Russian and East European Studies

Contested Options and Shared Consequences

Leandrit I. Mehmeti, Branislav Radeljic, Leandrit I. Mehmeti, Branislav Radeljic

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780822981572
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Azan on the Moon is an in-depth anthropological study of people's lives along the Pamir Highway in eastern Tajikistan. Constructed in the 1930s in rugged high-altitude terrain, the road fundamentally altered the material and social fabric of this former Soviet outpost on the border with Afghanistan and China. The highway initially brought sentiments of disconnection and hardship, followed by Soviet modernization and development, and ultimately a sense of distinction from bordering countries and urban centers that continues to this day. Based on extensive fieldwork and through an analysis of construction, mobility, technology, media, development, Islam, and the state, Till Mostowlansky shows how ideas of modernity are both challenged and reinforced in contemporary Tajikistan. In the wake of China's rise in Central Asia, people along the Pamir Highway strive to reconcile a modern future with a modern past. Weaving together the road, a population, and a region, Azan on the Moon presents a rich ethnography of global connections

Chapter 1

KOSOVO: A CASE STUDY IN THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF COMMUNIST NATIONALITY POLICY, 1968–1986

Veljko Vujačić

Max Weber warned long ago against the indiscriminate use of “collective concepts” in social science. Concepts such as “the state,” for example, refer to nothing more than the probability that individual actors in the hierarchy of positions that constitute a system of legitimate domination in a territorially defined association called a state will actually carry out the commands of their superiors and continue to do so, both in routine times and under conditions of institutional crisis. Ultimately, the probability that they will indeed do so depends largely, though not exclusively, upon their subjective belief in the “validity” of the existing order.¹ Where this belief is shaken or lacking, for whatever reason, key actors are likely to defect from “the state,” as was the case, for example, during the dramatic August 1991 coup in the Soviet Union. Even in the case of the world’s second great superpower, that is, the tremendous coercive capacity of the state could not prevent its ultimate collapse because it lost legitimacy among critical constituencies like army officers.

Nowhere is the need to heed Weber’s warning as important as in studies of nationalism and nationalist mobilization, as the unavoidable use of collective nouns like “the French” or “the Germans” or, in our case, “Serbs” and “Albanians” is loaded by definition, since it obscures the interests and values of various elites and social groups in ways that, more often than not, impede sociological understanding. Instead of seeing ethnic groups or nations as homogenous entities and thus replicating the language of nationalists themselves, the task of sociological analysis is to disaggregate such collective concepts and ask why nationalist mobilization became the prevalent mode of social action at the expense of other potential social identities or political orientations, such as class-based social movement mobilization or the joint struggle of the cultural elites of both groups for civil rights with the aim of transforming Yugoslavia into a constitutional state.²

In this respect, another classical sociological concept—Robert Merton’s emphasis on the unintended consequences of social action—may come in handy.³ This is the case not only because it can be shown that the Kosovo conflict in the 1980s was to a large extent caused by the unintended consequences of communist nationality policy, but also because the emphasis on an explanation based on the logic of unintended consequences can help us avoid the reasoning based on “essentialist” arguments or various conspiracy theories that have made their way into everyday discourse as well as some scholarly works. This is not to deny that whole ethnic groups or nations can be “oppressed” in ways than an objective outside observer can assess to be approximately true on the basis of well-defined criteria. But the observable tendency to see only “Albanians” or “Kosovo Serbs” as the “oppressed group” in certain time periods more often than not obscures the internal divisions and interests of elites or social groups within those societies.⁴ Were the relatively privileged Albanian cadres who willingly participated in the suppression of their own co-ethnics in Kosovo also “oppressed” by “Great Serbian nationalism” or Yugoslav communism? Were the Serbian cadres in Kosovo who closed their eyes to the visible violations of the civil rights of Kosovo Serbs in the early 1980s also the “oppressors of the Serbian nation”? Or were both groups part of the same rent-seeking communist elite whose interests and political identity were tied to the preservation of an ideological vision of reality in which the legitimate grievances of ethnic groups (or social groups within these groups) were treated as unacceptable “deviations” from the official party line on nationalities? What are we to make of the efforts of those Serbian intellectuals in the 1980s who publicly protested the harsh sentences imposed on “Albanian irredentists” as violations of the rule of law and politically counterproductive? Were these same intellectuals acting as “Serbian nationalists” when they campaigned for the civil rights of Kosovo Serbs within a constitutional state?⁵ Already the posing of such questions alerts us to the fact that social reality, including the reality of ethnic conflict, is not pregiven but rather a matter of “the definition of social situation.” According to the classical sociological adage, “if men define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences,” and the very definition of the social situation in Kosovo as an ethnic conflict rather than as a social question or problem of civil rights in a communist party-state goes a long way in explaining why the conflict broke out with such intensity in the 1980s. Rather than seeing this ethnic definition of the situation as historically inevitable, the task is to explain why and how it became hegemonic in political discourse.

