The Balkans and the West

Constructing the European Other, 1945–2003

Andrew Hammond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351894227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

This collection of essays locates, investigates and challenges the manner in which the Balkans and the West have constructed each other since 1945. Scholars from the two sections of the continent explore a wide range of fiction, film, journalism, travel writing and diplomatic records both to analyse Western European balkanism and to study Balkan representations of the West over the last fifty years. The first section looks back to the Cold War, examining the divergent, often favourable images of the Balkans that existed in Western culture, as well as the variety of responses that appeared in South-East European writings on the West. The second section analyses the transitions that took place in representation during the 1990s. Here, contributors explore both the harsh denigration of the Balkans which came to dominate western discourse after the initial euphoria of 1989, and the emerging tradition of contesting Western balkanism in South-East European cultural production. Through this dual emphasis, the volume exposes the representational practices that help to maintain a deeply divided Europe, and challenges the economic and political injustices that result. Despite the rise to prominence of postcolonial theory, with its awareness of global inequality, the current crises in many parts of South-East Europe have received scant attention in literary and cultural studies. The Balkans and the West addresses this deficiency. Ranging in focus from Serbian cinema to Romanian travel literature, from Western economic writings to Yugoslav fiction, and from public discourse in Albania to NATO's vast propaganda machine, the essays offer wide insight into representation and power in the contemporary European context.

Chapter 1

Britain and the Yugoslav General Election of November 1945

Jim Evans

With the exception of Greece, where British involvement in an ongoing civil war provoked furious controversy in parliament and media alike, the plight of Yugoslavia at the end of World War Two had greater resonance in Britain than that of other Balkan countries. The coup which deposed Prince Paul in March 1941 – like the later guerilla resistance, only in part British-engineered and only in part anti-German – had produced enormous enthusiasm in Britain at one of the lowest moments of the war. Such popular engagement with events in Yugoslavia was maintained by rosy media coverage first of Mihailović’s activity in Serbia and then of Tito’s Partisan movement. During the years 1941 to 1945 Axis occupation, national resistance struggle, civil war, starvation and disease combined to leave some 1.7 million Yugoslavs dead. By 1945 a much larger number were homeless, cut-off and imperilled by the coming winter. In addition to well-publicised UNRRA relief work, the response from British charitable organisations like the Yugoslav Emergency Committee and the Yugoslav Relief Fund attracted wide support, belying subsequent suggestions of popular ‘compassion fatigue’.¹

In accordance with the British-sponsored Tito-Šubašič agreements of 1944, intended to resolve the intractable dispute between a radical liberation movement and a government-in-exile based in London and Cairo, a general election was scheduled for 11 November 1945.² Broadly coinciding with similar post-war elections in Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland, it aroused considerable interest among a British public optimistic about the potential for a belated flowering of stable democracy in Central and Eastern European states bedevilled by instability and autocracy in the inter-war period. A study of British attitudes to this event should provide insight into the understanding (or misunderstanding) of Yugoslav – and wider Balkan – realities in Britain during the uncertain period before the ossification of ‘Cold War’ divisions. It should cast light on the relationship between, on the one hand, the public representation of Yugoslav politics and culture in official and independent media, and, on the other, the evolution of British foreign policy. It should also illuminate some of the practicalities and pitfalls of electoral monitoring, problems which continue to exercise the international community today.

The reality of the election need detain us only briefly. While a Times editorial pronounced the ballot ‘fair and free’, it might more accurately be characterised as ‘relatively free and by no means fair’.³ Though polling on election day itself was largely uninhibited, the campaign as a whole was anything but. For weeks before the ballot a barrage of moral and psychological coercion aimed to instil the need for electoral unity. The Yugoslav-born Reuters correspondent Monty Radulović – no friend of the old regime – described his experience of endless political meetings and rallies, harassment by ‘street leaders’, OZNA agents and other (ubiquitous) Party representatives, as well as the exclusion from the franchise of any suspected of oppositional tendencies.⁴ As British officials similarly reported, while secrecy at the ballot seemed adequate, ‘before the elections, every form of pressure, intimidation and propaganda was brought to bear’.⁵ Voting itself could then be ostentatiously free and democratic for the benefit of foreign observers, without any of that unpleasant uncertainty about the result which can cloud a candidate’s enjoyment.

