.-led NATO alliance were meant to represent nonracist and universal humanitarian values against the rogue Serbian state, as noted earlier, NATO was acting without the support of the United Nations. Because Russia and China had indicated their opposition to the air strikes, with the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, the United States was able to assert its military superiority, establishing a precedent for its right to global interventionism that excepts itself from the approval of the international community of nations.

U.S. exceptionalism in the realm of international law establishes the sovereign right of the United States to decide on, suspend, and maintain the international juridical order through its imperial sovereignty, which has continued to undergird the violent process of constituting the “new world order” that we see manifest in the contemporary U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, NATO’s Operation Allied Force differed from earlier humanitarian interventions, such as those in Bosnia and Rwanda, in that, for the first time since the Third World independence struggles, the use of Western military force was explicitly understood to have imperialist objectives. However, through multicultural rhetoric, the new imperial formation was distanced from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imperial projects because it was enacted in the name of democracy, difference, and humanity. In his book Empire Lite, Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard professor of human rights and a prominent North American public intellectual, described empire as the necessary precondition for democracy in the contemporary global order.47 Ignatieff’s enthusiastic interpretation of war technologies, which, in his words, allowed “for the first time military means [to be] used to create a humanitarian space,” validates Western violence as enlightened.48

Based on the tropes of technological progress and monstrosity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the imperial Gothic continued to frame postsocialist fantasies of humanization inspired by Euro-American histories of slavery, imperialism, and institutionalized racism, whose legacies have not died out. Indeed, these histories are constitutive of modern Western epistemes through which the rest of the world is rendered legible. As Avery Gordon has suggested, “The post-modern, late-capitalist, postcolonial world represses and projects its ghosts or phantoms in similar intensities, if not entirely in the same forms, as the older world did.”49 Haunted by legacies of their racist “past,” the United States and its Western European allies displaced ongoing racial anxieties by opposing their humanitarian presence in the Balkans to the premodern barbarism of “ethnic cleansing,” for which the region came to be known. Yet even as Western politicians and the media “repressed” and “projected” their own past of racial violence and even the Holocaust onto the Balkans through their rationalizing political, media, and military technologies, the failure of these mechanisms to completely bury the memories of Western racial violence demonstrated that, to cite Stoker’s Dracula, “the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.”50

The Holocaust Analogy, New Moral Imperatives, and the Racing of Religion

Of all the instances of horrific inhumanity produced by Western racial and technological modernity, none has a similarly privileged place in historical accounts as the Holocaust. As a complement to the Gothic frame, which provided a cultural repertoire of monstrosity through which U.S. media and political rhetoric portrayed Balkan atrocity and Euro-American technological imperatives, the Holocaust became an analogy for understanding “ethnic cleansing” in the region. Histories of genocide and attempted genocide, of course, do not begin or end with the Holocaust. The United States was itself founded on the attempted removal and mass killing of Native Americans at the hands of European settlers. However, by choosing the particular correspondence of World War II and the Holocaust with “ethnic cleansing,” the U.S. media was able to foreground the U.S. role of first saving and then rebuilding war-torn Europe, then and now. The analogy seemed to suggest that Operation Allied Force was a reenactment of the moral imperatives from World War II. Though numerous historians criticized Clinton’s appropriation of the Holocaust to justify the NATO campaign in Serbia and Kosovo, this particular historical comparison invoked the need to intervene militarily more clearly than any other could have.51 Reenacting “saving the Jews” by “saving the Albanians,” a unified West demonstrated to itself that it had, once and for all, come to embody a common multicultural humanity through the overcoming of its own past of prejudice and violence against racial and religious minorities.

Throughout the 1999 NATO campaign, numerous articles addressed the fact that for an American generation that had grown up opposing the Vietnam War, including Clinton, Kosovo was the first chance in which a clear moral choice between right and wrong presented itself—it was the baby boomers’ turn to be heroes and to save the embattled Albanian minority in Kosovo. The NATO air strikes were therefore envisaged as the first just war since World War II. Clinton made the sweeping statement that “Sarajevo, the capital of neighboring Bosnia, is where World War I began. World War II and the Holocaust engulfed this region.”52 Indeed, according to Clinton, the United States and NATO were morally compelled to act because of the lessons taught by the Holocaust. Recalling the horrors of the civil war in Bosnia as the precedent for what was happening in Kosovo, Clinton argued in a presidential address that “this was genocide in the heart of Europe, not in 1945 but in 1995, not in some grainy newsreel from our parents’ and grandparents’ time, but in our own time, testing our humanity and our resolve.”53

From the start of Operation Allied Force, U.S. network news alluded to the parallels between “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo and the Nazi plan to eliminate all European Jewry. As soon as NATO air strikes began, U.S. televised news sources announced evidence of a growing human catastrophe in Kosovo, including forced marches and the dispossession of ethnic Albanians that had resulted from new “savage rounds of ethnic cleansing.”54 Though the pronouncement of the refugee crisis in Kosovo as the greatest human catastrophe since World War II implicitly invoked memories of the Holocaust, on March 28, NATO explicitly accused Serbian forces of “genocide.”55 News commentators were quick to urge the immediate documentation of war crimes, thus legitimizing NATO’s aggression as a mission to gather evidence against Serbian war crimes that were assumed to exist prior to the fact of discovery.56 As evidence of war crimes appeared to mount, the U.S. media broadcast images of streaming refugee columns, videos of burning villages, and personal testimonies. On April 10, the comparisons of the Kosovo crisis to the Holocaust became even more explicit. The German magazine Der Spiegel introduced evidence of a Serbian plan, entitled “Operation Horseshoe,” which provided instructions for the Yugoslav military on how to annihilate the Kosovo Liberation Army and remove all Kosovar Albanians from the province. Though actual evidence of the plan has never been produced, rumors that these documents existed led to chilling comparisons between Nazi plans for the “Final Solution” to the Jewish “problem” and “Operation Horseshoe.”

