Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  SIX JOURNEYS

  CHAPTER 1

  CROATIA AND SERBIA

  THE ANCIEN REGIME

  Wild strawberries were served in a silver cup at breakfast, I remember, followed by hot rolls with apricot jam. The dining room looked over the lake, and when the window was open you could feel the mountain air sweeping across the water, across the white linen tablecloth and then across your face.

  The hotel was called the Toplice, on the shores of Lake Bled, in Slovenia. The diplomatic corps spent the summer there, in attendance upon the dictator who took up residence across the lake. My father, like the other diplomats, came to gossip and take the waters. Every morning, he bathed in the heated pools beneath the hotel. I played tennis, ate wild strawberries, rowed on the lake, and conceived a passion for an unapproachable Swedish girl of twelve. Such are my ancien régime memories, and they are from Communist Yugoslavia.

  I remember an evening listening from the bottom of our dining room as the then foreign minister, Ko˘ca Popović, suavely smoked cigarettes in an ivory holder and told how his partisan unit had “liquidated the Chetniks,” the Serbs who had fought on Hitler’s side at the end of the war. I had never heard the word “liquidated” used like that before.

  It was obvious, even to me, that the Communist elite had won power not merely by defeating a foreign invader but by winning a vicious civil war. The reality of Tito’s police state was just as obvious. We lived in Dedinje, a hillside suburb overlooking Belgrade, only several hundred meters from Tito’s residence. Wherever you walked, there were men in plain clothes, strolling about or whispering into walkietalkies. Tito himself was the hidden god of the whole system. With his sleekly groomed hair, permanent suntan, shiny silk suit, and black onyx ring on his finger, he resembled nothing so much, my father said, as a prosperous south German refrigerator salesman.

  Obviously, he was more imaginative and sinister than that. I remember how, on a cruise in the Adriatic, my parents kept hiding a book from the crew, stowing it under their bunk, locking it in their luggage. The book turned out to be Milovan Djilas’s The New Class. Djilas, Tito’s companion in arms, was still in Tito’s jail for denouncing his dictatorial tendencies.

  We traveled everywhere in the Yugoslavia of the late 1950s—through Bosnian hill villages, where children swarmed up to the car, barefoot and in rags; to the great mosque of Sarajevo, where I removed my shoes and knelt and watched old men pressing their foreheads on the carpets and whispering their prayers; to the Dalmatian islands and beaches, then unvisited by Western tourists; to Lake Bled in Slovenia. Parts of southern Serbia, central Bosnia, and western Hercegovina were so poor that it was not clear how ordinary people survived at all. Ljubljana and Zagreb, by contrast, were neat, prosperous Austro-Hungarian towns that seemed to have nothing in common with the bony, bare hinterlands of central Yugoslavia.

  At the time, all expression of economic resentment, together with nationalist consciousness itself, came under Tito’s ban. The society marched forward, willingly or unwillingly, under the banner of “brotherhood and unity.” To call yourself a Croat or Serb first and a Yugoslav second was to risk arrest as a nationalist and chauvinist.

  I had no idea how complicated and ambiguous the division between national and Yugoslav identity actually was. I knew, for example, that Metod, my tennis coach in Bled, always called himself, first and foremost, a Slovenian. I remember him saying bitterly that he hated serving in the Yugoslav National Army, because both he and his brother were ragged by the Serbs for being Slovene.

  Was that the only time I saw the cracks that were to become fissures? I think so. For everywhere else I remember people who told me, happily, that they were Yugoslavs. In retrospect, I see that was there at the most hopeful moment. Tito was still lionized for having kept the country out of Stalin’s empire; there were the first signs of the economic boom of the 1960s; soon to come was the liberalization of travel, which allowed millions of Yugoslavs to work abroad and for a time made Yugoslavia the freest of all the Eastern European Communist countries.

