Article
Balkan Dreams
Yes, peace is possible, even in the Balkans. The worst bloodletting has been halted. Moderates are gaining slowly, in Croatia, Serbia, and Kosovo. Milosevic has been brought before The Hague tribunal to answer charges of war crimes. The magical opportunity to leave butchery behind and join modern Europe is compelling.
Yes, stability and perhaps even peace are possible in the Balkans. The course will not be easy. The final results will not be known for a generation. But a foundation has been laid.
This optimistic thesis rests on three premises: (1) that Rebecca West and Robert Kaplan were wrong in their assumptions; (2) that the allure of eventual membership in the European Union sets up a powerful magnetic field that pulls candidates toward market democracy; and (3) that Western military intervention in southeastern Europe, by blocking the local bully, has so shifted the balance of risks and rewards that many opportunists now choose moderation over nationalist extremism.
To put it another way, if the French and Germans, sworn enemies over six generations, could become in the seventh generation the joint engine of the European Community—and if the fiscally casual Italians could discipline themselves sufficiently to help found the European Monetary Union—anything is possible.
Or at least anything is possible in a transforming Europe at this beginning of a millennium. Even in the Balkans.
First, the premises. Rebecca West, who had every reason to demonize the Germans when she made her seminal tour of the Balkans in 1937, painted her portrait of romantic Serb heroes primarily as a backdrop against which to cast her nasty Germans. So well did she succeed that for half a century Black Lamb and Gray Falcon has been taken as a bible about the enduring Serb soul rather than the Nazi psychosis. Her stereotype—combined with an inflated memory of the success of Tito’s partisans in staving off the Wehrmacht in World War II—convinced Anglo-Saxon policymakers in the early 1990s that defeating Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbs could not be done without unacceptable bloodshed, and that confrontation should therefore be avoided. Or at least it eased the way for initial abdication of moral judgment about relative evil in a region where there were all too many competing practitioners of horror.
Black Lamb’s impact was only reinforced by Robert Kaplan’s popular Balkan Ghosts fifty years later. This was the flip side of Balkan romanticism. The region was seen instead as the backward east, the rotten remnant of Ottoman empire, the twentieth century’s crucible of terrorism and genocide. In this rendition Milosevic did not have to work hard over two years to stoke the Serbs to lethal hatred; the hatred was already there, just waiting to erupt once cold-war constraints were gone. A clash of Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim civilizations was preordained. Again, the subliminal message was that if the age-old identity of the Balkans was barbarity, then the West would be well advised just to stay out of the melee, build a firewall, and let the barbarians kill each other off. The prophecy was self-fulfilling; as long as the West abdicated, the dynamic of war and revenge followed its own terrible logic. The very successful multicultural and intermarried society in Bosnia succumbed to concentration camps and rape of known neighbors.
It took the shock of the Srebrenica massacre to shatter that paradigm. Europe’s worst inhumanity since the Holocaust prodded a reluctant United States to reengage in the region. It further shamed heartland Europe—whose greatest accomplishment of half a century had been to abolish war on its historically war-prone soil—into becoming its brother’s keeper in order not to sacrifice self-respect. Before Srebrenica, the EU mantra in looking at Bosnia was, “We must not allow that kind of atrocity to come into Europe.” After Srebrenica, the mantra became, “We must not allow that kind of atrocity in Europe.”
When Milosevic’s paramilitaries and the Kosova Liberation Army (UCK) accelerated their mutual butchery in 1998/99, then—with the Serb paramilitaries the more murderous from their vastly superior firepower (and the dearth of Serb civilians to be victimized in the 90 percent Albanian population)—NATO finally reacted militarily. The Balkans were no longer the alien Other. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer made an impassioned plea that tipped erstwhile pacifists in his Green Party and in Germany away from the primacy of no-more-war to the primacy of no-more-genocide.
Milosevic Demythologized
In the end, the Yugoslav army retreated from Kosovo, for reasons that are disputed to this day. Milosevic was demythologized, as it became clear that he had brought not glory, but misery, to hundreds of thousands of Serb refugees. Overconfident, the once-popular leader called elections without bothering to rig them sufficiently to win, and disillusioned voters kicked him out. Future Prime Minister Zoran Djindjib mobilized bulldozers to enforce the election results and subsequently spirited Milosevic out of the country to The Hague to face charges of genocide before the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal.
One key precondition for peace is therefore now in place: war exhaustion. It is clear to most of the potential militants (including even most of the UCK) that war leads only to slaughter and penury, except for the smugglers and other ruthless profiteers. The way has been cleared for an alternate hope of building, slowly but steadily, the kind of prosperity and peace that characterize heartland Europe.
