History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  In such a society, in such a moment, serious political analysis is very difficult, and prognosis near impossible. Nonetheless, almost everyone I talk to agrees on three things. First, and self-evidently Milošević has survived the immediate consequences of defeat. There has not yet been the “Galtieri effect” hoped for by the opposition and by the West—and perhaps especially by the Clinton administration. (The Argentine dictator was, of course, deposed for losing the Falklands War.) There are shortages. People get up at five in the morning to line up for milk. They are very hard up. But there are far more power outages in NATO-occupied Priština than in Belgrade. Somehow, Milošević is getting through the winter. He has a favorable barter arrangement for Russian gas supplied via Hungary. He has received what is said to be $300 million of aid from China. He has probably cut some backdoor deals for fuel through Bulgaria. His policy of systematically selling off state property (including those Trepča mines in Kosovo/a) to cronies and foreign investors has apparently still left some minimal hard-currency reserves. And he does a cash-flow juggling act that consists in not paying each group of public-service workers for a month or two in turn.

  A slick advertising campaign on state television shows his regime heroically rebuilding the bridges and buildings that NATO destroyed. Serbia defies the world! These public works are paid for partly by not paying the workers at all, partly by printing money, and partly by using the country’s ample reserves of very cheap labor—including the approximately eight hundred thousand impoverished Serbian refugees from other parts of former Yugoslavia. (Thus, Milošević’s own destructive policies have created a pool of cheap labor for him to exploit.) Politically, the street demonstrations called by the Alliance for Change, a loose coalition of opposition parties, started with a bang in the summer; they have ended with a whimper. They have failed in their stated objective of securing early elections. The 1980s ended with the fall of Honecker, Husák, and Ceausescu; it would have been wonderful to end the 1990s with the fall of Milošević. But no.

  This does not mean, however, that Milošević will be Europe’s Saddam Hussein. For there is also widespread agreement that we have entered the last act of the Serbian tragedy, with Slobo and his powerful wife, Mira Marković, still playing Lord and Lady Macbeth. Two major opinion polls, the NDI one and another commissioned by the local Center for Policy Studies, show a vast majority of respondents blaming Milošević for the country’s woes and wanting him to go before the end of his term. There is much anecdotal evidence of the regime crumbling: border guards congratulating opposition figures on their television appearances and so on. Quite big rats seem to be preparing to leave the sinking ship so as to save their own skins and the wealth Milošević has enabled them to accumulate in return for their support. I talk to a banker formerly close to the leading couple and—pulling at a large cigar as he weighs how far he dares go in conversation with a Westerner—he describes Serbia as being in a “pretransition period.”

  Unfortunately, the third thing on which all local observers agree is that this transition is most unlikely to be peaceful. One must distinguish between the rational and the real. Rational projections suggest, for example, that the Alliance for Change, a fragile coalition of some of the more liberal opposition parties, might win popular support by joining in a “Trilateral Commission” with the United States and the European Union to distribute Western aid. “See, we can deliver!” they would say. “Oil to opposition-run cities [the so-called Energy for Democracy plan], supplies for a hospital here, a school there.” Rational projections suggest elections—local and federal ones have to be held in 2000, the crucial republican ones in 2001 at the latest. The opposition parties have long been hopelessly disunited, and their most prominent leaders, Vuk Drašković and Zoran Djindjić, are in different ways widely discredited. Even so, Milošević’s Socialists, his wife’s United Yugoslav Left (JUL) party, and their extreme-nationalist coalition partner, the Radicals, would almost certainly not win enough votes to form another government. But there the rational ends and the real begins. For how would Milošević peacefully concede power, even assuming he was prepared to? And where would he then go? The Hague?

  Milošević is now more dangerous than ever. Drašković suggests to me that until this year, Milošević was still restrained by fear of the West’s reaction. Now the West has done its worst—it has bombed him—and he has little more to fear. On the other hand, because of the public indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (“The Hague Tribunal”), he has no safe exit. He has his back to the wall. Wounded, cornered tigers are liable to strike out—as he has. The universities, wellsprings of the great student protests of 1996—1997, have been brought firmly back under regime control. He used the pretext of the war to seize the assets of some of the most important independent media, such as Radio B92— though the indomitable Veran Matić now runs a Radio B292. The remaining independent media are being punished with huge fines under a draconian public-information law. Opposition activists are regularly arrested and roughed up.

  What is more, Serbian politics are becoming a matter of life and death. During the war, the newspaper editor Slavko Ćuruvija, once close to Milošević’s wife, Mira Marković, but subsequently an outspoken critic, was gunned down outside his home. In early October, the brother-in-law of Vuk Drašković was killed, together with three of Drašković’s bodyguards, in a highly suspicious traffic accident. Some speculate that this was a factional security service or even a gangland killing, since that brother-in-law was in charge of the lucrative and corrupt Belgrade city construction office. Drašković, however, has denounced the Radicals and Mira Marković’s JUL party (but not Milošević’s Socialist Party) as being responsible for “state terrorism.” His Serbian Renewal Movement has formed armed self-defense units from among its own members.

