No matter how many flaws, complaints, cynicism, and inconsistencies we find in the world of Western liberal democracy as we have known it in recent decades, more precisely since the end of World War II, and we know that there was an abundance of all of these, the point to which the current US President Donald Trump has brought that world is terrifying. And, unfortunately, cyclical.
Because with Trump, the world of Western diplomacy has practically gone back a hundred years, to the point of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, when, among other things related to Turkey's borders and its relations with Greece, the Convention on the Exchange of Population between Greece and Turkey was actually accepted. And from then on, until 1945, when, after all, the collective punishment for the horrors of Nazism and Fascism was paid by Germans throughout European countries, as well as by Italians on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, the horrifying practice of the so-called humane exchange of population, which is nothing more than a more polite name for ethnic cleansing, was normalized.
The world and international diplomacy then became somewhat aware and began to build a world based on anti-fascism, respect for borders, minority and other human rights, creating the illusion that it could go on like this forever. Only for the illusion to increase exponentially after the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc.
But then came the breakup of Yugoslavia, with all the wars that followed, the main features of which were ethnic cleansing. Moreover, Franjo Tuđman, in his book “The Wasteland of Historical Reality,” wrote about the advantages of humane resettlement and nationally homogeneous states.
The naive and culturally arrogant world of Western diplomacy attributed all of this to some excess and specificity of wild Balkan tribes. And then Vladimir Putin happened, then the ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh happened, then Netanyahu happened, and finally Donald Trump, who definitively abolished the world based on the victory of anti-fascism, respect for borders, and minority and other human rights.
Because it is one thing when we clearly see the intention of ethnic cleansing from the behavior of the militant right-wing government of Israel towards the people of Gaza, and quite another when this idea is advocated, and completely openly, by the American president.
To make matters more cynical, he sees Gaza as a tourist resort or something similar, which is cynicism of the first order. Because there have been cases when a place of suffering has been turned into a resort, such as in Višegrad or Mamula, about which Aleksandar Reljić recently made an excellent documentary. But we have not yet seen someone turn an entire country, which they had previously ethnically cleansed, into a resort. The matter is all the more devastating, because no one is stopping Trump and the US from rebuilding the infrastructure and life in Gaza with the intention of finally enabling the Palestinians there to have a decent life.
Ultimately, no matter how this particular idea ends, and let's hope it won't be like Trump announced, the fact that the leader of what is still the most powerful country in the world, and one that has carried liberal democracy as its official ideology, is even considering engineering the population, makes it clear that nothing good awaits us.
There is nothing more monstrous that can be done to a person or a nation as a whole than to take away their homeland. If anyone knows, it is the people from our region, especially from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Therefore, the only thing that can console us, unfortunately, locally, is that we have already been through the worst. The problem is that this realization does not help much in the broader picture, just as the problem is that our specific experiences, both those from the anti-fascist struggle in World War II, as well as these experiences of border redrawing, ethnic cleansing and genocide from the last war, are not considered relevant by anyone alive in international diplomacy, in order to possibly learn something from them. And unfortunately, neither we ourselves nor our diplomacy clearly consider them to be so. Which is tragically under-equipped and largely composed of party affiliations and without any serious references in the diplomatic world.
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