Fatal fallacies.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia I.

The misleading ideas behind our Bosnia policies

FALL 1994 MARKED THE DEFEAT NOT Only of the Democratic Party in Congress but of two central ideas--or clusters of ideas--that have animated it since the early 1970s. Those ideas lost not just a popularity contest in America but, far more tragically, a reality test in Bosnia.

The first cluster contains those ideas that treat people as mere components of ethnic, racial, or cultural groups. In domestic politics, this cluster produces ethnic quotas, racial gerrymandering, and escalating claims of victimhood; its basic tool is aggregation--lumping diverse individuals into groups, to be analyzed or stigmatized as such. It denies both the reality and the validity of intermarriage, cultural borrowing, assimilation, and, ultimately, individual character. Its adherents exist on both left and right, but only the Democratic Party promotes it explicitly.

In contemporary America, we call this cluster "multiculturalism," a misleading name that disguises balkanization as pluralism. Explicit multiculturalism is wildly unpopular, as numerous Democrats can testify. Yet our very language defines it as the fundamental characteristic of the Balkans. A Balkan country, a Balkan war, has little chance to be understood as anything other than a conflict among morally equivalent tribes.

And when Bosnia's advocates in the United States tried to whip up support for a major military intervention, they deployed the ultimate rhetorical weapon. They called Serb attacks on Bosnian Muslims "genocide." In December 1992, Elie Wiesel visited lame-duck Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to ask that the United States do something to oppose the Serbs' "ethnic cleansing" campaigns. "Within minutes," reports U.S. News, "the two men were engaged in an intense discussion of the definition of genocide."

And rightly so. Crying genocide was a mistake. It not only triggered skepticism, it equated the Bosnian cause with the preservation of a race rather than resistance to aggression. Those who cried genocide forgot what is actually important, and terrifying, in all such atrocities: not the death of a race but the deaths of human beings--parents ripped from their children, peaceful lives invaded, torture and starvation. Atrocities happen person by person, even when they happen on a mass scale. And rare is the atrocity campaign that approaches genuine genocide--hunting a group to extinction. That doesn't make atrocities any less terrible.

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