The U.S. media took these rumors as evidence that ever since the civil war in Bosnia, Milošević had been pursuing the goal of an ethnically pure, greater Serbia.57 Disturbingly, ABC News announced a countdown to the moment when not a single Albanian would be left in Kosovo.58 News cameras panned across the Kosovo landscape, which reporters described as “miles of emptiness.” Kosovo was portrayed as a “country without people,” a horrific image of what land looks like when it has been “ethnically cleansed.”59 While U.S. network news used the images of empty hillsides to show its viewers what a contemporary “final solution” looked like, televised reports of Albanian refugees that depicted people being crowded onto trains on their way to refugee camps in Macedonia alluded to the Nazi transport of Jews to death camps. CBS News coverage cut directly from the scenes of Albanian refugees to black-and-white footage of Jews being deported to death camps.60 Through this insertion of historic footage of the Jewish Holocaust into the contemporary scenes of ethnic Albanian displacement from their homes, the U.S. media flattened history in order to evoke a clear distinction between “right” and “wrong” and “villain” and “victim.”

Contemporary media and political discourses seamlessly refigured World War II history as the only analogy through which to grasp the evils of ethnic cleansing. Ironically, this occurred even though European modernity itself led to the horrors of the Holocaust. The recent history of Western European genocide should have served as a reminder for Operation Allied Force that, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”61 However, NATO officials and Western leaders used the Holocaust as a touchstone to distinguish European humanity from Balkan barbarity. In order to construe NATO’s militarism as part of a humanitarian ethics of intervention, European and U.S. foundations in racial and religious genocide were simultaneously rendered irrelevant to the present-day comportment of NATO nations, and significant only insofar as they became historical frameworks for understanding the Balkans as a contemporary site of inhumanity. Moreover, U.S. racism and European racism were framed as having been overcome in law and society long ago. Secretary General Javier Solana contrasted European values with Milošević’s and argued that NATO was fighting to reverse Serbian crimes against humanity in Kosovo. Reporters echoed this logic, suggesting that Western leaders fought a war of “remembrance” as a “‘never again’ cry” to the Holocaust.62 In her introduction of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who spoke on the perils of indifference at the White House, Hillary Clinton commented that Western values of “common humanity” stood opposed to the crimes of ethnic cleansing. During the same event, Bill Clinton suggested that it was only “natural” that Kosovo reminds us of the Holocaust.63 He presented NATO’s intervention in the region as an effort to preserve history, which the Serbs were trying to blot out in their campaign of ethnic cleansing. Thus while the United States and its allies engaged in a just war, defending Western values and spreading tolerance, the Serbs, according to one Newsweek reporter, lost all “norms of civilized behavior.”64 This reporter went on to argue that, unlike the Nazis, “the Serbs didn’t need to load Kosovars into boxcars to look bad. This is the nation that invented the term ‘ethnic cleansing.’”65

In their use of the Holocaust analogy, the media stirred U.S. audiences toward compassion by presenting NATO air strikes as an instance of benevolent intervention and implying that Western nations have the sovereign right to intervene because they use the lessons from past mistakes to fight racism and intolerance in the present. Although NATO did not put an end to “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia for a number of years, quickly responding to “genocide” and stopping a second Holocaust in Kosovo became an ethical responsibility in what British prime minister Tony Blair called “a battle between good and evil; between civilization and barbarity.”66 Introducing the term genocide through which to interpret images of the conflict in Kosovo thus ascribed morality and good to the side of Operation Allied Force. After Milošević was indicted as a war criminal accused of genocide and eventually extradited to The Hague in 2001, the media again invoked a plethora of historical allusions to World War II and the Nuremberg Trials. These allusions definitively inscribed the West on the side of universal values and justice, giving it the juridical and moral authority to pass judgment for the second time in the twentieth century over extremist forms of racism and ethnic prejudice. If the Holocaust was evidence of Western humanity’s past failures, then in acting to save the Kosovar Albanians “in time,” the West was reaffirming its “humanity” by atoning for not acting in time to save the European Jews.

