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10 Obliterating Heterogeneity Through Peace Nationalisms, States and Wars, in the Balkans

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10 Obliterating Heterogeneity Through Peace Nationalisms, States and Wars, in the Balkans Comp. by: SivaSankar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 10 Title Name: HALLandMAEEVIC Date:5/11/12 Time:08:25:52 Page Number: 255 10 Obliterating heterogeneity through peace Nationalisms, states and wars, in the Balkans Siniša Maleševic´ Despite general recognition that not all nationalisms end up in violence and that wars can be waged without nationalist hysteria there isatendencytoassumethatnationalismandwarfarearedeeply linked. Moreover many social analysts believe that the most important research task is to explain the causal relationship between the two. Hence some gauge the impact of warfare on the development of nationalist sentiments while others are concerned with the question “What types of nationalism are most likely to cause war?” (Van Evera 1994: 5). In this chapter I argue that nationalism and warfare have a very complex and unpredictable relationship that can neither be adequately captured, nor properly understood, by focusing on the narrow causal connection between the two. Rather than causing one another or being a key effect of each other’s actions, both nationalism and war emerge, develop, and expand as the outcome of many longue durée processes. Hence, in order to explain the relationship between warsandnationalismsitiscrucialto analyze the long-term organiza- tional and ideological transformations that have shaped the world in the last two hundred years. In this context I argue that (coercive/ bureaucratic and ideologized) periods of peace matter much more for the growth, expansion, and popular reception of nationalism than times of war. Nationalisms often witnessed in war contexts usually have not brought about these wars, nor have they been forged on the battlefields. Instead, both wars and nationalisms are multifaceted processes that emerge, develop, and are sustained by the continuous organizational and ideological scaffoldings created and enhanced in times of prolonged peace. Since the Balkan Peninsula is often per- ceived as the epitome of a region teeming with nationalism and war- fare I use this case to assess the strength of my general argument. 255 Comp. by: SivaSankar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 10 Title Name: HALLandMAEEVIC Date:5/11/12 Time:08:25:52 Page Number: 256 256 Siniša Maleševic´ Has nationalism caused war? Traditional historiography tends to reinforce popular views of nationa- lism as being one of the principal causes of warfare. The violence of the French and American revolutions is regularly linked to nationalist aspirations. The Napoleonic Wars are often interpreted through the prism of rising French nationalism and the counternationalisms of Germans and others that developed “in response to French invasions” (Calhoun 2007: 136). In particular the twentieth century has persistently been described as the period when competing nationalist ideologies caused total wars: “European nationalism was a major force in the origins of both world wars of the twentieth century. The peoples of Europe went to war in 1914 in an outburst of nationalistic fervour – the French ‘à Berlin,’ and the Germans ‘nach Paris’…” (Snyder 2009[1968]: 71). This “naturalist” approach often presumes that cultural similarity by itself is a principal driver of violent conflict (Maleševic´ 2011: 143–46). “War is,” in the words of one of the main representatives of this perspec- tive, “an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself” (Keegan 1994: 12). However, as decades of sociological research show, not only is there no significant causality between violence and cultural difference (Brubaker 2004; Fearon and Laitin 1996; Laitin 2007), but cultural similarity by itself is a poor predictor of most social action (Banton 2008; Brubaker et al. 2007; Maleševic´ 2006). Furthermore, since warfare is a substantially older social phenomenon than nationalist ideology, nationalism cannot explain the outbreak of most wars throughout history. If we agree that warfare originated at least ten thousand years ago (Fry 2007; Otterbein 2004) and that fully fledged nationalist ideology is barely two to three hundred years old (Breuilly 1993; Hobsbawm 1990; Mann 1986), then a rough estimate would indicate that even if nationalism is a principal cause of war it can only account for less than 0.3 percent of wars fought through history. Nevertheless, even the more moderate version of this argument, which posits nationalist ideology as a key generator of warfare only in the modern era (Snyder 2009[1968], 1990: 248–50) cannot explain instances of large-scale modern wars where popular nationalist sentiments were not a decisive force for initiating or waging wars such as the Crimean War (1853–56), the Austro-Prussian