PRISONERS OF AN INVENTED PAST
(A Peruvian's journey through the Southern Balkans)

José Luis Rénique

Epilogue

Zoran Djindic has emerged in recent months as the leader of the biggest anti-government demonstrations in Belgrade since President Slobodan Milosevic came to power in 1987. "Political power in the Balkans is complicated," he says.

"If we want to build a popular movement, we must use nationalism to do it. Our primary goal is to reform the economy and push Yugoslavia into Western Europe, but we cannot rally popular support around an economic program. This is why we are building our movement on Serbian nationalism (...) But Europe and the United States should not make too much of this. We will honor the Dayton agreement and we will not incorporate Serbian-held Bosnia into Serbia as long as this is opposed by our Western friends."

Following old clichés, numerous Western analysts had seen the recent Balkan conflicts as the product of centuries-old enmities between the Serbs, Croats and Muslims that over time have created certain culture of blood feuds. As the dust settles down in this troubled area, sounder interpretations appear.

Following the "Braudelian" model proposed in the introduction of this work, a ultimately fatal demographic fact arises as a prominent factor in the most distant past.

"The fluid migratory patterns in the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires allowed the members of many communities that later wanted to become nations to spread across large areas of the territory. This meant that when the newly self-conscious nations of the Balkans were attempting to establish their own states to replace the failing empires, the control of many regions with mixed populations was bitterly disputed on grounds both of demography and history."

Based on that complicated ground, and as the Ottoman and Habsburg empires declined, Balkan nationalism developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Three motives -according to John R. Lampe- favored a single Yugoslavia: (1) the promise of a representative government; (2) the attraction of economic integration, and (3) the security that a single state afforded to Yugoslavia's parts regarding "the seven potentially hostile neighbors that ringed its borders after the two world wars." However, struggling with these three modernizing state-building rationales there were

"three romantic nineteenth-century ideas for the creation of a unitary nation-state - Great Serbia, Great Croatia, and a Yugoslavia founded on the assumption that at least Serbs and Croats, and possibly all South Slavs, were one ethnic group.

"By the late twentieth century -according to Bogdan Denitch- Serbian and Croat nationalism were still "anchored in myth, tradition, and religious exclusivism. They are the nationalism of poets, novelists, historical mythmakers, overimaginative ethnographers, and irresponsible populist demagogues. These nationalisms, like those of the other Post-Communist countries in the region, are mytho-poetic and antirational. Therefore they are both antidemocratic and antimodern."

In spite of these views, the interaction of peoples cut into their ethnic segregation. To the extent that it did -explains Prof. Lampe- state-building rationales held the upper hand over the romantic conceptions of a nation-state.

"Where it did not, the viability of Yugoslavia was threatened. Two external shocks were still needed to make that threat lethal - the Second World War and the contagious failure in 1989 of the postwar Communist regimes."

At a second medium-range historical dimension, it is the making and unmaking of Tito's Yugoslavia what constitutes the proper context to examine the roots of contemporary clashes. Richard West has contributed to clarify Tito's handling of the tension between the "state building rationales" and the nationalistic "romantic conceptions" referred by Lampe. In the spring of 1941, West wrote, Tito understood that the way to win power in Yugoslavia was not "by fighting the foreign power invaders but by putting and end to internal conflict." Instead of leading a revolution in the way Lenin or Trotsky had done -concludes West- Tito was to present himself as a Yugoslav patriot, standing above the feuds of religion and history.

"Down the road, identification with Tito and the new Yugoslavia, meant rejection of an increasingly discredited past as well as the hopes for greater integration into the European community and the creation of a progressive society. As Ivo Banac puts it, the communists did not win the war under the banner of Yugoslavian unitarism; they won under the banner of the national liberation of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, and so on. Following a tactic that has been described as "strategic nationalism," once in power, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) set the goal of building a second Yugoslavia without insisting on a highly centralized Yugoslav nation-state reminiscent of the Serbian-dominated state of the first one. The objective was a combination of federalism and political centralization.

