WHY YUGO-NOSTALGISTS ARE WRONG

A few weeks ago I shared the podium at Princeton with an unreconstructed adherent of the “Old Left” from New York. We were both opposed to last year’s NATO bombing of Serbia, and we were invited to speak at an event marking the first anniversary of that infamy. While our broadly similar conclusions on the war itself were reached from very different vantage points, one could say that this was a commendable case of moving “beyond the Left and Right.” And yet there was one point on which I could not politely agree to disagree. I was disturbed by a simplistic, historically inaccurate account of the genesis of the Yugoslav crisis offered by this man. Yugoslavia was a viable, prosperous multiethnic, multi-cultural polity – he asserted – whose system of socialist self-management was so successful and so attractive that the mean capitalists of the West ganged together to do it in. In a nutshell, had it not been for foreign scheming and plotting Yugoslavia would have survived and prospered.

Even those anti-interventionists who do not subscribe to the tenets of dialectic materialism have a tendency to muse lyrical about the virtues of the old Yugoslav federation. Many old Balkan hands have fond memories of the place as it used to be before 1991, and tend to overlook its structural defects that had been present all along. Their Yugo-nostalgia is apparently shared even by many denizens of the successor states.

Since many well-meaning but badly informed analysts remain either unclear or ambivalent on this issue, it is necessary to take a long, hard look at the historical record. The only way we can meaningfully judge the present is by the example of the past - and this is the main difficulty in addressing the Balkans to today’s English-speaking world. The virtual-reality world of superficial reportage, fact-free opinion columns and agenda-driven “research” have transmuted facts into fiction, and even the fictions give up all pretense to credibility. It is high time to correct this trend that seeks not to understand events but to construct a propagandistic version of Balkan old disputes and current rivalries. Even if all history is in some measure contemporary history, it need not be dominated by the obsessions of the day. This paper is presented not in order to condemn or justify, but in the conviction that the cause of peace in a troubled region of Europe cannot be advanced by misrepresentation or by the sentimental lapse of seriousness.

The Yugoslav Problem From the moment of its creation, on the ruins of the old Europe at the end of the Great War, until its bloody disintegration seven decades later, Yugoslavia was constantly beset by national problems. Those problems were dealt with in different ways and with different intentions. They all failed: from the triune centralism of 1919 to the Royalist integralism of 1929; from the quasi-federalism of the Serb-Croat Agreement of 1939 to the Stalinist dictatorship of 1945; and finally, from the postmodernist chaos of Tito’s last period - embodied in the Constitution of 1974 - to the doomed attempt of his successors to keep the show on the road, amidst the collapse of communism and the emergence of the new global and globalist imperialism.

Those national problems proved impossible to solve, in the “first,” royalist Yugoslavia (1918-1941) no less than the “second,” communist one (1945-1991). (The “third” Yugoslavia, a rump known as “FRY” and consisting of Serbia and Montenegro, was not created in order to “solve” anything. It is likely to avoid further national problems by allowing itself to be reduced to the pre-1911 boundaries of Serbia.) Structural deficiencies of each and every “Yugoslavia” - as a state, society, and polity - were fundamental. In no incarnation could it devise a viable political system. It was not a viable entity, but an inherently flawed creation. This simple fact was the root cause of its speedy and ignominious collapse in 1941, and its final disintegration in 1991-1992.

From the outset the issue of Serb-Croat relations was at the core of the Yugoslav problem. Those relations, plagued by an ambiguous legacy of the previous century, were irreparably poisoned by the creation of a deeply flawed common state. The act of unification in 1918, and the decades that followed, drew the final wedge between the two nations “separated by the same language.” Serb-Croat relations would have remained ambivalent but tractable, had the two peoples not been forced under the same roof; it is inconceivable that they would have been any worse than they are today.

The Croat Problem Separatist tendencies, present in Croatia throughout those 72 years, proved enduring because they were rooted in its mainstream political tradition. This tradition gave rise to an ideology that rested on the axiomatic claim of insurmountable differences (political, cultural, and even racial) between Serbs and Croats, and that produced an unabashedly violent brand of Balkan chauvinism. This ideology had found its radical expression, in the first half of the twentieth century, in the Ustasa (“insurgent”) movement founded by Ante Pavelic between the two world wars. But the political history of modern Croatia cannot be understood without some reference to its history since 1102 - the year when the Croatian realm entered a personal union with Hungary, ending two centuries of precarious independence. That was the year to which the cult of Croatia’s continued statehood was subsequently backdated. This continuity was reiterated in 1527, when the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand took over, after the Hungarians’ rout at Mohacs.[i]

Although the successive Austrian monarchs duly proceeded to curtail Croatia’s self-rule and disintegrate the land from within, the legal entity of “Croatia” had never ceased under the Hapsburgs. The notion of continued statehood acted as a myth that helped form the nation’s self-awareness. But the notion of Croatia’s pravice (“rights” - meaning “rights of state”) also remained a factor of political life well beyond the period of Croatia’s national awakening.

During the period of national awakening in the 19th century, two different strands of political thought and self-perception were eventually articulated in Croatia. Its political and cultural integrity was threatened at that time by the centralist tendencies of the Hungarians. The increasingly aggressive Hungarian nationalism fostered the rise of the Illyrian idea in Croatia - a misnomer for the ideal of wider South Slav unity, based on common background and language. Roman Catholic Bishop Strossmayer, the most prominent champion of this idea, entertained a notion that the Serbs and the Croats should be drawn together.