The following chapter utilizes these classic sociological concepts in order to demystify the social reality of Kosovo in the first half of the 1980s. Although the problems in ethnic relations in Kosovo were evident—there is no point denying the obvious—I argue that this is not the only way to look at the problem. Rather than taking for granted the reality of ethnic groups, the following analysis seeks to show how the unintended consequences of communist nationality policy and the structure and ideology of the communist party-state exacerbated an already complex and difficult historical legacy of ethnic relations. The fact that the story is largely told in narrative form should not prevent the reader from discerning the larger theoretical concepts at work. The conclusion highlights the lessons that can be derived from this kind of sociological analysis in the hope that they will allow Serbian and Albanian readers as well as international scholars to assess the historical problem without reliance on taken-for-granted categories or ready-made explanations that posit a state of “frozen” relations between unambiguously defined ethnic groups.

COMMUNIST NATIONALITY POLICY AND THE KOSOVO PROBLEM IN THE EARLY 1980S

In March 1981, dramatic student demonstrations shook Priština, the capital of the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo. Although the demonstrations were precipitated by poor living conditions in student dormitories and long queues in the cafeterias of Priština University, they quickly assumed a broader political dimension. By early April, demonstrations had spread to several cities, encompassing a number of social constituencies other than students, notably miners and workers in a large electrical power plant. The suppression of the demonstrations by special police units came at a heavy price. While the exact number of dead and injured was never conclusively determined, it is clear that the toll was much higher than Federal Minister of Defense Stane Dolanc was willing to admit in April 1981, when he claimed that eleven people had died (nine demonstrators and two policemen), and fifty-seven were injured in clashes between the demonstrators and riot police.⁶ During the next few months a state of emergency was imposed in the province, with 30,000 troops placed in charge of restoring order. Nevertheless, demonstrations kept recurring for well over a year, accompanied by occasional violence. The violence had a “symbolic” dimension as well, perhaps the best example being the fire set in one wing of the Patriarchate of Peć, the traditional seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church throughout a considerable part of the Ottoman period.⁷

The 1981 Kosovo riots, as one prominent scholar noted several years later, represented “the most serious and widespread breach of the peace in Yugoslavia since the 1940s.”⁸ Perhaps even more disturbing than the violence, at least from the official point of view, were the explicitly nationalist overtones of the mass demonstrations. Although the student demonstrators voiced demands for greater equality and social justice (“No talk with the red bourgeoisie”; “Some sit in armchairs, others have no bread”; “Long live the working class”), other slogans called for the separation of Kosovo from Yugoslavia and its attachment to Albania (“We are Albanians, not Yugoslavs”). The most characteristic nationalist slogans, however, did not call for outright secession, but rather for the transformation of Kosovo into a full-fledged republic in Yugoslavia (“We want a republic”; “Republic—peacefully or by force”).⁹ Such a formal upgrading of the status of Kosovo from an autonomous province within Serbia into a socialist republic, that is, a full-fledged federal unit in the Yugoslav state, implied the recognition that Albanians were not a national minority or “nationality” (narodnost), but a constituent people of state (narod). Unlike “nationalities,” “peoples” or “nations” (narodi) were considered bearers of the collective right to self-determination. Whereas constitutional specialists repeatedly claimed that all Yugoslav peoples had irrevocably exercised their right to self-determination at the time of the formation of the communist state in 1945, Article 3 of the 1974 Yugoslav constitution left the question open to interpretation.¹⁰ This is why the demand for a “Kosovo Republic” could be interpreted not just as a manifestation of the Albanians’ desire for full national equality but also as a first step toward Kosovo’s secession from Yugoslavia.

