Micromanaging Malignant Optimism
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

"(America risks adopting)... a grasshopper mode - peripatetic,
noisy, hopping into other people's backyards, and unready when the
weather turns nasty."
Walter McDougall in "Foreign Policy in America in the Twenty First
Century: Alternative Perspectives, Hoover Institution Press, 2001


Never before has the Balkan been more of a powder keg, ready to
detonate thunderously. Never before has it been so fractured among
political entities, some viable - many not. Never before has it been
dominated by a single superpower, not counter-balanced by its allies
nor shackled by its foes. This is a disastrous state of things,
about to get worse.

Driven by America - this amalgam of violent frontiersmen, semi-
literate go getters and malignant optimists ("with some goodwill
there is always a solution and a happy ending") - the West has
committed the sins of ignorant intervention and colonial
perpetuation. Peace among nations is the result of attrition and
exhaustion, of mutual terror and actual bloodletting - not of
amicable agreement and visionary stratagems. It took two world wars
to make peace between France and Germany. By forcing an unwanted
peace upon an unwilling populace in the early stages of every
skirmish - the West has ascertained the perpetuation of these
conflicts. Witness Bosnia and its vociferous nationalist Croats.
Witness Macedonia's and Kosovo's Albanians and their chimerical
armies of liberation. These are all cinders of hostilities
artificially suppressed by Western procurators and Western cluster
bombs.

The West should have dangled the carrots of NATO and EU memberships
in front of the bloodied pugilists - not ram them down their
reluctant throats in shows of air superiority. Humanitarian aid
should have been provided and grants and credits for development to
the deserving. But the succour afforded by the likes of Germany to
the likes of Croatia and by the benighted Americans to the most
extreme elements in Kosovo - served only to amplify and prolong the
suffering and the warfare.

The West obstinately refused - and still does - to contemplate the
only feasible solution to the spectrum of Balkan questions. Instead
of convening a new Berlin Congress and redrawing the borders of the
host of entities, quasi-entities and fraction entities that emerged
with the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation - the West
foolishly and blindly adheres to unsustainable borders which reflect
colonial decision making and ceasefire lines. In the absence of a
colonizing power, only ethnically-homogeneous states can survive
peacefully in the Balkan. The West should strive to effect ethnic
homogenization throughout the region by altering borders,
encouraging population swaps and transfers and discouraging ethnic
cleansing and forced assimilation ("ethnic denial").

But the West's blunders are not confined to the political and
geopolitical realms.

The West (actually, America) has many long arms, the IMF and World
Bank being the most prominent. These ostensible multilaterals have
committed yet another strategic blunder. Instead of weaning their
clientele - the post-Communist countries in transition - off central
planning and command economics, they engaged in Washington-based
micromanagement of their economies. The Bretton-Woods institutions
have become all-pervasive, multi-tentacled approximations of the
Communist party. They dictate policy, involve themselves in the
minutest details of daily management, veto decisions (economic and
non-economic), cajole and threaten governments, block private sector
lending and compete in the international credit and investment
markets.

The post-Communist countries in transition are like infants taking
their first steps in the demanding world of free markets and
capitalism. The multilateral financial institutions are the mother
figures. Good mothers let go, encourage in the child a sense of
independence, self-reliance, learning by mistakes and the
predictability of just rewards and punishments. Bad mothers refuse
to acknowledge the emerging boundaries of their off-spring. They
reward clinging behaviour and punish every act of separation and
individuation. They are overweening, doting, crushing figures. In
short: they micromanage.

From my book "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited":

"The separation from the mother, the formation of an individual, the
separation from the world (the 'spewing out' of the outside world) -
are all tremendously traumatic. The infant is afraid to lose his
mother physically (no 'mother permanence') as well as emotionally
(will she be angry at this new found autonomy?). He goes away a step
or two and runs back to receive the mother's reassurance that she
still loves him and that she is still there. The tearing up of one's
self into my SELF and the OUTSIDE WORLD is an unimaginable
feat...The child's mind is shredded to pieces: some pieces are still
HE and others are NOT HE (=the outside world). This is an absolutely
psychedelic experience (and the root of all psychoses, probably). If
not managed properly, if disturbed in some way (mainly emotionally),
if the separation - individuation process goes awry, it could result
in serious psychopathologies. There are grounds to believe that
several personality disorders (Narcissistic and Borderline) can be
traced to a disturbance in this process in early childhood. Then, of
course, there is the on-going traumatic process that we call 'life'."


Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com