These heavy-handed tactics appeared to have backfired, however, when opposition parties decided to boycott the election altogether, a problem for Partisan authorities hoping the semblance of a free election would speed international recognition. The solution was twofold: a ‘blank ballot box’ by which protest votes might be registered, and the portrayal of the National Front to foreign observers as a loose coalition of competing parties. These ploys fooled few in Whitehall and not many in the American media, but were treated in the British press with abject credulity.⁶ ‘As far as I have seen’, a Southern Department official noted with distaste, ‘there has been no criticism of the elections in any of the press here, of whatever political tendencies.’⁷

This was not strictly true. A current of virulent anti-communism manifested itself in small-circulation weekly publications like Time and Tide and The Nineteenth Century and After and in the Catholic press. Here the repression carried out by ‘Tito-talitarian’ Partisan authorities was fiercely denounced and the mainstream portrayal of Tito’s regime and the November election bitterly condemned. On 17 November Time and Tide complained that ‘the daily press records the Yugoslav elections as though they had been a genuine ballot, and the ‘special correspondents’ […] accept the result of the ballot in a measure that suggests they left their critical faculties at home’.⁸ But all of these hostile news organs undermined their credibility by stubbornly denying evidence of Četnik cooperation with Italian forces, and by attaching an unquestioning credence to émigré propaganda. The Catholic press, while influential, was regarded with justification as a mouthpiece of the Vatican, more sensitive about the privileges of the Roman Church than about civil liberty.

In general Whitehall was quite right about the tenor of reporting. Mainstream coverage of the election was overwhelmingly positive. Tito’s poll of ninety per cent of the ballot (in which, according to the official record, eighty-eight per cent cast a vote) was represented as testimony to his popularity as a symbol of unity and patriotic struggle against Nazis and quislings, as well as being a reflection of the fact that political groups had converged in a ‘front’ organisation. Basil Davidson, writing for the Manchester Guardian and The Times, declared the result ‘a triumph for the aims and organisation of the National Liberation Movement [which] will be interpreted as a vote for the new way of life, a vote against the past and all that went with it’. Kenneth Syers of the News Chronicle enthused, ‘it is refreshing to see a Balkan election conducted with dignity and fairness’, while John Ennals of the Daily Herald assured his readers that ‘all the British observers agree that the elections were conducted freely and democratically’.⁹ On his return Syers insisted that ‘there is no censorship – and no “iron curtain’”. He debunked the ‘terror myth’ and made the surprising assertion that OZNA ‘is rather like MI5, except that it does not even try to be secret’.¹⁰

While Lovett Edwards of the less ‘progressive’ Telegraph was unusual in devoting some attention to the Yugoslav opposition, he accepted the inevitability of a Front triumph and confirmed wholeheartedly that ‘the system is the fairest possible’.¹¹ Even weekly journals which had been more cautious towards the new masters in Belgrade – Tribune, The Economist, The Spectator – overcame their doubts amid the heady enthusiasm. The Economist, which on 1 September had talked of ‘the fact of political terrorism’ in Yugoslavia, affirmed on 10 November in a markedly less critical report that ‘the spirit of next Sunday’s elections is that of a new start, of a radical break with the disastrous past’.¹² While Kingsley Martin tried in the New Statesman to scratch beneath the surface sheen of Tito’s new ‘democracy’ and noted the intimidation by ‘street leaders’, he was sympathetic, keenly citing a British official who had declared this ‘the fairest election ever in Yugoslavia’.¹³ Tribune likewise noted deficiencies, but hailed a monopoly ‘that has the genuine backing of the great majority of the people’.¹⁴

Quick to capitalise on the propaganda triumph of the election, the communist-dominated Constituent Assembly voted on 29 November to abolish the monarchy and declare a federal republic. Though it had been widely assumed in Britain that King Peter’s future would be decided by popular plebiscite, there was barely a squeak of disapproval in the British media. On 1 December a Times editorial enthused: ‘for the first time in the history of the country, the local population is now intimately connected with the work of government, which had ceased to be an official machine superimposed on them from above […]. The system is working’.¹⁵

Since the fall of Belgrade in October 1944 Whitehall had bemoaned the lack of objective reportage from Yugoslavia. In late February 1945 only one of four allied correspondents was British and by the end of April there were none. Partisan claims that the British government was preventing them coming and reporting favourably from Yugoslavia were wholly without foundation. Repeated pleas to papers to send ‘good men’ to Belgrade fell on deaf ears.

