History Essay

Instant History: Understanding the Wars of Yugoslav Succession Author(s): Gale Stokes, John Lampe, Dennison Rusinow and Julie Mostov Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 136-160 Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2500982 Accessed: 24-08-2017 18:10 UTC

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REVIEW ESSAY

Instant History: Understanding the Wars of

Yugoslav Succession

Gale Stokes, John Lampe and Dennison Rusinow with Julie Mostov

Nothing concentrates the attention like war. This is true not only of the actual participants but of the vicarious participants as well. While the peoples of the former Yugoslavia have suffered and died, a horri- fied but nevertheless fascinated world has wondered how it was pos- sible that a seemingly prosperous and stable country could collapse into such a brutal internecine war. Was this a case of "ancient ethnic hatreds" breaking loose? Who was at fault, the Yugoslav communists or ethnic nationalists, western financial pressures or indecisive western policy? Could the wars have been prevented? What to do now? In 1992 two British journalists, Mark Thompson and Misha Glenny, provided the best initial accounts of Yugoslavia's collapse into warfare.' Since then, our shelves have filled with an unprecedented outpouring of books offering descriptions and analyses of Europe's worst bloodlet-

ting since World War II. Sifting through this contextual logjan has become a daunting task, both in emotional and in scholarly terms. In this review article we dip into the flood of new books to investigate how, and how well, these studies have dealt with the Yugoslav crisis.

Understanding the wars of Yugoslav succession poses a problem that is common to most contemporary issues. Few archival sources of

the sort that historians are now using to inform their understanding

of the collapse of the first Yugoslavia in World War II and the creation of the second Yugoslavia in that war's aftermath are yet available to scholars. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service has translated major articles, broadcasts and public speeches from the Yugoslav me- dia and from the successor states, but in the main scholars have had to rely on a mountain of secondary work, much of it in English. West- ern academic specialists have joined native scholars in sampling public opinion, assembling statistical data, reading the press and interviewing participants to fill in the archival gaps, while the still larger number of journalists who report on the wars rely primarily on interviews with participants and on their own experiences on the ground. These con- trasting styles of investigation-scholars seeking written texts; journal-

1. Mark Thompson's A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia (New York: Pantheon,

1992), is particularly good on the western parts of the former Yugoslavia. His account

of Istria is unique. Misha Glenny's The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (London:

Penguin, 1992), is episodic and sometimes hastily written, but provides a dramatic yet

detached account. Glenny published an updated second edition in 1995.

Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (Spring 1996)

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Instant History 137

ists emphasizing the personal dimension-explain many of the differ-

ences between the way historians and political scientists, on the one hand, and journalists, on the other, have covered the Yugoslav crisis.

Branka Magas was one of the first journalists to identify the grow-

ing crisis in Yugoslavia.2 She began her research in 1980, just before the initial outburst of violence in Kosovo. Magas argues that the "wrong turn in Kosovo," as she calls the vigorous Serbian reaction to Albanian aspirations there, was perhaps the key ingredient in creating the Yugo- slav crisis. Increasingly critical of Serbian actions through the 1980s and, later especially, of Slobodan Milosevic, she was particularly

shocked when her old colleagues on the left, Praxis authors like Mihailo

Markovic and Ljubomir Tadic, begin turning into Serbian nationalists. By 1987 she realized that no partial solution to the vastly increased tensions was possible.

Magas is an acute observer and an intelligent analyst. Her writings from the 1980s, which make up two thirds of The Destruction of Yugo- slavia, perceptively track the growth of nationalism and the failure of Yugoslav intellectuals to "transcend the confines of their national cul- tures." Already in June 1988 she realized that a major explosion might be imminent and by the time of the collapse she was filled with anguish at the onrushing events. She understood better than most the subver- sive effect that Slovenian aspirations were having on the rest of Yugo- slavia and she foresaw that the troubles in Knin presaged a larger disaster in Bosnia.3

Maga-s is a Croat but she is primarily a socialist, not a nationalist. Her political orientation leads her to a consistent but misplaced con- fidence in the ability of the working class to save Yugoslavia. She agrees that self-management was "an instrument for exploiting the workers"

but her conclusion is that "the political dispossession of the working class" was the real root of the fissaparous tendencies in Yugoslavia. She thought at one point that the parties on the left would be the most crucial in reconstructing Yugoslavia, and at a different time that peace would return to the Balkans only when Serbia recovered its democratic and socialist tradition. Maga-s's book is not a full history of the collapse of Yugoslavia. She does not mention Ante Markovic's reform efforts, for example, and she does not talk about the absence or impact of Tito. Nevertheless, her analysis of the issues in which she does take an interest provides a critical perspective on later events.

Because of her interest in socialism, Magas was an engaged ob-

server of Yugoslavia. Even closer to events was Mihailo Crnobrnja, Yugoslavia's ambassador to the European Community until he re- signed in 1991.4 Western counterparts remember Crnobrnja, who is a

2. Branka Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up 1980-1992 (London: Verso, 1993).

3. In this article, the term "Bosnia" should be understood to mean "Bosnia anld Herzegovina," the official name of that country.

4. Mihailo Crnobrnja, The Yugoslav Drama (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994).

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138 Slavic Review

trained economist, as the sort of compatible colleague they rarely found in the Soviet bloc. His lucid, anguished account of Yugoslavia's rise

and fall shows how the process looked from the inside to a Belgrade- based liberal who considered himself a Yugoslav. Like Magas,

Crnobrnja concentrates on the post-Tito decade and the early war years. His chapter on the rise of Serbian nationalism clarifies how deceptive were the cliches ("the anti-Serbian coalition," for example) that flowed from the controversial Memorandum of the Serbian Acad- emy of Sciences and Arts in 1986. He goes on to lament Slobodan MiloseviW's failure to "rein in the nationalistic horse" he had loosed before 1990. More specifically, Crnobrnja argues that Milosevic could have calmed an inflamed situation by not insisting on controlling the

additional votes of Kosovo and the Vojvodina in the Federal Presi-

dency after he had effectively absorbed these regions into Serbia. Al- though starting from a different perspective, his critique meshes well with Maga's's, which stresses how critics such as Dragisa Pavlovic and Bogdan Bogdanovic attacked what she calls Milosevic's "racially based, proto-fascist formation." Crnobrnja and Magas prove, if it needs prov- ing, that not all Serbs were nationalistic supporters of Slobodan Milosevic.

Less accessible -to students but stronger in disciplinary rigor and richer in reference to other scholarship are three works that concen-

trate on the structural failings that made Yugoslavia vulnerable after the collapse of the other communist regimes of eastern Europe in 1989. These structural flaws were the inability of the Yugoslav People's Army

(JNA) to maintain its all-Yugoslav orientation, the insistence of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) on retaining exclusive po- litical control to the end, especially at the local and republican level,

and the severe economic problems of the 1980s.

James Gow argues that until the late 1980s the JNA was a "legiti- mating army" that imparted "some of its own stability, strength, and

cohesion" to civilian politics, while at the same time accepting a sub- ordinate political role.5 He shows how the general crisis of the 1980s transformed theJNA into an actively delegitimizing element, especially in Slovenia and Croatia. The Yugoslav army faced three serious post- I'ito pressures. First, Defense Minister Branko Mamula and other lead- ing Serb officers wanted to undercut the autonomy of originally sep-

arate Territorial Defense Forces, especially in Slovenia, and to consol- idate all military decisions in the hands of the JNA. Second, they imagined-or better, fantasized-that this more centralized command structure was needed to counter a potential threat of NATO invasion designed to take advantage of the growing disquiet in Yugoslavia, which in itself was part of a western, anti-communist plot. Third, and more practically, the accelerating economic crisis inside the country was forcing eastern Europe's largest army to reduce its forces and to cut

5. James Gow, Legitimacy and the Military: The Yugoslav Crisis (London: Pinter, 1992), 61.

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Instant History 139

the term for draftees. In 1988 in response to all three pressures, the

JNA abruptly reduced the number of its regional headquarters from eight to four, merging the Ljubljana region with that in Zagreb. Roughly at the same time, to increase revenues it undertook an expanded pro- gram of exporting arms, even to third-world trouble spots like Libya. Slovenian dissenters, already raising their voices for civil society along the same lines as their Polish and Hungarian counterparts, took these measures as threats to Slovenia's autonomy and as signs that the Serb- dominated army command was out of control.

