Dangerous Regimes

The London Times recently declared him the leading British political thinker and a writer whose work is internationally important. Keeney has published several books including Thomas Paine and The Media and Democracy which have become textbooks for learning democracy in many countries. Something similar will probably happen with his latest book Violence in Political History which was released last month.

VREME: Peace, in whatever form, has come to Bosnia. But the ambitions of neighboring countries still aren't clear.

KEENEY: "The frightening question is what peace in Bosnia means. It seems that in that part of Europe there is no chance for peace in the conventional, European sense of the word. Especially when you know that in the case of the Serbian and Croatian regime there is a wish to preserve socialism (strengthen state institutions, try to achieve legitimacy for the authoritarian authorities through, for example, insisting on the difference between friend and enemy). These are a type of regime which is not known well enough in political theory. Namely, this isn't just a question of the simple repeating of the authoritarianism from the beginning of the 20th century, rather there is something new in these regimes such as the use of television and radio as a means of achieving legitimacy. Above all, they are dangerous regimes, not only to their population but also because their attitude towards borders and geo-politics isn't clear.

If we look at the entire Eastern block, I would say here we are seven years after the historic 1989 revolution and the scenarios are not only more complex than we thought but also most of them have nothing in common with democracy."

As far as you know, how developed is the public sphere in the former Yugoslavia?

I have to say that prospects for that, at the moment, aren't very good. But that does not mean we should be pessimists. I'm not underestimating the power of censorship, obstruction and violent suppression of the public sphere at every level in those countries, but I wouldn't overestimate the current situation which won't last forever. I would ask the following question: can the dictatorial and imperial regimes being crystallized in at least two regions of the former Yugoslavia, those envious paranoiacs, continue isolating themselves in the long run from what I call European, and global, trends.

Perhaps they think that no one on the outside sees what they're doing inside? Or that someone is turning a blind eye?

The reality is that those regimes are already caught in the process of watching at an above national level. That doesn't have to seem important but that relationship has been established. And if those regimes want to join the so-called international community - the EU for example - they will have to face controversies on a daily basis, investigative and analytical journalism, debates and everything else in the above national public sphere.

The truth is that in the short term they will be able to use the tactics of political terror such as preventing the allocation of frequencies, preventing the use of print shops, preventing distribution, but regardless of whether they know it or not the communications of modern times have their own history and it is developing rapidly. We shouldn't forget the growing tendency of links between the media and power, and no political party can disregard the fact that today the media and power go hand in hand.

You are saying that the media are increasingly serving the centers of power?

I am convinced that the media are capable of complicating the lives of the authorities. In the short term it's possible for politicians to hold, control and manipulate the media, but I don't see that as being possible in the long term and certainly it can't be a good option. It might seem hopelessly naive but we can't explain the survival of various media such Feral Tribune or VREME as something that is just tolerated; they are part of the complicated resistance to the centers of power within the communications system at the end of this century.

All this can be explained in another way; people who want to build cesarean, isolated systems are actually in trouble.

When we speak of that region, Bosnia is that part of it where the problems are the most evident and expressed. I watch it with fear because, unlike the other states created there, a basic shortage is evident in Bosnia: there is no proposed solution for regional integrity, nor a concentration of the tools of power in one institution to prepare the way for a civil society in which the population is free of fear and violence. In that sense, we should carefully monitor the behavior of Belgrade and Zagreb in regard to what we consider Bosnia. The West hopes those two regimes, the Serbian and Croatian, will behave decently towards the raising of a new state from the ashes, a state which is stable and recognized and which could become the symbol of all the best in Europe. But, I'm afraid those expectations are part of the fiction of war, in the way the war was prepared as fiction: the war was seen as a civil war, a war between nations who carry hatred in their blood, a war against Islam ... Europe and the international community created a mythology of the war and that type of concept is part of the mythology.

You doubt the possibility of establishing a stable state in Bosnia?

I think the expectations that Bosnia will be established as a stable state which will guarantee civil and political liberties are part of those, I would say unrealistic hopes. The prospects for those expectations are slim and what we should pay attention to is the two most powerful regimes in the region and whether they are in the process, are they hiding the fact that they are preventing the forming of a stable state. If we look at Mostar, the indications are very bad. If we look at the current efforts to demilitarize Sarajevo, that is also a very depressing scenario with daily images of the road to concentration into so-called ethnic groups, purely ethnic grouping in the area with the goal of forming a Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia at the expense of Bosnia.

In Serbia, regime opponents are immediately declared internal enemies, foreign mercenaries. Tudjman recently published statistics on his opponents. Can we speak in those terms in democracy?

The statement that Croatia has between 15 and 20% of enemies in it reminds me of the framework for an absurd drama. But, unfortunately, this is more serious since it's not theater but politics. What is shocking to me is that this is an articulated old Communist habit of thinking in terms of friends and enemies in the world of power and politics. That has much deeper roots in the history of modern politics but only in the 20th century did this division in friends and enemy not only become absurd but also very dangerous. We should view it as fiction. People who speak in terms of friends and enemies are not objective, they nurture that division for their own political goals. This is one of the clear lessons we can draw from the history - especially the more recent history at the end of this century - of thinking in terms of friend or foe.