From its inception this brand of “Yugoslavism” - native to Croatia, and limited to a narrow segment of its educated elite - had a defensive character. It was born out of the perception of that segment of Croatia’s elite that their “Croatness” needed a broader South Slav context in order to assert itself, and thus to withstand the onslaught of stronger, more dynamic nationalisms to the north and west. Illyrism was attractive because it provided the formula for the cultural and political unification of all Croats. It did not envisage a South Slav independent state extending from the Julian Alps to Macedonia; its notions rested on the assumption that the Croats will give the tone and flavor to any future process of South Slav integration. Illyrism

The historicist notion of Croatia’s “rights” and its uninterrupted statehood inspired a very different ideology, articulated by Ante Starcevic in the 1860s and 1870s. His sometimes contradictory and often confusing “ideology” of ultra-Croatianism did not recognize other South Slavs as distinct nations. To him they were all “Croats,” including not only Bosnian Muslims but also those people “mistakenly called Serbs” who should come to their senses and return to the Croat fold - and those who failed to do so were ripe for extermination. The word “genocide” was not a part of the political vocabulary of Europe in 1869, when Starcevic wrote the following of the Serbs:

They are the race of slaves, beasts worse than any other. There are three levels of perfection: that of the animal, that of comprehension, and that of reason. Slavo-Serbs have not quite reached the first level, and cannot rise above it.* They have no conscience, they do not know how to read as humans, they are not teachable, they can not be better or worse then they are, aside for their agility and shrewdness, which comes with practice.[ii]

The need to dehumanize one’s hate-object, the prerequisite of any final solution, is obvious and self-avowed. Give this breed a little bread, then strike and skin them to the bone, was Star~evi}’s own dictum. Commenting on such texts, a leading Croat anthropologist remarked half a century ago that “never before had a tribal, atavistic urge entered with such irrational force into the world of political formulae and programs.[iii] Starcevic’s opus earned him the title of “the Father of the Nation” during World War II, a designation approvingly revived in today’s Croatia. Such sentiments were soon expressed in the political arena. His Party of Rights is connected in a direct line of development with the Ustasa movement. The original ideology underwent considerable change along the way, but the two salient features, which remained throughout, were an obsession with statehood, and an extreme antagonism - a morbid obsession, in fact - towards the Serbs.

The Serb Problem The roots of this antagonism hark to the Serbs’ special status as free yeomen and self-governed farmer-warriors, which they enjoyed in the Hapsburg Monarchy ever since the Thirty Years’ War. In the regions adjoining the Ottoman Empire, known as the Military Border (Milit”rgrenze, Vojna Krajina) they were successful in preserving their name, privileges, traditions and religion under often trying conditions. The Serbs’ presence in some parts of today’s Croatia (notably Dalmatia and the Littoral) harks without interruption to the early medieval times.* But it was the additional Serb settlements along the military frontier of the Hapsburg Monarchy after the fall of Bosnia and Serbia to the Turks, that provided a bulwark against further Ottoman incursions. Those Serbs were rewarded for their military services to the Emperor by being relieved of all tribute to the Croat nobility as far back as 1630. The Krajina Serbs had never been serfs, and lacked the reverence for neo-feudal institutions and social structure that were deeply implanted into their Croat neighbors’ collective memory. From the time of their settlement in the border areas, they were subjected to the jurisdiction of the imperial Austrian military authorities and their own, Eastern Orthodox Church.[iv] By the late-nineteenth century they accounted for a fifth of the population of today’s Croatia, and were beginning to make inroads into the professions, commerce and politics.

Their presence was a thorn in the side of Croat nationalists.[v] By the time of the Austro-Magyar Ausgleich of 1867 the Grenzer Serbs could hardly identify with the Croat nationalist cause of resisting Magyar domination if that cause, volens-nolens, implied the loss of their rights and the abandonment their name. The circle was thus closed: lingering Croat resentment of the Serbs’ special status was turned by Starcevic into malevolence towards the Serbs as such. His pronouncements - in turn - could not have given the Serbs in Croatia any other option but to seek strategies for self-preservation that entailed reliance on external support, for Vienna, or later, Budapest.

Starcevic’s successors turned anti-Serbism into a central tenet of their national ideology, a determining feature of their very Croatness. This was most notably the case with the movement started by Josip Frank. This utterly deracinated Hungarian-born, German-speaking Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism (who never mustered the finer points of the “Croatian” language) proceeded to define his adopted Croat identity strictly in terms of a crude Serbophobia. Frank was an avid Austrophile, and tied his brand of Croat ultra-chauvinism to the black-and-yellow mast of Hapsburg loyalism. After Frank’s death in 1911 the “Frankists” came to denote brutally single-minded chauvinists.

Croatia’s political spectrum under the Hapsburgs, dynamic and diverse as it may have appeared to a casual observer, was limited to a narrow social base. Politically as well as socially, the vast majority of Croatia’s population - its peasantry - did not participate in the political life. Exclusion from politics, the archaic social structure and institutions ensured that the views of Croatia’s peasants - on the subject of a common bond with other South Slavs, or indeed any other issue - were not known at the time. Contemporaries made many assumptions: the political class and intelligentsia tended to express what the people ought to think.[vi] The political enfranchisement of Croatia’s peasantry and the subsequent full development of Croatian national consciousness took place only after 1918, in the Yugoslav state.

In Serbia too, the peasantry constituted the largest social stratum, but its role and status were very different. The Serbian peasant fought for and won independence in a series of bloody battles against the Turks (1804-1815). He fought under popularly acclaimed leaders, whose autocratic tendencies were stubbornly resisted in subsequent decades. He distrusted bureaucratic authority and pompous titles, inherited privilege and priestly sermons. By the middle of the nineteenth century Serbia had become de facto independent, and started laying foundations of its democratic institutions. Unlike Croatia, it was not characterized by calcified class structure and its nascent bourgeoisie allowed for considerable social mobility: it was common for a clever, hard working village boy to make it big in the city and end his days as the respected father of university professors, ministers and generals. By the end of the century the country’s politicians were accountable to an electorate of all adult males, and the Serbian kings’ designation was by the grace of God and the will of the people. The country was homogeneous, ethnically and socially. After 1903 it had an established constitutional monarchy, a small but well trained and equipped army, and a rapidly developing economy.

