Essay Instructions: : How do primordialism and/or social constructivism explain ethnic conflict in Bosnia? What are the sources of ethnic pluralism?
Basic Readings/Video Clip:
o Assigned Readings: Esman, An Introduction to Ethnic Conflict, Cambridge: Polity Press Ltd., 2004, pp. 50-69; Jesse and Williams, Ethnic Conflict, Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2011, pp. 141-72.
o Foreign Affairs LEARNING COMMUNITY ONLINE: Sabrina Petra Ramet, “War in the Balkans,” Foreign Affairs Fall 1992 71 (4): 1-9 online, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/48212/sabrina-petra-ramet/war-in-the-balkans
Carnegie Council You Tube Channel, Self-Determination & Ethnic Cleansing, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqS0I7rawHs&feature=channel_page
• A nation defines itself first by what it is not: it is not a social group, it is not a religious group, and it is not a racial group; in other words, what binds together the citizens of a nation is the product of a unique combination of historical factors, and can never be reduced to a single dimension, whether social, religious or racial.
o What distinguishes a national community, as the Europeans have defined it, from all other communities lies in this: it brings people together not for what they are but for the memory of what they have been. A nation has no other definition but historical. It is the locus of a common history, of common misfortunes, and of common triumphs. It is the locus of a shared destiny. But a nation cannot only be defined by a single affiliation: if that were the case, it would be no more than an extended tribe. A nation, in the European definition of the word, is first of all a place, that is to say, a territory defined by precise frontiers, as precise as the boundaries that mark the limits of the fields in the old countryside of Europe.
o The Yugoslav catastrophe was not mainly the result of ancient ethnic or religious hostilities, nor the collapse of communism at the end of the cold war, nor even of the failures of the Western countries. Those factors undeniably made things worse. But Yugoslavia’s death and the violence that followed resulted from the conscious actions of nationalist leaders who co-opted, intimidated, circumvented, or eliminated all opposition to their demagogic designs. Yugoslavia was destroyed from the top down. (understand the instrumentalist perspective within social constructivism)
• The Yugoslav experiment in liberal communism from 1945 to 1991 was based on the twin assumptions that diverse peoples who had fought in the past could learn to live together and that communism based on local factors rather than the Soviet model could help them do so. In both conception and implementation, the experiment was flawed. But it offered far more to the twenty-four million Yugoslavs than the sea of misery into which most of them have now been cast adrift. The destruction of Yugoslavia led directly to wars in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia ??" each war more savage than the one before.
• The prime agent of Yugoslavia’s destruction was Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia. Milosevic claimed to defend Yugoslavia even as he spun plans to turn it into a Serb-dominated dictatorship. (totalitarian objective) His initial objective was to establish Serbian rule over the whole country. When Slovenia and Croatia blocked this aim by deciding to secede, the Serbian leader fell back on an alternative strategy. He would bring all of Yugoslavia’s Serbs, who lived in five of its six republics, under the authority of Serbia, that is, of himself.
• Milosevic initiated this strategy in Croatia, using the Yugoslav army (JNA) to seal off Serbian areas from the reach of Croatian authority. His plan in Bosnia was even bolder ??" to establish by force a Serbian state on two-thirds of the territory of a republic in which Serbs were not even a plurality, much less a majority. In league with Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader with whom he later broke, Milosevic was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Bosnians and for the creation of the largest refugee population in Europe since the Second World War.
• Franjo Tudjman, elected president of Croatia in 1990, also played a leading role in the destruction of Yugoslavia. A fanatic Croatian nationalist, Tudjman hated Yugoslavia and its multiethnic values. He wanted a Croatian state for the Croatians, and he was unwilling to guarantee equal rights to the 12 percent of Croatia’s citizens who were Serbs. Tudjman’s arrogance in declaring independence without adequate provisions for minority rights gave Milosevic and the Yugoslav army a pretext for their war of aggression in Croatia in 1991. And Tudjman’s greed in seeking to annex Croatian areas of Bosnia prolonged the war and increased the casualties in that ill-starred republic.
