This book is a rarity in and of itself in that it is written in defence of
American foreign policy, criticising European and specifically British
policy, and written by a British academic. Amongst the wealth of
literature that has appeared on the topic of Bosnia since the Dayton peace
agreement of 1995 the majority has been produced by journalists and has
focused on human interest stories or post-modern tracts on the nature of
war and the tragedy of genocide. The blame for the failure of policy in
Bosnia has traditionally been shared out among the governments involved,
much as the responsibility for the war itself has been shared among the
warring parties on the ground. This book is set to change all of that.
Brendan Simms, a history don at Peterhouse College Cambridge and a
relative new comer to the Balkans, has produced a work that deals with the
nuts and bolts policy failures of the British government under John Major
and the Foreign Office in particular. Simms singles out former foreign
secretary Douglas Hurd for particular criticism. His was a failure not of
moral fortitude or principle but rather a tragic ‘failure of judgement’.
It was Hurd – with his colleague in the MoD, Malcolm Rifkind – that
propounded the idea of moral equivalence for the killing and destruction
that followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia. As a result the
prevailing tactic among the men on the ground, to which Simms devotes an
entire chapter, was to refuse to blame solely the Bosnian Serbs.
It was with this intellectual understanding of the conflict that the
foreign policy machine of the Major government set out to stall and falter
the attempts to lift the arms embargo on the country. Hurd refused to
cede what he called the ‘level killing field’ that the Clinton
administration seemed to want to create. It is on this topic of the
transatlantic rift created by the Bosnian conflict that Simms is perhaps
at his most interesting. The analogy of the 1956 Suez crisis arises
frequently among decision makers on both sides of Atlantic. Indeed, in
Simms’ opinion the debate over ‘lift and strike’ created a crisis
unprecedented in the history of North Atlantic alliance and one which
still has its repercussions today in the nascent European defence
experiment.
Despite the restrictions on the release of official information, Simms
has managed to interview nearly every major figure of the period, in Britain
and the US, and amassed an impressive bibliography. This is a testament,
perhaps, to the merits of non-journalist authors risking their reputations
on such a notorious academic minefield as the former Yugoslavia. The
mind truly boggles at what could have been produced had the author had
access to the government archives.
Its academic rigour aside, Simms makes no pretence that unfinest hour is
an objective historical analysis of the causes, events and consequences of
the Bosnian conflict. Rather, it is a polemic. It is designed to bring
to light the mistakes of perception and understanding perpetrated not only
by the British policy elite but also the popular press. Unusually, and
quite rightly, Misha Glenny is identified as particularly guilty of not
grasping the essential nature of the war.
Unfinest hour is an important contribution to the vast and growing
literature on the Bosnian war. Easy to read while maintaining its
academic rigour, it is good to see Simms’ work, before confined to the Bow
Group’s policy papers, reaching a wider audience. One would hope that is
work such as this that might finally signal the death of the
intellectually lazy myth of the ‘Balkan mentality’.
Reviewed by Michael Redman
