Lethal Balkans Nationalisms

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The Balkans

Lethal Nationalisms -

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TH E H ISTOR ICAL ROOTS OF TH E KOSOVO WAR

T H E WAR in Kosovo has reinforced the Ba lkans image as a cauldro nof ethnic hatred. Ma ny com me ntators argue that the region has alwaysbeen wracked by ancient hatreds. O the rs argue th at today s strains areartificial, manufactured by cynical pos tcom munis t demagogues lookingto legitimate their rule. Neither school has it right. Balkan ethnicstrains are neither as ancien t as time no r as recent as the rise to pow erof Slobodan M ilosevic; rather, they are abou t as old as the dissolution

of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of nationalism. To a historian,today s Balkan crises are rooted in, above all, the crippling dependenceof all Balkan peoples on the ideology and psychology of exp ansionistnationalism. W it h the W est now drawn deeper than ever into thestruggle between Serbs and Albanians, we must better understandthe roots of their passions.

Today s tensions are the result of the region s absorp tion into theOttoman Empire, which led to the extraordinary dispersion andintermixture of ethnic groups in Balkan and Danubian Europe.Pre m ode rn state-form ation in the Balkans was short-circuited by theOttoman Turkish conquest of the region during the fourteenththrough sixteenth centuries. As elsewhere in the worldIndia andimperial Russia are good examplesempire went hand in hand withgreat ethnic -cultural diversity and, at the local level, political autonomy.Under the Ottomans, the subject populations were organized above

W I L L I A M W . H A G E N is Professor of History at the University ofCalifornia Davis


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all by religion. Such a schema did not require that the adherents ofany particular faith live in any com pact area. From the view point bo thof the O tto m an Em pire and the various religious hierarchies, personalidentity was, so to speak, extraterritorial. In some cases, as with theSerbian Ortho do x C hu rch , religion fostered na tional cultural identity.But religion also fractured groups speaking the same language, likethe Albanianssom e three-quarters of whom until 945 were Muslims,either of the Sun ni or Bektashi orientation, while the rema inder werefollowers of Eastern Orthodoxy or Rom an C atholicism (as exemplifiedby the late Mother Teresa). Similarly, Catholic Croats, MuslimBosnians, and Orthodox Serbs all speak the same language but are

deeply divided by religion and political history.As the Ottoman Empire began to break down in the eighteenthcentury, the ideology of European nationalism penetrated theBalkans in suppo rt of the Balkan C hris tian s' claim to liberation fromincreasingly oppressive Turkish rule. Eager for territorial gains orBalkan Christian clients, some European great powers, notably Russia,became patrons of this process. Others, such as Great Britain, lostfaith in the abiHty of the sick m an of Europ e to go on living and

resigned themselves to the empire's partition. Thus the foundationsof inde pe nd en t national states were laid in Serbia in 1815, in G reecein 1830, in Ro mania in 1856, in Bulgaria in 1878, an d in Albania in 1913.In each case, the liberated state territory contained various minoritiesbesides the n ew ruHng nationality. T h e new states were all also merefragments of the ideal territorial nations in the minds of the newnationalist elites. These ideal nationsGreater Serbia, GreaterAlbania, G reater Greece, and the like encompassed outlying regions

pop ulated by still more national mino rities and coveted as w ell by oneor more neighboring states.

In other words, the Balkan states were all born in the nineteenthand early twentie th centuries as irredentist natio ns that is, as nationscom m itted to the recovery of their unred eem ed national territories.Thei r legitimacy rested entirely on their ability to embody th e national imagined community.

