The Balkans: A Short History (22 page)

Minorities had mostly shrunk. But in their behavior toward their minorities, Communist regimes looked rather similar to their predecessors in the way they combined repression and assimilation in the name of modernization. Romania veered in its treatment of the Transylvanian Hungarians from the apparent liberalism of the 1952 constitution, which had envisaged setting up a Hungarian autonomous region, to the forced assimilation policy pursued a few years later as the Party itself adopted a more nationalist tendency and came out against “manifestations of national isolationism.”

Bulgarian campaigns against the country’s Turkish minority forced thousands to flee abroad in 1950 and again in 1968. In the early 1970s many Muslim villagers were forced to hand in their old ID cards and to thank officials publicly for their new Bulgarian names. The 1984 assimilation campaign attacked fasting during Ramadan as a “destructive superstition.” “The Bulgars of the Rhodope regions have shaken off their Islamic fundamentalism,” commented Stanko Todorov in 1985, “liberated themselves from the influence of conservatism in their lives and strengthened their Bulgarian patriotic consciousness.” Bulgaria was, according to him, a “one-nation state” in which “there are no parts of any other people and nation.” In 1989, in its death throes, the Communist regime triggered off another mass exodus in which 300,000 Muslims left for Turkey. By 1990, however, Bulgarian troops were stemming the flow and nearly 130,000 returned. The same year, the new post-Communist government accepted the restoration of Muslims’ former names and arrested Todor Zhivkov, the former head of state and Party leader, accusing him among other things of “incitement of ethnic hostility and hatred.”
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In Yugoslavia, in contrast, the collapse of communism had very different consequences and made the plight of minorities worse, not better. The two forces preserving the unity of the federal state were the power of the Communist Party and the person of Tito himself. Under Tito, tensions between the republics were settled at the federal level of the state and Party apparatus. Even before his death in 1980, strains had been apparent in both Belgrade and Zagreb as nationalist currents emerged among Party cadres. The Bosnian party, which had the most hard-line leadership of any of the republics, became increasingly important in supporting the federal leadership against the centrifugal tendencies operating from the grass roots. But after Tito’s death, the federal leadership, weakened by the protracted economic crisis, was less successful in balancing the competing claims of the different nationalities. With the rise of Serbian nationalism in the mid-1980s, the system began to break down.

Tito’s regime had been based upon a highly elaborate system of official national groups, and even created several “new” ones. As early as November 1943, Yugoslav Communists had recognized Macedonia as a separate republic within the federation and declared its inhabitants to be members of a separate, “Macedonian” nation. In 1971 Bosnian Muslims were recognized for the first time as a separate nation too. Yugoslavia was one of the last countries where the old Habsburg distinction between “nations” and “nationalities” was preserved: among the latter, the largest were the Albanians, settled mostly in the autonomous province of Kosovo. They increasingly outnumbered Serbs and other groups; Albanians were perhaps 85 percent of the total population of Kosovo and roughly 20 percent of the population of the neighboring republic of Macedonia.

Even before the collapse of communism, Slobodan Milosevic began to reassert Serb power in Kosovo and Voivodina. His policies were originally intended to bolster Serb influence within Yugoslavia. But as the federation’s republics broke away it became clear that what Milosevic was fighting for was not Yugoslavia but rather the creation of a Greater Serbia that would allow Serb minorities in Croatia and Bosnia to remain part of the same overall political community as Serbs in Serbia and Montenegro. After 1991, international support for independent Croatia and Bosnia eventually caused even this policy to fail: Croatian Serbs were driven from the Krajina, and Bosnian Serbs were forced to give up territory and accept that they were part of Bosnia. At the decade’s end, Milosevic suffered a further failure when NATO went to war with Serbia to carve out a separate self-governing territory for the Albanians in Kosovo. By 1999, the borders of the Republic of Serbia were almost back to where they had been in 1878 in the time of Milan Obrenovic
. Milosevic had failed; his sole success was that he retained power in Belgrade.

The use of mass expulsions to ensure permanent ethnic domination had been the goal of Serb policy in Bosnia after 1992; it was feared to be Serb policy in Kosovo too six years later. Historians read such policies back into Europe’s past. Political scientists feared they might have a future. But whether the Yugoslav wars really indicated, as many foresaw, the emergence of a new “ethnic nationalism” could be doubted. It was easy, amid the gloom, to exaggerate. Potentially most destabilizing were the repercussions of the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo for neighboring areas. Tensions ran high between Serbia and Montenegro, though the latter’s suspicion of Milosevic and dreams of real independence would always be tempered by uncertainty at what life would be like for a small Montenegrin state, flanked by Albania in the south, Croatia and Bosnia. More worrying still were the implications for stability in Albania and Macedonia if Kosovo eventually—as seemed highly likely—broke away from Serbia altogether. Irredentism seemed stronger among Albanians than most other peoples in southeastern Europe, perhaps because they had been deprived for so long of their freedom.

Elsewhere, though, the expansionism of the past seemed to have vanished. Only a few diaspora nationalists—in the United States, Australia or Canada—dreamed of fighting for a Greater Greece or San Stefano Bulgaria. Almost no one in the Balkans actually harbored such aspirations. Attitudes to land and territorial expansion had changed there as elsewhere in postwar Europe. Moreover, the shift from rural to urban societies had transformed the role of minorities and the authorities’ attitude toward them. Moving from villages to towns meant leaving militarily sensitive border areas for more anonymous and less neuralgic political spaces. States in the Balkans either were in, or wished to join, European institutions that required their members to commit themselves to providing certain human and minority rights. And economic growth meant that countries which had formerly been exporters of labor now found that they were becoming importers instead: Greece was the first Balkan country to realize that new immigrant communities—from the Philippines, Pakistan, Ukraine—were turning it, willy-nilly, into a multicultural society.