Serbia’s considerable national dynamism until the first decade of the twentieth century was chiefly directed at liberating all Serbs from foreign rule. The wider South Slav issue, in so far as it figured at all among common people, was perceived as an extension of that task. Ordinary Serbians did not need a wider South Slav context (such as “Illyrianism”) to protect and assert their identity. Even less did they need dubious historicist notions and the neurotic fabrication of external hate-objects in order to define their identity in the first place. The traditions of Serbia and Croatia were based on two different sets of values, two distinct philosophies and experiences.

Lights Go Out Over Europe The European powers went to war in 1914 for a variety of deeper reasons, but the direct cause was the crisis between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, resulting from the murder of Archduke Francis Ferdinand by a young Serb nationalist in Sarajevo. This event was the culmination of an intractable conflict between Austria’s Balkan expansionism and Serbia’s, at least implicit, Piedmontism. Regardless of whether Serbia’s dynamism aimed merely at the unification of all Serbs, or for the more ambitious objective of the “liberation” of their South Slav brethren, the Monarchy perceived it as a serious threat. It watched with consternation the triumph of Serbian arms against Turkey in 1912 and Bulgaria in 1913, and the subsequent doubling of its territory. The shots fired in Sarajevo were seen in Vienna as an opportunity to settle the scores with a small but tough and increasingly assertive adversary while there was still time to do so.

With a blank check hastily granted from Berlin, the Monarchy presented Serbia with an ultimatum that contained extravagant demands. It was not meant to be accepted: Austria-Hungary willed the war, and rushed into it, fuelled by a heady brew of crude Serbophobia that blended anti-Slav racism and a peculiarly Central-European brand of anti-Orthodox Roman Catholic integralism. By going ahead with the attack the Monarchy activated the system of alliances, and duly ignited the continent.

In the decades preceding the war Austria-Hungary was in a state of latent crisis. Its mosaic of nationalities could not be permanently held together without radical constitutional reforms that would satisfy less than equal nationalities (Czechs, Croats, Romanians, Serbs, Italians…). Such reforms were vehemently opposed – albeit for different reasons - by the Hungarian land-owning nobility in the east and the pan-German nationalists in the west. It attempted to overcome domestic tensions through expansion in the Balkans, by occupying Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 and annexing it three decades later. In doing so, however, it turned Serbia from a client state into its sworn enemy.

The challenge of the advancing decay of the Ottoman Empire demanded the squaring of two different circles: reconciling the interests of different great European powers, and the aspirations of different Balkan nations. Austria’s expansionism in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and its evident ambition to control the corridor between that province and the remainder of European Turkey (the Sanjak of Novi Pazar) further complicated the so-called Eastern Question. Its attempts to subjugate Serbia by the means of a tariff war (1906-1911) proved ineffective, and had the unhoped-for consequence of enhancing Belgrade’s links with Paris and St Petersburg.

Frustrated in its attempts to force Serbia to submission and disturbed by Serbia’s successes in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, the Dual Monarchy grabbed its chance in July 1914. Even before Sarajevo its leaders had sought German support for a “preventive” war against Serbia, and Vienna duly presented the forthcoming conflict as a test of strength with a wider continental significance. Anti-Serbism, indeed crude Serbophobia, was born. The popular Viennese jingle of August 1914, Alle Serben mussen sterben, indicated that Croatia’s Frankism had become legitimate, and approved, in the Hapsburg Mitteleuropa.

While the Central Powers’ agenda was dictated for once from Vienna (something that Bismarck would never have countenanced) the Entente entered the Great War without a clear set of objectives in the Balkans. For Russia, the defense of Serbia was an issue of its survival as a great power. Having been humiliated during the Annexation Crisis only six years earlier, Moscow could not afford to let Vienna assert its total domination in the southeast. The Allies were prepared to see Serbia expanded into Hapsburg areas with large Serb populations, but they certainly did not envisage the creation of “Yugoslavia,” and until the very end there was no intention to dismember Austria-Hungary. Even President Wilson’s Fourteen Points originally envisaged “autonomous development” for the Monarchy’s nationalities, rather than sovereignty outside its framework.[vii] But his espousal of the principle of self-determination unleashed competing aspirations among the smaller nations of Central Europe and the Balkans that not only hastened the collapse of transnational empires, but also gave rise to a host of intractable ethnic conflicts and territorial disputes that remain unresolved to this day.

The Creation of Yugoslavia Serbia was primarily concerned with mere survival during the first months of the Austrian onslaught, but eventually it articulated its war aims that provided for two solutions, a “big” - the “liberation and unification of all our brothers Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” – and “small,” aimed to create an enlarged Serbia by adding predominantly Serb-populated areas of the Monarchy (above all Bosnia) to the Kingdom.

Serbia’s embrace of a radical program of South Slav unity, at such an early stage of the war, looked to its allies like an act of political bravado if not outright folly. It created difficulties for them even before Italy came into play, by making a separate peace with Austria-Hungary less likely. Soon thereafter, in early 1915 a “Yugoslav Committee” came into being, composed of Croat, Serb and Slovene political ÈmigrÈs from Austria-Hungary. Their initial task was to inform the Allies of the plight of the South Slavs in the Dual Monarchy and to propagate their unification with Serbia into a single state. It was the leaked news that the secret Treaty of London (March 1915) promised large territorial gains on the eastern Adriatic coast to Italy, as a reward for its entry into war on the side of the Entente, that prompted most committee members into action. The understated agenda of the Croat majority on the Committee was to preserve Dalmatia for the Croats, and deny it to the Italians, under the “Yugoslav” label.