The 1981 Kosovo riots were followed by a purge of the provincial party committee and the resignation of local government leaders.¹¹ The demonstrations were officially qualified as “counterrevolutionary” with the slogan “Kosovo Republic” labeled an “act of hostile propaganda” by “Albanian irredentists.” The qualified, albeit resolute support of the regime in Albania for the demonstrators’ demands enabled communist officialdom to connect these “irredentists” to “foreign agents,” and present the demonstrations as partially caused by external enemies. Such an interpretation had some credibility in view of the close cultural ties that were established between Kosovo and Albania in the heyday of Kosovo’s autonomy (1971–1981), the manifest desire of some Kosovo Albanian activists to attach Kosovo to Albania, the long-term hostility of the Albanian regime to Yugoslav “revisionism,” and the realistic fear that the Soviet Union would exploit internal ethnic unrest to make inroads into Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, it was obvious even to the communist elite that the unrest in Kosovo had deeper internal economic and political causes.¹² The elite’s panicked reaction to the riots revealed total surprise at the scale and intensity of the demonstrations, and a lack of faith in the regime’s legitimacy and stability a mere year after Tito’s death (1980).

The official ideological definition of the demonstrations as “counterrevolution” had serious political repercussions. Although Kosovo retained its status as an autonomous province within Serbia and continued to be administered by provincial party cadres and government institutions (including, importantly, the local judiciary and the local police), the heavy presence of Yugoslav army troops was a sign that the province’s elite was no longer trusted by the federal leadership. The mistrust was not surprising in view of what appears to have been a systematic cover-up of the real situation by some prominent Albanian communist cadres.¹³ More consequential still was the criminalization of Albanian national dissent. The figures speak for themselves: while in 1981 the number of Albanians convicted for political offenses approximated the Yugoslav average, during the next seven years Albanian political offenders rapidly outstripped their counterparts from Yugoslavia’s other ethnic groups. In the eight years between 1979 and 1988 (for which comparative figures exist), Kosovo Albanians made up 58 percent of all convicted Yugoslav political offenders, 61 percent of all those who had received prison terms for political offenses, and a full 70 percent of those forced to serve prison terms longer than one year (in 1981, Albanians constituted 7.7 percent of the Yugoslav population). The total number of Kosovo Albanians convicted for political offenses in this period was 1,087; 100 to 200 per year (with a peak of 284 political offenders convicted in 1982, one year after the demonstrations).¹⁴ When the size of Albanian extended families is taken into account, it becomes obvious that repressive state policies indirectly affected a large proportion of Kosovo’s Albanian population.

At first glance, this political criminalization of the slogan “Kosovo Republic” made little sense, especially in view of the evolution of Yugoslav communist nationality policy since the mid-1960s. The devolution of power from the federal center to the republics and autonomous provinces was an essential feature of that policy, and the idea of establishing a Socialist Republic of Kosovo was openly voiced by Albanian communists and intellectuals in intraparty discussions of the proposed constitutional amendments (1968–1971). Although these proposals were rejected at the time, most likely because Yugoslavia’s leading communists, Tito and Kardelj, did not wish to supply Serbian nationalism with a new grievance in the aftermath of the 1966 dismissal of Aleksandar Ranković as vice-president of Yugoslavia, the logic of constitutional devolution pointed in the direction of further decentralization.¹⁵ This is exactly how leading Albanian cadres interpreted the subsequent constitutional upgrading of the status of the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina (1971–1974) within Serbia.¹⁶ By 1981, however, several important developments intervened to make the slogan “Kosovo Republic” unacceptable to communist officialdom.