Moreover, these societies (except for parts of Romania and Croatiawhere local aristocracies survived) were extraordinarily populist bywest European standards. Ottoman rule had stripped them of their


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medieval dynasties and nobilities. The O ttom an collapse bro ugh tdown those few groups that had prospered thr ou gh collaborationwith the Turks . The newly l iberated B alkan lands were peasantsocieties with only very modest commercial and manufacturingelites and nationalist intelligentsias. T he intellectuals devoted themselvesto state-building advancing themselves as best the y could w ithinwhat might with apologies to Marx be called the nationalist m odeof productionthat is getting richer and accumulating status by servingthe burgeoning national state. Capitalist individualism possessedlittle prestige or legitimacy; state-building in order to field armiescapable of wresting away the unredeem ed lands of the n ation from

their enemy possessors was the highest public value. The Balkanswere hardly uniqu e in this respect; there are many parallels w ith otherparts of the non-W estern world notably postcolonial La tin A mericaand parts of Africa.

If there was dem ocracy in this it was an oligarchically controlledpopulist democracy that worked for the ruling nationality alone.A nd it coexisted with powerful kinship networks and patron-clientrelationships both of wh ich had been vital to the social surv ival of

non-Musl ims and M uslims alike under O ttom an rule.Na tional minorities faced unenviable dilemm as. M uslim minorities

could rarely claim effective citizenship in a Balkan Christian nationalstate since they were associated with the execrated and in most casesnow expelled Turks. But even C hristia n mino rities could ho pe fortoleration only if they confined their demands to linguistic and religiousrights while agreeing to learn the no w-do m inan t m ajority language andloyally serve the state in which they lived. To ask anything more riskedthe charge of hostility to their new fatherland.

T H E PRISON-HOUSE OF NATIONS

TODAY S BALKAN states then possess next to nothin g of the Westernliberal tradition w ith its emphasis on individualism and protectionfor dissenters and m inorities. The Balkan coun tries emerged fromcenturies of O ttom an rule with litde more than a desperately wished-fornational identity. Even their religious sensibilities had been nationalizedby the actions of both their own intellectuals and the O tto m an regime


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The interwar advance toward liberal democracy under Wilsonianauspices was weak. Tru e, in the 1920s, before they fell under right-w ingdictatorships, the independent Balkan states developed multipartypolitical systems in which broad-based peasant parties urged landreform and o ther anti-oligarchic m easures. Bu t these parties were alsostrongly nationalist, as were the right-w ing

authoritarian monarchies and protofascist In t h eev eso fT ito 's fo esregimes that eclipsed them in the 1930s.There was little byway of liberalism to resis t p r o t e e t i n g A l b a n i a nthe rise of r ightist d ic ta torship. K o s o v a r s a n d M u s l i m

Likewise, pos t-W orld War II Balkan ri , -

communism was deeply nationaUst in nature, ^ ^ ^ n i a n s w a s a s m .despite its internationalist phraseology. Thecommunist regimes were, in effect, populist development dictatorshipsjustified in terms of the unity of the nation and its right and need tocatch up with the developed capitalist world. Even in capitalistGreece, the com m unist and socialist movem ents have been profoundlynationalistic. Tito's Yugoslavia was legitimized through and throughby nationa lism, especially after the d ram atic T ito -S tal in split of 1948.

Tito aimed to satisfy each Yugoslav nationality's basic collectiveclaims while at the same time balancing them against each otherto keep his own position of charismatic authority impregnable andensure that no one national group overwhelmed the others. Thus in1966 he broke the power of his heir apparent, the Serb AlexanderRankovic, for accumulating excessive power within the Serbiancomponent of the Yugoslav federation.

It is som etimes said that because Tito's Yugoslavia was a comm unist

dictatorship, it prevented the emergence of a dissident movementstriving to create a liberal, individualistic civil society. Instead, the an ti-communist movement was supposedly forced to clothe itself in thegarb of separatist nationalism. But this is Western liberal wishfulthinking. Exclusivist nationalism triumphed in Yugoslavia because itexpressed the deepes t yearnings and values of m ost of those w ho w eredisaffected from the communist regime. Among the various sins ofT ito's prison-h ouse of nations, in its nationalist foes' eyes, was its

protection of such minorities and outsiders as the MusHm Bosniansand Albanian Kosovars.


