A Modern History of the Balkans

Nationalism and Identity in Southeast Europe

Thanos Veremis

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786721051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

The history of the Balkans has been a distillation of the great and terrible themes of 20th century history – the rise of nationalism, communism, fascism, genocide, identity and war. Written by one of the leading historians of the region, this is a new interpretation of that history, focusing on the uses and legacies of nationalism in the Balkan region. In particular, Professor Veremis analyses the influence of the West - from the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise and collapse of Yugoslavia. Throughout the state-building process of Greece, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria and later, Albania, the West provided legal, administrative and political prototypes to areas bedevilled by competing irredentist claims. At a time when Slovenia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Croatia have become full members of the EU, yet some orphans of the Communist past are facing domestic difficulties, A Modern History of the Balkans seeks to provide an important historical context to the current problems of nationalism and identity in the Balkans.

PART I

The Balkans from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century: the Building and Dismantling of Nation States

CHAPTER ONE

Perceptions and Misreadings

The term ‘Balkanisation’ first appeared in British magazines of the 1920s to denote the fragmentation of large administrative entities, as well as the hostile relations between the resulting states. Balkanisation is a derogatory term that signifies weakness, underdevelopment and a hapless division.1 The Balkans as we know them consist of states that broke free of Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian rule. Their ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity is similar to that of the state-entities of Central and Western Europe before the policies of absolute monarchies, and later those of each nation state, had managed to attain an extensive cultural and religious homogenisation.

Yugoslavia came together because of the common linguistic heritage of most of its constituent parts and the many external threats that surrounded them. The experiment of state building was performed twice before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the ‘really existing socialism’ whipped up the local nationalisms that Tito had bridled after World War II.

Although the dismantling of Yugoslavia from its multicultural configurations of 1919 and 1945 did not occur elsewhere in the Balkans, the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the EU, and more recently the economic bailout of Greece by the Eurozone and the IMF, entailed a reduction in national sovereignty for all the nation states involved. Did the Balkan states ever exercise their sovereignty to the full? This book will note that the gunboat diplomacy of the past has been replaced by the influence that creditors exert over their indebted clients; it might therefore be safe to assume that extraneous military control is a thing of the past while economic influence, with its positive as well as negative attributes, is here to stay. Nationalist aspirations were given a new lease of life and irredentisms were summoned from the past. While visiting Pristina in April 2010 I was given a handsome picture book by the Kosovo tourist agency and was surprised to find a map indicating the borders of the Albanian irredenta in Greece, Montenegro, Serbia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). The schoolbooks of FYROM with a map of the greater Macedonian state straddling Bulgarian and Greek territories can be easily obtained in bookshops in Skopje. Could this be considered part of the unfinished business in the Balkans, along with the claims of the Kosovar Albanians for recognition as the last independent state of the Western Balkans?

This book will suggest that wars of liberation from imperial domination and subsequent ethnic competition between Bulgaria and Serbia, Greece and Turkey, and Albanians with Serbs have not all expired, although some have. The last remnant of ethnic competition took place in Kosovo, but Albanian irredentism may not be entirely finished. This book will attempt to explain the sources of lingering aspirations of national unification in the Western Balkans.

Historical accuracy has not always been displayed by those Western authors who turned the Balkans into the scapegoat of the European continent. Moreover, the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia added new brushstrokes to an already dark picture of the area. The famous American diplomat George Kennan attributed the responsibility for the Yugoslav tragedy to the Balkans as a whole: ‘Eighty years have now passed’, he notes, ‘since the Carnegie commissioners paid their visit to that region. And this writer knows no evidence that the ability of the Balkan people to interact peaceably with one another is any greater now than it was eighty years ago’.2 However, relations between states in Southeastern Europe since 1994 bear no resemblance whatsoever to the era of irredentist competition in the Balkans that Kennan refers to.

There are nonetheless contemporary commentators such as Misha Glenny (The Balkans 1804–1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, London: Granta, 1999), and also Susan L. Woodward (Balkan Tragedy. Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 1999), who assign a large share of responsibility for the violence that prevailed in the recent Balkan developments to the influence of Western Powers. Woodward maintains that the economic upheaval created by the second oil crisis intensified the pressures that the Powers brought to bear on Yugoslavia to repay its debts to them. The measures dictated by the International Monetary Fund demanded a reform of the Yugoslav federal system that would strengthen the authority of the central government over the federated republics. At exactly the same time, many Western countries put pressure on the Yugoslavs to liberalise their economy and reduce the powers of the central government in favour of the federated republics. Such contradictory Western pressures contributed significantly to the dismantling of Yugoslavia and the violence that hit it.

It was not just their ideology and their systems that the Western great powers brought into the area but also their quarrels. As noted by Jonathan Eyal: ‘The view that the Balkans represent a disease rather than a geographical entity is based on a fundamental misreading of history. While the region has suffered more than its fair share of violence, much of it was engineered by competing alliances hatched in the West, rather than local animosities.’3

The history of the Balkans had started to be written by the Europeans long before the area was labelled ‘Europe’s powder-keg’. During the eighteenth century this less-developed region of the continent found its moral scourge in the person of the British Protestant writer Edward Gibbon, who painted the Byzantine Empire and its realm in the darkest possible colours. It was thus that all the Balkan nation states emerging in the nineteenth century out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire inherited the original sin of having been part of a ‘dark orientalising’ culture that, by acquiring its Ottoman shape, ended up by breaking totally with the West. The difference separating Gibbon from Samuel Huntington4 – who classifies both Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the Balkans as belonging to a non-European part of the world that confronts the pure-blood Catholic and Protestant Europeans – is not that great.