  He clearly fears for his own life, as does Ognjen Pribičević, a friend and former member of my Oxford college who threw in his lot with Drašković during the war. I sit with Pribičević in a restaurant in central Belgrade and he says, “I don’t think they’ll shoot me here, in this restaurant, but perhaps something will happen on the road, another ‘traffic accident.’” He is meant to chair a talk I propose to give in the hope of engaging Belgrade intellectuals in dialogue. He arrives five minutes late and says breathlessly to Aleksa Djilas, “I can’t do this now, the armed struggle has begun!” This is one of the more interesting excuses I have heard for being unable to chair a talk. It turns out there’s a tense standoff with police who have come to interrogate three party leaders about their statement denouncing “state terrorism.”

  Well, the armed struggle does not actually begin—and old Belgrade hands say they have heard it all before, a hundred times—pre-revolutionary hysteria as a way of life. But that does not mean that violent change will not one day, finally, happen. There are widely differing speculations about what the spark for revolution might be. Drašković suggests it might be an attempt by Milošević to reassert control over the last remaining constituent part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Montenegro, which is carefully carving out its own de facto autonomy. The next day, there is a confrontation between Serbian soldiers and Montenegrin police at Montenegro’s main airport. Yet the shrewd and cautious Montenegrin president, Milo Djukanovic, has again and again managed to avoid a showdown in which many of his people, identifying themselves as Serbs, might actually side with Serbia.

  Dragoslav Avramović, the wily old economist who once worked for Milošević and now leads the Alliance for Change, speculates that the spark might be another bout of hyperinflation. He says the current rate of 40 to 50 percent a month, though desperately difficult for anyone without a hard-currency income, is just about sustainable. But if it passes 100 percent a month, then the balloon goes up. Zoran Djindjić of the Democratic Party thinks no one can predict what the spark would be. After all, one of the Serbian risings against Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century began when an Ottoman soldier shot a
Serbian boy lining up for water at a well.

  What one can identify are the many groups waiting to act, when the moment comes. Students are organized outside the universities, in a movement called Resistance. One of their leaders tells me they are conserving their energies for the right occasion and deliberately focusing on a single demand: “Slobo must go.” There are the opposition parties, of course. Then there are several opposition-controlled cities. I visit one, Čačak, and talk to its popular mayor, Velimir Ilić, a private entrepreneur built like an ox, who survived the war hiding in the woods to escape Milošević’s security men. He tells me, “We’re waiting for Belgrade.” There are the independent media, including an impressive network of regional television stations. Then there are the opportunists—politely called pragmatists—who are held to be especially numerous in Milošević’s own Socialist Party. There is the mass discontent evidenced in the opinion polls, as well as the miserable refugees—although their revolutionary potential may be doubted. Western observers always speculate about a possible army coup, but there is scant external evidence of that possibility. On the other hand, the incidents involving Čuruvuja and Drašković do suggest a real fragmentation of the security apparatus. Who knows if one day their guns could not be turned against Milošević himself?

  Asked what the West can do to increase the rather small chances of a change that is both swift and peaceful, people from all points of the political spectrum join in making two firm statements. First, Milošević must be given a way out. They hate him. They wish him dead or in prison. Morally, they think the Hague indictment is right (though some of them say the recently deceased Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, and the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic, should have been indicted, too). But politically it is proving disastrous. Milošević has nowhere to go, so they fear he will fight “to the last Serb.” Even the radical young student leader says Milošević must, instead, be offered some safe exit. With the fantasies of limitless American Machiavellianism that are rife here, those I talk to conjure images of some new Ollie North covertly spiriting Slobo off to a Caribbean hideaway in an unmarked Stealth fighter.

  Second, everyone says that sanctions are counterproductive. Sanctions against the regime, yes. Barring some six hundred people associated with the regime from getting visas to Western countries has been an excellent move. And they strongly approve of the steps taken to block the foreign bank accounts of Milošević and his associates. But sanctions against the people only increase the possibilities for illegal earnings by Milošević’s cronies. They impoverish ordinary Serbs. Above all, they reinforce the very image that his propaganda has so successfully exploited for so long: innocent, heroic, suffering Serbia, a Christ among nations, persecuted by the whole world.

  So let fresh air in. Let people travel again. Then they can see for themselves how Milošević has ruined their country while all their neighbors have moved on. (“The most painful thing for me,” says one Serb who does travel, “is visiting the other former Yugoslav republics. Why, even Skopje looks better than Belgrade.”) Wouldn’t lifting sanctions enable Milošević to say, “Look, you can have me and the West”? No, they unanimously insist, quite the reverse. After all, the biggest challenge to his regime so far—the demonstrations of 1996—1997—came after the easing of UN sanctions in 1996.

