Thesis presented for the
MA Program in Peace and Development Studies
Universitat Jaume I, Castellon, Spain
by Christopher FitzThe Clinton Shift and "Ethnic Conflict:"
U.S. Media, Foreign Policy and the Myth-making of Ethnic Conflict in the War of Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-1994Abstract
The 1990s wars of former Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, are considered by many commentators to be the defining crisis of United States foreign policy in that decade. Gaining center stage in US media for their brutality, proximity to so-called Western civilization and the apparent neighbor-versus-neighbor "ethnic" nature of the violence, these wars captured public attention with a widely repeated (mis)understanding that a "cauldron of ancient ethnic hatreds," tightly sealed under the dictatorial Tito regime (1948-1980), vindicated themselves in the thaw of the Cold War. People who had been killing each other for thousands of years were simply returning to their historical fate. Such was the popular logic.
This paper vehemently opposes such claims as a basis for substantial research. Arguing from a number of common-sense assumptions and from a small body of critical literature on ethnicity, it asserts that "ethnicity" played a central function in the media and official discourse of that era primarily to promote particular domestic US agendas, notably, an official US policy agenda of inaction. This is most visible in the "Clinton Shift," an awkward reversal in which Bill Clinton rescinded a campaign promise for decisive engagement in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the course of his presidency's first year in 1993. The discourse surrounding such a reversal starkly reveals the superficial functions of "ethnic conflict" in the Clinton Administration's foreign policy rhetoric, but also served to powerfully shape the actual situation of violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The paper demonstrates the justification of the "Clinton Shift" by examining in detail two six-month periods of Time Magazine in the context of a broader quantitative examination of the Washington Post and contextual surveys of other news media. Time articles were coded according to article type and section, and text was searched for key words and phrases related to ethnicity and ethnic conflict. Image content, averaging 50% of Time article space, was given additional consideration. Subsequent analysis of key words and their developments was compared to State Department archival text during that period.
The Time content analysis is a stunning portrayal of delinquent behavior by Time editors and journalists and by Clinton Administration officials. It shows a discourse that began with unsubstantiated claims about the ethnic origin of the conflict and rapidly evolved into a more subtle and strategic but equally unsubstantiated discourse dependent on ethnicity, called "neo-primordial." This new, seemingly refined discourse used the primordial "ancient ethnic hatreds" myth on which to build language of "Serb, Croat and Muslim contenders" in a "civil war" practicing "ethnic cleansing" on "each other." The direct ties between the original primordial claims and the neo-primordial language as explicit functions of foreign policy agenda are especially evident in the discourse that accompanies the Rwanda genocide of 1994, examined in detail by comparison.
The paper finds a complicity that strongly implicates Time Magazine and the Clinton Administration as organizations that supported the perpetrators of the genocides of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda. It also finds an eagerness by academic entrepreneurs to recklessly participate in the "ethnicization" of foreign policy that became popular during this decade. In retrospect, it is clear that such under-researched and under-critiqued assumptions about so-called ethnic factors had devastating consequences, both reifying the propaganda claims of the perpetrators of "ethnic cleansing" and genocide and establishing new and problematic definitions of "peace" on the ground. Perhaps more insidious, the inscription of an exoticized ethnicity in language surrounding US foreign policy institutions reveals a peculiar attempt to construct a civilized and triumphant West to newly dominate the otherwise "uncivilized" post-Cold War world.
The thesis is available as follows in PDF format. (Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.) Text totals 112 pages.
Title and Contents (14 K) Introduction: Looking for the Right Lens (189 K) Chapter 1: The Rise of Ethnic Conflict Discourse (534 K) Chapter 2: Spinning Ethnic Conflict in Time, An Overview (552 K) Chapter 3: Spinning Ethnic Conflict in Time, Article Analysis (130 K) Chapter 4: Looking in the Mirror, Reflections of a US Discourse (60 K) Works Cited (22 K) Appendix 2.1: Index of State Department Archives (16 K) Appendices 1.1-1.6 not available due to size and format difficulties Also, read my article in The Journal of Human Rights, reviewing Powerless by Design, by Michel Feher.