The Holocaust was useful not just as a moral referent and imperative for intervention in Kosovo but also as a frame through which to reimagine the role of racial and religious difference in postsocialist imperial projects. As Mick Hume has noted, the term genocide is fundamentally connected to conceptions of racial difference. He argues that in the case of the Balkans, the Holocaust analogy led to a misuse of this term, which “is not just another word for brutality, making people homeless, putting people on trains, or even murder. It means . . . [the] ‘annihilation of a race.’”67 Whether or not the term genocide was misused in this instance, its connotation, as evidenced through the privileging of the Holocaust in 1999, demonstrates the importance of religious conflicts in postsocialist racializing discourses of difference. The Holocaust emerged as a clear choice for a historical analogy through which to apprehend Balkan “ethnic cleansing,” because the Nazi program occurred in Europe and served as an example of nationalist violence that conflated the religious and racial difference of the other. That U.S. and NATO intervention took place in Europe under the shadow of the Holocaust analogy precluded a critique of postsocialist imperialism, fought in the name of neoliberal principles of diversity and tolerance, as racist. Barnor Hesse has argued that since the end of World War II, the international concept of racism has privileged “the anti-fascist critiques of the Jewish Holocaust, while foreclosing subaltern and anti-colonial critiques centered on Western Imperialism.”68 The result of this imbalance, according to Hesse, has been that “the concept of racism is doubly-bound into revealing (nationalism) and concealing (liberalism), foregrounding (sub-humanism) and foreclosing (non-Europeanism), affirming (extremist ideology) and denying (routine governmentability).”69 Hesse’s framework helps elucidate what at first appears to be the incongruous equating of the Jewish Holocaust with the refugee crisis in Kosovo. In the U.S. media’s emphasis on Serbian “nationalism,” ethnic Albanian “sub-humanism,” and Milosević’s “extremist ideology,” dominant discourses that favored “humanitarian” intervention concealed how U.S. liberalism and its multicultural ideology continued to privilege Euro-American modernity as a site of progress against non-European others. The favored circulation of the Jewish Holocaust as an analogy for Kosovo undergirded the racialization of religious difference in the postsocialist era that enabled U.S. humanitarian imperialism to be portrayed as multicultural and antiracist.

Because the Western media conflated ethnicity and religion in their analysis of violence between the Orthodox Christian Serbs and the ethnic Albanian Muslims, the coverage set a precedent for using “religious” and “ideological” difference to replace “racial” difference as the predominant mechanism for interpreting non-Western conflicts as irrational, premodern, and genocidal formations.70 That this interchangeability enabled the comparison between “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans and the Nazi genocide of the Jews in the Holocaust suggests the dehistoricizing effects of such representations that ultimately allowed the U.S.-led Western coalition to represent its militarism as a struggle for universal human values. Although the term “ethnic cleansing” that was used to describe monstrous violence in the Balkans was popularized in the English vocabulary in 1992 during the Bosnian civil war, it was not until NATO’s Operation Allied Force that it came to be equated with “genocide.”71 Jean Seaton argues that the use of ethnicity to frame the civil wars in the 1990s was a depoliticizing mechanism that subsumed social and economic realities within the language of naturalized and essentialized differences.72 In the aftermath of the Holocaust, ethnic and racial explanations for conflict became taboo, and the Cold War provided “the stable background framework for situating conflicts.”73 After 1989, “ethnicity” began to be used again by journalists who attempted to comprehend contemporary instances of global crises. As Cold War histories were buried, theories of primordial differences gained credence as referents through which to understand non-Western conflicts. The resurrected concept of ethnoreligious sectarianism was significant because it marked the reemergence of nineteenth-century essentializing explanations of difference that were once used to conceive of European racial superiority and the right to imperial expansion.

The U.S. media’s use of the Holocaust analogy displaced U.S. national foundations in genocide, slavery, and imperialism from the realm of Western “civilization” by contrasting the ideals of “common humanity” in the West with contemporary “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans. Not only did the dehistoricized merging of the figures of the Nazi and the Serb, the Albanian and the Jew, and the conflict in Kosovo and the Holocaust conflate the different historical contexts, social complexities, and scales of violence but the use of the Holocaust analogy as the framing mechanism through which to understand Kosovo made it easy for the media to present a story of good and evil. Although both the U.S. media and the Clinton administration frequently invoked the Second World War’s clear moral imperative in order to justify NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, such instances of nostalgia also provided the opportunity for the West to rewrite its racist history, as it now presented a unified front against barbarity. With the United States and Germany no longer being the sites of genocide and Western Europe no longer the stage for the horrors of war, a unified West could finally symbolize its own redemption as it enacted its new imperial right to military aggression across the globe. While the West can recognize “racism” in contemporary instances of “ethnic conflict” by filtering it through the privileged frame of the Holocaust, it conceals its own context of domestic racial troubles, such as violent racism toward new immigrants, and new imperial ambitions, which unite Western capitalist states in the NATO alliance at present.

Media Technologies: Documenting the Horrors of a Humanitarian Crisis

The entrenchment of the Holocaust as a historical analogy for “ethnic cleansing” and the Gothic frame as a cultural repertoire for understanding humanitarian imperial technologies came together in media technologies rationalizing Operation Allied Force as a humanitarian and just war. A crucial task undertaken by the U.S. media was the humanization of NATO’s military intervention. This had to do with the imperative to manage the contradiction between the images of high-tech warfare that U.S. audiences saw each day of the aerial campaign, and the accompanying rhetoric that this was a war fought in the name of a global humanity. The increased role of the media in postsocialist warfare, and the ways that Western journalism was portrayed in relation to the pursuit of human rights through militarism, became important for managing the paradoxical association between war and human salvation that underwrote the new humanitarian imperialism.