• Slovenian nationalism was different from the Serbian or Croatian sort. With a nearly homogeneous population and a location in the westernmost part of Yugoslavia, Slovenia was more democratically inclined and more economically developed than any other republic in Yugoslavia. The Slovenes wanted to be free of the poverty and intrigue of the rest of Yugoslavia. They particularly detested Milosevic, charging him with making Yugoslavia uninhabitable for non-Serbs. Under the presidency of Milan Kucan ??" a conflicted figure buffeted toward secession by the winds of Slovenian politics ??" Slovenia unilaterally declared its independence on June 25, 1991. The predictable result, irresponsibly disregarded by Kucan and the other Slovene leaders, was to bring war closer to Croatia and Bosnia.
o An ironic feature of Yugoslavia’s destruction was the descent into barbarism of the Yugoslav People’s Army. The army, heir to the partisan force that Joseph Broz Tito had led to victory in World War II, was a genuine Yugoslav institution. Though with a predominantly Serbian officer corps, it drew soldiers from all parts of the country. Its mission was to protect Yugoslavia’s integrity and borders. As the country became increasingly divided by competing nationalisms, the army became a tool of Milosevic’s imperial designs. It tried unsuccessfully to destroy the Slovenian and Croatian leaderships: it helped the Serbs in Croatia seize more than a quarter of that republic; and it colluded with the schemes of Milosevic and Karadzic to tear away two-thirds of Bosnia. The army’s shame was symbolized by the rise of General Ratko Mladic, commander of the Bosnian Serb strategy ??" a career officer in the Yugoslav army and a war criminal of Nazi proportions.
o Because of the intensity of the nationalisms in Yugoslavia, it proved impossible to preserve the country in a way that would have moved it toward democracy. There were many Yugoslavs that tried. The leading figure was Ante Markovic, a businessman and economic reformer from Croatia who was prime minister from early 1989 until the Yugoslav flame finally guttered out toward the end of 1991. Had Markovic come to office a decade earlier, at the time of Tito’s death and before the rise of nationalism, he might have led to country to economic and democratic reform.
o All Yugoslavs were not the bloodthirsty extremists so ubiquitously visible in Western news accounts. Most of the people living in Yugoslavia were peaceful and decent, without a trace of the hostility on which nationalism feeds. It is true that nationalist leaders were able to turn many normal people toward extremism by playing on their historic fears through the baleful medium of television, a matchless technological tool in the hands of dictators. Many Yugoslavs resisted the incessant racist propaganda. Their political heirs must someday help to build societies not driven by rabid nationalism.
o Consider if a political or even military intervention from outside could have arrested the nationalist-inspired drive to Yugoslavia’s destruction.
o When war broke out in Bosnia, however, the United States was not so impotent. The Bosnian war confronted two successive American administrations with the first real test of their leadership in Europe since the end of the cold war ??" a test of that, until much too late, they failed to pass. The aggression in Bosnia by Milosevic, Karadzic, and the Yugoslav army went far beyond the bounds of any Serbian grievances, real or imagined, against the Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic.
o Had the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met that aggression with air strikes in the summer of 1992, Mazzucelli believes that a negotiated result would soon have followed. From July 1992 US officials urged that course, without success. The war dragged on into the Clinton Administration, whose vacillations deferred decisive Western action until the summer of 1995.
• The issues fought out with such savagery in Yugoslavia ??" how to curb a tyrannical majority, how to preserve minority rights, when to recognize claims to self-determination, how to apply international preventive strategies, when and how to use force, how to reshape international institutions to meet ethnic challenges ??" are being contested around the globe.
• Yugoslavia was created in 1918 out of the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires in World War I. It was an offspring of a commitment by Woodrow Wilson to the principle of national self-determination in Eastern Europe. The United States was not only present at its creation; along with France the US was its godfather. The new country was named the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, for the three nations that had joined together to form it. For Serbia, which had been an independent country since 1878, the creation of Yugoslavia provided an opportunity to unite Serbs scattered for centuries throughout the two empires. In recognition of Serbia’s historic role on the winning side of World War I and of the numerical plurality of Serbs ??" about 40 percent throughout the life of Yugoslavia ??" the Serbian royal house of Karadjordjevic was given hereditary rule over the new monarchy.
• Croatia, which had been part of the defeated Austro-Hungarian monarchy, joined the new state to be among the winners of the war and to counter Italian ambitions along the Dalmatian coast. Nineteenth century Croatians had also been the source of the initiative for a South (“Yugo”) Slav state. For the Slovenes, the smallest and westernmost of the three groups, Yugoslavia could provide security against the territorial pretensions of Italy and Austria. There was nothing “artificial” about the creation of Yugoslavia. It was the voluntary union of its three major nations ??" the same three that seventy years later were to tear it apart.
• Invaded and partitioned by the Germans and Italians and their allies during World War II, Yugoslavia was recreated as a communist state after the war by Josip Broz Tito, the former Stalin apparatchik transformed into a redoubtable resistance leader. The Croat Tito ??" actually he was half-Croat, half-Slovene ??" fought the Germans more convincingly than his anticommunist rival, the Serbian general Draza Mihailovic, who concluded in 1943 that communism was the greater threat. Tito’s partisans won the support of the British and the Americans because of their success in tying down some ten German divisions in the mountains of Bosnia and Montenegro, thus making them unavailable for the Western front. Tito expelled the Germans and won the civil war within Yugoslavia against Mihailovic’s forces and Hitler’s puppet state of Croatia. He emerged the unchallenged leader, and communism emerged the unchallenged ideology. When Stalin broke with Tito in 1948, the United States, swallowing ideological scruples, backed the intrepid Yugoslav in an extraordinary act of enlightened statesmanship.