The Committee established contact with the Serbian government, relocated to the Greek island of Corfu after the epic withdrawal of its army through northern Albania in the winter of 1915-1916. While the Committee sought to exploit Serbia’s weak position in 1916-1917 to exact concessions, and even share decision making powers with the Serbian government, Pasic had grown more inclined to a federal model which would define “Serbia,” politically and territorially, within the new South Slav state. His pragmatism was in contrast to the integralist enthusiasm of Prince Regent Alexander, however, to whom the royal prerogative had been transferred in 1914. This led to the signing of a declaration in 1917 which stated that “this people of ours, which has three names, is of same blood, shares the same spoken and written language, inhabits the same contiguous and undivided territory, and has the same interests of national survival and comprehensive moral and material development.”

The Corfu Declaration was a political compromise between two groups of politicians lacking any true mandate from their presumed constituents for the proposed endeavor. Millions of Serbs in the devastated, occupied Serbia, and further hundreds of thousands of their sons, brothers and fathers in the Serbain Army overseas, were hoping or fighting for a resurrected and enlarged Kingdom of Serbia. Further millions of non-Serb South Slavs had no idea that a “Yugoslav Committee” existed, let alone that it presumed to negotiate political documents of far-reaching significance on their behalf.

The Corfu Resolution did not resolve the dilemma between centralism and federalism but left it to the future constituent assembly. In so far as it did provide an outline of future constitutional arrangements, the Declaration reflected Regent Alexander’s preferences in that it proposed the creation of a “constitutional, democratic, and parliamentary monarchy headed by the house of Karadjordjevic.” It was to be called the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.[viii] It is noteworthy that under its terms Serbia was not to be given any privileged status or veto power in the new state, such as had been granted to Prussia in 1870. Both Serbia and Montenegro were supposed to cease existing as separate sovereign states. The decision of the Serbian government to sign the Declaration and to present it to the Allies as its official program - even though it could have had the “greater Serbia” on a plate – was an act of folly or generosity, depending on one’s viewpoint. The Croat chairman of the Yugoslav Committee, Trumbic, declared:

Serbia has made the greatest sacrifice for the union of our three-named people. She is ready to sacrifice her state individuality in order that one common state of all Serbs, Croats and Slovenes be created. With that she begins the greatest of her deeds and attains the absolute right to be called the Yugoslav Piedmont.[ix]

Both Britain and France preferred the “small” solution, which would result in a greatly enlarged Serbia, united with Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and given an outlet to the Adriatic south of the area promised to Italy in Dalmatia. This solution could be easily accommodated with the Treaty of London, under which Italy was to get Dalmatia and other parts of the northern Adriatic coastline. Such an outcome would have left Croatia squeezed between two enlarged, victorious neighbors – Italy and Serbia - and devoid of its coastline (most of which was promised to Italy), of friends and future.

The prospect was too horrible to contemplate even to those Croats who, until that time, had been loath to contemplate any scenario that smacked of “Yugoslavism” or Serb-friendly solutions. In the final year of the war, with the deteriorating internal situation in Austria-Hungary and the collapse of the Central Powers increasingly imminent, the openly Yugoslav sentiment was gaining strength in its South Slav-inhabited lands. By 1918 their political representatives started considering the creation of a grouping of all forces aimed at the establishment of a “democratically-based state of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs.” The new wave, coupled with the fear of Italy’s aspirations if the collapse of the Monarchy caught them alone, induced even some unabashedly Serbophobe Croats to join the bandwagon: the “Yugoslav” solution was perceived as a means of preserving and protecting Croat interests. As the Monarchy crumbled in the autumn of 1918, the Croat-Serb Coalition was the driving force behind the founding in Zagreb of the National Council, an ad hoc body that proclaimed the “State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs.” Even those diehard Schwarz-Gelbers, the Frankists, voted for it.[x]

Unhealthy Legacy of 1918 With events threatening to overtake their efforts to negotiate unification terms with the Serbian Government, the National Council had its scope for action severely limited. Its new “state” of the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs was effectively reduced to the old territory of Croatia-Slavonia and Slovenia. Italy proceeded to take possession of Dalmatia, and its units even took positions even beyond the lines determined by the Treaty of London. There were signs of commotion at home too: military deserters and dissatisfied peasants, hungry cities and a collapsing currency had the makings of a revolution. With the Bolsheviks still intent on exporting their bloody product to the rest of an exhausted Europe – as witnessed in Kiel, Munich, and Budapest - the National Council started taking ad hoc decisions.

In its attempts to preempt a revolution the Council acted - strictly speaking - not as a constitutional, but as a revolutionary body. As its delegates were dispatched to Belgrade to offer unification (14 November 1918) there was no time or will to observe legal niceties and sign a new Pacta Conventa in the best tradition of Croatia’s “State Rights.” The new state might have had a happier start in life if things had not been rushed, but at the time of confusion and fear Croatia’s political leaders could see no alternative to an urgent union with Serbia on the basis of the Corfu Declaration. Their main concern, one might say, was to get the Serbs in, to keep the Italians out, and to keep the Bolsheviks down. On 1 December 1918 the Regent accepted their offer, and proclaimed the establishment of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

What was the motive for the 29-year-old future monarch to plunge into the murky Yugoslav venture, without a mandate from his own people to do so? Why was he so keen to trade a solid, internationally approved and ethnically fairly homogeneous project – such as the Kingdom of Serbia promised to be had the Treaty of London been applied – for an uncertain, and, as it turned out, both personally and corporately fatal experiment? No single explanation (Alexander’s free-masonry, arrogant single-mindedness, lack of political experience) is fully satisfactory. In all probability he was the victim of an insatiable hubris. Keen to see his realm extend from the Julian Alps to the gates of Salonica, Alexander chose the path of ruin comparable to that of Athens after the Persian War. He fell victim to his affliction in 1934; his people are still paying the price.