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To m ake m atters worse, the Balkan cou ntries have also been w eakstates, resting until W orld W ar II on underdeveloped agrarian econom icbases. T h e i r tax revenues were not enough to pay for large andsophisticated armies, nor for state institutions that could firmlycontrol their own societies. The sporadic wars the Balkan statesfought bled them white. Until 9 4 their rulers lived in fear of antitaxrevolts in the countryside. In 1907 quelling a peasant revolt in Ro maniacost a hund red thousand lives. T h e B alkan states fell into heavy foreigndebt. As their economic dependency on the cap italist or comm unistpoles grew, they fell as well into gre at-po wer clientage.

LOVE THY NEIGHBOR

T H E C O N C E P T I O N ofa n ideal Grea ter Serbia dates to the 1840s. It gavethe independent state of Serbia the agenda to conquer and incorporateSerb-inhabited lands in Bosnia, in O ttom an-h eld southern Serbiastretching into Macedonia, in the Vojvodina and Banat districts insouthern H ungary, in the Krajina district in Croatia, in Serb-speaking(if historically independent) Montenegro, and in Kosovo, cradle of

the medieval Serbian monarchy. The notion of a southern Slavicfederationthat is, the ninetee nth-ce ntury Yugoslav idea appealedvery little to Serbian nationa lists. N or was it essential to their nationalliberation, as it was for the Croatians and Slovenes living underHa psburg A ustrian rule.

Although Serbia had dom inated interwar Yugoslavia, in Tito sstate, Serbian nationalists resented their reduced infiuence. Serbianbitterness at the loss of hegemony persisted from the t ime of

Rankovic s fall u nt il the collapse of the federation in 1992. Serbiandissident nationalists began criticizing communist Yugoslavia afterTito s death in 1980, focusing on the Serb decline in Kosovo, whereSerbs were now overwhelmingly outnum bered by Albanians. SlobodanMilosevic, a com m unist poli t ician, em braced this them e in a n o w -notorious 1989 speech, redefining himself and the Serbian state heled in Serbian nationalist terms.

The Serb position in Kosovo had been perm anently unde rm inedby the failure of a 1689 Serb rebellion against O tt o m a n rule. TheOttomans had been temporarily weakened by a great 1683 defeat at


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Hapsburg and Polish hands but were still capable of dominating theSerbian lands. Fearing murderous reprisals, the Serbian archbishopof Pec led some 30,000 Serbian families into exile in Hapsburg-ruled

southern Hungary, where their descendants live to this day. Hence-forth the Albanians in Kosova as the region is known in theirlanguage), favored by the Ottomans as loyal Muslims, rose to demo-graphic predominance. Two centuries later, when the great EasternCrisis of 1875-78 partially dismantled the Ottoman Empire, theminiature Serbian state sought to seize Kosovo but ran headlong intonascent Albanian nationalism there. The result w s severe bloodshed.

In the Balkan War of 1912 Serbia succeeded in conquering and

annexing Kosovo, whereupon it promptly attacked and expelled theOttoman Turkish elites along with many Muslim Albanians. Slavic


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Christians (mostly Serbs and M ontene grins) perpetrated terriblemassacres of Muslim Albanians, along with Turks and SlavophoneMuslims, in Kosovo, M onte neg ro, Bosnia, and southe rn Serbia du ringand im m ediately after W orld W ar L In the interwar decades, Kosovowas an internal colony of the Serb co m pon ent of the Y ugoslav state.Official policy settled numerous Serb officials, farmers, and t owns -people there while seeking to Serbianize the A lbanian m ajoritylinguistically and politically.

D ur ing W orld W ar II , Kosovo was torn away from Yugoslavia afterthe country fell to the Nazis. Kosovo was then joined to Albania, whichhad been an Italian colony since 1939. T his briefiy fiilfilled, although

under foreign tutelage, the program of G reater Albanian nationalism.After Mussolini's fall and Italy's withdrawal from the war in 1943, theNazis occupied Albania, encouraging the Kosovars to join their fightagainst both the Serbs and Tito's communist Partisans. The Nazisraised an ss division among the Kosovar M uslims. M urderou s attackson the Serbs were carried out as they were in pro-Nazi Croatia.

