John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia As History: Twice There Was a Country, 2Nd Ed

Book Reviews

John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 487 pp. $24.95.

Reviewed by Veljko Vujacib, Oberlin College

The wars of Yugoslav succession have resulted in a ºood of academic and journalistic publications. With a few notable exceptions, these works have concentrated on con- temporary aspects of the conºict, often at the expense of historical analysis of the long-term causes of Yugoslav disintegration. The second edition of John Lampe’s Yu- goslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country admirably ªlls this gap, providing a rel- iable, judicious, balanced, and clearly written guide to the histories of the two Yugoslavias—the interwar kingdom and Josip Broz Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia. By adding a new chapter on the wars of Yugoslav succession, Lampe brings his narrative all the way up to the intervention in 1999 by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) against the “rump” Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The book is divided into twelve chapters, each focusing on a distinct period of pre-Yugoslav or Yugoslav history. The ªrst three chapters cover the pre-Yugoslav period, concentrating on the indispensable geographical background; the legacies of the medieval Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian states; Ottoman and Habsburg rule in vari- ous Yugoslav lands; the birth of the Serbian, Croatian, and Yugoslav ideas; and the period of “new divisions” and emerging “Yugoslav ties” (1903–1914). The next three chapters detail the troubled legacy of World War I and the history of the interwar Kingdom. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the dissolution of the Yugoslav state in World War II and the ascendance of Tito’s Communists to power. Chapters 9 and 10tell the story of the ascent and gradual demise of the postwar Communist order. The ªnal two chapters examine the rise of divisive ethnic politics and the wars of Yugoslav succession. Lampe carefully distances himself from the view that “age-old antagonisms” are at the root of present conºicts. He rejects the self-justiªcations of the sundry nationalists from former Yugoslavia, as well as those of Western politicians eager to use the phantom of “primordial hatreds” to avoid political and military involvement in the Balkans (p. 4). Lampe also avoids the temptation to characterize Yugoslavia as an “artiªcial state” created by the Versailles settlement and to depict the Yugoslav idea as somehow doomed from the beginning (pp. 6–8). Yet, by making readers aware of the international, political, economic, and ethnic constraints faced by the “two Yugoslavias,” Lampe draws attention to the troubled historical legacy of a state twice united and twice divided in the twentieth century. Lampe convincingly demonstrates that an emphasis on historical legacies need not result in the fallacy of retrospective determinism. By preserving a sense of open- ness and contingency in the historical process, Lampe not only provides–in his all too modest self-characterization–a much needed historical overview of the two Yugoslavias and their “strengths and weaknesses” (p. xiv), but also critically synthesizes existing scholarship, adds much new information, dispels the self-justifying myths of

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nationalist Yugoslav historians, and tells the story of “missed opportunities” for a uniªed Yugoslav state. As an economic historian, Lampe is predictably at his best in demonstrating the economic obstacles to Yugoslav integration (pp. 117–121, 145–154, 315–322, 333–341) and the long-term consequences of regional economic disparities for suc- cessive Yugoslav crises. For this reader, at least, one of the most striking regularities that emerge from Lampe’s long view of economic history is the continuing rural over- population, agricultural backwardness, and comparatively high illiteracy rates in the long southeastern stretch of the country, extending all the way from the Serb- populated regions of Croatia and the long Dalmatian hinterland to parts of Bosnia and Hercegovina, Montenegro, southern Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia—an economic reality that Communist modernization did not alter to the desired extent (see the map on p. 297). Because these are some of the regions that played a central role in the wars of Yugoslav succession as well as World War II, whether as focal points of ini- tial conºicts (Kosovo, Knin in Croatia), recruitment spots for armed volunteers (Hercegovina), or loci of traumatic collective memories of historical “ethnic cleansing” (Krajina, Hercegovina, eastern Bosnia), one wonders to what extent the persistence of economic backwardness and its cultural side-effects (illiteracy, large extended families, the notion of the “limited good,” etc.) helped prepare the social and psychological ground for the wars of the 1990s in these regions. Another virtue of Lampe’s account is his rehabilitation of the much neglected history of the interwar Yugoslav kingdom. Contrary to the widespread stereotype of “old Yugoslavia” as a simple extension of “Greater Serbia,” Lampe shows that the political and bureaucratic domination of Serbian elites in the interwar state did not nec- essarily extend to the ªnancial ªeld (largely dominated by the Zagreb banks) or to the sphere of culture in which much productive give-and-take took place among the Europeanized intellectual elites, especially Serbs and Croats (pp. 145–149, 191–194). Equally dispassionate is Lampe’s analysis of the traumatic legacy of World War II and the Communist takeover of power that—despite Tito’s subsequent “liberal” reputa- tion—was achieved with a characteristically Stalinist “settling of accounts” (pp. 227–229). Finally, Lampe’s account of Tito’s Yugoslavia persuasively demonstrates the country’s persistent economic problems and its continued dependence on Western aid. Lampe’s sobering ªgures dispel the mythical Yugoslav self-image of a largely self-sustainable nonaligned country, a hard lesson that today’s post-Yugoslavs (the Slovenes excepted) will have to assimilate as part of their market-learning experi- ence. What were the critical junctures when things went wrong in the two Yugoslavias? Here Lampe is more cautiously optimistic than most other observers about the prospects of the ªrst Yugoslavia. He argues that the imminent federalization of the state on the eve of World War II might have allowed a reorganized Yugoslav kingdom to survive in a less traumatic international environment than the Nazi-dominated Europe of 1941 (p. 194). In Lampe’s view, the second Yugoslavia reached a critical juncture in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the devolution of central authority and economic