  I hold on to my ancien régime memories. Everyone now says the descent into hell was inevitable. Nothing seemed less likely at the time. My childhood tells me that nothing is inevitable: that is what makes what did happen tragic.

  THE NARCISSISM OF MINOR DIFFERENCE

  As Balkan nationalists tell it, their history is their fate. Croats will explain, for example, that the root cause of the bloodshed in the Balkans is that they are “essentially” Catholic, European, and Austro-Hungarian in origin, while Serbs are “essentially” Orthodox, Byzantine, and Slav, with an added tinge of Turkish cruelty and indolence. The Sava and Danube Rivers, which serve as borders between Croatia and Serbia, once demarcated the boundary between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.

  If this historical fault line is emphasized often enough, the conflict between Serbs and Croats can be read off as inevitable. Yet it is not how the past dictates to the present but how the present manipulates the past that is decisive in the Balkans.

  Freud once argued that the smaller the real difference between two peoples, the larger it was bound to loom in their imagination. He called this effect the narcissism of minor difference. Its corollary must be that enemies need each other to remind themselves of who they really are. A Croat, thus, is someone who is not a Serb. A Serb is someone who is not a Croat. Without hatred of the other, there would be no clearly defined national self to worship and adore.

  In Croatia, Franjo Tudjman’s ruling HDZ (Croatian Democratic Alliance) party presents itself as a Western-style political movement on the model of the Bavarian Christian Democrats. Actually, the Tudjman state resembles the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević much more than either resembles anything on the Western European parliamentary model. They are both post-Communist one-party states, democratic only in the sense that their leaders’ power derives from their skill as manipulators of popular emotion.

  An outsider is struck, not by the differences between Serbs and Croats, but by how similar they seem to be. They both speak the same language, give or take a few hundred words, and have shared the same village way of life for centuries. While one is Catholic, the other Orthodox, urbanization and industrialization have reduced the salience of confessional differences. Nationalist politicians on both sides took the narcissism of minor difference and turned it into a monstrous fable according to which their own side appeared as blameless victims, the other side as genocidal killers. All Croats became Ustashe assassins; all Serbs became Chetnik beasts. Such rhetorical preliminaries, needless to say, were an essential precondition of the slaughter that followed.

  Yet what remains truly difficult to understand about the Balkan tragedy is how such nationalist lies ever managed to take root. For ordinary people know that they are lies: all Croats are not Ustashe; all Serbs are not Chetniks. Even as they use these phrases, people know they are not true. It cannot be repeated too often that these people were neighbors, friends, and spouses, not inhabitants of different ethnic planets.

  A nationalist minority on both sides went to work on their deeply intertwined common past, persuading all and sundry, including outsiders, that Serbs and Croats have been massacring each other since time immemorial. History has no such lesson to teach. In fact, the protagonists were kept apart for much of their past, in separate empires and kingdoms. It was only the assassination of Croat politicians in the Parliament in Belgrade in 1928 that set off the slide into ethnic warfare during the Second World War. While the present conflict is certainly a continuation of the civil war of 1941-45, this explains little, for one still has to account for the nearly fifty years of ethnic peace in between. It was not merely a truce. Even sworn enemies on either side still cannot satisfactorily explain why it broke down.

  Moreover, it is a fallacy to regard either this war or the civil war of 1941-45 as the product of some uniquely Balkan viciousness. All the delusions that have turned neighbors into enemies are imports of Western European origin. Mode
rn Serbian nationalism dates back to an impeccably Byronic style of national uprising against the Turks. Likewise, the nineteenth-century Croatian nationalist ideologue Ante Starčević derived the idea of an ethnically pure Croatian state indirectly from the German Romantics. 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.

  Likewise, even genocide in the Balkans is not a local specialty but an importation from the grand Western European tradition. Ante Pavelić’s wartime Ustashe regime, which Serbs mistakenly regard as the true face of Croatian nationalism, couldn’t have lasted a day in office without the backing of the German Nazi regime, not to mention the tacit approval of that eminently European authority the Catholic Church.

