Bosnia
Nairn, Tom
Grant to them the Fatherland of their desire, and make them again citizens of Paradise Rebecca West, dedication to Black Lamb & Grey Falcon: a Journey through Yugoslavia (1940) One...
...The Croat and Catholic part of the population feared Serb domination as much as the Muslims—"They betrayed a lively repugnance to the Great Serbian idea in any shape," the Evanses observed. . . seeing in Serbian unity the triumph of their Greek rivals, who form the large majority of the population of Bosnia, and who would at once become the ruling caste if Bosnia were united to Free Serbia, Montenegro and the other fragments of the old Serbian Empire Rather than see Bosnia in any form of Serbian state they would accept the continuance of Turkish rule (pp.182— 4...
...What imperial rule, what Hapsburg tyranny or slothful dominion of Muscovite apparatchiks, would not be preferable to this...
...It is the representative in conversation of these primitive social relations which hold throughout all these lands within the common yard of the house-community and have survived alike the imported feudalism of the Middle Ages, and the Turkish conquest...
...FALL • 1993 • 409 Politics Abroad Notes I "There is no place of Industry...
...But these prospects depended upon redrawing boundary lines...
...While no solution was possible without violence and imposition, at least some of the victims might have been "persuaded of the futility of resisting partition and agreed to an exchange of populations...
...Time and again we have seen and heard the story, essentially the same story, from Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox Serbs: tales of families previously friends who now try and shoot one another, of mixed marriages torn apart...
...We were anxious to catch a glimpse of that antique society [they wrote] . . . so long artificially preserved from change by the monarchy, before it dies away from the memory of man...
...When the eighteenth century brought what we now call the "Age of Nationalism" — a mere couple of centuries—their conflict had endured for true ages, so long that few of the inhabitants knew much of its origins or could even imagine its end...
...But of course tribalism is easily extrapolated into the more modern categories of nationalism or chauvinism— and so into a conventional image of primitive, atavistic tendencies erupting through the veneer of civilization...
...The new frontiers will duly be declared inviolable, and the demographic traces of the old one will mostly have disappeared...
...After the long Communist dictatorship, the traditions or civic customs that might have led in that direction simply did not exist—or at least, nothing like strongly enough to furnish a mobilizing alternative to the ethnic one...
...For to cross the Military Frontier is to go back, not indeed into Feudal times . . . but to wander beyond the twilight of history, and take a lantern as it were into the night of time...
...Wherever "demons" are evoked one should be suspicious...
...By "modern" I mean here not recent but postfeudal: development from the mid-eighteenth century up to the present day...
...2 Arthur J. Evans, Through Bosnia and Herzegdvina on Foot, during the Insurrections, August and September 1875 (London, 1876), Chapter 2, "The Old Military Frontier, Siscia and the Save...
...When Empire Dissolves To their intense surprise, not unmixed with British indignation, the Evans brothers walked straight into a Bosnian war...
...On one hand, it rightly deplores maltreatment and forcible deportation...
...I suggest that it is this whole manner of argument that is stale, including its dubious identification of a war in Bosnia with the problems of American multiculturalism...
...When the old communist one fell apart (therefore) such accommodation came to depend upon the rapid constitution of a successor— of a multi-ethnic democracy capable of governing a capitalist social order...
...Many commentators have noted that it is the oldest of European marchlands —its original boundary with "the Orient" of the Ottoman Sultanate and (before that) with Byzantium...
...The chief places in Europe where they have survived are along two ancient marchlands: the vojna granica or East-West military frontier (including a lot of Bosnia-Herzegovina), and the Settlement frontier of Northern Ireland...
...Beyond Ethnic Cleansing One mercy (I hope) will be the simultaneous effacement of the phrase "ethnic cleansing...
...These are indeed the tones that resonate in different ways in the judgments of Ignatieff, Kennan, and Hughes...
...It then appears to follow that if only one deals with these blighters firmly enough (especially the Serbs), then interethnic amity can be recreated, and ordinary folk would fall back into their ancestral and accommodating ways...
...But that was before democracy...
...Hence—depending on the intimate geography of place—they involved a different and more damnable choice for one or more of the other communities locked into the palimpsest or jigsaw: the choice of moving, of relocating on the other side of one of the new frontiers...
