Paris -- The officials of Western governments now take refuge in thickets of blather, having abandoned Bosnia. They promise vTC reform of their institutions of cooperation so that never again will there be a tragedy like the former Yugoslavia's.
U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher last week promised "a strengthened CSCE" to deal "more effectively and more soundly" with future cases of international aggression. NATO is "fundamentally sound," according to Dee Dee Myers at the White House. There is "a Bosnian crisis, not a NATO crisis."
France's foreign minister calls for "a new international conference" on the former Yugoslavia. Germany's foreign minister says that "aggression should not pay." International villainy must surely recoil at such words.
Mr. Christopher says the Atlantic alliance's "Partnership for Peace" has made "extraordinary progress." NATO has "talked itself through the conditions, the circumstances, the implications, the responsibilities of membership" and "over time . . must be willing to include nations that are willing to assume the necessary obligations and commitments."
It will be enlarged. Or perhaps not. The North Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels on last Thursday named a commission to report back on the matter in a year.
This is criminal irresponsibility. It marks both Americans and Europeans. The Franco-German summit last week agreed to do nothing but recommend peace and negotiations to Yugoslavia. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's own party has asked that the Bosnia arms embargo be lifted. This was ignored, Mr. Kohl deferring to French President Francois Mitterrand's implicitly pro-Serbian neutralism.
Europe's leaders will now discuss how to give Europe's military organization, West European Union, the command and logistical structures NATO possesses and WEU lacks, so that Europe -- next time -- will not have to depend on American agreement and cooperation.
An anonymous French diplomat says, "The United States wants more than ever to control the show, on the back of the lives of French and British soldiers."
Fine, as an expression of bitterness over what has gone on in Bosnia. But will the Europeans take future responsibility? Experience suggests they will not.
The notion that reform of the mechanisms of cooperation can solve the problem is delusion, as every intelligent member of the American and European political classes must know. The collapse of the United Nations, NATO and the European Union in Bosnia had nothing fundamentally to do with the political and military machinery at the disposal of the Western countries. It had everything to do with the lack of a common policy. They did not know what to do with the machinery they possessed.
It follows that the future will not be improved by bureaucratic fiddling with the mechanisms of cooperation. It will be affected only by alliance decisions -- Atlantic or West European -- or the acts of individual governments prepared to defend civilized values even if others dither or retreat.
It is essential that the policy problem be addressed, not the mechanical one. There are a number of serious conflicts in waiting. The problems of national minorities will worsen in the Greater Serbia that the Western powers now seem anxious to ratify. Albanian and Hungarian minorities have no secure place in the Greater Serbia now in prospect.
The new Hungarian government has dropped the irredentist rhetoric that characterized its predecessors, but the tensions provoked by Hungary's national diaspora remain grave and threatening.
Romania's government has done little to halt the aggressive anti-Hungarian acts of local authorities in Hungarian-populated Transylvania.
Greek-Turkish hostility over Greece's maritime claims in the Aegean Sea has been contained up to now only by strenuous American diplomacy. Greek-Macedonian and Greek-Albanian tension remains serious.
The Western powers currently have acquiesced in Russia's reassertion of authority in Chechnya, which unilaterally claimed independence in 1991. What is Western policy with respect to the other new states issued from the old U.S.S.R.? What distinctions are made?
These issues have to be addressed. Institutional reform means nothing if the Western governments do not know what to do about actual problems.
Here is where a joint policy effort must be made during the months to come. Threats and options must be put before policy-makers now, while there is time for confidential reflection and common decisions.
What would NATO actually do about a Ukrainian crisis? What is the policy of the European Union on Balkan irredentist claims? Are the powers now prepared to defend the principle that only peaceful and negotiated territorial change in Europe is acceptable? Will they defend human rights? How? Only with talk?
Now is the time to decide. They have a second chance to do so, after Yugoslavia. It may be the last chance.
William Pfaff is a syndicated columnist.