And here it is worth noting that outside of ex-Yugoslavia and Albania, there was no resort to violence in the region in any case in the post-cold-war era. Bulgaria, the twin of Serbia in having been the region’s hegemon in medieval times, rejected the nationalist extremism that the Bulgarian communists (like Milosevic) sought to exploit to form a new power base. After the economy collapsed in the mid-1990s voters expelled the old communists; the center-right that relaced them invited the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Turks whom the communists had expelled to return. Brave Bulgarian activists defied death threats to urge their fellow citizens to welcome the Turks back and not to forfeit the good name Bulgaria had earned by saving its Jews in World War II. The new government also ended Bulgaria’s eight-decade-old cold war with Macedonia—even though the Bulgarians might conceivably have claimed the historic seat of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in Ohrid, Macedonia, even as the Serbs claimed Kosovo’s Blackbird Field, the hallowed site of the Serbian Orthodoxy. Nor does the quirky electoral defeat of Bulgaria’s center-right by ex-king Simeon Sachskoburggotsky last year obviate the solid accomplishments of that center-right government.
Next door, the largest state in the region, Romania, may not have as good an ethnic record as Bulgaria in its treatment of Hungarian and Roma minorities. And its governance may owe more to the old communist system of clans, secret-police networks, and payoffs than to any democratic competition of political options. But once the initial spasm of violence against communist boss Nicolae Ceausescu was spent, the Romanians did not again resort to force.
A major reason for the Bulgarian and Romanian restraint—and their role in founding unprecedented pan-Balkan military, police, and customs cooperation—is the powerful attraction of future membership in the EU and NATO, and the knowledge that membership requires non-violence, democratization, and market economies. The EU is helping both to modernize with financial, economic, technical, legal, and administrative assistance, and is increasingly doing so in association agreements with the western Balkan states as well. Never before have the Balkans had such a good prospect of real integration into the European mainstream. This opportunity has a powerful normative impact.
In part, this evolution is a deliberate continuation of the chain of post-World War II reconciliation pioneered by Germany and France and followed by Germany and Poland, Poland and Ukraine, Ukraine and Romania. In part, it is the most rational way to play catch-up with a globalized world of accelerating change.
The Western Balkans
The real test of stability, of course, will be those portions of the west Balkans that did plunge into war in the last decade—Albania and ex-Yugoslavia. Albania, apart from its lawless north, seems to be calm for now and has showed no sign of pursuing the once widely feared Greater Albania by joining with Kosovo and threatening to pull in ethnic Albanian parts of Macedonia, Montenegro, and Greece. Croatia’s voters turned moderate even before Serbia’s voters did—and some Croatian generals accused of war crimes have in fact been turned over to The Hague tribunal without provoking a political crisis. Macedonia has managed to smother the Albanian-Slav fighting, and it is hoped that the minimal NATO security presence there, now taken over by the EU, can keep the peace. Bosnia, in some ways the least successful piece of the puzzle, still seems to be a hotbed of ethnic hostility and crime, even if some refugee returns have been effected.
In both Serbia and Kosovo, the news is surprisingly good. The pragmatic government in Belgrade has embarked on the path of economic rationality. Driven by Vojvodina’s surge, the Serbian is growing at over 5 percent annually. Yugoslav central bank governor Mladjan Dinkib (who maintains his sanity by performing now and then with his rock band) boasts ruefully that since Yugoslavia is the last in line, it is necessarily implementing reforms faster than any post-communist country before it. Far from stirring up chauvinism, he and Prime Minister Djindjib are both hinting that if Montenegro and even Kosovo eventually want peaceful independence, they are welcome to it—and that Serbia might do better without their economic drag.
In the Connecticut-sized protectorate of Kosovo there is a race on between the positive and negative impact of the overwhelming foreign presence in money and personnel. The negatives include sky-high rents in Priötina that are unaffordable for ordinary Kosovars; rampant prostitution with enslaved Romanian, Moldovan, and Ukrainian women; distortion of society from wage scales in which anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of English can get much higher pay as an interpreter than as a teacher; and the prevalent risk of building a dependency culture. Defenses against such distortions come from the sheer energy and initiative of the Kosovars, sophistication about Western ways among the many Kosovars who have worked in Germany and Switzerland; the dedication to nation-building on the part of many international civil servants; and a remarkable absence of cynicism that regularly puts Kosovars on the top of the optimism charts in surveys.
Moreover, some of the worst Albanian guerrilla commanders who commission murders of more moderate rivals and run flourishing smuggling rings—the Albanian competence in the latter profession is world class—are gradually being squeezed out by international police action. Arrests even of one-time war heroes have begun on charges of murder of Albanians, and attempts to mobilize the public against the international community over the issue have failed.
Transformation will not be easy. The mafias that cooperate in exemplary fashion across ethnic lines are entrenched. Politics is still often viewed as a license to extort money from others rather than an obligation to serve. Poverty remains and in some areas is even increasing. Democracy and the market are both unfamiliar games.
Yet a beginning has been made in this turbulent corner of Europe that would have seemed impossible even five years ago. Ultimately, peace is possible.
Download as PDF (52.247 Bytes)
ELIZABETH POND war verantwortliche Redakteurin der Global Edition
der IP. Ihr jüngstes Buch: „Endgame in the Balkans: Regime Change, European Style“ (2006).
ELIZABETH POND is the founding editor of Internationale Politik—Global Edition, and is the author of Endgame in the Balkans: Regime Change, European Style.
