A New World Made to Order: Making Sense of the Future in a Global Era

Abstract

As I write these words, NATO forces are in the second month of an air campaign against Serbia and the remnants of the Yugoslav Federation, and by the time you read them, some resolution to this difficult and painful conflict will presumably have been reached. Whatever that outcome may be, it will remain ironic not only that in its fiftieth anniversary year, ten years after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, NATO should take up arms for the first time against a nation which was never part of the opposing military alliance, the now defunct Warsaw Pact. In a richer irony still, Albania, the East European nation which was most hard-line — or most eccentric — in the application of its Marxism, has greeted an American military advance force of Apache gunship helicopters (code-named ‘Task Force Hawk’) with open arms, the government has turned over to NATO the use of all its ports and its airspace and the Albanian President has called for a ‘future Marshall Plan for the Balkans’.² But first, the situation of 800 000 ‘deportee’ Kosovo Albanians driven out of their homes by heightened Serbian terror will need to be resolved — itself a major consequence of the air campaign, and one apparently completely unanticipated by NATO’s planners. These ironies are, of course, made to measure, given that we never do quite get either the future we imagine or deserve, but I want to argue that events in the Balkans do mark the transformation in our expectations of a collective future, and to understand what this tells us, we will need to examine not just our future lost and found, but our faith in our ability any more to make sense of the future.

It is a conflict between the Present and the Future, and I am convinced the Future will win …

Rexhep Mediani, President of Albania, 11 April 1999¹