...Undemonic Nationalism Nationalism is all too often depicted as the imposition of abstractions on "ordinary life" by ideologues...
...What it separated were not countries or nation-states but empires and faiths...
...no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force...
...There is no state of nature...
...Deriving from the past fluctuations of the border, Catholics, Orthodox Serbs and Greeks, and Muslims (or as they usually said, "Mahometans") lived in adjoining villages, or sometimes at different ends of the same villages or towns...
...A model of interethnic peace" is Ignatieff 's version of it, willfully destroyed (therefore) by selfish, inwardand backward-looking fanatics on all sides...
...All nationalism is Balkanization and archaic lunacy...
...Everyone was a second-class subject...
...With few exceptions, both the European and international communities have from the beginning declared two things loudly and simultaneously: (1) "You must be free...
...The cold war should really be added to the torture list...
...Relics of Empire I don't believe it...
...And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short . . ." Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, Ch.13...
...Together these make up a good deal of what historians call "the Age of Nationalism...
...the advocacy and application of such remedies cannot in turn fail to justify those among the new leaders who (as in Serbia) always proclaimed that force was the only answer, and ethnos its sole valid principle...
...The point is the nature of the questions...
...and consequently no Culture of the earth...
...As Robert Hayden points out in one brilliant overview of the conflict: The continued peaceful coexistence of Serbs, Croats, and others in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Banija or Slavonija, for example) would have constituted living disproof of the Serbian and Croatian nationalist ideologies...
...May 13th 1993) From this perspective it tends to follow that whatever the state of nature discloses must be human nature in the raw, stripped of cultural accretions...
...After the Balkan Wars would come the retreat of the Ottomans, two world wars, and then the Yugoslav revolution and civil war of 1943-45...
...This was intended to be two things: a cushion in between the all too real 406 • DISSENT Politics Abroad countries of Croatia and Serbia (whose nationalisms had to be tied down), and an exhibition of progress undefiled by ethnic antagonisms—all the more important because of these vestiges of the first sultanate that endured there...
...It is true that ethnic fratricide was stilled during the period, and that Tito's regime lessened the Serb hegemony over Yugoslavia as a whole...
...But at the same time the brothers knew how these troubles would probably be sorted out—by the arrival of outside forces with orders from Istanbul to impartially shoot down anyone misbehaving (including local Muslims...
...On the other (and this is the real bite), it also tends to imply that any movement of population or borders must be of that sort—a betrayal of pre-existing harmony, as it were, made or forced with motives indistinguishable from those of Nazism...
...That the defense of Bosnia should have fallen into the hands of such men is one of the most terrible features of the situation, and nothing can better show the abjectness of her present governors than that they have consented to accept the services of these bandits...
...that is, adopt democracy and market economics...
...It doesn't matter much from which communal angle these questions were (are) being posed...
...They might have been less like Ignatieff 's state of nature, and more like the normal minority problems elsewhere in the wider area—Trieste, for instance, Vojvodina or Macedonia...
...New York Review rigidity on the theme manages to take the worst side of nationalism at its own face value, perceive it everywhere—and hence unintentionally encourage it everywhere...
...There is nothing marvelous about the fact that most border and minority problems have been sorted out in that basic, crude, and sometimes surgical fashion...
...After 1989, removal of the external, regulating force was final—and perceived as such...
...In this other perspective, human nature in the awesome Hobbesian sense has very little to do with it, and atavism nothing at all...
...One can without difficulty translate these descriptions into the television images of today and yesterday...
...no Letters...
...It is part and parcel of a democratic habit of mind common to the whole Serbian, and indeed the whole South-Slavonic race...
...It seems to have been taken for granted that "existing frontiers" meant the internal ones of the old federation as well as those (for example) between Yugoslavia, Hungary, Greece, and the other surrounding states...
...What I want to do is suggest some elements of an alternative theory of what has happened in part of the former Yugoslavia...
...After all, this was border country indeed—not just a line on the map but a veritable march-world, a partition of civilizations...
...The curse of this old frontier zone is that, though ravaged by so many wars and revolutions, it was never allowed to unscramble itself along what became the standard lines of European nation-state evolution...
...But there is an alternative interpretation...