• The evidence of history has not shaken the general Serbian conviction, derived from Kosovo, that Europe owes the Serbs something for defending it and that valiant Serbian warriors are always betrayed, either by treason in war or by an unjust peace. Thus, the argument goes, Serbs deserve special treatment. This mind-set is important for understanding why Serbia remained aggrieved after World War I despite receiving royal authority over the new state of Yugoslavia; why Serbian nationalists hate Tito for not having given them a dominant position after World War II; and why the Bosnian Serbs so long resisted a political settlement to the Bosnian war that gave them more territory per capita than it gave the far more numerous Muslims.
• Serbia’s tragic flaw is an obsession with its own history. Serbian hearts are in their past, not their future. Outsiders experiences with the Serbs emphasizes that unfortunately there is a tendency, particularly among nationalistic Serbs, to assume that their paranoid view of the past excuses, or at least explains, any atrocity committed in the present.
• Milosevic, no supporter of Yugoslav unity except as a vehicle for Serbian influence, wrapped himself in the mantle of unity as he sharpened his duel with the Slovenes. His concept of unity was Serbian nationalism buttressed by communist methods of control. It tolerated neither democracy nor power-sharing with other national groups. Because it was unacceptable to all Yugoslavs who wanted real unity or real democracy, or both, it was bound to be divisive. In fact, Milosevic’s pursuit of a narrow Serbian agenda made him the major wrecker of Yugoslavia.
• The fragmentation of power among the republics left Prime Minister Ante Markovic with little influence. He was forced to operate by persuading and cajoling. To get something, he often had to give away elements of the reform that were necessary to its effectiveness. Nothing could be done without the agreement of all six republics, and agreement was not an abundant commodity in the waning days of Yugoslavia.
• The problem was structural. Each of the three strongest republics had special and often contradictory reasons to combine against him. Slovenia, though reformist itself, didn’t want any reforms coming out of Belgrade. Croatia, even before the nationalists came to power and still more after, rejected both the Belgrade origin of the reform and its threat to the old-style command economy in the country. Milosevic’s Serbia had no interest in an economic reform that might dissipate its own powers. It also rejected Markovic’s appeal to Yugoslav unity, since it wasn’t the Serb dominated unity Milosevic fancied.
• The 1990 republican elections were a triumph for local nationalisms almost everywhere. In bringing nationalism to power, the elections helped snuff out the very flame of democracy they had kindled. They were democratic in one sense, antidemocratic in another. By and large they represented the choice of republican electorates, with the important caveat that people were given no chance to vote as Yugoslavs. But they put no curbs on the potentially nondemocratic behavior of those elected. Nationalism is by nature uncivil and antidemocratic because it elevates and empowers one ethnic group over all others. Even if nationalism arrives by democratic means, it accepts no obligation to conduct itself democratically. As the elections weakened the democratic element so necessary for Yugoslavia, they also weakened the equally necessary unifying element. The stronger the nationalism in a republic, the greater was its inclination toward separatism.
• Those who argue the “ancient Balkan hostilities” account for the violence that overtook and destroyed Yugoslavia ignore the power of television in the service of officially provoked racism. While history, particularly the carnage of World War II, provided plenty of tinder for ethnic hatred in Yugoslavia, it took the institutional nationalism of Milosevic and Tudjman to supply the torch. Inherent violence is as much a matter of reputation as of fact.
• Why did so many Serbs, Croats and (later) Muslims succumb to these racist appeals? One function of democratic government is to protect an open competition of ideas that will, it can be hoped, offset the spread of hatred. When government assumes precisely the opposite role, when it uses its power over the mass media to exhort people to hate, then many citizens look to the press not for information but for emotional reassurance. They can take religious satisfaction in discharging their anger at their neighbors.
• Even more important was the fear factor. The nationalist media sought to terrify by evoking mass murderers of a bygone time. The Croatian press described Serbs as “Cetniks,” the Serbian nationalists of World War II. For the Serbian press Croatians were “Ustase,” which was the name of the Croatian nationalist and fascist movement during World War II whose members ruled Yugoslavia under Nazi protection and killed Serbs indiscriminately, (and later Muslims became Turks). People who think they are under ethnic threat tend to seek refuge in their ethnic group. Thus did the media’s terror campaign establish ethnic solidarity on the basis of an enemy, to be hated and feared. Many people in the Balkans may be weak or even bigoted, but in Yugoslavia it’s their leaders who have been criminal. Milos Vasic, one of the best independent journalists in Yugoslavia has said, “You Americans would become nationalists and racists too if your media were totally in the hands of the Klu Klux Klan.”