Attempts to redefine the U.S. media’s role in the 1990s as an unbiased witness to humanitarian crises elided the collusion between media technologies that enable instant transmission of news and images, and new military technologies in the construction of modern wars. This was especially the case in Operation Allied Force, in which the Western media took on the role of documenting war crimes for use by the International Criminal Tribunal. The drive to document and therefore bring to light monstrous acts and horrific otherness through new media technologies, which affirms the objectivity and scientific authority of the Euro-American observer, is one of the central fantasies of the Gothic. In the present day, journalistic reports function similarly as a genre that documents and brings to light local and global developments. In instances of war, the scales of atrocity committed by the enemy, or in distant places embroiled in conflict, tend to be portrayed as unimaginable. Vivid images of suffering and death are circulated and reproduced, feeding the never-ending cycles of crisis and resolution produced by twenty-four-hour news networks. In spite of the sensational and spectacular composition and visual and narrative framing of such images, contemporary journalists emphasize objectivity in how information and news are transmitted to audiences. Especially in the reporting of distant horrors, the U.S. media insist on their independence from state control.74 According to the Society of Professional Journalists,

the history of journalism and the history of the laws of war are often intertwined. . . . Often, it is the journalists who are in the unique position of being able to combine reports from combatants and civilians, non-governmental organizations and government officials into a coherent and compelling account and to disseminate that account to a large audience. It is each journalist’s responsibility to make that account as complete and as accurate as possible.75

In spite of the journalistic ideal of impartiality and fairness, the contradictions inherent in the concept of militaristic humanitarianism underscore the impossibility of unbiased media documentation.

Media coverage of the 1990s humanitarian crises cannot simply be seen as the objective documentation of horrors that worked to generate public empathy and urge governmental intervention. The crises themselves must be understood as media events that were produced in conjunction with Euro-American national and economic interests. Throughout the 1990s, academic considerations of the Western media’s interaction with the state centered on the extent to which media documentation of humanitarian disasters influenced their governments to intervene in troubled regions. For instance, Piers Robinson’s work on the “CNN effect” relies on Somalia, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda as case studies for examining the extent to which the print and televised media’s “attention to the human consequences of ‘distant’ civil wars” led to intervention.76 Robinson concludes that “under conditions of policy uncertainty and critical and empathy-framed media coverage, the news media can be a factor in influencing policy-makers to use air power in pursuit of humanitarian objectives. No evidence was found that media coverage could cause policy-makers to pursue the more risky option of deploying ground troops during humanitarian crises.”77 Because Robinson’s media-state model only considers the effects of the media on state intervention, his study ultimately reduces the state–media relationship to that of unidirectional influence. In contrast, the 1999 NATO campaign suggests that it is crucial to address media and military technologies as coconstitutive in managing humanitarian catastrophes. As Mirjana Skoco and William Woodger have shown, since the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. military has strategically shifted its policy toward the media and has begun to share its operations’ details with journalists in order to satiate the demands of twenty-four-hour news coverage. The military now provides the media with “good stories” but continues to exclude “sensitive” information from the public domain.78 Relying on military publications and military academies’ course descriptions, Skoco and Woodger conclude that since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military has increasingly relied on the media to sell its policy to the public through “‘compelling stories of human values.’”79

In spite of this trend, during Operation Allied Force the myth of an independent Western media that objectively documented the horrors of ethnic cleansing was crucial to justifying NATO’s military aggression as a “humanitarian intervention” based in universal human values. Conversely, NATO demonized the Serbian media, arguing that it was a tool used by Milošević to indoctrinate his own people. On March 24, 1999, the day that NATO launched its air strikes against Serbia and Kosovo, the Serbian authorities arrested and expelled from the country most Western journalists. While the Milošević regime “assailed CNN as a ‘factory of lies’” and accused the Western media of being a “part of the whole attack structure,” U.S. journalists and media heads were not only frightened by the “harrowing experience” of “deportation” but also scrambling to find alternative intelligence sources in order to secure accurate reports from the war front.80 The expulsion of Western journalists from Serbia and Kosovo was widely interpreted as Milošević’s attempt to monopolize the global circulation of war images and to conceal the horror of Serbian war crimes from Western eyes. U.S. journalists argued that the action consolidated Milošević’s totalitarian control through Radio Television Serbia (RTS). U.S. print and televised media thus contrasted themselves to RTS, whose headquarters were eventually demolished during the NATO air strikes, by presenting themselves as non-nationalist organizations and independent participants coming to the aid of hapless victims in the Balkans.

One of NATO’s “humanitarian” aims, therefore, became installing a free and independent press in Serbia. Jamie Shea, NATO’s primary spokesperson during Operation Allied Force, argued that Radio Television Serbia was “spreading hatred and creating this political environment of repression.”81 NATO’s depiction of the Serbian media as illiberal and repressive legitimized its targeting of RTS in the middle of its campaign. On April 23, NATO bombed the RTS building in downtown Belgrade while there were at least 120 civilians working inside.82 Even though sixteen civilians were killed in the attack, NATO officials insisted that RTS was part of the “national command network” and that “our forces struck at the regime leadership’s ability to transmit their version of the news” by taking out the “source of propaganda.”83 By destroying RTS, the alliance affirmed that it recognized the media as a weapon during times of war—though, paradoxically, it only acknowledged it to be a weapon in the enemy’s hands. In NATO’s perspective, the Serbian media were turned into legitimate military targets because they were biased and therefore tools of Milošević’s regime. Rather than expressing concern over NATO’s destruction of a media network, as they had over being expelled from Yugoslavia, U.S. journalists echoed NATO’s rhetoric that the destruction of RTS had hit the “heart of the propaganda machine.”84 By distinguishing propaganda from journalism, the U.S. media affirmed their supposed roles as independent and unbiased sources of news that documented global horrors for the Western public.