...Whichever murderer invented etnieko eiseenje, all that this parrot phrase has really achieved is to sum up a sort of metropolitan bemusement at the Bosnian events and to impede any solution to them...
...We find it in one of the most outspoken American polemics of the past year, Robert Hughes's Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America: People once used a dead metaphor— "Balkanization" —to evoke the splitting of a field into sects, groups, little nodes of power...
...Instead of which Civilization insisted on recognizing and preserving a Bosnian-Herzegovinian state (albeit in increasingly spectral form)—and "made a truly terrible situation worse...
...They then become archaic lunacies, explainable only in terms of atavism...
...People had got used to it and, after twenty-five years, tended to forget about it except during atrocity days or, exceptionally, atrocity weeks designed to remind them of this national question still unresolved by huge amounts of outside force and astronomical quantities of well-meant sermonizing and persuasion...
...Paradoxically, all that the rigid antinationalism of pundits and statesmen has achieved is to exacerbate the most deplorable features of nationalism...
...The sole other alternative would have been the one which Ignatieff goes on to indicate in summary style: "Interethnic accommodation depended on the existence of a multi-ethnic state...
...It was something like Ulster, and also resembled the old Debateable Land of the western marches between Scotland and England, only much broader and about nine hundred miles long...
...No surrender": the tone of international relations remained that of the cold war, locked into rigid imperatives of stability and Great Power propriety...
...Would they had been so lucky...
...2) "No existing frontier must be altered...
...But in this part of ex-Yugoslavia, as a result of the way interethnic unity had been artificially conserved, the transition took place in a vilely compressed and explosive form...
...I am simply pointing out that the fact has been a fact, which no doubt would not have occurred in the various ideal or better worlds that people have imagined, and still imagine...
...By the time they reached Sarajevo much of the land was up in arms against its Muslim rulers...
...It seems to me we need to look more directly and critically into the "Balkan tragedy," the heart of darkness itself...
...Yet what one might call the normal results of such experiences— movement of populations, redefinition of boundaries, new national or subnational polities—never happened there in permanent form...
...In reality, where (as in this odd situation) peoples cannot co-exist tolerably, and minority status is impractable, then they have to separate...
...Such were the ferocious FALL • 1993 • 405 Politics Abroad warriors whose acquaintance we made in Travnik," they comment sourly: Today they are streaming into Sarajevo: we met a party of them defiling through the street, and the leader of the gang, as he passed, glared savagely at us...
...The preexisting exemplar of ethnic harmony, the marvelous patchwork quilt of settlement upon settlement, faith side by side with its ancient foes, turned out also to be a bomb...
...But it also diligently preserved the extraordinary patchwork of Bosnia-Herzegovina...
...And in this region people are primarily communities, the democratic impulse is strong but also collective, ethnic rather than individual or abstract...
...The accompanying commentary has been mainly outrage and lamentation, punctuated by demands that something be done, by some outside agency, to remove the continual fear and the danger of violent death—to restore what, in those conditions, people are no longer so shy about calling "civilization" or "Western standards...
...Maybe American—or German-owned, of course—but then FALL • 1993 • 407 Politics Abroad with a Croat/Muslim/Serb management and careerstructure...
...They were faith-inclined, of course, but not ethnically or linguistically biased...
...Nonetheless, it seems to me that in this case the television reporting of the conflict has often been revealing for that very reason...
...ambassador to the USSR and Yugoslavia...
...The population-mosaic of Bosnia was essential to Titoism, precisely because it indicated what one might call a postnationalist solution without democracy...
...Bad, but definitely this side of Hell...
...Of course national "extremists" and outright psychopaths moved in to seize the life chances denied them by the rigid old regime: "organized brigands and irresponsible partisans...
...Instead of being sorted out, however deplorably, still another external force was imposed upon the Bosnian mixture: the second sultanate (as it were) of the Yugoslav League of Communists...
...Had the outside world more readily recognized the disruptive consequences of dissolving the Bosnian protectorate, and been ready earlier on actively to assist the resettlement of its communities, then things might (at least) have been better than they presently are...
...Evans (1851-1941) later became a famed archaeologist, notably for his work at Knossos in Crete...
...Speaking as an ignorant radical, I can only suggest to Hughes that this overemphasis falls below the standard of his book's generally worthy polemic...