The collapse of Austria-Hungary, resulting from the war, abruptly presented the South Slavs with their unification as a fact of practical politics that did not allow any delay. It was above all the leaders of the Slovenes and Croats who insisted that the Serbian Army take immediate possession of their territories, which they saw as the only true insurance against Italy. All concerned were forced to improvise. This created a problematic legacy for the new state’s internal development, just as its territorial disputes created a potential for conflict with its revisionist neighbors. Neither internal solutions – as attempted by the centralist Constitution of St Guy’s Day (Vidovdanski ustav, 28 June 1921) - nor external settlements, embodied in Versailles, proved effective in providing stability at home and security abroad, which is the fundamental objective of every state.

Given Serbia’s century of political and cultural independence, its contribution to the Entente in the Great War, and the Serbs’ numeric plurality in the new state, some degree of Serb predominance in its power structure was to be expected; but crudely applied, it often appeared as “hegemony” to the non-Serbs. Although there had been no grand design to establish such hegemony on the Serbian side, a clumsy and heavy-handed approach was often taken when subtlety and fine-tuning were required, creating deep resentment among other groups, especially in Croatia. Yugoslavia saved Dalmatia for the Croats, but once this had been accomplished they were still stuck with it. The Serbian political establishment could not grasp the fact that in 1918 most Croats longed for the creation of their sovereign state, just as most Serbs – had they been asked - would have preferred a strong, secure Serb state to the new amalgam that was forced upon them.

The Serbian establishment erred by default rather than design. Challenges of nation building, of obtaining recognized borders and defending them, establishing a national currency, regulating economic, educational and judicial systems, solving issues of de facto multi-ethnicity concealed behind the fiction of “one nation with three names” and restive minorities, were immense. They all demanded a new thinking and a departure from the established prewar patterns of political action. And yet it was the old approaches, received political wisdom, and confusion of wishful thinking and reality that prevailed, on all sides, in the first ten years of the new state.

The legacy of different cultural, political and religious traditions - most obvious in the case of Serbia and Croatia – was underestimated. This legacy, coupled with uneven economic development and different aspirations of the three “tribes” of the newly-promulgated “nation” could not be overcome by a centralist constitution and unitarist slogans. The Yugoslav dilemma was, in essence, a clash between the Jacobin etatisme, represented by the predominantly French-educated Serbian political establishment, and the old Hapsburg constitutional complexity of historic units. The ruling Radicals, in particular, were inclined to view the new state as a continuation of pre-1914 Serbia, and advocated centralism on the premise of national unity (“three tribes of the Yugoslav nation”). As the party of bureaucracy and “strong government” they insisted on centralism. The Croats, in turn, knew agreements, contracts, Pacta, Ausgleichen and Nagodbas… the very opposite of the centralist concept.

The boundaries of the new Yugoslav state, determined at the Paris peace conference after a long and arduous dispute with Italy, gave it an ostensibly viable territorial base.[xi] And yet, those boundaries did not bring the longed-for stability to the Balkans. As a presumed beneficiary of Versailles, Yugoslavia eventually had to cope with an array of the discontents within (Croatian separatist, Bulgarophile Macedonian “autonomists” and Albanian Kachaks in Kosovo*) with the revanchists abroad (Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria). It is an irony of the aftermath of World War I that the territorial settlements of 1919 eventually proved to be a major source of weakness for those who appeared to have gained most. Poland’s eastern territories beyond the Curzon Line and its corridor to the Baltic, or Romania’s doubling in size in Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia, created a constant source of revanchist malevolence among the “losers” - who exacted their revenge two decades later.

The First Bloodbath The real European catastrophe occurred well before the fatal year 1914, in the decades when science and progress and the loss of faith left a gaping hole that the nice, civilized bourgeois society could not fill. The birth of Yugoslavia, a by-product of the Great War, although effected by bourgeois politicians rather than Bolshevik conspirators, was indicative of a similar malaise. It was an eminently “liberal” creation – in the first decade of its existence, anyway – and the product of an ideology, that of “Jugoslavism.” It rested on 19th century notions of South Slav unity, which fitted rather uneasily into the realities of 20th century Europe. The unification of the South Slavs, I insist, occurred fifty years too late: the differences had developed too highly for an exercise in Gleichschaltung from above to be successful. The rushed and improvised unification was based on an ad hoc deal between two unrepresentative elites: the coterie around Alexander and a group of emigres. The resulting edifice had remained an unhappy and inherently unstable union throughout the seven turbulent decades of its existence.

Between the wars, Yugoslavia was a state desperately in search of a viable political system. Without any tradition of independent statehood in modern times, Croatian politicians tended to perceive any state as an entity external to themselves and their perception of the Croats' national interest, therefore as antagonistic and intrinsically untrustworthy. The mood of mistrust and increasing antagonism was facilitated by many mistakes made by the Serb political establishment, where one could find both insensitivity and lack of understanding of the other side's apprehensions and aspirations.

Nevertheless, even this "Serb-dominated" state was constantly in search of a modus vivendi with the Croats. In August 1939, when an agreement was finally reached, Croatia's political establishment expressed satisfaction with the extensive autonomy granted thereby. But by that time the clouds of war were gathering around Yugoslavia. In March 1941, in the darkest hour for all friends of liberty in Europe, thousands of Serbs took to the streets of Belgrade and other cities in support of a pro-Allied coup d'etat. Hitler's rage resulted in a ferocious Axis attack and the destruction of the country. Being on the Allied side even when pragmatic self-interest dictated otherwise was to cost Serbia yet another crop of its youth, for the second time in a generation's lifetime.