NATO’s attempts to control information went beyond its cooperation with the Western media. When Wired magazine dubbed Operation Allied Force the “first internet war,” it implied that in this war new media provided a forum in which different points of view could be expressed and that, at least to an extent, information flows were democratized. After the war, Jamie Shea acknowledged the influence of the Internet on warfare by positing that “in the future NATO needs to be ‘more dynamic and creative’ in obtaining access to enemy media in order to ‘level the playing field.’”85 In the context of Western technological might, however, leveling the playing field is only significant insofar as promoting the vision of Western warfare as humanitarian and moral remains a foremost concern. Goran Gocić suggests that in the case of Operation Allied Force, though the Yugoslav media’s response to NATO bombings was much more sophisticated than NATO’s message, in a war in which “the technologically superior winner is known in advance, resistance significantly shifts in the realm of the symbolic.”86 Gocić concludes that since a pro-NATO stance was unthinkable during the bombing, far from liberating the Serbian media NATO in fact destroyed the widespread opposition to the Milošević regime that had been building in the 1990s. New media are not automatically democratizing forces; instead, media must be understood as instruments and technologies. As NATO’s Operation Allied Force demonstrated, new technologies continually shift and redefine the mutually constitutive roles of the military and media in warfare.

In spite of being the “first internet war,” the traditionally dominant forms of Western media (network and cable news, and major newspapers) continued to be the primary sources of news for Western audiences. During Operation Allied Force, the Western media tended to represent the war from the point of view of the new military technologies. Cable and network news sources broadcast cockpit scenes from fighter jets that deployed night vision technology and computerized target demolition, a common practice since the 1991 Gulf War. Unlike in the first Gulf War, images of NATO’s airpower were regularly juxtaposed with images of refugee columns and mass graves. Viewed side by side, the violence of Western military might was refigured as a benevolent force in the service of conflict resolution. The aerial campaign provided a “war fit for Western eyes,” in which NATO’s mistakes and “collateral damage” were justified by footage of the Albanian refugees.87 The media interpreted the scenes of burning villages and streaming refugees as evidence of the medieval warfare methods used by the Serbs. These scenes provided a contrast to NATO’s technological warfare, which appeared to be enlightened and humanitarian. Although after the campaign it became evident that the majority of Kosovar refugees were displaced due to NATO air strikes, during the war, the images, which mostly focused on displaced women, children, and the elderly, provided “the visual alibi for U.S. and NATO intervention by establishing a national narrative about U.S. power and political good.”88 NATO’s ambitions in Serbia and Kosovo were never simply, or even primarily, to stop Serbian violence against Kosovar Albanians. Rather, the U.S. media’s adoption of NATO’s military perspective, juxtaposed with scenes of the refugees, highlights the way in which the media contributed to the erasure of NATO’s role as one of the warring parties with its own interests in securing economic and political control over the last “rogue” nation in Europe. By presenting NATO’s military perspective of a benevolent intervention from the sky, the U.S. media confirmed President Clinton’s rhetoric that this was a war of human values fighting the vestiges of Balkan barbarity and masked U.S. interest in “developing” Eastern Europe and pursuing its own economic interests there.

Ironically, the technologies of Western humanitarianism mirrored Milošević’s own drive to “destroy,” especially when it became evident that NATO bombings severely increased the number of refugees in Kosovo. The day after the air strikes began, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, the American general Wesley Clark, declared:

The military mission is to attack Yugoslav military and security forces and associated facilities with sufficient effect to degrade its capacity to continue repression of the civilian population and to deter its further military actions against his own people. We aim to put its military and security forces at risk. We are going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate and ultimately destroy these forces and their facilities and support, unless President Milošević complies with the demands of the international community. In that respect the operation will be as long and difficult as President Milošević requires it to be.89

In Clark’s assessment, it is humanitarianism that motivates NATO to “attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate and . . . destroy.” NATO’s “humanitarianism” seemed to need to give in to violence in order to force Milošević to comply.

Nonetheless, the U.S. media represented military technology not just as a technology of war but also as a technology of human rights that could gather evidence of ethnic cleansing. Just as Stoker’s novel depicted new technologies of the Victorian era through which the vampire hunters documented Dracula’s vampirism, so the Western media replayed images from satellite and reconnaissance photographs that revealed mass graves as evidence of Serbian war crimes. In her analysis of the satellite view of mass graves in Srebrenica photographed during the civil war in Bosnia, Lisa Parks argues that U.S. officials interpreted the images as objective and omniscient, claiming that they had “acquired evidence of genocide.”90 In the context of the international community’s passivity during the war in Bosnia, Parks reads the satellite images as indicators of “distant technologised monitoring,” passive voyeurism, and the “refusal to acknowledge (put into discourse) the complex political, socio-historical, economic and cultural conditions that have given rise to the recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.”91 Though in Operation Allied Force satellite technologies continued to function reductively, they no longer proved Western passivity, but instead the photographs of unconfirmed (and in many instances never confirmed) graves were used as evidence to fuel support for NATO’s civilized humanitarianism against Serbian barbarity. Indeed, claiming that it is more difficult to argue with satellite and reconnaissance images than with eyewitnesses, the U.S. media explicitly recalled the Bosnia images to construct a time line of Serbian atrocities and to uphold the imperative for Western intervention.92 As one reporter put it, “along the blood-spattered timeline of Slobodan Milošević, Kosovo is merely the hideous Now.”93