...I don't know the area well enough to guess whether such attitudes played a significant part in the Bosnian shambles, but I suppose it's possible...
...The old clothes should not so easily deceive us: nationalism has been turned homicidal by fears—uncomfortably rational fears—about the future, and not by ghosts inevitably resurgent from the European past...
...Will they really grow up with fair opportunities in this new free-but-capitalist world where they will almost certainly have to work in a Croat/Muslim/ Serb-owned farm, factory or office...
...What about our children...
...All this has occurred in circumstances that, mercifully, were never characteristic of nationality struggles and are now very uncommon...
...3 When the last protectorate crumbled away, the danger of ordinary democracy could no longer be averted...
...FALL • 1993 • 403 Politics Abroad Yet ignorant radicals (he concludes) still "orate about separatism...
...South-Slav socialism had magically broken the rules of nation-state development...
...However, the main point is that it was not the overwhelming seduction or force of ethnos as such that drew Bosnia into chaos...
...They cannot know what demons they are frivolously invoking...
...The direct impact of the wars upon Bosnia was dreadful, above all in the years from 1942 to 1944...
...It would at once have been denounced as surrender to nationalism...
...3 Robert Hayden, "The Partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1990-1993," in the RFEIRL Research Report, 2:22 (May 1993), p. 13...
...Now we have democracy, Mr...
...The peculiar magic of self-management transcended all the old dilemmas and gave the State a permanent moral cudgel against the ethnic recidivism of Croats and Serbs...
...At least, they do not do so naturally: making them fit the rules is itself a drastic exercise...
...They feel rightly that old prejudices about the Balkans will be reinforced by suggesting that they are somehow more helplessly governed by antique patterns than we, the more liberated folk west of the line...
...To worry (or, to worry overmuch) about just who applied which match to it, or with what precise intentions, is a bit absurd...
...no Knowledge of the face of the earth...
...This view was endorsed recently by Michael Ignatieff in a New York Review of Books article, "The Balkan Tragedy," where he depicts "the whole region . . . turned from a model of interethnic peace into a nightmare from the pages of Thomas Hobbes...
...That is, one outside protectorate or another was due to continue, with a stake in conserving the ethno-religious mixture left behind by the old empires...
...Thus in Bosnia the Christian outbreak has been opposed by a counterrevolution of Moslem fanaticism...
...There too one finds an ancient imperial marchland, a history of patchwork settlement, a reciprocal siege mentality, a capital town divided between community factions and armed gangs, a largely arbitrary frontier that must be preserved at all costs, and plenty of organized brigands capable of the wildest atrocities...
...Since the politicians who won in 1990 based their programmes on these ideologies, the communities whose existence would disprove them could not be permitted to exist...
...What am I to do, what are we to do about this situation where we may find ourselves under Croat/Muslim/Serbian rule...
...A fossilized antinationalist order has continued to preside over the more molten, dislocated, and nationalist world following the great change...
...There was a lull during the inter-war period, true, under the Serbian Karageorge monarchy...
...because the fruit thereof is uncertain...
...It had conjured up an interethnic way forward...
...that is, no one must in any way tamper with any line between existing populations (who must, by implication, also stay put where they are...
...Savage brutes, they wrote, "Raw levies dressed in the ordinary country costumes—the red turban and sash, loaded with antiquated pistols and handshars or short sword-knives . . . beating a diabolical tattoo on drums shaped like the bowls of spoons...
...4 The most astonishing and revealing film coverage of the conflict so far has come from the Russian director P. Pawlikoski...
...The international refusal to accept the partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina that was made inevitable by the partition of Yugoslavia ensured that it would be accomplished in the worst possible way...
...There was another necessary condition: the absence of any other more civil and moderating route toward reconstruction— of a Yugoslav tradition sufficiently democratic, and sufficiently implanted in popular attitudes...
...Among the Christians," they complained bitterly, "even of the highest social strata, the want of politeness and that ungenerous vice of mean spirits—ingratitude—are simply astounding...
...no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea...
...However, such readier recognition was not possible...
...But without drawing any such conclusion (in fact it is rather a contrary one I hope to make) one may still think that history does have an unusual place in the circumstances of Bosnia-Herzegovina...