"The expectation that the LCY could provide political unity in the context of multinational identities was supported by the belief that this move would buy time for economic development to erode particularistic identities. The support for nationalism, including the recognition of the "lesser nations" (Montenegrans, Macedonians, and Moslems), was also an attempt to undercut Serbia's dominance over the republics and nationalities; by recognizing more peoples as "nationalities" the aspirations of Serbian nationalism could be checked. Increased urbanization, reduced isolation of rural areas, higher educational attaintment, and open opportunity structure, worker-managed enterprises, and nearly two generations of living as a single state were expected to reduce the political strength of nationalism, leaving it its place cultural traditions and ethnic pride held in common by all South Slavic people."

Worker self-management and a new Constitution issued in 1974, were crucial steps toward a loser confederation which unity increasingly resided in Tito's ability to maintain ultimate control through the LCY elite. In the medium-term, however, the weakening of state power and its decreasing control over the economy will end up fragmenting the LCY. "Local leagues were encouraged to defend their own regional interests as a way of broadening their political support" and "as the system continued to decay the leaders of the republics increasingly began to represent the interests of their power base, their own republics against the center. This was a sure road to local popularity. As time went on leaders of the LCY in the republic, particularly after Tito's death in 1980, ever more directly and openly represented the desires and interests of their own republics. A symbiosis of Communist and localist nationalist policies thus evolved (....) in the absence of a Tito or an institutional equivalent as a legitimate arbiter, it became much more difficult to deal with a popular populist nationalism."

Regional and ethnic disparities in living standards, employment, and education as well as important alterations of ethnic demographic patterns created a tense scenario that an increasingly feeble system will be unable to cope with. Economic crisis was going to be an important catalyst for the final collapse of Yugoslavia. In 1989, living standards had declined by at least a quarter and inflation had reached more than 2,500 per cent. By then, in the midst of a general breakdown of Communist regimes all over Europe, the end of the second Yugoslavia entered into its final, vertiginous, and bloody stage.

Ample consensus exist among those who have analyzed the process of Yugoslavian dissolution that it was Belgrade the political epicenter of the ethnic nationalism. In a well known process, Serb political leadership decided to bring nationalist fever onto the center of the political stage, and to use it as a powerful weapon in an otherwise purely political confrontation. In other words, rational politics receded before this abrupt incursion of nineteenth century romantic nationalism inciting a chauvinistic eruption that would soon engulfe the whole Southern Balkan region.

Was violence an inevitable outgrowth of ethnic mobilization? According to V.P. Gagnon, the current major conflicts taking place along ethnic lines throughout the world have as their main causes not "ancient hatreds," but rather the purposeful actions of political actors "who actively create violent conflict, selectively drawing on history in order to portray it as historically inevitable." Following this analysis, violence along ethnic lines in the former Yugoslavia resulted from a "purposeful and rational strategy" planned by those most threatened by changes to the structure of economic and political power, changes being advocated by reformists within the ruling Serbian communist party. V.P. Gagnon has aptly described the nature and the evolution of these leading political actors:

"A wide coalition -conservatives in the Serbian party leadership, local and regional party elites who would be most threatened by such changes, orthodox Marxist intellectuals, nationalist writers, and parts of the Yugoslav army- joined together to provoke conflict along ethnic lines. This conflict created a political context where individual interest was defined not in terms of economic well-being, but as the survival of the Serbian people. The conservatives' original goal was to recentralize Yugoslavia in order to crush reformist trends throughout the country, but especially in Serbia itself. By 1990, in a changed international context and with backlashes against their centralization strategy in other republics, the conservative coalition moved to destroy the Yugoslav state and create a new, Serbian-majority state. By provoking conflict along ethnic lines, this coalition deflected demands for radical change and allowed the ruling elite to reposition itself and survive in a way that would have been unthinkable in the old Yugoslavia, where only 39% percent of the population was Serb."

As these lines are being written, this strategy appears to be heading to a decisive battle in the streets of Belgrade while in Bosnia the ghosts of the past still seem to be rendering good services to political elites unwilling to see their privilege positions perturbed. Unable to submit ethnic nationalism to their dreams of a new world order, Western leaders try to contain it without fully awakening again. The one-year old peace enforced by NATO is, on the other hand, an invaluable deed for the common citizen of that devastated country. Maybe it would be appropriate to end this work by saying that what the future holds is neither the self-sustained democracy that social engineers dream of nor the apocalyptic "war of cultures" or "clash of civilizations" that some forecast, but simply more of the mediocre bargaining that has so far allowed Milosevic to survive and Karadzic freely moving around in the vicinity of Pale.