Summary: Murray N. Rothbard, “Hands Off the Serbs!” (1993)

This file is a single polemical political essay. Written during the Bosnian War, it argues against U.S. or UN intervention in the Balkans and uses Bosnia to attack what Rothbard sees as the collapse of the antiwar left after the Cold War.

Rothbard opens with a betrayal narrative: groups once identified with antiwar politics now support intervention when it is framed as humanitarian or internationalist. The Gulf War becomes his precedent, Bosnia his confirmation.

But there’s no “anti-war left” left anymore.

The essay’s first movement is therefore less about Serbia than about anti-interventionist consistency. Rothbard claims that support for UN-backed war exposes a deeper loyalty to “world government” rather than peace. He treats moderate intervention as structurally unstable: once military measures begin, escalation becomes politically inevitable.

As usual, there are disagreements about the extent of military intervention demanded; but as usual, the “moderates” are either liars or self-deluders, since timid and moderate first steps will obviously not work, and then the precedent being set and intervention begun, the pressure will become irresistible for ever more accelerated steps, until the maximum pain is inflicted.

The second movement turns to the Serbs themselves. Rothbard’s key conceptual move is to replace the language of recognized state borders with the language of ethnonational claims. He does not defend “Yugoslavia”; indeed, he calls it an artificial postwar construction. But once Yugoslavia collapses, he argues, the legitimate question is not Bosnia’s territorial integrity but the division of territory among peoples.

The Serbs want all the Serbs in former Yugoslavia to be part of a new Greater Serbia being carved out of the ethnic mess in the Balkans.

This leads to the essay’s central denial: Bosnia is not, for Rothbard, a nation at all. It is only a territory containing rival national communities. That denial underwrites his rejection of intervention on behalf of the Bosnian Muslim government.

There is no more a “Bosnian nation” than there is a “nation” of North Dakota.

Rothbard then situates his own position against both pro-Yugoslav establishment opinion and anti-Serb humanitarian rhetoric. He insists that his earlier opposition to Serbian dominance of Yugoslavia is consistent with his later opposition to anti-Serb intervention, because the object of criticism has changed: first an artificial multinational state, now a foreign campaign against ethnic partition.

Yugoslavia was a geographical expression which served only as a mask for Serbian imperialism and dictatorship over the other peoples incarcerated into that expression: notably the Croats and the Slovenes.

The essay’s proposed solution is partition, not federal reconciliation. Bosnia should be broken into its ethnic components, and outside powers should stop trying to preserve a state Rothbard regards as fictive.

Instead, the only hope of genuine peace and justice is to destroy “Bosnia” and to allow this non-country to be divided completely into its constituent parts.

Its most controversial passages minimize the distinctive moral force of atrocity claims by recasting them as general features of civil war. Rothbard does not argue that the Serbs are innocent; rather, he argues that all sides behave similarly and that humanitarian intervention would worsen the violence.

All these clashing groups perform ethnic transfer—cleansing when they can get away with it.

The conclusion is bluntly noninterventionist. Rothbard’s final answer is not diplomatic management but disengagement, rooted in anti-statism, hostility to supranational authority, and a belief that ethnic conflicts must be settled locally rather than by American power.

The answer, as repugnant as it is to this meddling age, is to stay the Hell out.

The essay’s relevance lies in showing how post-Cold War libertarian anti-interventionism could fuse with ethnonational realism and anti-humanitarian polemic. Its structure moves from denunciation of the pro-war left, to an escalation argument, to a theory of Balkan nationality, to a defense of partition, ending in the demand that the United States and UN leave the conflict alone.