Laslo Sekelj does not deny the importance of the military but he

finds Yugoslavia's fatal flaw in the political conservatism of the many

local centers of oligarchic power that the LCY jealously guarded throughout its existence.6 Sekelj's incisive study, carefully translated and condensed from the Serbo-Croatian original by Vera Vukelic, uses the term "really existing self-management" to describe the Yugoslav system, evoking the contradictions of "really existing socialism" in other east European countries of the 1980s. The conservative com- munist monopoly, unchallenged from the 1940s, not only subordi- nated the workers' councils but also frustrated socio-economic mod- ernization and created a crisis of fundamental values. At the republic level, this "peculiar form of pluralism"-decentralization of state and economic structures but maintenance of communist control through republic-level parties-made ethnic conflicts structurally inevitable.

Despite this view, Sekelj spends far less time on the Kosovo issue than does Maga-s. His explanation is sociological and he uses the work of Yugoslav sociologists well. By the mid-1980s both workers and peas- ants were dropping out of the LCY and taking less part in the confus- 'ing process of delegate selection that passed for elections under the 1974 constitution. Sekelj calls this lessening participation in the public sphere a symptom of waning psychological attachment not only to socialism but to Yugoslavia as well. He argues that this was in part because attachment to socialist Yugoslavia had symbolically become loyalty to Tito. Soldiers swore their oaths in front of Tito's picture, for example, not before the Yugoslav emblem. Tito's death in 1980, and the death of socialisW nine years later in the surrounding states, re- moved the restraints on the hierarchies of the LCY in the republics. The nationalism latent in those hierarchies, Sekelj concludes, could then step forward with no resistance.

Across most of Yugoslavia in the 1980s, as John Allcock writes in his acute, generally favorable review of Sekelj's book, many informed observers considered economic issues the crucial ones facing the fed- eration.7 Allcock chides Sekelj for underestimating the dependence of Yugoslavia on the world economy and calls for a study of the country's

6. Laslo Sekelj, Yugoslavia: The Process of Disintegration (Boulder: Social Science

Monographs and Atlantic Research and Publications, 1993). 7. John B. Allcock, "The Fall of Yugoslavia: Symptoms and Diagnoses," Slavonic

and East European Review 72, no. 4 (1994): 686-91.

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140 Slavic Review

political economy in an international context. Susan Woodward's long- awaited monograph answers that call.3 Woodward seeks to explain the paradox of unemployment in a socialist economy but the implications for her study go far beyond that relatively narrow topic. The Yugoslav economy matched the growth rates of its Soviet-bloc neighbors and far outstripped them in the quality and availability of consumer goods.

Nevertheless, unemployment in the social sector rose from 5 percent in 1960 to more than 15 percent by the early 1980s, with regional

unemployment dangerously skewed from under 3 percent in Slovenia to over 30 percent in Kosovo. Woodward attributes this development

to -the several rounds of market-oriented reforms forced on a Yugoslav

economy that had fallen heavily into debt. The austerity imposed by

the IMF succeeded in reducing the debt but, at the same time, it fed

both inflation and unemployment. For this reason, Woodward calls the access that Yugoslavia had received since the 1950s to western capital in return for its independent, non-Soviet foreign policy a

"Faustian bargain." Every time the Yugoslav government moved to increase employment through foreign borrowing and investment, it

led to an unsustainable import surplus, which in turn led to calls from the international financial community to impose austerity measures. The conditionality imposed by the IMF during the 1980s was just the

last manifestation of this ultimately fatal pressure. Some of Woodward's assumptions are difficult to accept. She makes

the unquantified assertion that the wildly ambitious five-year-plan launched in 1947 rested not on the stalinist model but on Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) and was in any event undone by pressures to increase exports and military spending generated by American hegem-

ony. Elsewhere she characterizes the 1950s and 1960s as eras when "a mixture of constitutional principles and international ties . had produced a relatively prosperous, open, and stable society." 9 This judg- ment must be accepted for Woodward's argument on the implications

of the Yugoslav unemployment problem to proceed. So must the more questionable assumption that representing labor's class interests rather

than achieving a grneral increase in the standard of living was the primary economic source of legitimacy for the postwar communist regimes.

For the post-1960 period, however, Woodward draws on statistical evidence assembled by Yugoslav economists to show how closely pres- sures to trim trade deficits and maintain military preparedness can be correlated with steadily rising figures for unemployment. Correlation is not necessarily proof but her case in this instance is sufficiently impressive to demand a response from mainstream economists, Yugo- slav as well as western, who hold that the country's economic weak-

8. Susan L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

9. Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Wash- ington: Brookings Institution, 1995), 45.

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Instant History 141

nesses in the 1980s derived primarily, as they had in the 1950s, from communist political intrusion into enterprise management. Two per- suasive advocates of this interpretation are David Dyker and Harold Lydall.'l The former recognizes that the efforts made to repay debt in the 1980s by drastically reducing imports required sacrifices, but he criticizes the failure of the Yugoslav government to encourage rational capital investments and of enterprises to increase exports, even in such

obvious areas of comparative advantage as tourist services and food processing. Like Sekelj, Dyker lays the long-standing failure to restruc-

ture the domestic economy squarely at the feet of the "perverse plu-

ralism" of the political establishment.

In sum, none of these recent books offers a complete interpretation of the Yugoslav collapse, although taken together they illuminate most of the facets that such an explanation needs to contain: the divisive

Kosovo issue, the role of the military, the stultifying effect of continued control by the League of Yugoslav Communists, the economic diffi- culties and the limitations imposed by the international community. Ironically, several of the books designed to describe only the war years do a more rounded job of pulling these threads together.

From the moment in 1992 that Roy Gutman first broke the story of the Omarska prison camp, the world has known exactly how horrible the war in Bosnia was." Reporters who rushed to the Bosnian war zone were horrified with the "ethnic cleansing," outraged with those who perpetrated it and disgusted with the lack of effective action by the western powers. From the beginning, reporters and columnists such as Anthony Lewis of The New York Times saw the Yugoslav wars as a moral issue.'2 These reactions were perfectly understandable human responses to the cruelty they witnessed. By the nature of their trade, however, journalists do not focus on a subject until it gets "hot." They

come prepared to witness, rather than to analyze. One of the authors of this article recalls receiving a telephone call a few years ago from a reporter on a Friday afternoon at about 5:00 p.m. The caller wanted to know what she needed to read to inform herself on the Yugoslav situation since she was flying to Bosnia on Sunday to do a story and she needed some background.

Ed Vulliamy is not the worst example of such a "parachute jour- nalist." He traveled widely in the war zone and-made an effort to learn a little of the language. But his book, Seasons in Hell, is a good example of advocacy without depth."' Like many journalists who have covered

10. Harold Lydall, Yugoslav Socialism: Theory and Practice (London: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1984); idem., Yugoslavia in Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); David A. Dyker, Yugoslavia: Socialism, Development and Debt (London: Routledge, 1990).

11. Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan, 1993).

12. The New York Times eventually produced excellent coverage on the war. Roger Cohen's work in particular was well informed and balanced, as well as incisively an- alytical.

13. Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War (New York: St. Martin's

Press, 1994).