A t W orld War II 's end the Kosovars fought vainly for nearly a yearagainst their reincorporation into the Yugoslav state. They were subse-

quentiy ruled in semicolonial fashion by the Serbian communists, whosediscriminatory policies caused perhaps 250,000 Albanians to emigratefrom Kosovo. Violent Albanian dem onstrations in 968 persuaded Titoto grant Kosovo wide-ranging provincial autonomy, which in thesubsequent 20 years the Albanians exploited to their own advantage asmuch as their economic weakness and dependence on Serbia allowed.

This , then, ^yas the state of affairs against which Serb nationalistsrebelled in the 1980s, inspiring M ilosev ic in 1989 to abolish Kosovo's

provincial autonomy, introduce direct rule from Belgrade, and seek tore-Serbianize the public sphere. The Kosovar Albanians reacted byforming an unofficial dissident society, complete with its own taxsystem, schools, and legal and police organs, governed by an ideologyof nonviolent nationalist separatism em bodied in the Kosovar Alban ianleader, Ibrahim Rugova. Like other stateless peoples' ventures innational solidarity, this one too som etim es displayed aggressivenessto prod the local Serbs to retreat.

Wi t h the 1991-92 disintegration of Yugoslavia, capped by thesecession of Sloveniaand Croatia and the subsequent civil war involving


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and his Serbian p artners. Had NATO acceptance of Croa tian secessionin 1991 been con ditioned on firm guarantees for the Serb minoritythere, a better outco m e m ight have occurred n ot only in Croa tia, fromwhich the Croats brutally expelled 200,000 or more Krajina Serbsin 1995, but also in Bosnia. Internationally mediated negotiations in1991-92 to secure the rights of the Serbian m inorities in Croatia andBosnia would have presented an op portunity to pressure Milosevicfor a quid pro quo guarantee of the minority rights of the KosovoAlbanians, including self-government. In this way the presenttragedy in Kosovo mig ht have been averted.

WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER

T H E O T H E R Balkan nationalisms in play in the lands of formerYugoslavia are not intrinsically morally superior to Serbian nationalism.The Slovenians, who in the past were locked in bitter nationalistconflicts with both the Italians and the Austrian Ge rmans, today havea state tha t fortunately has neither irredentist claims against ts neighborsnor internal minorities. Croatian, Albanian, and Bosnian Muslim

nationalism are no less prey to the t em p ta t ions of violence andauthoritarianism than is Serbian nationalism. Croatia has proventhis conclusively, most bloodily by depo rting the Krajina Serbs, whileKLA ex trem ism has tarnished the Kosovar Albanians reputation, asdid adherence to M ussolini and the Nazis for an earlier gene ration.

Altogether, the A lban ians have faced extrao rdin ary difficultiesin attaining a sense of modern nat ionhood , as is shown, am ongother things, by the profoundly paranoid and repressive character

of communist Albania after World War II. The Kosovar Alba niansdiffer markedly from their linguistic kin in Albania proper, as dothe numerous Albanians in Macedonia . Th e Albanians have noBalkan allies. Greece is inclined to be hostile because of borderdisputes in Epirus and Greece s interest in an alliance with Serbiato counterbalance Bulgaria and indep ende nt, m ultiethnic M aced onia.Long-standing Albanian sympathies for the Turks w ere alienatedby late Ottoman repression, though today the Turks are m ak ing

some tentative pro-Albanian moves that may be harbingers of afuture rapprochement.


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T he A lbanians' only support, it seems, is NATO. If the alliance succeedsin returning the expelled Kosovars to their homes and in crippling oreven toppling Milosevic, it w ll create a crisis about which few respon-sible Weste rn officials are currently speaking . Th is wall result fi-om theforcible defeat of Serbian nationalism, which sees the effort to retain andre-Serbianize Kosovo as entirely legitimate. This will leave a hugeautho rity and legitimacy deficit in the Serbian lands. Som ething similarmight prove true in M onteneg ro, whose pro-W estern governm ent mayno t survive the aifiront to pro-Serb ian feelings provoked by the bom bingcampaign, which has not spared Montenegrin targets. How will NATOfill this vacuum? How will Washington and its allies help a liberal,pro-Western Serbian political culture emerge after the war?