War (1866), the Second Boer War (1899–1902), or even World War I and World War II (Burbank and Cooper 2010; Mann 2012). The Balkan region provides an excellent testing ground for this thesis as the southeast of Europe experienced a progressive acceleration of Comp. by: SivaSankar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 10 Title Name: HALLandMAEEVIC Date:5/11/12 Time:08:25:52 Page Number: 257 Obliterating heterogeneity through peace: the Balkans 257 organized violence through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For this very reason the Balkans have regularly been singled out as the embodiment of a case where nationalism was (and some would argue remains) the main source of violent conflict. For example, writing about late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Balkan warfare Richard Hall argues that “each Balkan people envisioned the restoration of the medieval empires on which they based their national ideas” (2002: 2). Similarly Andre Gerolymatos believes that “at the heart of all the Balkan wars is the clarion call of ethnic hatred served up as cultural heritage,” (2002: 5) whereas most traditional historiography interprets the popular uprisings at the beginning of the nineteenth century in southeast Europe as “national revolutions” and the “awakening of nationalities” (Jelavich 1999; Pavlowitch 1999). However, not only is therenoreliableevidencetosuggest that nationalism was behind vio- lent conflicts in the early nineteenth century Balkans, but it seems plausible to argue that nationalist ideology played little or no part in these early uprisings (Kitromilides 1994, 2010; Maleševic´ 2012a, 2012b; Meriage 1977; Stokes 1976). The Ottoman, and to a lesser extent Habsburg, imperial legacy posited aristocratic lineage and religious affiliation firmly ahead of any “ethnic” attachments which, if they existed at all, were shared by a miniscule number of elite enthusiasts. The millet system reinforced confessional divides, most of which crisscrossed cultural and linguistic communities.1 Hence, the rebellions and uprisings of the early nineteenth century, such as the First and Second Serbian Uprisings (1804–13 and 1815–17), Hadži Prodan’s Revolt of 1813, or the Wallachian and Cretan insurrec- tions of 1821, were not nationalist revolutions aimed at the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the independent nation- states of Serbia, Greece and Romania, but were essentially social revolts not very different from the peasant rebellions of the previous centuries. In all of these Balkan uprisings, just as in the Greek War of Independence (1821–29) nationalist ideology played a marginal role or no role at all in the mobilization of social action for violent conflict. Instead of imple- menting a coherent program of national self-determination these violent events were a highly contingent, disorganized, and messy product of different individuals and groups motivated by diverse and often mutually incompatible interests. For example, the Serbian Uprisings were led by opportunistic merchants and outlaws who utilized the social discontent of peasants to expand their economic and political influence in the 1 The millet system was complex but its key feature was the division into semi-autonomous confessional communities. For more information see Haniog˘lu, 2012. Comp. by: SivaSankar Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 10 Title Name: HALLandMAEEVIC Date:5/11/12 Time:08:25:53 Page Number: 258 258 Siniša Maleševic´ region. Both Ðorđe Petrovic´ Karađorđe and Miloš Obrenovic´, the leaders of the two uprisings, were large-scale pig traders initially motiv- ated to establish a monopoly on pork trade with the Habsburg Empire and showing little inclination towards Serbian nationalism. Rather than fight the Ottoman Empire they offered “to restore the order on behalf of the Sultan” and to remove the disloyal ayans and ill-disciplined janissar- ies (Djordjevic´ 1985; Meriage 1977; Roudometof 2001: 231; Stokes 1976). Similarly the Greek War of Independence originated far away from contemporary Greece (in present-day Romania) as a violent social conflict between two groups of Christian elites. In contrast to latter-day nationalist reinterpretations, this was a far cry from organized national revolution bent on establishing an independent nation-state. Instead it comprised a chaotic and messy series of events involving prolonged internal strife among different groups of “Greeks” with the final outcome decided exclusively by the direct involvement of the great powers (Glenny 1999; Mazower 2000). The social bandits in the Balkans – hajduks, uskoks, khlepts,and armatoloi – later glorified in nationalist historiography as the heroes of national independence, were for the most part driven by economic self- interest, were essentially ignorant of national projects, would easily switch sides during the violent conflicts, and would rob Christians
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