Bosnia

Bosnia is presented as a destination for Muslim volunteers after the Soviet-Afghan war and as a case through which Noam Chomsky challenges explanations of international politics based on a fixed clash between civilizations. The account links the volunteers’ later roles to their welcome by regional governments, while describing U.S. patronage of Bosnian Muslims in the Balkans as a choice made chiefly for reasons of power.

Volunteers after the Afghan war

When the war against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ended, the people Chomsky calls the “Afghans”—many of whom, including Osama bin Laden, were not Afghan—turned their attention to other conflicts. Bosnia was one of their destinations, alongside Chechnya. Chomsky says they received at least tacit U.S. support and were welcomed by the governments of the regions where they went.

The Bosnian example makes that welcome concrete: many Islamic volunteers gained citizenship in recognition of their military actions. Chomsky cites a report by Carlotta Gall in The New York Times dated October 2, 2001. The detail presents the volunteers not simply as outsiders moving through a conflict, but as people whose military service could be acknowledged through membership in the country where they had fought.

U.S. patronage in the Balkans

Chomsky places Bosnia within a broader account of changing U.S. alliances. In the early 1990s, he argues, the United States chose Bosnian Muslims as its privileged clients in the Balkans, principally for cynical reasons of power. He adds that this policy was surely not to their advantage, resisting any assumption that receiving patronage necessarily meant receiving a benefit.

This account also unsettles a religious explanation of political alignments. Chomsky recalls that in the 1980s the United States had favored radical Islamists because of their effectiveness as fighters, while elsewhere treating the Catholic Church in Latin America as an enemy for siding with the poor. In his argument, the criterion is not religious doctrine but submission to power and service to its interests. Bosnia’s place in the narrative therefore belongs to a changing pattern of alliances, rather than to a permanent division between religious blocs.

Against a civilizational divide

Chomsky uses these contrasts to reject the idea that international politics can be summarized as a clash between a Muslim world and the West. If opposition between civilizations were the governing principle, he observes, the alliances and conflicts of the period would make little sense: the United States could support Muslim clients in Bosnia while opposing other groups according to their political usefulness.

Bosnia thus serves as a concise but significant example in his critique of geopolitical explanations framed around cultural identity. The volunteers’ reception and citizenship, and the U.S. decision to favor Bosnian Muslims, show political relationships being shaped by military service, government welcome, and strategic calculation. In Chomsky’s presentation, these circumstances make Bosnia evidence against treating religion as the stable cause of alliance or enmity.