...If anything they have often struck at least one viewer as, by current Western norms, somewhat narrowly overrational...
...There is, surely, nothing whatever irrational about them...
...Ethnic demons have resurfaced in a way that, unless the veneer is forcibly reimposed, menances the entire world with the Ethnic Abyss...
...But it would take another article to explain why...
...Citizenship was a bad joke in both empires, but at least it was more or less the same bad joke for everybody, Croat, Serb, and Muslim alike...
...What this meant, surely, was a sudden spillage of the most combustible known human fuel over an unprecedentedly wide area...
...Television tends all the time to personalize issues in mistaken ways...
...But the effects of that were in a sense foreseen by these Nonconformist travelers of half a century earlier...
...Snow accused him in the usual lofty way of destroying the old tolerance with his nationalist antics...
...This is bound to be very bad for many of them, but it does not have to mean civil war...
...Divergent eternities, as it were, both descended from world conquests, that had set themselves no bounds in either heaven or earth...
...but then these are also moral truisms repeatedly endorsed (for example) by Presidents Tudjman and Milosevic...
...Can it truly be said to disclose fearful truths of human nature, all those warnings about Old Adam the ethnic savage...
...It features Karadzic as poet and family man, as well as political chieftain, and the "cabinet" of the SerbBosnian state, all armed to the teeth with the equivalent of antiquated pistols and handshars...
...I can recall no time when it was not used against would-be "little nodes of power" with deadly effect, most often by authentically slothful metropolitans...
...Twenty-five years of it have failed to dent either the conventional wisdom on the subject of nationalism or the prevalent theories of sovereignty and international relations—a fact hardly encouraging either to Bosnians or to ignorant radicals...
...Although the original function of the military frontier had passed away, they observed how much of its social order had remained—an odd, decayed pattern of plantation and extended-family settlements, at once garrison and buffer zone...
...The assorted criminals involved in its carve-up were also assisted by the truly preposterous position of the West...
...The great eyewitness of this was Milovan Djilas, in his incomparable memoir Wartime (1977...
...In addition to which, if not encouraged to decamp, they will certainly do the same to us (as they once did in times past, and so on...
...Palimpsest" usually means "a parchment that has been used twice or three times after the earlier writing has been erased," but where the previous entries are decipherable—hence a historical situation of intimate overlay or admixture, or a spatiotemporal mosaic...
...Yes, yes," the interviewee snapped back, "it is quite true we used to live like that for a long time...
...Just over a century ago, two brothers, Alfred and James Evans, traveled on foot across this same terrain now so familiar through newsreels and recorded their impressions...
...This was 1875—the beginning of over a century of more-or-less incessant warfare across the region...
...The Hapsburgs on one side of the old divide and the Ottoman Sultanate on the other were sufficiently remote, conservative, and disinterested to hold the ring in that sense...
...And today this verdict still tends to find a sort of validation among Western observers...
...By 1990 post-Titoist Yugoslavia had become a Hobbesian world, a state of nature in which the means of violence were too widely distributed to afford anyone safety, especially those who found themselves a minority in the successor republics...
...This would indeed be another way of putting the "problem" which is now being "solved" by population movement and slaughter: second-class subjecthood was also destined to endure until 1990...
...Once the logic of division was accepted, the partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina was as inevitable as the partition of Yugoslavia itself, for if Yugoslavia could not exist as a common state of Serbs, Croats, and others, neither could Bosnia...
...The latter have always felt cultural differences to be aesthetically admirable, until they seek a political form...
...Here, one fails to see that ordinary life needed any help...
...and which is worse of all, continual) feare, and danger of violent death...
...Hayden's overall verdict on the war is that the Vance-Owen plan merely "took a house divided and proclaimed it as a condominium...
...The "multi-ethnic state" such coexistence depended upon can also (less flatteringly) be described as a tolerable external force capable of arbitrating clashes of interest...
...Partition was inevitable, but could have been carried out in a more tolerable way...
...Unfortunately the real world was (and as we see, still is) rather different...
...Ethnic demons are undeniably present, but these have been conjured up almost entirely by modern motives...
...They are, from what we hear, mere organized brigands headed by irresponsible partisans, and at present are committing the wildest atrocities—cutting down women, children, and old men who come in their way, and burning the crops and homesteads of the peasants...
