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Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism: Analysis and Management

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Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism: Analysis and Management Südosteuropa 59 (2011), H. 2, S. 192-213 GORDON N. BARDOS Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism: Analysis and Management Abstract. If peace and stability in southeastern Europe are still at risk even after massive international engagement, then this suggests that both our understanding of the problems facing southeastern Europe and the policies used to deal with those problems have been deficient. This article outlines the academic and the policymaking conventional wisdom on what has been driving disintegration and violence in southeastern Europe over the past two decades, and then provides an alternative understanding for these processes. It focuses on Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism as a collective, non-rational, and chronic phenomenon, arguing that such a perspective harbors numerous implications for the choice of policies. A serious effort to deal with Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism must focus on transforming the political culture of southeastern Europe as a whole, which can, ultimately, be only the task of the peoples of southeastern Europe themselves. Gordon N. Bardos is Assistant Director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, New York. For the past several years, scholars and policymakers have been warning that political and security conditions in southeastern Europe are deteriorating, and that more attention and resources are needed to prevent a return to the instabil- ity and violence which afflicted the region in the 1990s. Apart from what such warnings say about conditions in southeastern Europe, however, they also pose an important intellectual question – how successful has almost twenty years of intensive international engagement in southeastern Europe actually been? Since 1992, a variety of international actors have spent well over 100 billion U.S. dollars on various military interventions, peacekeeping missions, economic development projects, and other forms of financial assistance in southeastern Europe.1 These financial investments have been accompanied by significant 1 The following information should serve as an approximate indicator of the amounts in question: Elizabeth Pond cites figures showing that the U.S. spent 22 billion dollars in southeastern Europe between 1992 and 2003, while the EU spent 33 billion euros in the region between 2001-2005 alone. Aid to Bosnia per capita in 1996-97 exceeded aid given to postwar Germany or Japan in 1945-47. See Elizabeth Pond, Endgame in the Balkan: Regime Change, Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism 193 investments in human resources as well; to take but one example, in 1996-1997, 60,000 international troops and over 10,000 international civilian personnel deployed to Bosnia and Herzegovina to implement the Dayton Peace Accords. Yet if peace and stability in southeastern Europe are still at risk even after such massive engagement, then this suggests that both our understanding of the problems facing southeastern Europe and the policies used to deal with those problems have been either deficient or simply wrong. To examine these issues in more detail, the first part of this article will briefly outline what can be called the academic and the policymaking conventional wisdom on what has been driving disintegration and violence in southeastern Europe over the past two decades, and then provide an alternative understanding for these processes. The second part will then analyze and critique the policies used to deal with Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism over the past twenty years. Conventional Understandings of Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism The conventional wisdom on the forces driving events in southeastern Eu- rope over the past two decades has focused on two things. The first has been the belief that Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism2 is the work of relatively small groups of “evil leaders” who manipulate naïve, gullible populations into supporting policies and goals inconsistent with their own best interests. The second has been the alleged material and economic bases for the outbreak of nationalism and violent conflict in the region. In these explanations, variables such as history, culture, religion, or a more deeply felt sense of ethnic identity or sense of community among the general population assume secondary or tertiary importance as explanatory variables. Richard Holbrooke provided a typical example of the elite-led understanding of what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s when he claimed that European Style. Washington/DC 2006, 278. One estimate of the cost of the Kosovo war to NATO itself was 40 billion dollars. See Michael R. Sesit, Cost of Kosovo War Could Hit $ 40 Billion, Biggest Economic Impact Could Turn Out to be End of Peace Dividend, The Wall Street Journal, 29 June 1999. Between 1999 and 2008, one report estimated that the U.N. had spent 33 billion U.S. dollars in Kosovo, or approximately 1,750 euros per capita – 160 times more than the U.N. spent on the entire developing world per capita. See Walter Mayr, Elefanten vor dem Wasserloch, Der Spiegel, 21 April 2008, available at <http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/ print/d-56670321.html>. All internet sites were accessed on 29 July, 2011. 2 In this article, the term “nationalism” is used in the most commonly accepted sense, i. e., the belief that ethnic and political boundaries should be congruent. See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca/NY 1983. Use of the term “ethnoconfessional” is meant to emphasize the fact that, as Milorad Ekmečić has argued, nations in southeastern Europe are based on religious ties rather than linguistic ones. See Milorad Ekmečić, Radovi iz istorije Bosne i Hercegovine XIX. veka. Belgrade 1997, 9-11. 194 Gordon N. Bardos “Yugoslavia’s tragedy was not foreordained. It was the product of bad, even crimi- nal, political leaders who encouraged ethnic confrontation for personal, political, and financial gain.”3 An analogous academic school of thought argues that such politicians provoke conflict to promote political or economic advantages for themselves, and in so doing intentionally create cleavages or foster new identities amongst their respective populations.4 A number of important implications result from such an understanding of the causal forces driving Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism.5 Most importantly, the elite-manipulation argument subjugates society and culture to the political, granting the former little autonomous power with respect to the latter.6 In its cruder forms, the elite manipulation argument also assumes that the general population is composed of “passive dupes, vehicles or objects of manipulative designs” instead of “active participants” and “political subjects in their own right”.7 Such theories also assume an essential dichotomy between the goals of elites and those of the general population (something which is not necessarily the case); in fact, they assume that the general population does not understand its own best interests – but the outside observer does.8 3 Richard Holbrooke, To End a War. New York 1998, 23-24. 4 See, for instance, Franke Wilmer, The Social Construction of Man, the State, and War. New York 2002; Valère Philip Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca/NY 2004; Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and National- ist Conflict. New York 2000; and Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism. Oxford 2000. 5 In this article I will only focus on a few problems with the elite-manipulation argument. Many others could be made, such as the fact that in many instances of ethnic conflict (including examples from the Balkans in the 1990s), violence can spring up spontaneously, or, put a dif- ferent way, it is not clear who the leaders of such conflicts are; another problem is the fact that in the estimations of many of these leaders themselves, they were following public opinion more than they were leading it, which in effect reverses the causal direction of the process. 6 Alon Confino, Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method, American Historical Review 102 (1997), n. 5, 1386-1403, 1394f. 7 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge 1996, 72. For similar arguments against the view that “the masses” are passive objects manipulated by elites with no autonomous identity or traditions independent of those imposed upon them by elites, see Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism. London 1998, 127f., Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley/ CA 1985, 104f.; and Paula M. Pickering, Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor. Ithaca/NY, London 2007, 13. 8 In one interview, for instance, former High Representative Sir Paddy Ashdown claimed that there was a large difference between the ambitions and desires of the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the desires and dreams of people in power and in politics. A rather bold conclusion, considering the fact that the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina had never elected him to public office, or that his knowledge of what the locals wanted might have been hampered by the fact that he did speak the local language(s). See the interview with Ashdown, Ja sam visoki predstavnik, nisam Bog, Dani, 28 June 2002. On the methodological fallacy posed by such views see John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State. Chicago/IL 21993, 410f. Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism 195 Explanations of ethnic identity formation, nationalism, and ethnic conflict stressing the economic or material bases of these phenomena suffer
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