A mouse that roared: when Western powers refuse to acknowledge victory, they create problems for countries that are trying to surrender.

When Western powers refuse to acknowledge victory, they create problems for countries that are trying to surrender.

Mr. Straus is Senior Associate at the Program on Transitions to Democracy, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University.

IT WAS an historic moment. The Albanian navy surrendered to Italy. They fitted up their rusty ships, sailed into Italian waters, and ran up the white flag.

Finally, a few Albanians had found a way to do what the whole country has been trying to do for months: surrender. So far, however, the rest of Albania has been out of luck. And it can't very well uproot itself as a land mass and float itself across the Adriatic onto Italian soil.

Everyone in Albania -- the government, the opposition, even the rebels -- is asking for a Western occupation force. The only people who don't want it are the Westerners themselves. NATO is standing aside. American and German offi- cials are saying that their troops wouldn't even know what to do there -- and they are not making the plans that would tell the troops what to do.

Italy has actually been forced to send a few troops -- not because it is accepting the surrender on Albanian soil, but because too many Albanian refugees are arriving on Italian soil. It has declared a nationwide state of emergency over the refugees, sent troops to Albania to ensure distribution of food, and impounded Albanian ships to prevent them from bringing more people to Italy. That is what we have come to: troops are sent, not to take Albania's surrender, but only to avoid taking its refugees.

In the good old days, a surrender was a surrender. Run up the white flag, and the nearest power around would collect your weapons and put your country under orders. Nowadays, as Albanians are learning to their distress, it is a lot harder. You can get a truce accepted easily enough, but not a surrender.

It is as if we were entering into a new historic stage in the politics of sur- render. After primitive surrender with all its gory barbarism and modern sur- render with all its elaborate rituals, we arrive at the stage of postmodern decadence -- the refusal to accept surrender at all.

In the primitive stage, the virile instincts were operating with full force. Any tribe would gladly accept a surrender. It would also gladly rape the women, pillage the wealth, take the best men as slaves, and massacre the rest.

In the modern stage, surrender was an institution within an international sys- tem with formal rules. One of the rules of warfare was the obligation to accept a surrender. Another was to cut down on the rape and pillage. People began asking whether it was worth it economically to take over another coun- try, given the end of large-scale pillage and slave-taking. But the instinct of strategic gain was still there.

In the postmodern stage, strategic thinking is regarded as outmoded. If it's just "the economy, stupid," and the short-term balance sheet, then it's a wasteful expense to take over another country. Instead of a territorial acquisition being presumed a plus strategically, it is presumed a minus economically. Gone are the old natural instincts for glory and conquest; gone even are the mature instincts of strategic planning. All that's left are the sucker's instincts of penny pinching. In the final stages of decadence, thoughts about the annual budget deficit reign supreme. A poor beleaguered country can't find anyone to surrender to any more.

But before we give up on the modern stage as finished forever, we should remember its advantages. Conquest had been civilized, but countries still had the normal impulse to take over territories with any strategic potential. Within this stage, a unique height was reached in the expansionism of the United States.

In the nineteenth century, when the United States overran territories in the western portions of its continent, it incorporated them as equals. In this way, it won the full use of the energies of the people living there and others who moved in, adding their energies to its own, rather than keeping its energies limited and investing them in keeping the newcomers down. What a remarkable departure from past experience!

In the twentieth century, when the United States overran Europe and Japan at the end of World War II, it did something even more remarkable. It undertook the democratic reconstruction of the societies it overran, bankrolled their recovery, and integrated them into a common democratic system, one in which they could regain their dignity as economic and strategic partners of the United States.

This inspired a dream in many other countries: if only they could get overrun by the U.S., the way Germany and Japan had been! There was even a film about it -- The Mouse That Roared, in which a small country declares war on the United States in order to get overrun and reconstructed.

This was the hope of millions of people. In the countries that were America's enemies in the Cold War, people naturally assumed that they could someday sur- render, as in any other war, thus getting themselves rebuilt as American allies as well as ending the Cold War. This assumption became part of the col- lective subconscious. It emerged into the public sphere as a joke -- the clas- sic Freudian expression for a hope that can't be avowed openly because it is too wild, too easily ridiculed, too hard to express in a dignified way.