...Snow...
...The judgment has been echoed a thousand times...
...In reaction the Muslims of Lower Bosnia took the law into their own hands and counterattacked the Christians...
...Robert Hayden's conclusion in the account quoted previously is that partition was inevitable, because: Yugoslavia's brief exposure to relatively free elections brought not democracy but the replacement of state socialism with state chauvinism...
...Yet there was another side to Bosnia that, in fairness, they also felt compelled to acknowledge: I should be guilty of passing a very shallow judgement on the sometimes too obtrusive familiarity of these people if I did not point out that it is but an unpleasant phase of what is really one of the most valuable qualities preserved by the Bosnian people in the days of bondage...
...A Hobbesian world: the war of all on all, locked in blood-feud and theocratic hatred...
...Their dilemma was much more difficult: it was a choice between what most could not help perceiving as intolerable minority status and (if they took to arms) enormously preferable prospects inside one or another majority...
...It may even have been possible in circumstances different from those prevailing But the fact seems to be that on the ground, among these patchwork populations stranded by the collapse of Yugoslavia, it was out of the question...
...Essentially the same liberal view surfaces in many different forms...
...The latter constructed an artificial polity, the regional federated state of Bosnia-Herzegovina...
...Balkanization" was never a dead metaphor...
...hence it has to be crushed, or at least restrained by Kennan's "outside force...
...no account of Time...
...Are we all Bosnians under the thin skin of civilization, unless multi-ethnic or non-ethnic restraints are kept firmly in place, and forcefully reimposed where they have lapsed...
...In a week when the latest Bosnian atrocities were occurring alongside preparations for an impeccably democratic referendum in the newly independent Republic of Eritrea, I think that few who step back or think comparatively about the wider context would really pretend that such ethnic demonology represents a balanced or overall verdict on the post-1989 world...
...I know that Slays don't like being pinned down by this kind of consideration (in precisely the way Kennan does, above...
...Much of it remained (or was restored) even after the massacres and expulsions of the Croat Fascist state...
...To obviate misunderstandings, it is important to say that calling this "normal" does not imply that it was wonderful...
...On the question of forcible reimposition, probably the most authoritative statement so far has come from George Kerman, a former U.S...
...In due course this will be refined and renegotiated, with all sorts of concessions about the numerous remaining minority questions and the status of Sarajevo...
...The Evans brothers were very hard on the "Bashi-Bazouks" or Muslim militiamen called up to keep the Christians in order...
...The Jews and the Germans had left the frontier marches, under conditions most preferred not to remember...
...Is it really a return to the state of nature...
...Meanwhile, on the ground itself what could on no account be contemplated or allowed has taken place: 408 • DISSENT Politics Abroad a crude repartition of Bosnia-Herzegovina...
...4 Naturally the new power centers in Zagreb and Belgrade sought at least to consolidate their authority, and then to extend it wherever they could in disputed zones...
...Democracy is people power...
...2 They need not have worried so much about its dying away, since a "monarchy" (in a sense rather different from the one they had in mind) was due to survive until 1990...
...Commentators on Eastern Europe have many times suggested that one of the ironic legacies of communism is a kind of ultraprivatization of outlook—an unwillingness to run any risks at all in a public or civic domain seen as alien and corrupt...
...Such a democratic void was bound to have a peculiar impact in this region, given its history...
...Hence that nature is indeed an aggressive one, disposed to the war of all against all...
...Why do you wish us punished for that, Mr...
...This meant (however interpreted) some people and boundary lines shifting or being shifted, winners and losers, contemporary anger swiftly justified as revenge and the righting of past wrongs...
...no Society...
...Snow...
...Now, on the dismembered corpse of Yugoslavia, whose "cultural differences" (or, to put it plainly, archaic religious and racial lunacies) have been set free by the death of Communism, we see what that stale figure of speech once meant and now means again...
...It had to be progress without democracy (although this crucial fact was veiled in various ways, by general Marxist rhetoric as well as by the specially Yugoslav smokescreen of the self-management system...
...Now We Have Democracy The Evans brothers could detect no "surviving polish of an older civilization" among the "Bosniacs" (as they usually call them...
