Tails Do Not Wag Dogs

Paul Hockenos, "Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism and the Balkan Wars" (Cornell, 2003).

Berlin-based Paul Hockenos offers an insightful review of the powerful pull of diaspora communities in North America. Loaded with cash from successful "Free World" businesses, anti-Communist nationalists with often-outdated mindsets funneled the long green into post-Tito movements that revived their long-suppressed agendas. As such they came to play - as in much of former Soviet Europe - a role out of all proportion to their numbers. In this follow-up to his excellent "Free to Hate" of a decade ago, Hockenos follows the trail - often slimy - of cash and opportunism across the Balkans.

The Berlin-based Hockenos is however not without an apparent agenda of his own. In line with German journalism as a whole Hockenos is staunchly anti-Serb, taking to task those US politicians who came under the thumb of the Serb lobby, ascribing their nuanced view of Balkan realities to this lobby. Although he is critical of Croat and Kosovar lobbying activities, these swipes are largely absent in his account of their efforts in North America.

After all is said, however, it must be remembered that tails do not wag dogs. Studies of more powerful "national" lobbyists - such as AIPAC or the Cuban-American National Foundation - show that funneling money into the right pockets does work. But at the end of the day none of these lobbies has any more power than Washington wants them to. American "equivocating" in Bosnia is demonstrable proof that Hockenos laments, though it's still hard to see how a NATO ground war in Bosnia could have "done anything" but produce a proto-Iraq.

In general, however, this is still an interesting look at the blinkered complacency of emigre communities and their oft-disastrous input into devastating, rather than liberating, their ancestral homelands.