The joke was not limited to small countries; it was widespread among Russians as well. In the 1980s, Russians began openly wondering whether they would not have been better off to have lost the last world war as the Germans and Japanese had. Russia was, after all, a great power like Germany and Japan.

There were two examples of German surrender for the Russians to work from: Weimar Germany after 1918, and Bonn Germany after 1945. The Weimar model had the worst combination of the elements of surrender: punishment of the loser, but no occupation or reconstruction, leaving the power-politics game to revive as before. The Bonn model had the best combination: full occupation, democratic reconstruction, the Marshall Plan, and integration with the old democracies through the European Union and NATO.

Apart from the military occupation, the Bonn model was something that Russians were able to imagine being applied to themselves, without having to go through a hot war first. The Marshall Plan had, after all, been offered to Russia, too, in 1947. The EU and NATO were open by law to all European countries. The creation of an institutional West meant that the West could finally be joined without conquest. Here was a dignified way of expressing the fantasy of sur- render, a way of translating it into a form that could work. The West could get the global strategic victory; the East would get a firm anchoring to Western ways.

When Gorbachev spoke of a "common European home," this was the dream: if Rus- sia could not defeat the West, at least it could join it. Yet Western offi- cials were more confused by this than hopeful about it; they were no longer looking for such a practical way of implementing the geopolitical equivalent of a Russian surrender, and instead dismissed it as a plot to deceive the West! After decades of managing the Cold War, they had honed their goal to one of conflict management; victory and peace alike were rejected as destabiliz- ing. They had lost the dream of triumph. They had forgotten all about the obligation to accept surrender.

Yeltsin made the offer of a surrender-equivalent even clearer when he came to power and spoke of joining NATO. Still the West showed no interest. Rather than work out the operational specifics of how to accept the Russian sur- render, officials began to mumble about how hard it would be for NATO to have to adjust to making decisions with more members.

The West wasn't in a mood to accept a surrender. It was as if it had passed over from modernity into postmodern decadence at the very moment of its tri- umph.

In 1996, the West finally did accept its first post - Cold War "virtual sur- render." After years of fretting, NATO sent its forces into Bosnia. Earlier, the Bush Administration had refused Bosnia's surrender; and after 1993, former officials and supporters of the Bush Administration kept warning that Bosnia could become a quagmire like Vietnam. Then the troops arrived in Bosnia, and there was no resistance at all.

In fact, the Bosnians had been praying for the occupation for years. One of them, Mihajlo Mihajlov, wrote an article under the very title, "Bosnia Is Not Vietnam," to explain why, in fact, the situation was the exact opposite: in Vietnam, nationalism was a cohesive anti-Western force, but in Bosnia the nationalisms were all directed against one another and the vast majority of people wanted a Western occupation force as a liberation from the warring nationalists. Mihajlov turned out to be right.

The West has failed to draw any conclusions from is surprise success in Bos- nia. No officials have laid out the lessons of it. No one has examined why the leading authorities were wrong from 1991 to 1995. The West remains unable to figure out how to distinguish a likely quagmire from a likely success.

Not only Bosnians but millions of other Yugoslavians would like to surrender to the West. Hundreds of thousands have already fled to the West. In both Ser- bia and Croatia, democrats have pleaded publicly for a Western occupation of the entire former Yugoslavia. They'd like the West to arrest the two chief tyrants and war criminals, Milosevic and Tudjman, not just a few underlings in Bosnia. The nationalists accuse the democrats of being advance agents of the Western occupation forces; the only problem is that there aren't any Western forces planning for an occupation.

Farther north, in Hungary, people are positively basking in the "NATO occupa- tion," as it is jocularly called. It is seen as a step toward joining the alliance.

Albania is both an opportunity and a danger. It is an historically open moment. The opportunity is for NATO to insert itself into the opening; the danger is to leave it to other, less benevolent forces to insert themselves. By acting in Albania, NATO could prove itself again as the prime European agency for stability -- and meanwhile get a better strategic platform from which to influence events in the former Yugoslavia. If the opportunity is not taken, the chaos could spread from Albania into Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia, and Bosnia -- hitting NATO on the tail end for its failure to take active measures on the front end.

They say NATO doesn't know what its troops would do in Albania. Then NATO ought to be making plans so they would know what to do. That is, after all, part of its job description.