Officials’ concern was not, of course, with the general edification of the British public. In the first place it was hoped that, given Partisan sensitivity to their international image, ‘the presence of foreign correspondents [might] be expected to exert a salutary influence on the authorities’.¹⁶ Less directly, Whitehall hoped a balanced media coverage – critical of abuse but sympathetic to the difficulties of reconstruction – would act as a useful tool of foreign policy. In a negative sense, this meant ensuring media opinion did not constrain diplomacy. The disastrous way recent events in Greece had been presented in the media had gravely complicated British policy in that country and was attributed to the inadequate press representation in Athens.¹⁷ Accurate news coverage would help British opinion ‘march in step with events in Belgrade’,¹⁸ a phrase whose elusive meaning might perhaps be rendered as ‘march in step with British policy towards events in Belgrade’. More positively, diplomats hoped to be able to protest the very constraint they sought to avoid: to emulate, in other words, the ploy used with shameless panache by the Soviet bloc regimes (and tirelessly by Tito himself) of lamenting to foreign governments the restriction of their options by domestic media opinion. Whereas the incessant anti-Western propaganda in the controlled Yugoslav press was used to justify Partisan intransigence over Trieste and other issues, the largely uncritical British coverage of Yugoslav affairs offered few such opportunities.

How, then, do we account for the inadequate press representation of Yugoslavia in this critical period?

Matters of simple practicality certainly played a role. Editors already short of men and resources were discouraged by the logistical difficulties in a country in which the devastation of infrastructure as well as Partisan obstructionism made travel awkward and slow.¹⁹ Though officials cited Yugoslav censorship as a further discouragement, in truth Allied military censorship was primarily to blame for delays (as well as excisions), requiring that copy be sent to Bari before returning to be cleared by Partisan authorities. From autumn 1944 news moved swiftly in pursuit of Allied armies liberating the occupied cities of Europe. For the brief moment of its liberation Belgrade was newsworthy; a few days later the tide had moved on taking most Western journalists with it.

In the absence of permanent correspondents, papers were forced to rely on Yugoslav sources which came in two very contrasting hues, Partisan or disgruntled émigré. On the one hand there were the official Titoist outlets: Radio Free Yugoslavia (which, unmentioned by British papers which cited it, operated from the Soviet Union), Radio Belgrade and written press releases. On the other hand there was the fiercely anti-communist refugee community. Papers relied on the sources which accorded most closely with their political predilections, rarely accounting adequately for the prejudice of the material. While The Economist admitted that ‘any comment on the political situation [in the Balkans] must be guarded, for the information available is insufficient and grossly biased for or against the Government in power’,²⁰ the daily press eschewed such caveats. It turned almost exclusively to Partisan channels whose rhetoric of unity, transformation and liberation appealed to those optimistic about the potential of left-wing politics – the only politics, it might be argued, that a European could be optimistic about in 1945.²¹ Meanwhile anti-communist papers preferred to buy the tales of fanatical extremism relayed by the refugee community. Their reports of genuine instances of oppression and injustice went unnoticed or uncredited in the wider media perhaps because, like the proverbial leaf hidden in the tree, they were immersed in baseless scare-stories and propaganda.²²

When qualified individuals were eventually secured (after disbandment from the military) in time for the November election, their backgrounds did not always equip them to observe objectively. Basil Davidson, Kenneth Syers and John E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Britain and the Yugoslav General Election of November 1945
• 2 Primitivism and the Modern: A Prolonged Misunderstanding
• 3 The Rhetoric of Economics: Cold War Representation of Development in the Balkans
• 4 The Red Threat’: Cold War Rhetoric and the British Novel
• 5 Seeing Red: America and its Allies through the Eyes of Enver Hoxha
• 6 Paradoxes of Occidentalism: On Travel Literature in Ceauşescu’s Romania
• 7 Images of the West in Serbian and Croatian Prose Fiction, 1945–1995
• 8 Western Writing and the (Re)Construction of the Balkans after 1989: The Bulgarian Case
• 9 Albanians, Albanianism and the Strategic Subversion of Stereotypes
• 10 Albania after Isolation: The Transformation of Public Perceptions of the West
• 11 Between a Balkan ‘Home’ and the ‘West’: Popular Conceptions of the West in Bulgaria after 1945
• 12 Milošević, Serbia and the West during the Yugoslav Wars, 1991–1995
• 13 Savage Tribes and Mystic Feuds: Western Foreign Policy Statement on Bosnia in the Early 1990s
• 14 The Balkans Conflict and the Emergence of the Information Operations Doctrine
• 15 War in the Hall of Mirrors: NATO Bombing and Serbian Cinema
• Bibliography
• Index