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142 Slavic Review

the war, Vulliamy is horrified by the atrocities that he witnessed in the first two years of the war, angry first at the Serbs and then at the Croats

for committing them, and appalled that the outside world did not take more resolute action to prevent them. But his understanding of Yugo- slav affairs is shallow. He claims that 35 percent of Serbs are illiterate, constantly misstates dates by a year, often mistranscribes the Serbian and Croatian words he sprinkles through the text in an effort to lend it authenticity and says that in 1992 few Serbs were left in Croatia not

under Serbian authority, apparently not realizing that approximately 100,000 Serbs were living in Zagreb. Praising Vulliamy's book, Robert D. Kaplan comments, "Here is history, not just another correspond-

ent's memoir." 14 One can perhaps understand Kaplan's enthusiasm for the book, since Vulliamy exhibits the same facile judgments that char- acterizied Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts. ' Vulliamy's impressionistic and emo- tional style sometimes leads him to a colorful, if not always accurate, phrase, such as characterizing the main threat to Europe as "localized, parish-pump, grubby" genocide. His vivid observations of the grue- some slaughter that has characterized the war, not only by Serbs but by Croats in Mostar as well, perform a service but they do not lift his book above the pot boiler level.

But Vulliamy looks good next to Florence Hamlish Levinsohn."' Determining on the basis of a two-day visit to Belgrade in 1990 that the Serbian story needed to be told, she visited Belgrade again in 1993 for three weeks. Her chronicle of that visit consists primarily of lengthy interviews with a variety of Belgrade intellectuals. Annoyed that more people do not speak English and that the Serbian language is "hard as hell to pronounce," she eschews diacritical marks because, as she puts it, they "are beyond the understanding of the general English language reader." Her absurd analyses-Serbia cannot be fascist be- cause she sees so few uniforms on the streeL-and her completely un- critical acceptance of the Serbian self-assessment as a persecuted peo- ple make her book useless as a commentary on the Yugoslav crisis. The lengthy verbatim remarks by a wide variety of Serbian intellectuals provide a marginally interesting cross-section of Serbian nationalist opinion but Levinsohn does not weave them into a coherent whole.

David Rieffs report on the Bosnian war, which bears the chilling title Slaughterhouse, is several worlds removed from the work of Vul- liamy and Levinsohn.'7 Rieff is genuinely curious and he is a careful

14. This is Kaplan's blurb on the book jacket. 15. Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: St. Martin's

Press, 1993). Kaplan's book has sold well but the academic community has roundly criticized it. See Henry Cooper, Slavic Review 52 (1993): 592-93; Van Coufoudakis, The Mediterranean Quarterly (Fall 1993): 105-8; and Noel Malcolm, The National Interest (Sum- mer 1993): 83-88, along with the exchange in the same journal (Fall, 1993): 109-11.

16. Florence Hamlish Levinsohn, Belgrade: Among the Serbs (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994).

17. David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

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Instant History 143

observer. Like so many others, he knew nothing about Bosnia before he went, having worked on stories in Miami, Los Angeles and Cuba

previously, but at least he knew that he knew nothing. Like Vulliamy,

he quickly became appalled at "the callous indifference, the shallow

pessimism and the hypocrisy that has surrounded the murder of Bos-

nia." He feels guilty to return to the west, where he chokes "on the

cant and complacency of everything that used to be familiar and plea- surable." For all that, Rieff does not set aside his judgment. He con- demns the Serbs, calling Radovan Karadzic a liar and Biljana Plav-sic "the weirdest of the lot," but he also realizes Alija Izetbegovic is not perfect, hates "Croatia's appalling government-directed television," and praises the extent and heroism of the humanitarian efforts of the UN

and the NGOs while criticizing the black-marketeering of the UN troops. He also has the courage to change his mind. He opposed the

Vance-Owen plan when it came out but subsequently came to see it as

better than the later efforts. What separates Rieffs effort from most of the other journalistic

accounts is his insight into the function of journalism in public affairs. He characterizes his main mistakes as journalistic conceit. He believed that if he and his colleagues told the true story of atrocity and aggres- sion in Bosnia, the world would be moved to action. But the world was

not moved. Like many of his colleagues, Rieff believes that the western powers could have stopped the disintegration of Bosnia. But, also like many of his colleagues, he provides little concrete advice on how it might have been done.

It is easy enough for reporters to call for action because they do

not face any consequences for their advice. Political leaders, on the other hand, have to calculate costs. Not only do they know, as does Rieff, that significant military intervention would be bloody but they realize that their citizens are not willing to sustain heavy casualties for

Bosnia. The dragging of one American pilot through the streets of Mogadishu was enough to end American involvement in Somalia. Until recently, President Clinton was accused of lack of leadership in the Bosnian crisis but, in fact, Clinton was doing exactly what polls showed the American public wanted-avoiding costly involvement. Was this callous, shallow, complacent, obscene, disgraceful and hypocritical- all words Rieff uses? Perhaps, but if so, it was the western public that projected those values onto the decisions of their leaders. Rieff quotes Haris Silajdzic as follows: "If nothing is done for us then it will mean there is no such thing as morality in world affairs." What else is new? One of the west's failures-and one of Rieff s-was to suggest to the Bosnians that morality rather than cost-benefit analysis might play a role in western policy making.

The primary source of information for journalists is the spoken word. Typically they begin by talking to the participants in the events with which they are concerned and only then, if they are conscientious, do they turn to the literature on the subject. For academics, on the other hand, written texts are the primary source of information; only

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144 Slavic Review

after having scoured the archives and the printed materials do they conduct interviews. The journalistic method is valuable for its imme- diacy, the academic style for its depth.

Lenard Cohen's assessment of the Yugoslav crisis is an excellent example of the virtues of the academic approach and it should prove successful in the classroom.'8 Drawing on his long study of Yugoslavia's political elites, Cohen combines instructive analysis with a steady nar- rative flow.'9 He intersperses opinion polls, tables, graphs, maps and photographs to provide precision and drama, and, like Sekelj, he uses

the inquiries of Yugoslav social scientists into the crises of the 1980s to good effect. His breathless 40-page review of Yugoslav history from 1830 to 1980 is prudent.2' The bulk of his book, however, contends that the responsibility for Yugoslavia's collapse rests on the shoulders of republican, primarily communist, leaders who "failed to agree on a revised model of political coexistence." Instead, they appropriated na-

tionalism as an "elite resource." For Cohen, Slobodan Milosevic was the initiator of the nationalist fever and receives the sharpest criticism, but Franjo Tudjman is not far behind. In fact, dangerous rhetoric dominated the 1990 elections in all six republics. For example, the JNA leadership demonized the entire election process in Slovenia and Croatia as "directed from the outside and unsuited to Yugoslavia's conditions."

Cohen is cautious in his criticism of the German decision to rec- ognize Croatia and Slovenia in December 1991, and of the American- led decision to recognize Bosnia the next April. He does not find these external decisions more important than those taken by domestic lead- ers, nor does he find that the west had any coherent strategy toward a disintegrating Yugoslavia. His section on Secretary of State James A. Baker's meeting with republic leaders in Belgrade in June 1991 dis- putes the notion that Baker intentionally gave a "green light" to any

of them. The section's subtitle for Baker's belated appearance sum- marizes Cohen's interpretation: "Mission Impossible."

Cohen ascribes the eruption of violence in 1991-1992 to three long-term causes: persistent ethnic and religious animosities, the stir- ring up of memories from the bloodlettings of World War II, and the post-World-War-IL failure of political modernization and of the com- munist nationalities policy. Cohen may be faulted for not adducing any specific short-term causes for the ready resort to violence, however. These might include military factors such as the inability of the JNA to act effectively, the army's willingness to distribute its plentiful arms to local Serbs and the freedom of locals to bear arms in territorial

18. Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia, 2nd ed. (Boul-

der, Westview Press, 1995).

19. See Cohen's sometimes neglected volume, The Socialist Pyramid: Elites and Power

in Yugoslavia (Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1989).

20. One might, however, object to the citation of the special pleadings of Chletnik apologists David Martin and Michael Lees without differentiating them from the sub- stantial, influential and respected work of Walter R. Roberts and Mark C. Wheeler.

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Instant History 145

defense units-and even to import arms separately from the federal government. Neither does he adequately discuss the nefarious role of the Belgrade and Zagreb media, previously significantly more credible

than their counterparts in the Soviet bloc, in stirring the feelings that triggered violence in the name of self-defense. Cohen does, however, lament the illiberal manipulation of the media that has characterized Serbia and Croatia since war broke out.