Another strategy that the Western media utilized to bridge the distance between the highly technologized view of targets in Serbia and Kosovo and the purported humanitarian values of the military campaign was to personify the targets in the figure of Milošević. The Western media and military discourses about “degrading” Milošević’s capabilities were based in the extreme gap between high-tech and low-tech war-waging potentials, since referencing the precision of high-tech weapons was crucial for developing metaphors about taking out targets located in the body of a single individual. Each time NATO took out “strategic” targets in Serbia and Kosovo, NATO spokespeople and the U.S. media represented the military acts as attacks on Milošević’s “organism.” In the prominent example of NATO’s demolition of RTS, which was viewed by the U.S. media as the heart of the Milošević propaganda machine, Jamie Shea set the precedent for the use of such metaphors connecting the vital systems of the human body with the vital systems constituting the state. He proposed that by demolishing RTS, NATO had struck at the “central nerve system of the Milošević regime.”94 The term “surgical” air strike, which was first used during the Gulf War, thus took on new meaning during Operation Allied Force. The spectacular showing of “overwhelming or decisive force,” which was represented as being put to use against a single criminal, masked the damage to civilian life, including that done to the ethnic Albanians whom the technology was supposed to rescue from Milošević’s tyranny.95 In doing so, military and media technologies inscribed Western violence as just in contradistinction to individuated and pathologized religiously and racially motivated rogue forms of aggression.

In addition to humanizing NATO’s militarized perspective on the war, the U.S. media refigured their own role in the war as that of war crime witnesses as they documented the refugee crisis and Serbian war crimes. The structure of most broadcast news reports during the seventy-four days of air strikes cut from images of NATO planes taking off and the digitalized images of targets to columns of refugees crossing the border into neighboring Macedonia and Albania. In this context, U.S. journalists saw their role in interviewing Albanian survivors as supplementing that of military technologies, since they argued that their interviews preserved evidence in a landscape that was emptied of people.96 Indeed, “news organizations such as ABC . . . have willingly contributed documentaries, news reports and unbroadcast ‘rushes’ to the ICTY,” the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.97 Associating themselves with the ICTY and using familiar human rights genres, such as witness accounts and testimony, to frame their coverage of the war as an unbiased mode of documenting human rights atrocities, the U.S. media concealed their connection to and dependence on one of the warring parties—the U.S.-led NATO. Moreover, by depicting the war as being purely about human rights, it was implied that the United States and NATO were not participants in a war but, rather, benevolent interveners. The emergent conception of the U.S. media as an impartial technology documenting human rights violations through witness testimony thus elided the orchestration of Operation Allied Force as a coordinated media–military event. What is lost is that the U.S. media and the U.S.-led NATO used both visual and military technologies to shape the spaces of atrocity that they then “witnessed.” The reconceptualization of postsocialist humanitarian imperial projects as nonracist and moral depended on such erasures.

In a special episode of ABC’s Nightline about the difficulties of waging peace in Kosovo following the gradual return of Kosovar Albanian refugees to their homes, Ted Koppel, reporting from the scene, encapsulated the new role of the media as embodying the struggle for human rights and universal values.98 Koppel and his team, who were riding through Kosovo in an armored vehicle, came across a group of Kosovar Albanian children who mistook them for NATO troops. As more and more children gathered, shouting “NATO! NATO! NATO!” Koppel explained to them that he and his crew were not NATO but, as the Western media, were the harbingers of liberation. The Kosovar children’s confusion in their initial encounter with the ABC News crew, as well as Koppel’s implication that the Western media’s presence preceded the possibility of Western occupation or “liberation,” demonstrates the need for media and military cooperation in framing contemporary U.S. wars. The distinction between media and military roles in times of war has only become more blurred in the current U.S. occupation of Iraq due to the practice of “embedding” journalists. The media police, collect evidence, and are upheld as impartial witnesses in contemporary warfare, neglecting the fact that it is ultimately media coverage that distinguishes between “collateral damage” and “victims.” In this connection, U.S. journalists’ upholding of NATO’s militarism as humanistic and just, which removed NATO from consideration as one of the warring parties, belied the media’s self-proclaimed role of objectively documenting atrocities and building a more “human” view of the conflict in Kosovo.

Postsocialist Imperial Sovereignty and International Law

The use of media and military technologies of documentation to apprehend war crimes, alongside the Holocaust analogy, facilitated NATO’s invocation of international human rights law as justifying Operation Allied Force. The military operation explicitly referenced the Geneva Conventions, which established new regulations after World War II to prevent future wars and to outlaw war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, and genocide in all instances of armed conflict. NATO itself, however, violated international law, the UN charter (by bypassing the Security Council), and its own founding charter (which established NATO as a defensive alliance). Like the early attempts at modernizing and codifying law during the time of Euro-American imperialist expansion, NATO’s violation of international law opened up a space in which the West could create new law to justify its interventionism. The cultural invocation of Gothic inhumanity and monstrosity in the Balkans, which reaffirmed the U.S.-led West as a site of humanity and justice, was once again crucial for this shift. Through the opposition between the horrific monstrosity of ethnic cleansing and the ethical responsibility of Western humanitarian intervention, NATO militarism was portrayed as fighting on behalf of natural law and the rights of man, which preceded and trumped the letter of the international law. Following international law and charters, in other words, was represented as the choice that would have perpetuated the humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo.