  I don’t see how we can even contemplate doing the first of these things—giving Milošević a way out—however strong the political logic. This would undermine one of the pillars of the international liberal order we are trying to build for the twenty-first century. But I think we can and should do the second—lift the sanctions against the people—as many West European governments are inclined to. This is not a replay of old cold-war arguments, with West Europeans being soft on the Soviet Union out of cravenness and material self-interest. I have always felt that we should be guided by domestic oppositions in the application of sanctions. That’s why sanctions were right against Poland in the 1980s, where Solidarity wanted them, and against South Africa, where the ANC wanted them, and are right against Burma today, where Aung San Suu Kyi emphatically supports them. By the same token, they should be lifted here. But that would mean the Clinton administration admitting, in an election year, that it had got something wrong.

  4

  I make the long drive back north to Budapest, through the rich, dark fields of the Vojvodina plain. After waiting hours at the frontier for that little exit stamp, I face another shock: neat, modern highways; tollbooths with the prices already shown in Euros; American-style out-of-town shopping centers; a gleaming modern airport. The West!

  This is no Huntingtonian frontier between clashing “civilizations.” Eighty years ago, the Vojvodina was part of pre-Trianon Hungary. It belongs to exactly the same historical civilization. Nor is this a cold-war divide. For much of the cold war the people living on the Yugoslav side of this frontier were in many ways better placed than those on the Hungarian side. No, this shocking contrast is a product of the politics of one decade: the broadly positive politics of Central Europe and the terrible politics of former Yugoslavia.

  The consequences of those terrible politics are nearly played out. Slovenia is already sailing west. Croatia, after the death of Tudjman, has a chance to follow it. The domestic tragedy of Serbia has still to reach its bitter end. We also have yet to see whether tiny Montenegro is pushed to independence or if it can make a future in a loose federation with a reformed Serbia. Equally, we shall see whether the greater autonomy promised to the Albanians in western Macedonia by Boris Trajkovski, the successful candidate in Macedonia’s recent presidential elections, spells stabilization or further disintegration for that still imperiled country. Bosnia remains an ethnically divided international protectorate.

  I have argued for several years now that this separating into small states or substate units with clear ethnic majorities, driven though it has been by manipulative and often cynical postcommunist nationalism, nonetheless has powerful precedents and counterparts in the rest of Europe. Elsewhere in Europe, too, people generally prefer to be ruled by those they consider somehow “of their own kind.” Only once thus constituted, in some version of a nation-state, are they prepared (up to a point) to come together in larger regional and all-European units. A realistic liberal internationalism for the twenty-first century needs to take on board the insights of liberal nationalists from the nineteenth.

  So there is, alas, a logic in the madness. Yet I come away from this journey feeling, more than ever, the futile folly of it. It’s not as if these nations want to live in quite different ways in their different houses. What you find in each individual, small, battered, impoverished part of the Balkans are people—especially young people— looking at exactly the same Western advertisements, worshiping the same Western pop stars and fashion models, watching the same Western films and television shows, yearning for the same Western way of life. This is true in Serbia, despite the anti-Western sentiments, just as much as in Kosova, where the West is liberator-king.

  My judge/driver/interpreter in Kosova happens also to be the president of the leading Priština basketball club, and on my first evening there he invited me to a match. Players wore smart Adidas gear. Young fans had baseball caps, T-shirts, scarves, and flags. They jumped up and down, clapped rhythmically, chanted “olé, olé, olé,olé,” and did all the other things they had obviously seen Western fans do on television (although I think they had gotten slightly confused between basketball and football rites).

  I sat in the freezing stadium and mused on the madness of these small and tiny nations, who have spent years fighting and murdering each other so that, in the end, they can all go off to their separate little patches of land, and there—each and all of them—try to live just like Americans.

  CHRONOLOGY

  1999

  DECEMBER. Russian forces continue their action in Chechnya, working toward the capital, Grozny.

  5 DECEMBER. Boris Trajkovski is confirmed as the new president of Macedoni
a, after a partial reballot to remedy electoral fraud.

  10 DECEMBER. Croatian president Franjo Tudjman dies.

  10-12 DECEMBER. EU summit in Helsinki agrees to open membership negotiations with Turkey, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, and Malta and to create a European rapid-reaction force. British prime minister Tony Blair clashes with his European colleagues over the ban on British beef and a proposed Europe-wide tax.

  19 DECEMBER. Russian parliamentary elections give victory to the pro-Kremlin forces, although the communists remain the largest single party.

  31 DECEMBER. Russian president Boris Yeltsin announces his early retirement, due to age and ill health, and names Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as acting president and his chosen successor.

  ENVOI

  THIS BOOK IS A KALEIDOSCOPE. I HOPE A FEW TRUTHS ABOUT EUROPE emerge from these mirrored images of colored fragments, constantly rearranged into different patterns as time’s hand twists the tube. Perhaps one truth is that Europe is itself a kaleidoscope. The real Europe, I mean: a jagged, diverse continent of more than six hundred million individual men and women, speaking more than fifty languages, living in more than thirty-five states, making food, love, and politics in countless subtly different ways.

  Such a book can no more end in a summary than a kaleidoscope can be turned into an organization chart. History of the present must acknowledge its own limitations. Systematic conclusions need a greater distance of time. Since the privilege of historians of the present is to record what we ourselves see and hear, our favored tools are fine brushes and smaller canvases.