...During the crisis the international community has mainly stood on the sidelines, first talking what amounted in a Bosnian view to aggravating gibberish and then— when blatantly ignored—resorting to breastbeating and belated damage limitation...
...no commodious Building...
...But its main national ingredients remained or in some places returned...
...Comparing today's Balkans to the crisis and wars of 1913, this veteran diplomat and author has argued (also in the New York Review of Books, July 15, 1993) that "there is no evidence that the ability of the Balkan peoples to interact peaceably with one another is any greater now than it was those eighty years ago . . . [hence] it will take outside mediation, and in all probability outside force, to devise a reasonable settlement and to bring the various parties to accept and observe it...
...The war is of one gang against another, and "tribalism" has returned to being the favored term in this connection ("the tribal politics of Bosnia," as the Economist labeled it...
...Hence all conceivable solutions become tragedies...
...People no longer have to live that way, we have free choice...
...Given the incapacity of these unfortunate people to interact in a civilized fashion, future restraints upon them will, regrettably, "have to be greater than those that are now normally applied in the international community...
...If they did, they would fall silent in shame...
...His documentary Serbian Epics was made for BBC2's Bookmark program and shown on December 16, 1992...
...Its disappearance produced not a state of nature but a series of anguishing personal and familial dilemmas throughout the region...
...Subsequently this would be seen and advertised as proof of communism's success with ethnic issues: a civilized and socialist solution to the nationalist question, as demonstrated by the intimate daily coexistence of the Muslim and Christian communities...
...Where they will be deciding job opportunities, who gets what, who owns what...
...Democracy was too dangerous in Bosnia...
...Eastern tragedies too, a Balkanic fate which we in the continent's West End have most blessedly escaped...
...It may be in that absence that the true failure of the Titoist regime can be read...
...Ethnic palimpsests or mosaics do not constitute minority problems in the usual sense...
...But chauvinism and criminality could obtain sensational successes only because of the area's underlying, inherited configuration...
...In that phrase I quoted earlier from Ignatieff 's article, he says that the Yugoslav communities concerned "found themselves a minority in the successor republics" and (by implication) have been rebelling against that fate...
...In such areas, situations of what could be called ethnic palimpsest have survived—although in a sense "survived" is not, or not quite, the right term...
...Actually such situations have been preserved for equally unusual reasons—deliberately maintained against the grain of most modern social and economic development...
...There, "being free" ("democracy" in Karadzic's sense) meant doing something about the inherited mosaic of peoples, and the widespread fear (or panic) that the collapse of Yugoslavia had caused...
...I thought of these travelers one day last year, when the Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was being interviewed by Jon Snow of London's Channel 4 News...
...And communism, by arrogating formal democracy to itself and blocking all other paths of growth, had in the end strengthened the very nationalism that it boasted of containing...
...As reasonable as the next thought, which could not fail to occur: this fear can be got rid of only if they (the other lot) can be moved on, or out of the way...
...Grant to them the Fatherland of their desire, and make them again citizens of Paradise Rebecca West, dedication to Black Lamb & Grey Falcon: a Journey through Yugoslavia (1940) One interpretation of events in BosniaHerzegovina is that over recent weeks we have been receiving direct satellite images from Thomas Hobbes's "state of nature...
...Now, such a solution was imaginable by intellec404 • DISSENT Politics Abroad tuals, and was indeed quite often imagined...
...Hysteria and scapegoats abound, the latter captained by capital "N" Nationalism and personified in the Great-Serb regime of Milosevic...
...Elsewhere in Europe such a transition had taken place in many stages, as a result of various wars and resultant peace processes, often through complex and recurrent negotiations and concessions defining the status and rights of minorities...
...No endorsement of Great-Serb expansionism is implied in the recognition that here, on this crucial point, Karadzic was quite right...
...But the aggression also has an uncomfortably collective or communal dimension to it...
...Once that recidivism had reemerged, of course, exactly the opposite became true...
...In a region structured in that way, with that history and that recent politics, such fears were all too reasonable—on all sides...
...When applied to Bosnia-Herzegovina these principles were in more or less total contradiction...
...I mentioned earlier that another example worth taking into consideration is Northern Ireland—the small bit of Eastern Europe that happens to be on its western coast...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