NATO’s act of war established the sovereign right of the Euro-American powers to decide on the international juridical order. If, as Carl Schmitt famously argued in the context of Nazi Germany, the sovereign is the one who decides, then at issue is not just that Operation Allied Force violated Yugoslavia’s sovereignty, as many scholars have pointed out. Rather, NATO’s intervention established a new international juridical imperative in which (Euro-American) nations that establish themselves as spaces of rights, fighting against human rights violations in places marked by atrocity (the Global South and parts of Eastern Europe), need not follow the letter of the international law. In his work on the juridical and political constitution of modern governance, Giorgio Agamben builds on Schmitt’s concept of “exception” and sovereignty to argue that the state of exception, in which the rule of law is suspended, undergirds a structure of sovereignty based in a juridical order that can only establish the norm in the suspension of the law.99 In his most recent work, Agamben argues that “the state of exception increasingly tends to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics.”100 While Agamben’s argument is based on the George W. Bush administration’s suspension of the national juridical order enacted in the USA PATRIOT Act, NATO’s Operation Allied Force can also be considered as the occasion and post–World War II precedent for the United States’ suspension of international law. In other words, the “new” sovereign right to declare the state of exception in the international juridical order establishes the imperial sovereignty of the United States, a sovereignty that is based in its military and technological power. Since it went against the UN charter, Kosovo became a precedent for the United States to assert its sovereign right to decide on the exception to international law and its postsocialist imperial sovereignty.

Ever since Operation Allied Force set a precedent for deciding on the exception to international law, humanitarianism has become central to justifying each instance of U.S. interventionism that bypasses international approval. Indeed, the “new” imperial sovereignty claims to embody and spread human values. During the NATO air strikes, Jack Goldsmith, a professor of international law, argued that humanitarian emergencies provide an exception to international law “by custom and practice,” though in the instance of U.S. interventionism the debates over legality remain largely theoretical because no nation-state or international organization can hold the United States accountable.101 Because NATO’s disregard for the UN charter raised critical questions about the force of international law and the legitimacy of the United Nations, those supporting the NATO air strikes quickly acknowledged that though technically illegal, NATO’s cause was morally justified, and its military actions were therefore legitimate. Václav Havel, like President Clinton, argued that NATO’s air strikes were the first war to fully privilege principles and values over national interests. He claimed that this war “did not happen irresponsibly, as an act of aggression or out of disrespect for international law. It happened, on the contrary, out of respect for the law, for the law that ranks higher than the law which protects sovereignty of states.”102 Any argument in favor of “just war,” such as Havel’s, demands closer consideration of who defines justice and decides on higher law. The report of the Brookings Institution, for instance, found that

NATO had moral and strategic rectitude on its side in using military power in the Balkans. First, upholding human rights and alleviating humanitarian tragedy are worthy goals for American national security policy. Doing so reinforces the notion that the United States is not interested in power for its own sake but rather to enhance stability and security and to promote certain universal principles and values.103

The Brookings report tries to argue, as did Havel, that the universal principles of humanitarian law, which the United States and its allies were supposedly attempting to uphold, legitimized NATO’s air strikes. In the end, however, the report has difficulty distinguishing between “universal principles and values” and U.S. national security and interests. The conflation between U.S. national interests and universal ideals forecloses the possibility that the United States itself would ever need to submit its actions to the judgment of an international court. By blurring the line between a higher moral law that suspends international law and Western national interests, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention legitimizes U.S. and Western global military presence.104

NATO’s violation of the UN charter affirmed and upheld the U.S.-led West as a space that already embodies universal values and human rights and that therefore has the right to judge and punish the violators of the laws upon which it has decided. The Independent International Commission on Kosovo tried to account for the indeterminate space in international law opened up by Operation Allied Force. In its assessment of the war in Kosovo, the Commission concluded that because NATO’s actions were legitimate but illegal, in cases of “genocide,” the international community needs to recognize a “grey zone” that goes “beyond strict ideas of legality to incorporate more flexible views of legitimacy.”105 The Commission’s proposal for a more “flexible approach” in instances of humanitarian crises raises a crucial point about the disjuncture between the law and the ideals of human rights and the principles of justice. Nevertheless, if NATO’s violent humanitarianism is to be the precedent for a more “flexible approach” to international law, it has become clear that only the United States has the sovereign right to decide on the worthy values and the worthy crisis, and that it prevents other nations from doing so. As Nelson Mandela stressed in his introduction to the Kosovo Commission’s report, “It has now become so customary to point to the failure of the international community to intervene and end the genocide in Rwanda that it is almost forgotten that this relative neglect of Africa in these matters is much more general than only the Rwanda case.”106

