Misaligned

A Serbian contemporary of mine once stood for an office within the Durham Students' Union on a manifesto which claimed that she had been "UN President". I was so impressed, that I voted for her...

Her compatriot, Vuk Jeremić, will be 36 next month. Therefore, when he assumes office in September, I shall not be older than the President of the United Nations General Assembly. That really, really would have been too much to bear. A few days later, I shall be halfway to 70. But at least I shall still be younger than the President of the United Nations General Assembly.

This success demonstrates the continuing quiet influence of the Non-Aligned Movement, to which for now Serbia retains only observer status, but which nevertheless celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last September in Belgrade. Very much Tito's baby, it gave Yugoslavia an enormous global reach, to the extent that Tito's funeral in 1980 was at the time the largest ever gathering of world leaders. In good ways and in bad, the NAM was very much an extension of the Yugoslav project.

It should never have fallen to Tito to play that role. The Commonwealth centred on Britain's post-War and largely pre-War social democracy, the Francophonie centred on a France organised economically along the lines preferred from de Gaulle to Mitterrand and now again under Hollande, the vision of Italian Christian Democrats that their country would implement Catholic Social Teaching by emulating the Attlee Government domestically but be a beacon for peace between East and West outside both NATO and the Soviet Bloc, the same vision for a United Germany on the part of Jakob Kaiser, the Netherlands of the Rooms-Rood Coalitions and then of Coalitions led by the Catholic People's Party (in, take note, a country with a Protestant monarchy and, at that time, a Protestant Established Church), the Portugal of Lusotropicalism and of the Estado Novo that successfully held the line both against the Communists and against the National Syndicalists: those ought to have been at the core of the Non-Aligned Movement as Western Europe steered a path between the USA and the USSR while the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese Empires were becoming something else. Even as it is, it includes numerous Commonwealth countries, among them over half of the Queen's Realms.

There would and could have been no Indonesian occupation of East Timor, to cite only one among almost endless examples of the wrongs that would have been avoided. Consider a Libya or a Somalia which had gown into full membership of this family under the tutelage of an Italy like that. When Salazar, still The Greatest Portuguese according to that country's television viewers,  had given way, then he would have done so naturally, peacefully, and not to Maoists, still less to Maoists who went on to become rabidly neoliberal and neoconservative Presidents of the European Commission. No serious person would question the unity of Canada, or of the United Kingdom. There would be no threat to the unity of French-speaking, Dutch-speaking, Social Catholic, Anglophile Belgium. Nor to a Yugoslavia still multiethnic, still left-wing but not least because Social Catholic, and still Anglophile, yet very different from the one that all too many people experienced.

In which vein, Jeremić's election indicates that the General Assembly will not be admitting any time soon the unilaterally euro-using Islamist-Maoist-Nazi cesspit of heroin-trafficking, people-trafficking and Olympic-level corruption that is Kosovo. But how could such a deformity ever have been inflicted in the first place? The answer to that encapsulates the tragedy of a Non-Aligned Movement led and defined by, rather than leading and defining, post-War Yugoslavia. Such was always the wrong Non-Aligned Movement. Wrong for the world. And wrong for Yugoslavia.