The Yugoslav imbroglio cannot be understood without some reference to the policy of genocide perpetrated by Croatian Quislings, the Ustasas, against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies during the Second World War. There is a wealth of authentic documents on Ustasa atrocities from German, Italian, and Allied sources. Axis field commanders often complained that the Croats anti-Serb zeal was providing guerrilla formations with a steady pool of recruits. The trauma which the Serbs experienced in Croatian extermination camps and under the knives of Croatian regular units and irregular bands is only vaguely discernible from the Britannica entry:

In Croatia the indigenous fascist regime set about a policy of "racial purification" that went beyond even Nazi practices. Minority groups such as Jews and Gypsies were to be eliminated, as were the Serbs: it was declared that one-third of the Serbian population would be deported, one-third converted to Roman Catholicism, and.one-third liquidated [...] Ustasa bands terrorized the countryside. The partial collaboration of the Catholic clergy in these practices continues to be a component of Serb-Croat suspicion. (Macropedia, Vol. 29, 1991, p. 1111)

A similar assessment is offered by the Encyclopaedia Americana, which stresses that the Ustasa regime organized a campaign of forced annihilation and conversion of the Serbian Orthodox - resulting in chaos and civil war. Similar verdicts came from Croatian democrats and anti-fascists, too. The late Dr. Branko Peselj, a prominent Croat pre-war politician and Macek's personal aide, and in his emigre days an attorney in Washington D.C. for forty years prior to his death in 1990, testified that Pavelic's Ustasas intended to eliminate all Serbs in areas they controlled. In this they almost succeeded, deploying means even more cruel - albeit less efficient - than those used in Auschwitz and Babi Yar. Exact numbers are still disputed; according to German contemporary estimates, several hundred thousand Serb civilians were slain. But more important than an exact number is the fact that, in "Independent Croatia," there was no rational correlation between a Serb's behavior or values and the state's attitude towards him.

Tito’s Time Bomb After the Second World War the victorious Communist regime attempted to sweep the bloody legacy of ensuing slaughter under the carpet, in the name of (Croat) Marshal Tito’s policy of obligatory ‘brotherhood and unity.’ In the ensuing 45 years the wounds remained unhealed, merely concealed.

Tito’s “federalism” was but a misnomer for a grand game of divide et impera, in which the salient objective was to carve up the Serbs, over 40% of the population, into as many different units as possible. The Montenegrin and Macedonian “nations” were hastily invented in 1945, and – absurdly – the Muslims of Bosnia were also proclaimed to be a “nation” 15 years later. Tito’s raving voluntarism created an inherently chaotic cauldron that depended on Tito himself as the ultimate arbiter. The communist Yugoslav federation existed as a permanent mechanism of keeping old passions and animosities alive and well, and thus providing the ruling clique with legitimacy. “Were it not for us, you’d be at each others’ throats.” When the ruling clique disintegrated, in the absence of the dictator who died in 1980, the threat turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The most pernicious, and – as it turned out – the most permanent legacy of Tito’s system concerned the boundaries among the federal units. The Serbs had lived in one state since 1918, when Yugoslavia came into being. They reluctantly accepted Tito’s arbitrarily drawn internal boundaries between the six federal republics - which left almost one third of their nation outside Serbia-proper - on the grounds that the broader Yugoslav framework afforded them a measure of security from the repetition of the nightmare of 1941-45, when they were slaughtered en masse by their Croat and Muslim neighbors. But they were adamant that they would resist any attempt by the breakaway republics of Croatia and Bosnia to force over two million Serbs living in those republics to become minorities, literally overnight, in their own land.

By recognizing the secessionist republics in their Tito-drawn boundaries, and thus by becoming a mere accomplice in the fight to force over two million Serbs west of the Drina river into submission, the so-called international community became a combatant in the war of Yugoslav Secession. It “mediators” accepted a role that was not only subordinate, but also squalid. Lord David Owen, for one, conceded that Tito's boundaries were arbitrary and should have been redrawn at the time of Yugoslavia's disintegration. “It is true that there could not have been a total accommodation of Serb demands,” he wrote, “but to rule out any discussion or opportunity for compromise in order to head off war was an extraordinary decision.” He concluded: “to have stuck unyieldingly to the internal boundaries of the six republics within the former Yugoslavia as being the boundaries for independent states, was a folly far greater than that of premature recognition itself.” But in all his deeds he still stuck to the principle that the Serbs had to succumb, hinting at the way the dominant supranational elites in the Western world have used the disintegration of both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union for their own ends.

Towards a Deeper Understanding Samuel Huntington’s notion of ‘civilizational blocks,’ like it or not, had the virtue of expressing something real in Western attitudes. My British friend Michael Stenton has called it ‘Frankish blinkers.’ Huntington speaks of ‘the West,’ he says, but if he had written ‘the Franks’ the term would have supplied more historical depth:

When the western crusaders came into the Byzantine world eight centuries ago they were all called ‘Franks’ - French, German or English. Just like their contemporary descendents, they had superb military technology, immense self-confidence and a good nose for profit and plunder. They waved their swords in the name of God but they acted as though there was something wrong and inferior about the Orthodox Christians. When they murdered Rhineland Jews in 1096, when they massacred Muslims in Jerusalem in 1099, this was all very new; when they sacked Constantonople in 1204 it was a trend. By the time the kings of the Latin West calmly watched the Turks take Constantinople in 1453, it was engrained.

Of these crimes only the first two seem worthy of Pope Wojtyla’s apology today, the rest being merely a matter of murmured regret. The Franks are still at the center of the world, having crossed the Atlantic to become ‘Americans.’ They have tended to fuse Christianity with culture and make culture a weapon, which is why their tradition is at risk. Secular rationalism achieved and cemented its position by repudiating both the faith of old, and the secular imperialism of great states, as vulgar errors. This new cultural standard made a powerful offer of assimilation to anti-religious Jews, and throughout the twentieth century it has extended the offer to secular modernizers across the globe. The old, vulgar contempt for Islam and Judaism was erased, but now this went way beyond humanity and courtesy to become a theological maneuver - expressing a distaste for Western tradition by promoting alien Weltanschauungen into a parity of esteem.