The climax of NATO’s Operation Allied Force was the criminal indictment of Slobodan Milošević. In this process, Milošević was identified with Hitler and Stalin, a composite figure of evil, like Stoker’s Count Dracula. Like the vampire, who is described in the novel as a “criminal type,” Milošević was the figure in the 1990s against whom the U.S.-led West established a new global order in which the West continually reimagines the face of the enemy and dubs it criminal. Diana Johnstone has argued that as the sole superpower in the post–Cold War era, the United States has devised a system of crime and punishment, underwritten by humanitarianism, which has become the justification for its global acts of military aggression.107 Similarly, according to Alex Callincos, the importance of the criminal in the new world order structures the dominant language of rights, justice, and law through which international affairs become depoliticized as the judicial order of crime and punishment (upon which the West has decided) becomes supreme.108 The U.S. government’s offer of a $5 million reward for the capture of Slobodan Milošević was one such highly publicized figuration of an outlaw dictator; the “Wanted” posters that circulated in the U.S. media refigured NATO’s actions, ascribing to them the authority to police the international order and excluding the Euro-American alliance’s actions from the scrutiny of international law. Like the packs of playing cards issued to U.S. soldiers in Iraq that featured Saddam Hussein and his officials, the poster of Slobodan Milošević provided a cultural reference through which the U.S. public could understand U.S. military action as an execution of justice.

Following his capture and extradition to The Hague in 2001, Milošević was put on trial for crimes against humanity in front of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Milošević’s trial has been described as “the world’s most closely watched criminal proceeding since the case of O. J. Simpson.”109 By removing the “last” Eastern European Fascist and Communist dictator—Milošević—and standing in judgment of what were depicted as his racially and religiously motivated crimes, the West was not only able to definitively add closure to the binaries of good and evil that constituted the Cold War framework but also able to establish new standards of morality for the “new world order.” The emergent paradigm of humanitarian intervention and imperialism recognized Western capitalism as a system that provides for its citizens through “democracy,” liberalism, and tolerance and opposes its system to the “horror” and barbarity of ethnic and religious conflict in non-Western and underdeveloped regions. The prominent journalist Roger Cohen described this opposition in his assessment that “modern American life is untethered to place, unlimited by distance, mostly untouched by horror. Not so in the Balkans, where real or imagined past Serbian suffering was the stuff of Mr. Milošević’s invective.”110 According to Cohen, U.S. military aggression offers the Serbs democracy: “Communism promised equality. Hitler promised the 1,000-year Reich. Milošević promised glory. All the West offers, alongside the prosperity of this boardwalk, is the rule of law.”

Authorizing the representational and legal systems of postsocialist humanitarian imperialism, political and media discourses recalled the narrative tropes of European imperialism, pointing to civilizational connections between Europe and the United States while at the same time underscoring the liberal democratic and antiracist nature of U.S. postsocialist power. To emphasize changes in Euro-American ideologies between the eras of European imperialism, the Cold War, and the postsocialist era, spaces like the Balkans had to be depicted as unchanging. In 1993, after the civil war in Bosnia had begun, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace republished its 1913 report on the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 in the hope that it would shed light on the present situation. On the occasion of the report’s reissue, the Carnegie Endowment engaged George Kennan, the architect of the U.S. Cold War policy of containment and ambassador to Yugoslavia in the 1960s, to write a new introduction. Kennan took the opportunity to explain the current conflict in the Balkans by drawing a connection between the Balkan Wars at the start of the twentieth century and at its end, concluding that we have today “the same Balkan World” that existed in 1913.111 Tracing the beginnings of international peace movements and the development of “new legal codes of international behavior” to the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, which addressed “the Eastern question” and the Balkans, Kennan imagines the origins of the Euro-American alliance in the desire for peace, law, and justice against Balkan violence, that had ignited the First World War in Europe just as it had the 1999 war.

Contrary to Kennan’s understanding that the Balkans interrupted the Euro-American progression toward global cooperation and peace, early attempts at codifying international law in the 1880s were rooted in the European “scramble for Africa” and in the imperialist nations’ desire to create international laws that would legitimize their right to global expansion. Accounting for the divergent interests of the different European powers and the United States eventually culminated in the First World War. At the end of the twentieth century, the civilizational dilemmas of Western imperial power were once again at stake in the problem of the Balkans. Kennan’s introduction to the reissue of the Carnegie Endowment report is striking in that although Kennan was himself a key figure in the formation of Cold War policy, his rhetoric in the report parallels the shift in U.S. policy from containment toward humanitarian imperialism justified in the name of international human rights law. The policy of containment maintained the United States’ right to intervene in and protect its spheres of influence from Soviet “imperialism.” In the “new world order,” the U.S.-led West no longer struggles against a single site of evil, but it establishes its right to intervene in the name of human rights against multiple “rogue” states and dictatorships. Of major significance in the new doctrine of humanitarian intervention is that the United States conceives of its contemporary imperial projects as moral through ideas of freedom and tolerance, excluding itself from the scrutiny of international law, even as it decides when and where to punish rogue violators.

Operation Allied Force represented the first clear articulation and justification for postsocialist imperialism as the post–Cold War decade drew to a close. Opposing ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in the Balkans throughout the 1990s and, in 1999, finally battling Balkan prejudices with military force seemed to position U.S. force on the side of human rights and universal human good. This set the context for further U.S. militarism in the post-9/11 era, this time against non-European Muslim majority nations, to be read as continuing the struggle for liberal democratic values and tolerance already begun in the 1990s on behalf of Muslims. As new conceptions of “humanity” emerge from the violent mechanisms of humanitarian “empire lite,” older imperial and Cold War notions of good and evil are both revived and reframed.