T h e analogy that comes to mind is occupied Germ any after 1945. Butthere German political culture could draw on an authentic tradition ofmoderate liberalism and cosmopolitanism, as embodied in KonradAdenauer. Even so, U .S . policy in West G ermany, successflil though itwas, required several decades and many hundreds of millions of doUars.W ill NATO mak e such an inves tme nt in a defeated Serbia? W h a tincentives can NATO offer to bring forth Serbian political elites who will

move the country beyond the xenophobic and collecdvist nationalismthat has defined the country's political culture since Napoleon's day?Similarly, who can guarantee that a self-governing Kosovo will hono r

liberal democratic values? H ow do we propose to encourage Albanians,in both Kosovo and Albania, to advance themselves beyond collectivistnationalism? W h o will guarantee the Slavic majority in Macedonia thatAlbanian irredentismradiating fi^om Pristina, Tirana, or both^willnot destabilize their feeble but strategically important country?

W ould such Alban ian aggressiveness tem pt the Greeks to move againstMacedonia? Or the Bulgarians? Might the Greeks and Bulgarians goto war again over contro l of Macedonia, as they did in 1913?

B RB RI NS AT T H E G TES

F I N A L LY, a few words about violence and cruelty. A lthough journalistslike Ro bert D . Kaplan tend to essentialize Balkan violence that is,

to treat it as inherent in Balkan culturesit is pos tmo dern orthodox yin the acad em y to insist th at it is socially con struc ted. N eith er


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perspective is very enlightening. State-imposed violence is quitedifferent from the violent actions of individuals, whether acting onstate orders or on their own initiative. Under the Ottoman Empire,kinship-based blood feuds of the type common to medieval western

Europe survived well into the twentiethT h e B a lk a n e th ic of century. They did so because the Turks did

not efficiently provide security and justice tob l o o d r e v e n g e h a s j gij. subjects after the sixteenth-centuryb e e n c ra f te d o n t o Ottoman golden age, while the authorities

. . . ,. they sanctioned among the non-M uslimse t h n i c n a t i o n a l i s m . ^ ^ ^ ^ ^^^y ^ ^^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^^ ^^ ^^ Largely

though not entirely suppressed after 1918, theethic of blood revenge, binding individual members of extended families,sprang back to life when states disintegrated and civil wars erupted.

In many cases, this ethic has been successfully grafted onto ethnicnationalism. The individual murders customary to blood feuds arecommitted against the anonymous national enemy. This helps usunderstand how such people as Milosevic's security police in Kosovocan murder and deport civilians of all ages. It also helps explain

violence against women. In the postcommunist Yugoslavian civilwars, rape's age-old dishonoring effects have been heightened byperpetrators bent on implanting their own ethnic offspring in thewombs of the national enemy's women an essentialization ofnational identity if there ever was one.

Under the circumstances of civil war and ethnic cleansing, the m ostruthless rise to the fore; the less ruthlesswho cannot escape thesituation by, for example, emigrating to the U.S. eastern seaboard, wherehundreds of thousands of erb and other Balkan refligees unwilling toparticipate in the slaughter have congregatedare forced to toe the line.Something similar occurs in U.S. prisons, organized as they usually arealong ethnic lines that pit gangs of black. Latino, and white racistsagainst one another, leaving little or no room for dissenters.

At the level of state-imposed violence, attacks upon the enemy'shuman numberssuch as the expulsion of the Kosovo A lbanians andthe murder of many Kosovar Albanian men capable of bearingarmshave a long history in the Balkans, stretching all the way backto Thucydides' Greece Evident here is the military and technological


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weakness of the Balkan state, which , in Machiavellian manner, counselsdestroying th e enem y s m anpower in lieu of his industries o r arms asthe bes t way of crippling his capacity to fight back. Th is can be grimlyeffective. A t th e same time, ethn ic cleansing may succeed, as M ilosevicseems to ho pe, in establishing an irreversible fait accom pli in Kosovo.