  In sum, therefore, we are making excuses for ourselves when we dismiss the Balkans as a sub-rational zone of intractable fanaticism. And we are ending the search for explanation just when it should begin if we assert that local ethnic hatreds were so rooted in history that they were bound to explode into nationalist violence. On the contrary, these people had to be transformed from neighbors into enemies.

  Thomas Hobbes would have understood Yugoslavia. What Hobbes would have said, having lived through religious civil war himself, is that when people are sufficiently afraid, they will do anything. There is one type of fear more devastating in its impact than any other: the systemic fear that arises when a state begins to collapse. Ethnic hatred is the result of the terror that arises when legitimate authority disintegrates.

  Tito achieved the national unification of each of the six major south Slav peoples. He understood that a federal state was the only peaceful means to satisfy the national aspirations of each people. For each ethnic group to unify on its own, they would each have had to initiate the forcible deportation of populations. As much as a quarter of both the Croat and Serb populations have always lived outside the borders of their republics. Tito created an intricate ethnic balance which, for example, reduced Serbian influence at the heart of the federal system in Belgrade, while promoting Serbs to positions of power in Croatia.

  Tito’s containment of nationalism, built as it was on a personal dictatorship, could never have survived beyond his death. Even by the early 1970s, his socialist rhetoric of “brotherhood and unity” was falling on deaf ears. In 1974, he compromised with nationalism, allowing the republics greater autonomy in the new constitution. By the end of his reign, the League of Communists, instead of counterbalancing the ethnic clientism among the elites in the republics, was itself fragmenting along ethnic lines.

  This fragmentation was inevitable given Tito’s failure to allow the emergence of civic, rather than ethnic-based, multi-party competition. Had Tito allowed a citizens’ politics in the 1960s or 1970s, a non-ethnic principle of political affiliation might have taken root. Tito always insisted his was a Communism with a difference. In the end, his regime was no different from the other Communist autocracies of Eastern Europe. By failing to allow a plural political culture to mature, Tito ensured that the fall of his regime turned into the collapse of the entire state structure. In the ruins, his heirs and successors turned to the most atavistic principles of political mobilization in order to survive.

  If Yugoslavia no longer protected you, perhaps your fellow Croats, Serbs or Slovenes might. Fear, more than conviction, made unwilling nationalists of ordinary people. But most people did not want it to happen; most people knew, if they drew back for a second, that rushing to the protection of their ethnic group would only hasten the disintegration of their common life.

  Ethnic difference per se was not responsible for the nationalistic politics that emerged in the Yugoslavia of the 1980s. Consciousness of ethnic difference turned into nationalist hatred only, when the surviving Communist elites, beginning with Serbia, began manipulating nationalist emotions in order to cling to power.

  This is worth emphasizing, since most outsiders assume that all Balkan peoples are incorrigibly nationalistic. In fact, many people bitterly lament the passing of Yugoslavia, precisely because it was a state that once gave them room to define themselves in non-nationalist ways. In a poignant and bitter essay, “Overcome by Nationhood,” the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić describes how, until the late 1980s, she had always defined herself in terms of her education, profession, gender, and personality. It was only the maddened atmosphere of the Croatian-Serbian war of 1991 that finally stripped her of all of these defining marks of identity except simply being a Croatian. What is true of an intellectual cannot be less true of village people. The nationalist language games of the elite only appeared to give a voice to their fear and their pride. In reality, nationalism ended up imprisoning everyone in the Balkans in the fiction of “pure” ethnic identity. Those with multiple identities—for example, from mixed marriages—were forced to choose between inherited and adopted families, and thus between two fused elements of their own selves.