As in the rest of Europe, then, the Balkans were seeing issues of nationalism and minority rights turning from a question of war and peace to one of border policing and urban coexistence. The long struggle to create a nation-state—of which the Yugoslav wars could be seen as the final phase—had taken the entire twentieth century. The irony was that just as this struggle ended, economic and political changes at the international level threw the very idea of the nation-state into question. The collapse of Communist one-party states signaled the most dramatic crisis of the old idea of socioeconomic transformation though the domestic policies of the individual state; but accession to the European Union in a more insidious and indirect way confronted Greece and future Balkan applicants with similar issues. In both cases, the dismantling of tariffs and protected state industries as well as the exposure to global competition meant the triumph of neoliberal forces. The traditional Balkan nation-state is no longer challenged by the old empires; it is not even challenged by the rivalry and hostility of neighbors; its main threat comes now from the international economy.

EPILOGUE

ON VIOLENCE

When I travelled in Europe, I saw everywhere things I did not particularly like. Fine—I did not say, “That is no good.” I wanted to know why things were thus.

—OTTOMAN OFFICIAL IN CONVERSATION WITH FRENCH PRIEST, 1848
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In the 1990s, the wars in the former Yugoslavia put the Balkans back on the map of Europe, and aroused anxious memories of the First World War. While the rest of the continent was coping with mass immigration, new regional diversities and what were often euphemistically termed “multicultural societies,” southeastern Europe looked as if it was reverting to an earlier historical logic of territorial wars and ethnic homogenization. Was this Europe’s past or its future?

Those who opposed Western intervention in the Balkans tended to blame Yugoslav President Milosevic less than long-run cultural determinants of behavior in the region. They saw ethnic diversity itself as a chronic source of tension in a part of the world that lay on the intersection of several major religions, and they interpreted ethnic cleansing not so much as part of the European logic of nation-state building but as the latest in a series of massacres and countermassacres that, according to them, constituted the stuff of Balkan history. “The conflict in Bosnia,” British Prime Minister John Major stated in 1993, “was a product of impersonal and inevitable forces beyond anyone’s control.” The language was not new. A century earlier, Gabriel Hanotaux, the French foreign minister, had similarly termed anti-Armenian massacres in Anatolia as “one of those thousand incidents of struggle between Christians and Muslims.”
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Yet for centuries, as this book has attempted to show, life in the Balkans was no more violent than elsewhere; indeed the Ottoman empire was better able than most to accommodate a variety of languages and religions. To Arnold Toynbee, witnessing its final days, it was evident that the source of conflict lay outside the region. “The introduction of the Western formula [of the principle of nationalism] among these people,” he wrote in 1922, “has resulted in massacre. . . . Such massacres are only the extreme form of a national struggle between mutually indispensable neighbors, instigated by this fatal Western idea.” “Ethnic cleansing”—whether in the Balkans in 1912–1913, in Anatolia in 1921–1922 or in erstwhile Yugoslavia in 1991–1995—was not, then, the spontaneous eruption of primeval hatreds but the deliberate use of organized violence against civilians by paramilitary squads and army units; it represented the extreme force required by nationalists to break apart a society that was otherwise capable of ignoring the mundane fractures of class and ethnicity.
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To be sure, not everyone shares this view. In 1994 an Austrian reader of my book
Inside Hitler’s Greece
suggested I had been too harsh in my judgment of German military behavior in the Balkans in the 1940s, given that—as recent events again demonstrated, in his view—there was evidently a peculiar propensity to violence among the people of the region. To me, the wartime slave labor camp at Mauthausen indicated that the Austrians did not have much to learn from the Bosnian Serbs about violence. But our argument was not really about
violence
so much as about cruelty—behavior, not numbers. It was, after all, neither the peoples of the Balkans nor their rulers who gave birth to the Gulag, the extermination camp or the Terror. Wehrmacht soldiers (not to mention other Nazi agencies) killed far more people in the Balkans than were killed by them. What my correspondent objected to was the manner in which the partisans had done their killing.

During the Second World War, Nazi ideology too distinguished “necessary” impersonal violence from the cruel or sadistic behavior of men who lost control of their feelings and actions. In the trial of one officer, a Munich SS court in 1943 contrasted orderly and decent killing with the defendant’s “cruel excesses,” “sadism” and “vicious brutality.” Such attitudes formed part of a longer Western effort to define rules of civilized warfare, which highlighted an ideal of individual self-control. Like others in that tradition, the Nazis saw primitive and oriental bloodthirstiness lingering in the Balkans.
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We can go back to Montaigne’s essay on cruelty to see the new view emerging. Castigating men of his own times for their delight in suffering, he describes the grief he feels when unnecessary pain is inflicted upon humans and animals:

I could hardly be persuaded before I had seene it, that the world could have afforded so marble-hearted and savage-minded men, that for the onely pleasure of murther would commit it; then cut, mangle and hacke other members in pieces; to rouze and sharpen their wits, to invent unused tortures and unheard-of torments. . . . As for me, I could never so much as endure, without remorse or griefe, to see a poore, sillie and innocent beast pursued and killed.
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