In contrast to Cohen, Christopher Bennett believes that Yugoslav

distintegration "is largely a testimony to the power of the media in the modern world." ' Bennett is not an academic but he does bring rele- vant training at the University of London to his observations and, unlike most journalists, he speaks Croatian and Slovenian. These vir- tues are evident in his excellent summary of Yugoslav history that occupies a good third of his book. His knowledge of the languages and his familiarity with the country enable him to highlight significant

details that others miss. For example, he points out that the organizers of the Serb revolt in Croatia were from Knin, a Chetnik stronghold in World War II, or from former German communities in eastern Sla- vonia settled after World War II by Serbs from eastern Herzegovina or Montenegro. Unlike the starosedeoci (the Serbs who had lived in Slavonia for generations) these dosljaci (newcomers) had no experience of cooperation with Croats. "Virtually none of the instigators of the revolt came from Croatia's urban Serb population or the more-estab- lished communities."

Bennett's account is balanced, in the sense that he distributes his criticisms broadly, but that does not mean that he lacks strong opin- ions. He argues persuasively that the cause of the breakup was "a cal-

culated attempt to forge a Greater Serbia" and that MiloseviCs pack- aging of "myth, fantasy, half-truths and brazen lies" into a nationalistic media blitz poisoned the political atmosphere, left Serbs with little ability to understand their situation and encouraged the most radical Serbian elements in Bosnia and Krajina. "The xenophobia cultivated by the Serbian media ... destroyed Yugoslavia," is his final judgment. Bennett may be criticized because he states his views uncompromis- ingly. He compares Milo-sevic"s tactics in rousing the Serb disapora to the tactics that Hitler used toward the German diaspora (in the Su- detenland, for example) in the 1930s.22 But for those seeking an easy to read, well informed and trenchant account, this is the book.

The most powerful academic study of the Yugoslav crisis is Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy.23 Woodward's book is a marvelously de- tailed if tightly packed narrative of how all the parties to the crises

21. Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences (New York: New York University Press, 1995). For an thorough study of the role of the media in the Yugoslav wars, see Mark Thompson, Forging War: The Media in Serbia,

Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina (London: International Centre against Censorship, 1994).

22. This is Magas view as well (321). 23. Full citation in fn. 9.

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146 Slavic Review

interacted or understood each other from about 1985 forward. Her

work in creating an analysis and assessment unit for UNPROFOR head- quarters in Zagreb helped solidify her grasp of the motives of the actors involved and to master the details of crucial diplomatic exchanges.

Her experiences there complemented the extensive interviews she had already conducted and her command of a truly staggering range of secondary sources. These assets permit her to provide the most de- tailed analysis of the international implications of the wars yet to ap- pear.

The underlying conceptual problem that the west has not yet solved, in Woodward's view, is the contradictory nature of the notion of "self-

determination." Germany's recognition of Croatia and Slovenia late in 1991 suggested that this principle was an acceptable method of break-

ing up a state, thus undercutting the west's insistence on the Helsinki principle that borders could not be changed by force and suggesting

that the European Community's application of its alleged principles would be arbitrary. Abandoning the inviolability of borders encour- aged all parties to seize territory, ethnically "cleanse" it and then pe- tition for diplomatic recognition on the basis of "self-determination."

Furthermore, recognizing Croatia before solving the question of the Serb minority there offered no solutions for Bosnia, where ethnic pop- ulations were far more mixed than in Croatia. In these and other decisions, the west actually reinforced the tendencies toward war rather than dampened them.

Woodward also agrees with those like Sekelj who argue that weak political structures and incomplete political cultures left the Yugoslav republics in no position to create viable pluralist regimes once a split had occurred. Unlike most observers, however, she does not see ethnic

conflict or political personalities as playing fundamental roles in the conflict. Hers is a structural explanation. She understands the Yugoslav crisis as part of a widespread phenomenon of political disintegration characteristic of the contemporary world; but she does not dwell on her earlier thesis that the pre-1990 problems were prim,arily the re- sponsibility of economic pressures from the west. She nevertheless assigns the US "heavy responsibility for the Yugoslav tragedy [because of] its hegemonic role in defining Europe in the Cold War period" and stresses the disposition of American diplomacy to avoid significant involvement.

If Woodward were to assign blame to any of the Yugoslav peoples, it would be the Slovenes, whose nationalistic rebirth in the late 1980s made cooperation in the Yugoslav federation increasingly difficult. She hardly discusses the Kosovo crisis and finds a number of ways to defend the policies of Slobodan Milo-sevic. Some of these defenses are hard to accept. She interprets Serbia's consolidation of control over its two provinces in the late 1980s as primarily a reaction to western pressure

to recentralize monetary control and suggests that turning anti-Serb rhetoric in other republics into "a language of victimization took

scarcely any political skill on Milo-sevic's part." More persuasively, she

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argues that most Serbs in 1989 favored a liberal, Europeanist and pro- Yugoslav option. However controversial her views on several specific topics may be, Woodward's book is powerful, full of insight and high on the short list of must reads.

If Woodward is the most powerful academic study of the crisis, the

book written by Laura Silber and Allan Little to accompany a BBC television documentary is the most accessible guide to the immediate

causes and the detailed course of the wars.24 The pace and precision of Silber and Allen's account amply compensate for the lack -of schol- arly references. Silber and Little, respectively reporters for The Finan-

-cial Times and the BBC, deny that the wars were inevitable and dismiss Woodward's notion that the international community was primiarily at fault. They, like most others, trace the origins of the crisis to Serbia in the mid-1980s, where they begin their account, and to "men who had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, from a peaceful transition ... to a market-based economy and multi-party democracy." Slobodan

Milo'sevic's successful harnessing of the nationalist rhetoric emanating from Belgrade intellectuals made Serbs "the key successionists" in the crisis. Neither do Silber and Little share Woodward's readiness to in- dict Slovenian leaders but they join her and Cohen in identifying the inflammatory rhetoric of Franjo Tudjman and his Croatian democratic Union (HDZ) in electoral campaign 1990 as the Croatian counterpart to Milo'sevic's initiatives. They see the subsequent transformation of Croatia's police force into an army under Defense Minister Martin Spegelj, a former JNA officer, and the flood of arms imported with emigre funding and assistance as contributing to making the crisis more explosive.

While generally attributing the escalating violence to the interplay

of local political leaders and the media with public opinion, Silber and Little do not exonerate either American or European policy from their

share of blame. They argue that the Baker visit sent "mixed signals" over whether the US supported Yugoslav unity or the right of the republics to self-determination. The European Community's initial mistake, in their view, was to dispatch mediators who "behaved as

though/ all they had to do was persuade the belligerents of the folly of war." When a real peace process began under Lord Carrington, the German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher "drove a coach-and- horses" through it by insisting on diplomatic recognition of Croatia.

Silber and Little place the responsibility for the war's outbreak in

Bosnia squarely on the shoulders of Radovan Karadzic and other lead- ers of the Serbian Democratic party (SDS), with formerJNA units re- configured to comprise primarily Bosnian Serbs as the main accom- plice. In their view, when these JNA units failed to stop the assault on

24. Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (New York: TV Books/ Penguin USA, 1996). The television series appeared in the US in late December 1995 on the Discovery channel.

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Bijeljina's Muslims by Arkan's notorious Serb militia early in April

1992, Bosnian President Alija lzetbegovic had little choice but to mo- bilize his ill-equipped territorial defense force and to demand western recognition as some sort of international guarantee. For Silber and Little, therefore, neither mobilization nor international recognition

caused the war.

The four books by Bennett, Cohen, Woodward, and Silber and Little constitute the short list of required reading on the Yugoslav

crisis. Bennett's is the most pointed, Cohen's the most balanced for undergraduates, Woodward's the book of most interest to policy mak- ers, and Silber and Little's the most readable and detailed overall ef- fort.

