Discusses several books on the former Yugoslavia
Denitch, Bogdan
Books about the breakup of Yugoslavia and the genocidal war against the Moslem Slays of Bosnia have become a minor industry. As expected, journalists are at the forefront and social...
...The latter could have easily found numerous native colleagues in all the major university centers...
...A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia, Mark Thompson...
...These cutbacks were worst of all for studies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...
...Martin's Press, 1993...
...219 pp...
...The most balanced of the journalistic accounts is Misha Glenny's The Fall of Yugoslavia...
...Clearly all sides are committing atrocities, and equally clearly the lion's share has been committed by the Serbian nationalists...
...The Yugoslav chapters are thin and too influenced by Rebecca West's magnificent and flawed Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a huge mythopoetic excursion into the history of the region...
...In part Yugoslavia stopped being unique as a relatively open society for a communist-ruled state when Hungary and later Poland liberalized...
...Unfortunately it is influenced by the literature on "mentalities," which supposedly produce unchangeable exotic cultures, such as those of the Balkans...
...Even the intelligence community paid ever less attention to Yugoslavia, although the CIA proved to be right in 1989 when it predicted that there was high probability of an explosive breakdown...
...For a declared Marxist internationalist, she is much too sympathetic to her own national group, the Croats, but I agree that the main responsibility for the Yugoslavian tragedy lies with the Serbian regime and the Yugoslav army...
...The first myth leads to the notion that murdering Bosnian Slav civilians is a just retribution for centuries of suffering under the Turkish yoke...
...It is much weaker in its handling of Croat nationalism, which it treats as essentially defensive, and pays little attention to the self-satisfied localist egoism of the Slovenes, which contributed to the violence of the breakdown...
...Most of the reportage in the New York Times until the recent flurry of interest was written by a (to be sure, excellent) stringer, Chuck Sudetic...
...It provides a good understanding for what followed...
...While he understands that the major responsibility is that of the Milosevic regime in Belgrade and its proteges in Croatian Kraina and Bosnia, he also shows that the Croat regime is no innocent victim but a lusty participant in the carnage and partition of Bosnia...
...I am old fashioned enough to believe that the echo effect of the collapse of communist rule in the entire region, increasing economic difficulties given prolonged European economic stagnation, the death of Tito and the rise of aggressive Serbian nationalism all had more to do with the breakup of Yugoslavia than anything that happened in Slovenia...
...Branka Magas's The Destruction of Yugoslavia is a frustrating book...
...It is well informed and well written, but it has too little continuity...
...368 pp...
...350 pp...
...As things stand, one of the best of the books under review is The Yugoslav Tragedy, edited by James Seroka and Vukasin Pavlovic...
...We are now paying the price for some of that reckless cost cutting...
...The kind of Yugoslavia they wanted could not be saved...
...Just as the American Indians undoubtedly committed horrible atrocities against white settlers, so did the poorly armed Bosnian Moslem forces (usually months after their homes were destroyed and families massacred) against the Serbs, themselves often innocent civilians...
...Yugoslavia was easily the most accessible of all the countries in Eastern Europe...
...Nevertheless, the Thompson book is worth reading for the Slovenian angle on the events and for fascinating sketches of scenes in Croatia and Bosnia...
...War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina...
...What is astonishing is how little useful material was written by social and political scientists in the years immediately preceding the catastrophe...
...Vols 1 and 2, Helsinki Watch, 1992 and 1993...
...Even the newspapers and news agencies abandoned Belgrade in the eighties...
...39.95...
...In part this was a delayed reaction to Tito's crackdown on the Croatian Spring and on liberals in Belgrade and Ljubljana in the early seventies...
...Mark Thompson's book The Paper House is well written and based on extensive travel in Yugoslavia, mostly in Slovenia...
...Kaplan treats political cultures as essentially unchanging and provides a justification for all those who believe the myth that these peoples have been killing each other for centuries, that it is in their very nature...
...194 pp...
...In the mid-eighties more attention was focused on the country during the ever more brutal repression of the Albanian majority in Kosovo under the Serbian leadership of Slobodan Milosevic...
...Extensive local field and opinion surveys had been carried out since the mid-sixties...
...One could almost believe that Slovenian rock and punk music caused Yugoslavia's breakup...
...Lastly, as upsetting and badly written as it is, the Helsinki Watch report is a must for all who want to think seriously about the area...
...Glenny shows an awareness of the complexity of the background and the fact that there are many victims and few heroes in this story...