Huntington is better known for his previous work on the role of the military in post-colonial societies. The Clash of Civilisations, on the other hand, displays the author’s cavalier attitude towards history and his tendency to replace economic progress with religious cultural traits. Nonetheless such repetitive, standardised degradation of the Balkans consolidated this prejudice in Western minds and ended up by turning it into a dead certainty. The only way of overcoming this exclusion of the Balkans from the European cultural tradition would be if a credible Western intellectual and writer undertook to reinstate the Orthodox Balkan peninsula into the European mainstream.5

The collapse of Yugoslavia and the atrocities that followed it were the work of ethnic leaders who were keen to play a dominant role in the new, unitary states (except Bosnia). The various secessionist ethnic forces, instead of accepting a secondary role within the federated units of former Yugoslavia, created five state entities of which they gained full control. Ethnic cleansing thus became the natural consequence of the creation of statelets based on the dominant position of a single ethnic group.

Western perceptions of the war in Yugoslavia were shaped by the mass media that reduced a complex reality to simplistic aphorisms, easy to absorb by a bewildered public. Very few were the voices heard in the West condemning the biased presentation of the facts of war. Amongst them was Charles Boyd, second-in-command of the US European Forces. In an article published in Foreign Affairs he mentioned that ‘any distinction between the warring factions in Bosnia has to do with power and degrees of opportunism rather than morality’.6 The ‘good side’ was distinguished from the ‘bad side’ on the basis of crimes committed on the battlefront, but also with regard to more permanent features and cultural ties, the outstanding political debts, the good or bad public relations, the circles of influence in Europe and in the United States, as well as on the basis of a host of other such factors. It is certainly true that there were no innocents among the leaders of the war but the CNN and most of the mass media in Europe projected the Serbs as the only villains in this carnage. Even while the Serb population was being expelled from Krajina there was not a word of sympathy for the fate of people who were driven from their homes by force. The West took sides in this conflict while deluding itself that it was acting as a mediator between the opponents.

The solution of the Bosnian issue on 21 November 1995 in Dayton, Ohio, was the work of a superpower whose belated decision was prompted by calculations of home policy concerns (the forthcoming presidential elections). Even so, the conjunctures worked perfectly. In summer 1995, the Croatian army evicted the Serbs from Krajina while the Serb-Bosnians cleansed their share of Bosnia. No agreement would have been reached, whether with or without the bombings, if ethnic cleansing had not first been completed. This is the unfortunate conclusion that future proponents of ethnic cleansing will adhere to, unless refugees are repatriated in sufficient numbers.

European pronouncements after Dayton reveal the awkward feelings generated by the American success (International Herald Tribune, 23 November 1995). The German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel said that the USA appeared on the scene just when the possibility for a settlement had started to come dimly into light, while his French counterpart Herve de Charette criticised the USA for having hampered efforts to find a diplomatic solution at previous stages. In spite of their cogency, such remarks reveal, nonetheless, the resentment felt by those who had failed in their efforts to find a solution. The truth is that the prime movers of the European Union’s foreign policy failed to work out a common stand during the Bosnia crisis. The USA, on the other hand, promoted their cohesive and well-integrated solution with the required decisiveness.

The Dayton Treaty had a serious impact on the policy concerning Kosovo’s future. The lessons that its Albanian inhabitants drew from this treaty were the following: the territorial gains resulting from the war in Bosnia were ratified; the external borders of Yugoslavia remained intact; and the sanctions were lifted without any concessions being made on the Kosovo issue. The appeal to the international community by Ibrahim Rugova – the leader of the Albanian Kosovars – to be granted independence without the use of violence, proved futile. At the radical end of the Albanian political spectrum, voices were heard advocating the use of violence. The Serbian authorities refused to revise the 1974 regime of autonomy as long as the Albanian leadership persisted in rejecting any arrangement short of full independence.

The problem created by the confrontation between the Albanians and the Serbs in Kosovo is not exclusive to the region. The Albanians of the ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’, for instance, make up 25 per cent of the population and claim to be recognised as a constituent non-Slavic ethnic community within a state which, they say, is entirely run by its ethnic majority. The European Union, the USA and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) believe that the majo...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Imprint
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part I
• 1_Perceptions and Misreadings
• 2_Common Elements in the State Formation
• 3_From the Nation State to the Stateless Nation
• 4_Albanians, South-Slavs and Bulgarians
• 5_Era of Ferment and Wars
• 6_The Inter-war Conundrum
• 7_From War to Communism
• 8_The Balance of Forces in the Balkans
• 9_In Search of Multilaterism
• 10_Redefining Security Yugoslavia 19189-95
• Part II
• 11_Nationalism and Identity in the Balkans
• 12_The Economies
• 13_The Army in Politics
• 14_Western Amateurs and the End of History
• Part III
• 15_The Macedonian Question 1991-2010
• 16_Independence for Kosovo
• 17_Bosnia-Herzegovina an Intractable Problem
• Epilogue_The Chances of Post-Modernity in the Balkans
• Chronology
• Notes
• Further Reading