Most of the attention devoted to the Yugoslav wars properly has

been placed on explaining and describing the conflict between Serbia and Croatia and the war in Bosnia. Concomitant with these works, a number of studies have appeared that deepen our historical compre- hension of Bosnia and extend our understanding of former Yugoslav republics such as Slovenia and Macedonia that have escaped the horror of actual warfare. Sabrina Petra Ramet and Ljubi-sa S. Adamovic, for example, have edited a compendium of essays in which all the repub- lics receive separate attention.25 Pieces on the military by Marko Mili- vojevic, and the media by Jasmina Kuzmanovic and Andrew Horton

instructively complement the narratives found in the larger studies. So does Paul Shoup's balanced and insightful treatment of the Bosnian situation.

More than the other parts of the former Yugoslavia, however, Bos- nia remains a faraway place about which foreign audiences and policy makers knew little and wanted to know less. As both old Yugoslav

hands and parachute journalists became painfully aware, many oth-

erwise well informed members of their audiences were vague or con- fused about the difference between Serbs and Croats, surprised to learn that there were Muslims, especially native European Muslims, in south- east Europe, and sometimes easily persuaded that these Muslims must be fundamentalists and should be sent "home" to the middle east.

For most writers on Yugoslavia's disintegration, the Bosnian back- ground to the crisis is a sub-theme, lost in the description of post-1990 events. Lately, however, books addressing the specifically Bosnian di- mension of the story have become a thriving cottage industry. More books and journal articles devoted wholly or in large part to the Bos- nian past have been published or initiated outside former Yugoslavia in the last three years than in the entire preceding century. The four considered here are two histories of Bosnia, one by Robert Donia and John Fine and another by Noel Malcolm, Mark Pinson's edited volume

25. Sabrina Petra Ramet and Ljubisa S. Adamovich, eds., Beyond Yugoslavia: Politics, Economics, and Culture in a Shattered Community (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).

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on the Muslims of Bosnia, and a collection of articles edited by Rabia Alia and Lawrence Lifschultz.26

None of these four books is entirely original, in that they all depend on previously published studies. But taken together they significantly increase the visibility of Bosnian history and thereby contribute im-

portantly to public debates over the war. Many of the authors appear- ing in these volumes are experienced observers of Yugoslav affairs, including Robert Donia and John Fine, who are the English-speaking world's leading authorities on Bosnian history, Fine for the medieval period and Donia for the Habsburg era. Others are newcomers, but many of them seem to have been quick, thorough and perceptive learn- ers. The exceptions are a number of the contributors to the Ali and Lifschultz volume who did not do their homework and seem to have

thought that it did not matter. All of the authors of these four books have in common a clear and

in most cases openly confessed lack of the detachment to which some of the best analysts, such as Bennett and Silber and Little, aspire. Their Bosnia is a historically legitimated political entity and relatively suc- cessful multicultural society that has recently been destroyed primarily by external forces, ideas and ambitions. Because of this bias, one critic has described them as "the save Bosnia bunch." Judged by what they have actually written, that is an inaccurate description of their intent or even their hope. The authors of these books explicitly or implicitly assume that Bosnia as a single political entity and multicultural society was already (although unnecessarily and tragically) beyond saving at the time they were writing. All four books read more like sad and bitter obituaries for a beautiful, on balance healthy, and wholly or largely innocent murder victim than as calls to save Bosnia. They are filled

with sympathy for the millions of individuals who went to the grave or into exile, with anger toward the murderers and with bitterness toward those they regard as abetting the crime or failing to stop it.

The subtitle of Donia and Fine's study, A Tradition Betrayed, de- scribes their book's purpose, its strength and at the same time its weak- ness. Tradition refers to the longstanding multicultural coexistence and mutual tolerance among its religious (and since the second half of the nineteenth century also national) communities. Betrayal is the recent mobilization of previously vague fears and prejudices by identifiable perpetrators deliberately seeking to turn the slogan "Serbs, Muslims and Croats cannot live together" into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The authors' central argument, presented in a narrative that Fine takes up to 1875 and Donia continues from that point, is a convincing and often

26. RobertJ. Donia andJohn V.A. Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Mark Pinson, ed., The Muslims of Bosnia- Herzegovina: Their Historic Development from the Middle Ages to the Dissolution of Yugoslavia

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History

(New York: New York University Press, 1994); and Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds., Why Bosnia? (Stony Creek: Pamphleteer's Press, 1993).

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passionate rebuttal of the claim that the Bosnian war and its special

horrors are the result of ancient ethnic hatreds. Politicians and dip-

lomats in the US and western Europe have frequently repeated this

canard in partial justification of their inaction: if reciprocal violence and "ethnic cleansing" are the result of a primordial urge, then they

cannot be restrained without inordinate costs that the outside world is not and should not be willing to pay. For Donia and Fine, this represents a gross distortion of Bosnia's history, in which peaceful cohabitation and cooperation among its Muslim, Orthodox (Serb) and Catholic (Croat) communities have been more frequent than confron- tation and violence. Present horrors, with Serbs primarily but not ex-

clusively responsible and Muslims as the principle but far from only victims, are the result of deliberate, recent political provocations. The only intercommunal violence equivalent to the present conflict in Bos- nia's past took place during World War II. Their second(ary) theme is an analogous rebuttal of the claim that Bosnia was never in its history an independent state with a distinctive society, conscious identity and recognized borders that closely approximated those it had in Tito's Yugoslavia.

Their advocacy on these issues is persuasive, although weakened

by occasional exaggerations of the intercommunal harmony they find in Bosnian history before and after World War II. They sometimes similarly exaggerate the culpability of Serbs and the innocence of Bos- nian Muslims in developments since 1990. A minor weakness comes from Donia's efforts to give readers who do not know much of the history of post-1945 Yugoslavia some background. In chaps. 9 and 10 the result is a tendency to lose sight of the Bosnian trees for the Yugo- slav forest. Fine might also have made it clearer that some of his his- torical contentions are disputed. For example, most Bosnians, other

ex-Yugoslavs and writers still do not accept his and Marian Wenzel's debunking of the Bogomil theory of the medieval Bosnian Church and the origin of Bosnia's Muslims, despite the convincing evidence that Fine and Wenzel have produced. The reputed Iranian origin of Serb and Croat is also far from universally accepted.

Donia and Fine do not pretend that their book is original or that

it is a scholarly study. Most of their data and interpretations can be found in other places, including their own earlier works. Fine cites no sources and Donia cites very few. Their originality lies in their selec- tion of evidence, which improves or corrects our understanding of the background to the present situation and our own responsibility for it. Others have attempted to rebut historical myths that purport to ex- plain and excuse Bosnia's current tragedy, but none with Donia and Fine's thoroughness and conviction, and none with the authority their credentials as historians of Bosnia give them.

Noel Malcolm's book is longer, studded with citations (826 end- notes citing a broad range of sources in more than a dozen languages) and less passionate than Donia and Fine's, but it covers the same lengthy period with the same pro-Bosnian partisanship. Half the text

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deals with the origins and histories of the Bosnian peoples from the pre-Slav era through the Ottoman period. Its best parts, corresponding closely to Donia and Fine's principal themes, are his well documented attacks on the myths of ancient hatreds and on the thesis that Bosnia was never a state with a distinctive Bosnian culture. Malcolm's discus- sion of the alleged Bogomil origins of the Bosnian Muslims supports Fine's position, but-is easier to follow and adds additional, sometimes dissenting sources.

Malcolm's last three chapters, which cover developments since

World War II, are by comparison disappointing. Overall, the book is an erudite survey but these last chapters bear the mark of hasty writing, which is not surprising since Malcolm claims to have written the book in 30 days. This is particularly true of the chapter entitled "Bosnia in Titoist Yugoslavia," which joins the current vogue for portraying Tito and all his works in the darkest terms. In the final chapter, entitled

"The Destruction of Bosnia," Malcolm's distress at the devastation he witnessed personally at times gets the better of the balanced approach to which the book aspires.