...Yugoslav workers' self-management within a market economy did not interest a West and United States that were going through a period of dogmatic insistence that markets could only be coupled with private ownership and that democratizing the workplace was a utopian illusion...
...This was naturally accompanied by a continuous drop in the number of graduate students entering this area...
...Robert E. Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts tries to do too much...
...A brief flicker of interest in Yugoslavia revived when Tito died in 1980, with the inevitable question: what would happen now...
...That myth is only half as deadly as the more contemporary one, equally popular in Serbia today, that the Serbs are all that stands in the way of an imperial Germany's inexorable march to the east...
...Pantheon Books, 1993...
...It is written by people who were arguably the best social and political scientists in the country...
...West's book is excessively pro-Serbian: she saw them much as they saw themselves, as the guardians of the West from the barbaric Ottoman Turks...
...Bosnian Moslems had supported both Yugoslavian states as the best solution for their community and have a high rate of intermarriage with both Serbs and Croats...
...This problem will be with us for a long time to come...
...It would have required the repression of all other national groups, which had developed strong local loyalties underpinned by the fact that all the republics except Bosnia were national homes of a Yugoslav nation...
...20.00 each...
...Yugoslavia was no longer "in...
...10.00 paper...
...More often than not, the academics have issued updated versions of studies that were carried out some years ago and can only be made relevant to the current situation with considerable strain...
...q FALL • 1993 • 571...
...22.95...
...Yugoslavia was the most open society in Eastern Europe but it also had more political dissidents in jail than any other country in the area...
...Penguin Books, 1992...
...He is fascinated by exotica...
...The Tragedy of Yugoslavia, James Seroka and Vukasin Pavlovic (eds...
...he knows his area in depth and has paid more attention to history than most social scientists...
...366 pp...
...23.00...
...This reflected two things: the general cutback in reporters stationed abroad over the past two decades, and the drop of interest in Yugoslavia since the middle seventies...
...It is solid in its coverage of the Serbian repression in Kosovo, an autonomous province with 570 • DISSENT Books Discussed in This Essay Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, Robert Kaplan...
...Books an Albanian majority where the disintegrative processes began...
...352 pp...
...He is the London correspondent of the iconoclastic Slovenian review Mladina and reflects the viewpoint of that journal and of trendy young intellectuals in Slovenia...
...nothing terribly exciting seemed to be happening...
...The book's bias is liberal, democratic and pro-Yugoslay...
...Sharpe, 1992...
...as martyrs who had sacrificed their magnificent medieval civilization to defend an ungrateful West...
...It is somewhat dated but represents an invaluable collection by younger scholars from all parts of former Yugoslavia on the verge of its destruction...
...In prosaic fact there had never been war between the Serbs and Croats except under Nazi and fascist occupation during the Second World War...
...It is clear that both the UN negotiators and Washington policy planners had no experts available or that their experts had done their research a generation ago...
...22.95 paper...
...The two reports provide numbing details of atrocities, in town after town...
...and 440 pp...
...Without getting a feel for the barbarism that has resulted from the breakdown of an admittedly repressive multi-ethnic state, one cannot think intelligently about the rise of populist nationalism throughout the area and in much of the world...
...Yet social scientists contributed very little to help us understand why a successful experiment in managing a multi-ethnic state collapsed with such bloody results...
...departments of Slavic and Russian studies atrophied as young scholars fled what was turning into a desert...
...they cite endless witnesses and convince by the sheer weight of facts...
...It was no longer an interesting experiment...
...The journalists' books have been produced in a hurry, and it shows...
...Glenny's book is indispensable...
...However, the book will remain indispensable for those who need to know the details of the internal struggles in the Yugoslav League of Communists that led to Milosevic's de facto coup against the federal "Titoist" Constitution of 1974...
...It is a book I would recommend for any courses in the area...
...The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War, Misha Glenny...
...Thus he has a post-modernist approach to the collapse of Yugoslavia, emphasizing the politics of identity, both ethnic and generational, as a major factor...
...the second, to the belief that the European Community must be defied since it is under the pernicious influence of the Germans and Austrians and therefore wants the destruction of the Serbs...
...The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-Up, 1980-92, Branka Magas...
...thus the book is a variant of the literature denounced by Edward Said in Orientalism...
...Verso, 1993...
...The reason for the dearth of relevant social research was simple: two decades of systematic cutbacks on research funds for social science...
...As expected, journalists are at the forefront and social scientists and historians lag far behind...
...It was open both to journalists and social scientists...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