• The breakup of Yugoslavia was a classic example of nationalism from the top down. While the peoples of the Balkans have not enjoyed an untroubled history, there is very little to the theory that they have never gotten along and never will. In the Yugoslavia that broke up in 1991 over a fifth of its citizens were members of ethnically mixed families, an unlikely phenomenon if ethnic hatreds were foreordained and immutable. It was primarily the ruthless ambitions of the leaders, manipulating a critical mass of the population through the cynical use of television images, which destroyed the multiethnic experiment of Yugoslavia. During the cold war, when Yugoslavia had been threatened from the outside by the Soviet Union, the West had been in a position to help it. The Yugoslavia of 1991 was threatened from inside by its constituent parts, and no outside force could save it.
• Shortly before the Slovenian and Croatian independence declarations, the European Community offered the government of Yugoslavia four billion dollars if the country would stay together. The offer was never seriously considered. Nationalist hysteria is not usually susceptible to economic or any other kind of inducements of penalties. If it were, then all the people of the former Yugoslavia, with the possible exception of the Slovenes, would not be worse off today than they were before the misery of war and economic deprivation. American policy had been based on the conviction that, if unity failed, democracy would fail with it. That conviction proved tragically accurate: both unity and democracy were lost.
• If it wasn’t possible to prevent the breakup of Yugoslavia, was it at least possible to manage the breakup in a way that avoided violence. In retrospect, the US should have chosen an earlier time to express a preference for a loosely confederated Yugoslavia; even if this had taken place though, the momentum toward collapse was unlikely to slow down.
• Short of a credible threat of force, the United States and its allies lacked decisive leverage. Why, then, wasn’t force threatened? In Croatia, unlike Bosnia, Serbs were in fact being abused. They had a legitimate grievance, even though the actions they took later to avenge it were abominable. Moreover, the JNA had not yet earned its reputation for brutality. Second, and much more important, there was no consensus for military intervention, either in America or Europe. Herein lies a dilemma that could be called the “paradox of prevention” and that applies to crises everywhere: it’s rarely possible to win support for preventive action at a time when the circumstances that unambiguously justify such action have not yet arrived.
• Bowing to German pressure, the European Community leaders on December 17, 1991, decided to recognize Croatia and Slovenia and to offer recognition to Bosnia and Macedonia. The prospect of war in Bosnia accelerated.
• The Bosnian leader Izetbegovic was playing a double game. With the European Community supporting Bosnia’s independence, he seemed to think he could get away with it under the guns of the Serbs. Perhaps he counted on Western military support, though nobody had promised him that. Whatever his motives, his premature push for independence was a disastrous political mistake. Serbia, Bosnia’s vastly more powerful neighbor, now had the pretext it needed to strike ??" the claim that 1.3 million Serbs were being taken out of “Yugoslavia” against their will. Milosevic and Karadzic had already decided to annex the majority of Bosnian territory by force. The Community’s irresponsibility, the United States’ passivity, and Izetbegovic’s miscalculation made their job easier. (inside and outside factors ??" assess their influence)
• Milosevic’s actions ??" (1) his denigration of Izetbegovic as a dangerous Islamic fundamentalist, which did not square with his benign remarks on Serbia’s intentions; (2) his failure to respect the integrity of Bosnia; (3) the condition he placed on Bosnia’s independence ??" there had to be agreement among all three of Bosnia’s constituent nations (the Serbs, the Muslims and the Croats) on new constitutional arrangements; (4) his assertion that Serbs in Bosnia lived on and therefore possessed 64 percent of the territory of the republic ??" the implication was that Serbs “living on” 64 percent of Bosnia’s land had the right to control it by force and to deny it to others.
• In the midst of the violence in Bosnia, Sarajevo was a symbol as well as a city. Since its fifteenth century occupation by the Ottoman Turks, it had been a safe haven for diverse ethnic groups and a model ??" though not always a consistent one ??" of racial tolerance. It stood for precisely the values that Karadzic’s policy of apartheid was intended to stamp out. There was a special spirit about Sarajevo that Rebecca West caught in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “The air of luxury in Sarajevo has less to do with material goods than with the people. They greet delight here with unreluctant and sturdy appreciation, they are even prudent about it, they will let no drop of pleasure run to waste.”
• ‘The misery of the Balkans stems in part from a pathetic longing to be good Europeans ??" that is to import the West’s murderous ideological fashions. These fashions proved fatal in the Balkans because national unification could be realized only by ripping apart the plural fabric of Balkan village life in the name of the violent dream of ethnic purity.’