Mark Pinson's edited volume grew out of a conference on "The Historic Development of Bosnia's Muslims from the Middle Ages to the Dissolution of Yugoslavia" held at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies in spring 1993. Roy P. Mottahedeh, director of the center, put the conference together because the "willful distortion of history" revealed in many statements by politicians and reporters concerned him. In the first chapter, John Fine provides what amounts to a precis of his four chapters in Donia and Fine, repeating many of his best phrases, sentences and ideas. Colin Heywood reviews the his- tory of Bosnia under Ottoman rule andJustin McCarthy takes the story up to 1878. These are sound, pedestrian accounts, although McCarthy, from his standpoint as a geographer, introduces a good deal of useful

demographic and cultural data. Pinson's own chapter, which concerns the Austro-Hungarian era, makes much use of earlier studies by Donia and Peter Sugar, but he also adds new material, presenting a sound narrative that focuses on issues of contemporary relevance. Ivo Banac provides a good synthesis of the period 1919-1992 based primarily on his own work and on a variety of Yugoslav sources, but is seldom original. In sum, this edited volume was a worthy effort when it was conceived and it fills a specific niche as a study of the Muslim presence in Bosnia. Both Malcolm and Donia and Fine provide more accessible

surveys, however. The Ali and Lifschultz volume is a very different kettle of fish. It

mixes reprinted and original articles by some of the usual suspects, pieces by newcomers whose unfamiliarity with the terrain is manifest, passionate but often uniformed special pleading, and a few original, insightful, well informed contributions. The editors' lengthy introduc-

tion contains some new comparative ingredients, both from discipli- nary and regional perspectives, although their use of disturbingly prej- udicial anti-Serb and pro-Muslim adjectives sometimes compromise

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the text. David Rieff's thoughtful contribution foreshadows his book Slaughterhouse and contrasts starkly with T.D. Allman's classically ill informed and highly personalized account. A correspondent for Vanity Fair who accompanied Roy Gutman to Bosnia's killing fields in 1992,

Allman notes at one point: "I see the Serbs think I am an idiot." His text indicates why they might have thought so. One of the few pieces

that repays reading is Keman Kurspahic's "Letter from Sarajevo," in which the editor of Oslobodjenje describes the destruction of Sarajevo's

unique cultural milieu with despair but without loss of hope.

The longest and best piece in Why Bosnia? is the editors' interview

of Ivo Banac. They ask the right questions and Banac's answers are characteristically intelligent, candid, controversial and at times contra- dictory. He strongly condemns Croatian pretensions to de facto an- nexation of western Herzegovina (Herceg-Bosna) and parts of Bosnia proper because it undermines Zagreb's insistence that Croatia's own

pre-war borders are sacrosanct. For Banac, "if Bosnia did not exist, it would be necessary to create it-precisely because it mitigates the hos- tility between Serbia and Croatia." Asked if he could see any alterna- tives to the partition of Bosnia, Banac replied that he could see nothing else except, perhaps, a well armed Bosnian government re-establishing control over all of Bosnian territory and then granting right of equal citizenship to all. However, "one always faces the question as to what extent we are dealing with a moribund entity. I hope against hope it has not come to that." This provocative but somewhat contradictory alternative leaves the question of Bosnia as open today as it was then.

On balance, this question-and-answer chapter constitutes a good sum- mary of issues discussed throughout the book and remains relevant today.

In contrast to Bosnia, relatively little has been written in English

about Slovenia, the "forgotten survivor of the Yugoslav wars." As Jill Benderly and Evan Kraft suggest in their edited volume, this is ironic

given the negative role that many, including Susan Woodward, assign

to Slovenia in the breakdown of Yugoslavia.27 The articles in this edited volume discuss Slovenia's relationship to the idea of "Yugoslavism," its role in the first Yugoslavia, its participation in the national libera-

tion struggles of World War II and its growing dissatisfaction within the Yugoslav federation. Many of the authors participated in Slovenia's independence movement. They include Dimitrij Rupel, Slovenia's for- eign minister at the moment of independence; Tomaz Mastnak, par- ticipant and chronicler of new social movements; and feminist Vlasta Jalu-si. At best, this gives the book an immediacy and freshness that is missing from some studies of the economic and social transition in post-communist Europe. At worst, however, it produces a self-righteous tone and one-sided descriptions of Slovenia's allegedly unique suffer-

27. Jill Benderly and Evan Kraft, eds., Independent Slovenia: Origins, Movements, Pros- pects (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).

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ing in the Yugoslav federation. Tomaz Mastnak's chapter on social movements and national sovereignty, for example, is a celebration of

Slovenian democratization that completely ignores critical actors in any of the other republics, painting a picture of saintly Slovenes fight- ing the dragons of Belgrade. In the end, Mastnak concludes that the

west's failure to appreciate Slovenia's democratic aspirations encour- aged the growth of Slovenian nationalism and the emergence of a chauvinist and xenophobic party. Now, Mastnak whines, perhaps Euro-

peans will take Slovenia seriously. The chapters on Slovene history from the seventh century through

World War II (written by authors from the US and Slovenia) analyze the Slovene language, culture and national consciousness, but they too lack a critical stance. Slovenian communists such as Stane Dolanc or Edvard Kardelj would never recognize the passive role assigned to

them in the construction of Yugoslav ideology and political life. Several chapters, on the other hand, are excellent. Gregor Tomc's

article on the politics of Punk is a penetrating analysis of the role of music and subculture in general in stimulating political action among

Slovene youth. Tomc situates the interplay between the youth and Slovene leadership in a broad Yugoslav framework that provides a solid basis for further comparative study. VlastaJalu'si's chapter charts the development of the Slovene women's movement and its links to similar nascent movements in Belgrade and Zagreb.Y She shows the ambivalence of the relationship between the women's movement and the other actors in the Slovenian Spring, as well as the contradictory consequence of independence for women of a reversal of rights gained

under communism. Ton-ci Kuzmanic's article on strikes and trade unions is also first rate.

Even less favored by scholars is Macedonia. Its tangled history rou-

tinely defeats casual and even sometimes scholarly attempts to tame it. Hugh Poulton courageously attacks the problem by culling a broad range of English-language sources to present an "overview of the his- tory of Macedonia as well as of the competing claims to its inhabitants

throughout the ages." 29The book's originality and usefulness derive from his invariably appropriate selection and organization of a wide

variety of these sources. Even experts on Yugoslav and Balkan affairs, who are rarely specialists on Macedonia, can learn much from this very readable and balanced compendium. Non-experts eager to understand

but confused by the complexity of post-Yugoslav Balkan developments will discover a brief and admirably clear guide to one of the most bewildering, complex and relatively ignored pieces of the Yugoslav puzzle. Poulton even manages to impose some clarity on the confusing

28. For an excellent discussion of one aspect of the women's movement in Bel- grade, see Stasa Zajovic, ed., Women for Peace, vol. 1 (Belgrade: Women in Black, 1993), vol. 2 (1995).

29. Hugh Poulton, Who Are the Macedonians? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 208.

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154 Slavic Review

plethora of Bulgarian, Greek, Serbian and Macedonian revolutionary, nationalist and irredentist groups and grouplets that have made the Macedonian question so difficult to unravel ever since the late nine- teenth century.

Poulton's answer to the question posed in his title, Who are the

Macedonians?, is that most Slav inhabitants of Macedonia are now Ma- cedonians in the sense of a national identity (national consciousness) and community, but this sense is recent and precarious. His descrip- tion of this "qualified success" in nation-building dispassionately pre- sents all the conflicting claims of discrimination and oppression in the three parts of geographic Macedonia, but with sympathy toward both

the Macedonians, to whom Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs deny national identity, and to the Albanians, to whom the Macedonians deny na- tional aspirations and equality of citizenship. We read of the attitudes

and policy of Greeks toward what they term "Slavophone Greeks" in Aegean Macedonia, of Bulgarians toward what they term "Bulgarians" in Pirin and Vardar Macedonia, and of Macedonians themselves to-

ward the minority Vlachs, Roma,Jews and Muslim Slavs in the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia." Unfortunately for those interested in prognostications, Poulton cannot decide whether Macedonia will tilt toward Bulgaria or strengthen its independence. The first outcome seems plausible because of economic considerations and cultural affin- ity, whereas the actual economic performance under conditions of

blockade exceeded expectations and holds promise for a reasonably independent and prosperous future.

