Bosnia and nationalism
Denitch, Bogdan
Tom Nairn's provocative article (Fall 1993, "All Bosnians Now?") deserves a fuller reply than I can provide in a brief rejoinder. Nevertheless, a few notes might be appropriate. Nairn is right....
...It is this type of issue, not in the least bit specific to former Yugoslavia, that makes the revival of nationalism as a major factor in mass politics so problematic and dangerous to democracy...
...It will not do to invoke Mazzini and the liberal nationalism of the nineteenth century or, for that matter, the nationalism of the national liberation movements...
...Clearly this is incompatible with democracy...
...There is no evidence to prove that...
...Those had their problems too, but they were of a different sort...
...For one thing, it defines the citizens of the polity nationally and therefore reduces all others to second-class citizens...
...And in this region people are primarily communities, the democratic impulse is strong but also collective, ethnic rather than individual or abstract...
...Twenty-eight percent voted against all nationalist parties by voting for the social democratic Reformists or the former Communists...
...In fact, the first armed paramilitary groups in the former Yugoslav states were recruited from the soccer fans, who already had a history of fighting all and sundry, not too different from the British soccer fans...
...Nairn does not really belong in that company...
...Can a non-Muslim be an equal citizen in an Islamic state...
...But I will not cheat: it is not on those extreme examples that I base my argument that in an increasingly integrated and cosmopolitan world nationalism is hostile to democracy and pluralist societies...
...Just as it must include the right of individuals to organize collectively along class or national lines it must include the right of individuals and minorities not to be a part of the national collectivity, particularly as defined by the momentary nationalist leaders...
...Or subject to Catholic laws on matters like divorce, abortion, and the place of religion in schools...
...It includes individual rights and the right not to be a part of a collectivity...
...And more "Western" than, let us say, the National Fronters in England, Basque ETAers, IRA and Protestant extremist killers in Ulster, not to mention sundry chauvinist quasi-fascist nationalist parties and movements of Western Europe...
...More than 25 percent of the electorate did not vote at all, and a substantial number who did vote for the Serbian, Croatian and Muslim parties did not expect a partition or civil war...
...So are Muslim fundamentalists in many countries...
...Nairn seems to believe that nationalism (his decent and democratic nationalism to be sure, not the ugly blood and soil real-life thing) represents authentic democracy...
...It is not about cultural autonomy or equal rights...
...But West was writing from a point of view that was almost completely proSerb and strongly pro-Yugoslay...
...It is anti-modern and anti-democratic in its basic impulse and that is why it is attractive to the present postmodernist academic obscurantists...
...What happens when your child is asked in public whether she is a Catholic or needs to be excused from religious instruction...
...That was of course dangerous nonsense, since Serbian domination of the first Yugoslav state made it an all-too-ready victim of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy...
...Present-day nationalism stresses the centrality of the imagined national community to political mobilization and action...
...The Reformists won the elections in Tuzla and the center of Sarajevo...
...Some of us even consider ourselves no less "Western" than he...
...Again, Nairn to the contrary, most Bosnians are urbanites on whom the primacy of national identity was forced by a bankrupt political class...
...Last but not the least is the problem of defining the really existing nationalism of the present day...
...This is much like the case of the separatists in Georgia, who demand an independent state although they number only 17 percent of the population...
...Rebecca West's masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon seems to fascinate Nairn and a whole host of Western observers of the present-day Yugoslav tragedy...
...The IRA and the Basque ETA are good examples...
...Most of these were no more "historically shaped" than most individual British soccer gang members, whom they matched in loutish illiteracy...
...It is worse when national and religious identities are combined...
...It also encouraged the growth of the vicious defensive Croatian chauvinism that makes the creation of a democratic Croatian state so difficult today...
...Intellectuals were believers and spreaders of the nationalist myths, not the combatants, who were often much more open about their own motives for fighting, which are similar to those of post-disaster looters...
...The difference was that the new political elites that chose to mobilize support with nationalist legitimation armed their thugs...
...Can the over 30 percent who are non-Serbs be equal citizens in a state that defines itself as the national state of the Serbs and uses the symbols of Serbian history and the Serbian Orthodox Church in public institutions and schools...
...A great deal of evidence exists to the contrary...
...Nairn to the contrary, the large majority of Serbs in Croatia today do not live anywhere near the old military frontier (the Kraina) and are properly frightened of the consequences of becoming second-class citizens in a Croatian state run by right-wing nationalists and returned fascist exiles...
...Does being Irish necessarily mean being Catholic...
...He should leave it...
...It is the failure to understand that point that makes a settlement in Northern Ireland so difficult...
...That is, greed, the opportunity to settle real or imagined accounts, and the chance to—for once in their alienated lives—wield power over unarmed helpless others...
...Can one be a full citizen of Croatia and not be a Croat...
...Membership is only open to those who are born into it...
...Why on earth does Nairn, like the UN and like Vance, Owen, and Stolterberg, keep insisting that the nationalists represent a majority of the Bosnian population...
...Ethnic chauvinism is no more or less present among masses of soccer fans in Britain than it was in Croatia, Bosnia, or Serbia...
...More often than not it is about imposing a view, very often a minority view, of what the proper national (or religious) identity of the citizens must be by force and terror...
...Balkanites" are irritated when the historical divide between Byzantium and Catholicism or Islam and Europe is invoked by "Western" commentators to explain the crimes and furies released by a nationalism mobilized from above in former Yugoslavia...
...Huge mass demonstrations against the civil war took place in Sarajevo just before the Serbian aggression 124 • DISSENT Arguments that began the war...
...That is, her guide "Constantine" was a Serbian nationalist of Jewish origin who managed to convince her that Islam had been an unalloyed catastrophe, that Croats were hopelessly corrupted by years of culturally shallow Austrian rule, and that only Serbs rooted in an imagined vibrant Byzantine and national tradition could save Yugoslavia and hold back the eastward march of Germanic culture, commerce, and power...
...In most, though not all, cases, new nationalists do not permit everyone to become a part of the politically dominant nation...
...Why otherwise write godawful stuff like, "Democracy is people power...
...But democracy, as we should know by now, is more than the untrammeled rule of a mob...
...In a real world where more and more people live and work in countries where they were not born and where they are a minority, this new nationalism is an obvious threat to democracy...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