The first of these was the considerable cultural “Albanianization” of the province between the late 1960s and 1981. The first important concession to Albanian national sentiment occurred as early as 1968, when the name of the province was changed from Kosovo-Metohija (metoh, the Greek word for monastery land, reflected the historical presence of numerous Orthodox Christian monasteries in Kosovo, and symbolically confirmed Serbia’s “historic right” to at least a part of the province) to Kosovo (Kosova in Albanian). A year later (1969), Kosovo Albanians were allowed to fly the Albanian national flag as their national (not state) symbol, and a new university was founded in Priština. These developments were followed by intensified cultural exchange between Kosovo and Albania, with the Albanian state providing teachers and textbooks needed for Albanian-language instruction.¹⁷ This cooperation had significant cultural consequences, as the adoption of Tosk literary Albanian by Kosovo’s Gheg dialect speakers paved the way for the linguistic homogenization of the Albanian nation across the borders of the two countries.¹⁸

The main recipients of these new cultural goods were young Albanians flocking into the rapidly expanding local educational system, especially into higher education. The size of this group can be fully appreciated once it is realized just how hypertrophied Priština University had become in little more than ten years: although located in Yugoslavia’s most backward province, by 1981 it had 26,000 students, emerging as one of the largest higher educational institutions in the country.¹⁹ A full two-thirds of these students graduated from nontechnical fields, further contributing to the skewed occupational profile of the province’s cultural elite in which teachers—a classic nationalist constituency—were highly overrepresented.²⁰ The official promotion of Albanian language, history, and cultural studies in higher education soon led to the only possible outcome: the creation of a self-conscious Kosovo Albanian cultural elite acutely aware of Kosovo’s backward status, humiliated by relative poverty and lack of employment opportunities in a shrinking economy, offended by the Albanians’ second-class status in Yugoslavia’s informal hierarchy of ethnic prestige, and angry at the privileged lifestyle of local officialdom.²¹ The combination of social and national grievances in the context of underdevelopment made even Enver Hoxha’s enforced egalitarianism attractive to some young Albanians, as the emergence of radical Marxist-Leninist groups in Kosovo demonstrates. Nevertheless, the number of those who simply fought for social justice and national dignity or espoused some version of Albanian romantic nationalism was probably greater.²²

The problems of the young Kosovo Albanian cultural elite were exacerbated by the extraordinary demographic expansion of the province’s Albanian population: with a 2.5 percent annual growth rate, Albanians had become Yugoslavia’s (and Europe’s) fastest-growing population in the 1961–1981 period. As a result, the absolute population of Kosovo effectively doubled in the postwar period (from 733,000 in 1948 to more than 1.5 million in 1981). Although Kosovo’s Serbs and Montenegrins also exhibited high birth rates in the 1950s, these rates dropped during the following decades, while growing emigration from the province further reduced their proportion in the total population. By 1981, a considerable ethnic homogenization process was under way, with ethnic Albanians comprising 77 percent of Kosovo’s population (1,227,000). Under these conditions, the very substantial federal transfer payments to Kosovo (30–40 percent of all federal aid to undeveloped regions) could give few results, even if the mismanagement of investment funds by the local elite was also a factor in the province’s relative economic decline. A good illustration of the magnitude of that decline is provided by comparative GDP per capita figures for Slovenia (Yugoslavia’s most developed republic and comparable in population size) and Kosovo (the least developed region): while in 1952 Slovenia’s GDP per capita was four times that of Kosovo, by 1984 it was six times higher, a difference in economic levels equivalent to that between England and North Africa.²³

One of the main consequences of rapid demographic growth and underdevelopment was a dramatic rise in public-sector unemployment rate among young Kosovo Albanians: already above 40 percent in 1980, it grew to 50 percent in 1983 and close to 60 percent in 1984. Rising unemployment forced some Albanians into temporary migration, others into extended-family small private businesses, and a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms
• List of Municipalities
• Introduction
• 1. Kosovo: A Case Study in the Unintended Consequences of Communist Nationality Policy, 1968–1986
• 2. Settling the Self-Determination Dispute in Kosovo
• 3. Kosovo in the Official Rhetoric of the European Union and Russia
• 4. Governance Challenges to Interethnic Relations in Kosovo
• 5. Serbian Political Parties and the Kosovo Question
• 6. The Capacity and Performance of the Eulex Mission in Kosovo
• 7. The Role of Minorities in the Serbo-Albanian Political Quagmire
• 8. Minority Returns to Kosovo: Migration Policies, Practices, and Theory
• 9. Economic Cooperation as a Way Toward Reconciliation and Eu Integration for Kosovo and Serbia
• 10. Perspectives of the Normalization of Relations Between Kosovo and Serbia
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index