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liberalization opened the prospects for a new “historic compromise” between modern- izing elites in Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia. In particular, Lampe regrets that the Cro- atian crisis of 1969–1971 gave Tito and Edvard Kardelj an excuse for removing not only “the Croatian nationalists” but also the “Serbian liberals” and the “Slovene tech- nocrats”—elites arguably less interested in “ethnic politics” than in the advance- ment of their respective “republican causes” through economic modernization (pp. 305–311). Tito’s purge paved the way not only for the reimposition of ideological dogmatism, but also for an unsustainable “confederal constitution,” Kardelj’s costly experiments with “more self-management,” and a system of indirect representation whose mysterious workings no one in Yugoslavia in the 1970s (this reviewer included) could even begin to understand. Another important long-term factor of Yugoslav stability that Lampe sees miss- ing in the last decade of the country’s existence was Slovenia’s role as a balancing actor in the Yugoslav mosaic of nations: “Without Slovenia to create a broader balance be- yond that between Serbs and Croats, the second Yugoslavia’s framework of six federal republics and two autonomous provinces could not easily survive” (p. 3). This somewhat vague generalization is questionable. Whereas Slovenian loyalty to the interwar kingdom indeed played an important role in isolating Croatian nationalism and but- tressing the central state, the pivotal problem of both Yugoslavias remained the persistent inability of the elites of the two largest nations–the Serbs and the Croats–to strike a historic compromise regarding the character and structure of the Yugoslav state. In all likelihood, a stable compromise between the largest nations would have prevented Yugoslav disintegration, regardless of the positions taken by the elites of “smaller nationalities”–even the economically, culturally, and strategically important Slovenes. Finally, what about the main culprits—Slobodan Milosevib and the eternally “somewhat less guilty” Franjo Tudjman? Here Lampe has relatively little to say, largely satisfying himself with a rather neutral account of the evolution of ethnic politics and the descent into war in the 1990s. Although this sober view is a welcome reminder that moralism is no substitute for analysis, the magnitude of the disaster calls for more. To a professional sociologist and former Yugoslav citizen such as myself, who spent most of his youth in Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s, it is still somewhat of a mystery: How could so many Yugoslavs—Serbs and Croats especially, but also Bosnian Moslems and even the “sober Slovenes”—ªre guns so easily at those with whom, until the day before, they shared cigarettes and drank beers during breaks in their Yugoslav National Army training? Here, aside from the obvious targets—the “evil leaders” and their “hate-media”—much blame must be placed on the Titoist legacy with its dogmatic treatment of history, its conspiracy theories, its endless search for internal enemies, its substitution of slogans for policies, its reliance on the bought-off comprador nomenklaturas in the eternally subsidized underdeveloped regions (Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia), its brazen lies about brotherhood and unity, its sterile political rituals, its narrow intellectual horizons, and its simple lack of a plain liberal education.

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