Another region of Yugoslavia that has received very little sustained analysis, despite its obvious importance, is Kosovo. The inability of Serbs and Kosovars even to talk to each other renders significant the publication of the results of a roundtable held in Budapest in April

1993.1) Nineteen individuals from Tirane, Prishtine and Belgrade en- gaged in far-reaching discussion of the burning problems and potential dangers of Kosovo's situation. Even among those who were willing to

come together to begin a process of dialogue, however, significant tensions were obvious. All the non-Albanian contributors agreed that Serbs have consciously curtailed rights, reduced Albanian political ac- tivity to zero and violated human rights. But the participants differed radically on possible strategies that the Kosovo Albanians might pur- sue. Some criticized the decision to create a parallel government and parallel social institutions, while others criticized the decision to stay out of Serbian electoral politics, where a bloc Albanian vote could have had an important impact. Few see autonomy within the Yugoslav fed- eration as a solution, nor does immediate unification with Albania appear feasible or desirable. The value of the book, therefore, lies less in its scholarly contribution, although some of the articles provide

30. Dugan Janjic and Shkelzen Maliqi, eds. Conflict or Dialogue: Serbian Albanian Relations and Integration of the Balkans (Subotica: Open University, European Civic Centre for Conflict Resolution, 1994).

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authoritative discussions of specific issues such as demography and Albanian Ghandism, than in its implicit assertion that, despite differ- ences and despite the seeming lack of viable alternatives, at least some participants from Serbia, Albania and Kosovo are willing to discuss

their relations in a serious and non-confrontational way. Because they enter a terrain that is almost empty of rivals, recent

books on Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Kosovo perform a real ser- vice. But none of them, with the possible exception of Poulton on Macedonia, constitute the original contributions needed to re-open the pasts of these new lands. The research agenda, in other words, remains

open.

Most of the books discussed to this point stress the political di-

mensions of the Yugoslav tragedy. Although every author must in some

way take into account the emotional dimension of the events, and many have recoiled in sympathy to the victims, few have delved into

the nature of ethnic feeling or into an analysis of its social determi- nants. Superficial observers tend to fall back on essentialist phrases

like "ancient ethnic conflicts" to explain what otherwise seems inexpli- cable-the killing of neighbors and friends. Outside the field of Yugo- slav studies, however, recent scholarship has veered decisively away from the primordialist view that ethnicity and nationality are fixed categories. Most students of nationalism now understand national identities as boundary-maintaining, but malleable, imagined commu- nities sustained by invented traditions. These national identities are typically seen as one of a family of nested identities, the salience of which is a function of circumstances. Now two anthropologists, Tone Bringa and Loring M. Danforth, have applied this contemporary in-

sight to the evolution of communal identities among Bosnian Muslims and among Greek and Slav Macedonians before and during the dis- integration of Yugoslavia.

Tone Bringa's study of a mixed Muslim-Catholic village in central Bosnia began as a standard ethnographic project based on research she carried out in 1987 and 1988.3' At the beginning of 1993 her village was still precariously intact both physically and as a bi-communal com- munity. But when she returned for her last visit in May of that year, all of its Muslim majority had been killed or expelled, and their homes destroyed by Croats who included some of their fellow-villagers. Al- though Bringa's study preserves material on gender relations, court- ship and marriage, and similar matters of anthropological interest from her initial research, her focus now shifted to how the destruction of this micro-culture could happen.

Bringa's basic point is that external forces crushed the community. But her analysis of how nationalism "simplified" the village's multiple and nested identities provides a sobering cautionary tale of the dangers

31. Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1995).

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of ethnic homogenization. As late as 1990, Bringa says, her villagers and other rural Bosnians were still identifying themselves and each other as Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim in the religious sense rather than Croat, Serb and Muslim in the national sense. They displayed a lively awareness of their similarities as well as their differences, even joking about them in the course of various forms of intercommunal

socializing. These and other forms of "neighborliness" lay at the heart of "how unification in terms of rural Bosnian identity was created locally by villagers." Bringa provides persuasive evidence that such a

Bosnian identity, nesting separate Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox sen-

sibilities, was not confined to urban centers, as the media focus on besieged Sarajevo during the war implied. By early 1993, however, nationalists from outside the village were increasingly successful in insisting that separate national identities were incompatible and mu-

tually threatening. In April 1993, to the apparent surprise of both the Muslims and the Catholics, some Croatian villagers reacted to the ex- ploitation of the pre-existing, but until now relatively benign, aware- ness of difference and joined outsiders in destroying the Muslim com- munity.

Loring Danforth's study is even more striking in suggesting the constructed and fissionable nature of ethnic identity.32 Danforth, whose previous field work had focused on Greece, brings an original and illuminating dimension to his study by analyzing competing identities among the Greek and Macedonian Slav diaspora in Australia, as well as in their "Aegean" and "Vardar" Macedonian homelands. In this volatile controversy, in which Greeks emotionally argue that only they have the right to the term Macedonia and to Macedonian identity, Dan-

forth maintains a strict analytical distance between "the nationalist discourse [that anthropologists] study" and "the anthropological dis- course in which they write." As a device to this end that Peter Sugar recently adopted in a volume in east European nationalism and that

other writers on such subjects might emulate, he uses one chapter to present, without comment, Greek and Macedonian interpretations of

Macedonian history in their own voices.33 In the next chapter he ren- ders his own "third history," based on a "deconstruction or dereifica- tion of the essentializing tendencies of nationalist conceptions of cul- ture and identity." Elsewhere, Danforth finds striking evidence of the situational rather than essentialist nature of ethnic identity in siblings claiming different national identities: one Greek and the other Mace- donian. On balance, Danforth considers Slav Macedonian claims to Macedonian as a valid name for themselves and their newly independent state more convincing than Greek and Greek Macedonian claims that only Greeks may call themselves Macedonian. The persuasive studies of

32. Loring M. Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict-Ethnic Nationalism in a Trans- national World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

33. Peter Sugar, ed., Eastern Europe Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Washing- ton: American University Press, 1995).

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both Bringa and Danforth are a reminder of the ambiguous and multi- faceted nature of identity, and of the disastrous consequences of in- sisting (or "imagining") that ethno-national identities must be homo- geneous.

Two other authors, Brian Hall and Slavenka Drakulic, neither of whom concentrate directly on the Yugoslav wars, provide a different kind of insight into the causes and impact of the wars, less brash than the journalists, more humane than the academics. Brian Hall is a travel writer. In a way, reporters are travel writers too. They visit interesting places, talk with the natives and relate their experiences with the ex- otics to their readers. Reportage, however, has an edge that travel ac- counts lack. Reporters are interested in policy issues, accountability, high politics, the striking event. Hall does not invest his descriptions of travels through the former Yugoslavia with such apocalyptic issues.4 Hall, who has a knack for languages and previously published a charm- ing description of a bicycle trip through Romania and Bulgaria, trav- eled to Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo and Kosovo from May to mid-Sep- tember 1991, just as war was breaking out.35 Unlike Ed Vulliamy, who rarely finds a person he cannot disparage, Hall expresses the petty conceits and blindnesses he finds in a tolerant way. He is sympathetic, humorous, ironic but not deceived. In his own way, he follows the advice he so often receives from Yugoslavs to "write the truth," al- though the truth he writes is far more multi-faceted than the speakers of those words usually imagine.

One of Hall's revealing discussions is of the various ways that Yugo- slavs whom he meets understand the incident at Borovo Selo on 2 May

1991, in which a number of Croatian policemen and Serbian villagers were killed. He describes the official Croatian position (the innocent

Croatian policemen were attacked while performing their duties), the story given in an interview by the Serbian village defense commander (the Croats came in firing), the version believed by his Belgrade in- formant (the event was the chaotic outcome of a puerile bet among some Croatian policemen to raise the Croatian flag over the Serbian town under cover of darkness), the Serbian yellow press account (the majority of the dead Croats were actually Albanians) and finally the drunken tale of a man who claimed to be there but obviously was not. The specificity of Hall's accounts well captures the crosscurrents of inflammatory rumor that poisoned the atmosphere in the months pre-

ceding the outbreak of hostilities. Hall's personal account is moving because he is really interested

in people. Ivo Banac once criticized Misha Glenny for interjecting his

persona too much into his account of the Yugoslav collapse.3" We read

34. Brian Hall, The Impossible Country: A Journey through the Last Days of Yugoslavia

(London: Secker & Warburg, 1994).