  Historically, nationalism and democracy have gone hand in hand. Nationalism, after all, is the doctrine that a people have a right to rule themselves, and that sovereignty reposes in them alone. The tragedy for the Balkans was that, when democracy at last became possible, the only language that existed to mobilize people into a shared social project was the rhetoric of ethnic difference. Any possibility of a civic, as opposed to ethnic, democracy had been strangled at birth by the Communist regime.

  Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević was the first Yugoslav politician to break the Titoist taboo on popular mobilization of ethnic consciousness. Milošević portrayed himself both as the defender of Yugoslavia against the secessionist ambitions of Croatia and Slovenia and as the avenger of the wrongs done to Serbia by that very Yugoslavia.

  Milošević’s program, first set out in the Serbian Academy of Arts and Science Memorandum of 1986 and consistently followed ever since, has been to build a Greater Serbia on the ruins of Tito’s Yugoslavia. If the other republics would not agree to a new Yugoslavia dominated by the Serbs, Milošević was prepared to incite the Serbian minorities in Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina to rise up and demand Serbian protection. These minorities served as Milošević’s Sudeten Germans—pretext and justification of his expansionary design.

  So much is obvious. More complicated is the relation between the Milošević project and Serbian opinion. It would make matters simpler if we could demonize the Serbs as incorrigibly nationalistic and assume that Milošević was merely responding to their ethnic paranoia. The reality is much more complicated. While there were extreme nationalist elements, like the Chetniks, still seething with resentment at Tito’s campaign against their wartime leader, Draža Mihajlović, the majority of urban Serbs in the early 1980s displayed little nationalistic paranoia, and even less interest in their distant rural brethren in Knin, Pale, Kosovo, or western Slavonia.

  What needs to be explained, therefore, is why most ordinary Serbs’ general indifference to the Serbian question turned into rabid anxiety that Serbs in the diaspora were about to be annihilated by genocidal Croatians and fundamentalist Muslims. Milošević certainly exploited “the Serbian question” to serve his demagogic ends. But the Serbian question was not of Milošević’s making. It arose inevitably out of the collapse of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Once the multi-ethnic state disintegrated, every national group outside its republic’s borders suddenly found itself an endangered national minority. As the largest such group, the Serbs felt particularly vulnerable to the rise of Croatian nationalism.

  While the Croats, like the Slovenes, professed to support the emergence of a loosely confederal Yugoslavia, in reality both republics were set on the course of independence by the late 1980s. The drive toward national self-determination was fueled by economic resentment. As the bills came in for Yugoslavia’s expansion in the 1960s and 1
970s and its foreign indebtedness increased, the two richest republics, Slovenia and Croatia, became resentful that their economic success was creamed off to pay for backward Bosnia and “Balkan” Serbia. Both Tito’s suppression of the Croatian spring of 1970 and Miloševí c’s expansionist behavior—especially Serbia’s absorption of the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina— convinced Croatian and Slovenian nationalists that they had no future inside a federal Yugoslavia. Independence strongly appealed to the local intelligentsia and the Communist elite: it would make them big fish in a small pond.

  Croatians claimed the right of national self-determination, and they soon had influential backing from the newly reunited Germany. But no one in Germany or the European Community scrutinized with sufficient care the implications of Croatian independence for the rights of the 600,000-strong Serbian minority.

  Croatia, in its independence constitution, described itself as the state of the Croatian nation, with non-Croatians defined as protected minorities. While most Croats sincerely believed that their state offered full rights to the Serbian minority, Serbs regarded themselves not as a minority but as a constitutionally protected nation, equal to the Croats. When the Croats revived theŠahovnica, the red-and-white checkered shield, as their new flag, Serbs took one look and believed the Ustashe had returned. The Šahovnica was both an innocently traditional Croat emblem and also the flag of the wartime regime that had exterminated a large, if still undetermined, number of Serbs. When Serbs were dismissed from the Croatian police and from the judiciary in the summer and autumn of 1990, the Serbian minority concluded they were witnessing the return of an ethnic state, with a genocidal past.