Bosnia and nationalism
Nairn, Tom
Two general attitudes seem to surface in all arguments about the post-Yugoslav wars. The first is the one with which Denitch begins: Slays of all sorts are annoyed if it is suggested that some...
...If the outlook for Denitch's cosmopolitanism has worsened since 1989, I don't believe this is mainly due to sabotage, delusion, and thuggery...
...Think of Latin America, then and now...
...I remain enough of a historical materialist to want to perceive the force of historical contradictions in what is occurring, and also to want to deny that it's all necessarily bad...
...Not more...
...The European Community tends today to be extolled as a paragon of democratic customs...
...It appeared before the big change and doesn't deal with the Kraina frontier...
...Generally speaking the South Slays are not more imprisoned by a specific history than anybody else...
...But there is no such imputation in suggesting that this part of the world may have a particular inheritance that helps to explain a lot of what has happened since the 1980s...
...They rightly resent the imputation of backwardness and primitivism...
...If they are currently behaving differently (therefore) this must be because they have been pushed or lured into it, by the "new political elites" and intellectuals who provide legitimation for widespread thuggery...
...The old building crumbled about us, somewhat more gradually and (until Thatcher) gracefully than in Eastern Europe...
...The whole post-1989 world — "increasingly integrated and cosmopolitan" — may be threatened by such elites and intellectuals, and the ideological form this threat takes is nationalism...
...The general point is the vital one, of course...
...South...
...It applies equally (for instance) to the integrated cosmopolitan elites whose particular aspiration is escape or exemption from godawful communitarianism...
...126 • DISSENT...
...Because the latter is essentially atavistic— "anti-modern and anti-democratic" —it should be contested in equivalently general, uncompromising terms...
...There is a more general thesis behind this view of Bosnia...
...The second is the one he then goes on to defend: ex-Yugoslays are pretty much like anyone else, with similar quotients of soccer hooligans, family concerns, and citizen disgruntlements...
...It would take someone with a far deeper knowledge of southeastern Europe to do it properly...
...In a sense that was what I was trying to outline in the article, though only very crudely...
...Who, then, could have imagined South Africa evolving into any sort of democratic state (albeit with severe and probably not accidental ethnic problems...
...In 1993, ninety-nine of them are...
...However, I believe he could easily have added a section dealing with Bosnia and the Balkans...
...On this general theme I recommend the late Frank Wright's study, Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis (1988...
...Particularity is a universal plight, not a selective blight...
...If the Bosnians are like anyone else, then their dilemma could (at least potentially) be fairly typical too...
...That British variety of the cosmopolitan ethos began to collapse around us in the 1960s, most sensationally in Northern Ireland...
...I suppose what I was suggesting is that neither of these attitudes can really be right...
...Twenty years ago only 44 of the 184 countries represented in the United Nations were in any sense democratic...
...Seismic effects have been (so far) confined to Ireland, probably because of fault lines there analogous to those in Yugoslavia...
...But if nationalism has reasserted itself there (and in more civil forms in Scotland and Wales) this is not really ascribable solely, or even primarily, to "mobilization from above" by new elites or a few deluded ex-metropolitan converts like yours truly...
...twenty years ago, three of its present members were apparently hopeless flea-ridden dictatorships...
...The first is the one with which Denitch begins: Slays of all sorts are annoyed if it is suggested that some special historical curse attaches to them and their region—that they are more fated or imprisoned by the past than people in the WINTER • 1994 • 125 Arguments West...
...But whether abrupt or gradual, it was a movement of the ground under our collective feet that altered the appeal of ideas and the social leverage obtainable by mobilization (including the production of ethnic delusions and psychopaths...
...His chosen comparisons for Ulster are the Germans in Bohemia, the old Polish-German border, French Algeria and the U.S...
...It was traditionally dominant in Scotland, where our opposite of nationalist fate was still another version of All-the-Sameism...
...but also, not less...
...Like Denitch, I belong to such an elite...
...So don't blame "nationalism" as such...
...A sense of hurt and rage informs this comment, most recognizably in the remarks on that "godawful stuff" about people being communities, and democracy'having to assume national or ethnic forms...
...It is surely not "anti-modern and anti-democratic" in its basic impulse, but in a temptation that arises from the frustration and perversion of that impulse...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
