Beyond "ancient hatreds": What really happened to Yugoslavia

Policy Review, Oct/Nov 1999 by Schwartz, Stephen

WITH THE DEATH OF DICTATOR Josip Broz Tito in 980 and the crisis of European communism begining a half-decade later; Yugoslavia - a "country" assembled after World War I from pieces of the former Austro-Hungary, Turkish possessions "liberated" in 1912-13, and the former monarchies of Serbia and Montenegro came face to face with all the fault lines of the former states. As Yugoslavia broke violently into pieces in the 1990s, the first explanation on the lips of most commentators was this: "ancient hatreds," a phrase that quickly became a cliche.

Thus, viewers of television news as well as readers of print media were told for the nth time that the Serbs hate the Croats because of what the latter did to them in World War II; or, going further back, that the Serbs hate the Albanians for taking over Kosovo, which the Serbs consider their heartland because of the battle fought there in 1389. Or consider this:

swift, on horseback, the barbarians ride to the attack; an enemy with horses as numerous as their flying arrows; and they leave the whole land depopulated. Some flee, and with their plowed furrows unguarded, know their fields will be despoiled. The poor products of their labor, in creaking carts are driven with their flocks, all the poor peasant owns. Among the refugees, some are seized as captives and with their arms bound, march to an unknown fate; they cast a sad eye behind them, at their homes and farms. Some fall in agony, pierced by barbed arrows; for the metal head of the shaft is loaded with poison. What the barbarians cannot steal, they destroy and a flame rages through the innocent houses.

Thus the Roman poet Ovid (Tristia, III, x.), describing a raid 2,000 years ago by the Sarmatians, considered Slavs by some historians, against the ancestors of today's Albanians.

The "ancient hatreds" argument furnishes a convenient hook for nightly news commentary on atrocities. It has certain obvious merits. It would be absurd to deny that the Balkans, like much of Eastern Europe, have remained outside the mainstream of European history, and that their penchant for brutality in politics and war indicates that, in some ways, some of these cultures remain unassimilated to Western values and attitudes. Further, it is clear that violence in the region has a repetitive character, going back even before the Slavic intrusion in the sixth century A.D.

In addition to its merits, the "ancient hatred" argument has a certain convenience for some of those who embrace it. It assumes, implicitly or explicitly, the moral equivalence of the warring parties, with "a pox on all your houses" its apparent policy corollary. This view has a natural appeal for those who do not wish to take sides.

But is the presence of "ancient hatreds," legendary resentments, and atavistic habits really sufficient to explain the extent and intensity of brutality in the Yugoslav war of the 1990s? This is somewhat akin to blaming Gothic paganism for Nazism. The distance from cultural divergence to mass murder remains a long one for most societies, no matter how backward.

No, these "ancient hatreds" could not and did not combust spontaneously. The blaze was prepared, lit, and stoked by the Serbian political leadership in a massive assault against its neighbors, planned and executed to unite "Great Serbia" behind its communist rulers. In pursuit of this end, Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic would effectively revive an authentically fascist style of ethnic incitement, one with a terrifying potential for the destabilization of European - and even international -- civil society.

Moreover, there is no equivalence between Milosevic and the political leaders he confronted in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and, eventually, Kosovo. The Slovenes under ex-communist turned free-marketeer Milan Kucan had consistently acted in only one interest: the efficient integration of the former Yugoslav "republics" into Europe. Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, as devious and corrupt a politician as Milosevic, kept his country in a kind of "banana republic" semi-dictatorship, imposed policies leading to human rights violations on its own territory as well as in BosniaHerzegovina, and often appeased Milosevic. But with all his many faults, Tudjman acted defensively and opportunistically. The Bosnian Muslims, for their part, never engaged in the wholesale human rights violations characteristic of Serbian and Croatian military operations. The Kosovar Albanians maintained a position of nonviolence for 10 years before they took up arms, though they faced a constantly rising level of Serbian police and paramilitary atrocities.

As for "ancient hatreds," the divergence between West and East, it is all too obvious, has marked the Balkans for 1,500 years. Yugoslavia represented an attempt, probably doomed to failure in any event, to bridge the gap. Laid over the bedrock of ethnic rivalry, however, a network of thoroughly up-to-date grievances was visible, though little noticed outside Yugoslavia. These resentments were perpetuated and exacerbated because of policy issues as current as any in the world. The real, immediate reasons Yugoslavia broke up so horrifically come not from the poetry of long-ago battles, or recitations of wartime atrocities under the Nazis, or from the plotting of German bankers or American militarists, but from the dry and seemingly sterile world of public policy. These reasons involve attitudes toward property and entrepreneurship; the legacy of centralist statism in government; and tax policy.