35. Idem., Stealingfrom a Deep Place (London: Heinemann, 1988).

36. Ivo Banac, "Misreading the Balkans," Foreign Policy, no. 93 (Winter 1993-1994):

173-82, referring to Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia. Despite Banac's comments, Glenny,

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158 Slavic Review

about Glenny perspiring, Glenny the arms illiterate and Glenny fright- ened when he purposely contrives to put himself under fire. Banac believes such personal tales are thin gruel because they do not ade- quately take into account the written word, the historical record. But

Hall goes beyond documentation because he actually likes the people he meets. Readers relate to Hall's characters, who are different but not so different as to estrange us from them. Intellectually conditioned to sympathize with the other, we find much of ourselves in Hall's char-

acters. Despite the best of will and a sense of guilt, it is difficult to relate to the slaughtered villagers, skeletal prisoners and harried ref-

ugees that people Bosnian reportage. This is a discomforting obser-

vation because if it has any validity it gives us more insight into the sensibilities of those who witnessed the Holocaust and did not act than we probably want to have.

Two books by Slavenka Drakulic transmit the disintegrating impact of being trapped in conflict and engulfed in maximalist ideologies in a similarly accessible way.37 Drakulic has received a good deal of crit- icism in Croatia. Banac acidly characterizes her as "a bourgeois lady with a computer looking for dog food amid a nasty war." x The prob- lem is twofold. First, Drakulic is a feminist (although an "unthreaten- ing" one, Banac claims). Before communism collapsed she would hold up a sanitary napkin and a tampax, which were impossible to find in most parts of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, to show why com- munism could not work. What kind of socialism was it, she asked, that "in the 70 years of its existence couldn't fulfill the basic needs of half the population?" What Banac and Drakulic's Croatian critics do not grasp when they sneer at her touching discussions of make-up, high heels and fur coats is that these desires are not the superficial accou-

terments of a vain and pampered woman. They are metaphors for the inability of women under communism to live their lives as they chose. "What is the minimum you must have so you don't feel humiliated as a woman?" Drakulic asks.39 And the answer is not Italian shoes. In fact, Drakulic argues that it was precisely the willingness of Yugoslavs to tolerate the unfreedom of communism in return for the hothouse pros- perity of the 1970s that made them complicit in the perpetuation of that unfreedom.

The second reason for Drakulic's unpopularity at home is that, for her, "being Croat has no special meaning." She characterizes the 1989- 1990 changes in Zagreb as a "cautious, sour old lady," not the "laugh- ing revolution in Prague." "Independence stinks of death," she writes,

who has lived in eastern Europe for years and speaks Serbian and Greek, has consis- tently been among the best informed and most acute analysts of the Yugoslav situation.

37. Slavenka Drakulic, How we Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992); idem., The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993).

38. Banac, "Misreading the Balkans," 36. 39. Drakulic, How We Survived, 124 and 31.

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Instant History 159

and the war is not a war of national defense but a monster that grabs

you by the throat, after which you can never be a whole person again. "Before [independence]," she writes, "I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character-and yes, my nationality-now I feel stripped of all that." She feels "pinned to the wall of nationhood." In other words, the new independent state of Croatia deprives her of her right to personality just as much as did the old communist regime, and perhaps more so because of the exuberance of its inexperience. "Out of our opportunism and fear we all are becoming collaborators." 40

Drakulic's books sold well in English, which incidentally is another reason she was resented in Zagreb. In receiving praise for making critical remarks about nationalism and war, she confirmed the fear lurking in Zagreb that Croatia is not as much a part of the west as it

claims. But Drakulic is successful not for any reason having to do with Croatia but because she speaks to the human element, first in women, who have found her book an unusually clear feminist voice in a region

where feminism is an uncertain movement, but second in men too. The unfeeling way men often treat women bothers Drakulic but she knows that men face their own pressures. Together, both men and women were helpless passengers on the communist train from which they could not get off; and she now fears they are trapped in a similarly sealed railway car. When an interviewer asked Vaclav Havel what he considered the role of the Czech nation, Havel replied that he did not bother with such questions. "If our national fate depends on anything," he said, "it depends chiefly on how we acquit ourselves in ,our human tasks."41 Drakulic agrees and therefore finds herself out of step at a time when a distorting ideology once again has gripped the people of her part of Europe.

The outpouring of books continues. In Belgrade Ivan Stambulic, whom Milosevic displaced in 1g87, and Borisav Jovic, Serbia's repre- sentative on the presidency at the time of the breakup, have published their memoirs. Jovic in particular has turned on Milosevic in an effort to distance himself from responsibility for Serbian aggression. In the west, Lord Owen, co-author of the ill fated Vance-Owen plan, has brought his version of events into print, complete with extensive doc- umentation on a CD-ROM. In Misha Glenny's informed opinion, Ow- en's book, although demanding a specialist's knowledge to appreciate, is now required reading for those wishing to speak authoritatively about

the war.42 Also just out is Sabrina Ramet's second edition of Balkan Babel. Expected within the year are Glenny's own history of nationalism in the Balkans and John Lampe's "Yugoslavia as History: Twice There

40. Quotations from, in order, Balkan Express, 50; How We Survived, 143; and Balkan Express, 58, 50-51, 145.

41. Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel HvWzlala (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 179.

42. Misha Glenny, New York Times Book Review (21 January 1996): 12.

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160 Slavic Review

Was a Country" from Cambridge. Doubtless other studies are immi- nent.

Perhaps some of these studies will consider issues that are not prominent in the books reviewed here. For example, no author con-

sidered the UN war crimes tribunal particularly credible. But, with indictments now handed down in almost 50 cases and the certainty

that investigation of massacre sites under NATO protection will pro-

duce many more, it is conceivable that the most positive outcome of

the wars of Yugoslav succession could be a new international mecha-

nism forjudging crimes against humanity. Many authors have placed the wars in a broad Yugoslav context

but few have seen the wars as part of the larger history of the twentieth century. Far from being an unusual event, an instance of tribal warfare

beneath the consideration of civilized people, the homogenization of nations through population exchanges, refugee flight, border adjust- ments and massacre are a dominant characteristic of the modern ex- perience. Examples abound: the Turkish, Bulgarian and Greek ex- changes of the 1920s; the end of the thousand-year Drang nach Osten as Germans were cleared out of eastern Europe at the end of World War II; the shifting of Poland two hundred kilometers to the west; the clip- ping off of sub-Carpathian Ukraine from Czechoslovakia; and, most importantly, the Holocaust. If we understand the Yugoslav wars as a

continuation of a long-term trend, is it at least the last moment in Europe of violent national homogenization? Probably not. Despite ac- knowledgment that Kosovo was and is a problem, few have gone on

to suggest the obvious next step in the process: someday the relatively compact Albanian population of southeastern Europe will demand, and probably get, a political settlement that will bring them together within the borders of a single country. Given the interests involved, not only of Serbia and Macedonia but of Greece, it is unlikely that this almost inevitable moment will avoid the bloodshed that has character-

ized similar moments throughout the century. Has the outpouring of instant history led us to an understanding

of the wars of Yugoslav succession? To a certain extent they have. Individual analysts place their emphasis on varying issues and differ in their interpretations of specific events, but in general we now have a reasonably clear idea of the difficulties that Yugoslavia faced, the impact of institutions and individuals on the disintegration process,

the structural weaknesses of the western reaction and many other as- pects of the collapse. What we are less certain about is the underlying shocking mystery: why do human beings take such great pleasure in killing each other? So far, analyses of the Yugoslav war have not moved us very far in grappling with that basic issue.

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