Still, the violence in both the 1992-95 wars in Cro atia and Bosniaand the 999 war in Kosovo expresses not un m ediated ancient hatredsbut the insecurities accompanying the breakup of the multinationalcommunist confederation ofYugoslavia and the unresolved conflictsover the establish ment of new political boundaries. In sho rt, civil warsparked by confiicts over the frontiers of the successor states has

triggered the violence and inhumanity. Had those wars been foughtmo re impersonally, in the h igh -tech Am erican way, the U .S . reactionwould perhaps have been less horrified. Th e Un ited States fearsomebombing of German and Japanese cities in World War II was farmore destructive of civilian life than anything that has occurred inpostcommunist Yugoslavia.

Analogies are frequently drawn between Serbian e thnic cleansing inKosovo and the Nazi genocide against the Jews. In some particulars

such as the victims brutal uprooting from their homes at gunpointand their inhuman transportation by railroadthe analogy, thoughinexact, is enlightening. But fundamentally, it is misleading. TheHo locaust was a program of biological extermination based on racisteugenic theories. Balkan ethnic cleansing does not require massexterm ination b ut rather m ass removal, wh ich can be hastened alongby displays of murderous violence drawn from the rep ertory of revengekillings and blood feuds. Th is has, unfortunately, frequently occurred

in the last century for exam ple, the des truction and expulsion of theGreeks by the Turks in Asia Minor following the ill-fated Greekinvasion of Turkey in 1922. Even the lamentable Armenian genocideof 9 5 was an extreme form of ethn ic cleansing, not an attem pt to ridthe earth of every last Armenian. In 1914-15 czarist Russia forced themass exodus of its German-spealdng subjects who lived along itsborders with Austria-Hungary. The largest such expulsion was thatof the Germans from eastern and Balkan Europe following the Nazi

defeat of May 1945. Here some 12-15 million people were uprootedand driven from their homes amid rape and murder.


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Th ese points suggest that M ilosevic falls sho rt of Hitler. A lthou ghhis and his allies complicity in war crimes justifies their moral andlegal condemnation, diabolizing them serves no good strategic

purpose. The West is deaUng with ruthless nationalists who seeksecure and (to them) honorable bordersa goal understood andshared by all Balkan peoples. N AT O d estruction of the Serbian p olitywill not satisfy the Serbs justifiable grievances , nor will it stabilize theBalkans. It will instead either force a NATO occupation of Serbia orreduce Serbia to a desperate rog ue s tate tha t will leave the Balkans inpermanent insecurity and fear. Since blockades and embargoes leak,conta inm en t of such a rogue would be difficult. M oreover, a defeated

Serbia seething with nationalist extremism would cast shadows onneighb oring states struggling toward democracy.

W h a t should now be done? Every effort should be m ade, wh ethe rby fiirther military action or by ha lting the bom bin g, to get Serbia toagree to the return of the Albanian Kosovars to their homeland.Milosevic will have to agree to the presence in Kosovo of NATO orother international police force. To gain his assent, something willhave to be offered to him that he and the Serbs value, whether it is

guarantees for Serbian interests in Kosovo, compensation to Serbsexpelled from Croatia in 1995, or other econom ic concessions. T h e onlyway to remove Milosevic from power is to achieve a peace within whichliberal, democratic civil-society movements can sink deeper roots thanthey now have. It m ay take long time for such an opposition to becomea majority in Serbia, as it will in Croatia and other postcommunistBalkan regimes. Bu t it is vital to the region tha t they do .

M eanw hile, W ashin gton should take every care neither to imposethe peace of the graveyard on Serbia no r to turn its back on a millionor two Albanian Kosovar deportees. NATOwhich does not meanthe Un ited States alone has now intervened deeply enough to commititself to the long-term stabilization and pacification of the Balkans.A ny thing less fails to justify the W est s resort to arm s.


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