It is along those lines that the identity of the Balkan Christian nations came to be deemed irrelevant at best, and an obstacle at worst, to the nuances of ‘European’ versus ‘global’ order. The peoples who carry the Orthodox tradition lost so much - under the Ottomans and the Communists – that their revival is scarcely imagined today except on Western terms - as faithful imitation of, and absorption in, the West. The old Frankish question is also the new one: ‘Will they comply?’ It is along these tracks – Pravoslavophobia, Jim Jatras calls it - that the decision-makers in Washington have acquired a bias in Balkan affairs which by now goes beyond any one piece of policy, and outside the parameters of rational debate. In Serbia they carried out a premeditated aggression on par with anything engineered from Berlin in 1939 or 1941. In Kosovo they criminally aided and abetted secession by an ethnic minority which, once effected, will render many European borders tentative. In Croatia they assisted the most monumental ethnic cleansing operation in post-1945 Europe. In Bosnia-Herzegovina they ignited the war, kept it going, and prevented its early end.

In the seamless straightjacket being tailored by America’s ruling elites their domestic “culture” is thus manifested in the obliteration of the ethnic identity of peoples abroad, their special color and uniqueness, in the loss of diversity of social evolution that goes side by side with the diminishing diversity of nature. The individual’s consciousness captured by technos is divorced, as it were, from the time and place of his body’s life. In virtual reality, coordination between information-based and physical being is disrupted along all personality parameters. We are not so much living as intending to live, ever oriented toward what is coming, toward the design of an act, while behavior and experience of actual situations do not evoke interest, for they are mechanical and empty.

Nil desperandum! The starting point in the struggle for human survival should be the rediscovery of soul, manifested in our reorientation from “progress” to tradition. We have to stop becoming and live for the sake of being. That is the essence of the anti-globalist revolution we need. It must be expressed in defending the values of historical man in the teeth of its progressivist reduction to technology and intellect. The survival of Homo sapiens assumes the struggle for the eternal against the temporary. The ideology of universal human values – that is to say, of a common culture identical for the whole world – is clearly the Enemy. As befits the post-modern world, the proponents of politically correct “diversity” are in fact promoting its exact opposite: social-technological monism. They are emboldened by NATO’s bombing of the Serbs no less than by the lack of reaction to it in the heartland, and believe that the seemingly obvious futility of resistance in the Balkans will force the remaining atavistic humans everywhere to accept what they call the challenge of complexity, and merge with the post-humans through degeneration and loss of identity.

“Western” foreign policy elites, poorly educated, rootless, arrogant, cynically manipulative, and ultimately criminal – smell blood, and march boldly on. But the struggle of real people for survival and continued existence is natural, and inevitable, even if the outcome is uncertain - just as the individual’s knowledge of his mortality does not stop him from holding on to life, and beauty, and truth. The strategy for survival starts with understanding that, indeed, it is not just the Balkans any more.

Not all is lost as yet: demonic belief systems and assumptions of the dominant Western elites are at odds with the majority of the people in each country in Europe and America. But this majority is embattled. It is being steadily and deliberately overturned by the continuing onslaught on “conventional morality” in schools and the media, and by the attack on the demographic structure of our societies by the opening of the floodgates. The problem is compounded by the conquest of many “Christian” churches by anorak-wearing guitarists, crypto-communists, and radical feminists. These people have their secular agendas, their political and social objectives, but no serious faith of any kind. The corifei of the New World Order know, but they don’t want others to know, that they have nothing to offer the masses—anywhere—except the nightmare of “multicultural” idder cities from Marseilles to Bradford to LA. This alone should be their undoing. But let us not seek comfort in the prospect of apocalypse; let us hope, instead, that the rebalancing of world power takes place sooner rather than later.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTES * Slavosrbi (Slav-Serbs) being, in Starceviv’s scheme of things, “doubly slaves” - absurdly, he claimed that both names were derived from Latin for “slave” (sclavus and servus.) He described them as “garbage, slaves, cheats, scum of European, Asian and African slaves. Slav-Serbs are by nature meant for slavery, for every evil, like pigs are for mud. All the crimes of the criminals at a penitentiary would not make up three percent of the crimes, wickedness that are in secret dreamed and in reality performed by the best, most honest Slav-Serbs. ... The pigs should be stopped in their tracks.” (lzabrani spisi, Zagreb, 1943)

* The term “Croatia” until 1918 denoted a territory much smaller than the present republic in southeast Europe; it excluded Dalmatia, Istria, the Quarnero with Fiume (Rijeka), Baranja and Medjimurje.

* By that time Kosovo had an Albanian plurality (not majority). The Ottoman defter, or register of land, for 1455 shows that the province of Kosovo was still overwhelmingly Slav (cf. Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, Itaca, NY, 1984, p. 294). Albanians had started to move into Kosovo in large numbers when the Slavs en masse migrated into Hungary (16-17 century).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[iv] See Gunther E. Rothenberg. The Military Border in Croatia 1740-1881. Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 1966.

[v] Ferdo Sisic, “O stogodisnjici Ilirskog pokreta.” Ljetopis Jugoslavenske akademije, Zagreb, Vol.49 (1936).

[vii] Ivo Lederer. Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963, Chapters 1 and 2.

[viii] For the text of the Declaration see e.g. Ferdo [i{i}, Ed. Dokumenti o postanku Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca. Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1920.

[x] Cf. Bogdan Krizman. “Stvaranje Jugoslavije” in Zbornik: Iz istorije Jugoslavije, 1918-1945. Belgrade, 1958, pp. 147-164.

"Tito’s “federalism” was but a misnomer for a grand game of divide et impera, in which the salient objective was to carve up the Serbs, over 40% of the population, into as many different units as possible..... The communist Yugoslav federation existed as a permanent mechanism of keeping old passions and animosities alive and well, and thus providing the ruling clique with legitimacy. “Were it not for us, you’d be at each others’ throats.” When the ruling clique disintegrated, in the absence of the dictator who died in 1980, the threat turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The most pernicious, and – as it turned out – the most permanent legacy of Tito’s system concerned the boundaries among the federal units. The Serbs had lived in one state since 1918, when Yugoslavia came into being. They reluctantly accepted Tito’s arbitrarily drawn internal boundaries between the six federal republics - which left almost one third of their nation outside Serbia-proper - on the grounds that the broader Yugoslav framework afforded them a measure of security from the repetition of the nightmare of 1941-45, when they were slaughtered en masse by their Croat and Muslim neighbors. But they were adamant that they would resist any attempt by the breakaway republics of Croatia and Bosnia to force over two million Serbs living in those republics to become minorities, literally overnight, in their own land."

It is clear that all the entities forming the Former Yugoslav Republic were artificial, and forced on the various constituent peoples.

What we have seen recently, and what will continue is the further unravelling of this monstrosity, and the continued denial by the Serbs, of the freedom of peoples to decide for themselves how they are governed.

You don't have a clue don't you!?

Let's make it simple for you:

Why should I be a minority in your country, when you can be a minority in my country!?

Try to find an answer and you will see things a lot clearer, regarding the wars in Croatia and Bosnia in the 90's. Always bear in mind the timeframe 1941-1945 and the NDH, which had THE most important psychological impact on the serbs in that region during the last decades.

The God who brought down Communism, and who now appears to have targeted Islam, also has something in mind for secular humanism. May we be found on His side.

Fascinating history but way too long. Can you summarize?

What I get off-hand just by skimming through is that any solution would have been less than optimal and frought with problems. The conclusion looks too strong, confident or militant for an account of such a tragic history. Given the complexities of the situation, any set of ideas or policies, including the author's own could lead to tragedy. It doesn't look like adopting Trifkovic's view would have made anything better.

It does seem that Yugoslavia was a mistake. But if these "civilizational blocks" are like tectonic plates, people will naturally ignore them when there aren't seismic troubles to warn them off. That is in the nature of things. And how would the author's ideas have prevented long and bloody conflicts over Bosnia between the competing civilzations?

I can guess what "idder cities" are, but what are "corifei"?

The answer is to draw the lines around coutries, to include like minded people. That is something the Serbs did with their ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and Croatia. They refused however to partition Kosovo, and instead tried to drive out all the ethnic Albanians.

You Serbs are slow learners, it is obviously painful for you.

Your refusal to accept that people of different ethnic groups have the right to decide their own government, in the land they inhabit, is a big mistake, and will lead to perpetual bloodshed.

Maybe thats what you want?

Your refusal to accept that people of different ethnic groups have the right to decide their own government, in the land theyinhabit, is a big mistake, and will lead to perpetual bloodshed. Maybe thats what you want?

If Serbia, (or Serbians) as you stated above refuse to accept people of different ethnic groups, then why is the population of Serbia 67% Serbian, while "enlightened and ethnically tolerant" Croatia and Slovenia enjoy an almost 100% ethnically pure state???!

LOL! I met Trifkovic a few times - very long winded.

Internationally recognized rules for recognition of a new state are 1: The support of the majority of the peoples on that terriroty; 2: The physical control over that territory; 3: The protection of its minorities.

The Serbs of Croatia were denied their right to self-determination. I have a number of official croatian letters (dated May '91) of dismissal for serbs who refused to sign the famous 'croatian oath of loyalty'. The Croats never at any point offered credible protection of its minorites, totally the opposite in fact.

The Serbs of Bosnia were denied their right to self-determination, despite make up ~32% of the population. Posters like Hoplite seem to believe that the Serbs must have been crazy not to trust the moslem fundamentalist Izetbegovic who in his first 9 months of the rotating Presidency visited by far an large only Molsem, cash rich countries. A real sign of his 'multi-ethinic' beliefs. I'm not suprised that the Croats didn't trust him either. Somehow, Serbia was expected to completely ignore their own bretheren and leave them in a state they did not wish to live in with a President who refused to leave office despite the rotating Presidency agreement.

It seems you clearly believe in the freedom for outside powers to economically rape whichever state/country they wish and do their best to guarantee a conflict that will produce the desired results.

VRN

Again, I was referring to Serbia proper, not Republika Srpska, (besides I personally know of serveral Serb and mixed-marriage families from Bosna who lost everything, some to the Moslems, some to the Croatians). Secondly, unlike Croatia, Serbia proper did not ethnically cleanse anyone nor force anyone to accept Serbian citizenship, in fact, during the Kosovo debacle, over 100,000 Albanians fled to Belgrade.

Why would the Serbs of Croatia "turn against" Croatia? Could it be because they lost jobs based on their nationality or religion? Maybe because their churches were burned and graves desecrated? Or could it be because of harassment from some leftover ustasa idiots?

I'm certainly not saying that all Croatians were behind or supported these actions, but these actions targeted the Serbian population of Croatia, not the Italians, Czechs or Slovaks.

I agree in general terms with your definition of the rules for recognition. However the Croat treatment of the Serbs in Croatia should not suprise me given the emnity of the two groups, and, I would have thought only reinforces the point about drawing national boundaries along ethnic lines, where there is mutual dislike.

The Dayton Agreement was a recognition of the partion of various bits of Yugoslavia, along mainly ethnic lines. I presume it was what Milosevic wanted, because he agreed to it, and the military actions of the Serbs were (broadly) designed to achieve that result.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.