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
“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 from a number of problems as well. Most importantly, such views rely on a unidi- mensional understanding of human behavior, even though men and women are clearly often motivated by many issues besides financial or material gain; motivations such as altruism, or a belief in reciprocity, fairness, justice, a sense of group,9 or on non-egoistic based commitments.10 It also wrongly suggests that “ethnic” and “rational-universalistic” behaviors and identities can be compartmentalized.11 For these reasons, the economic reductionism of many contemporary understandings of nationalism represent “an unwarranted exag- geration of the influence of materialism upon human affairs”12 which does not correlate with most experience we have of nationalism in the real world. Or, as Daniele Conversi puts it, “to put economic issues at the center of the analysis means to miss the primary point, namely, that ethnic movements are indeed ethnic and not economic”.13
An Alternative Explanation for Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism
In contrast to such elite-led and rationalist/materialistic views, a more ap- propriate way of understanding Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism is to proceed from the view that it has three primary characteristics: it is a collective, chronic, and non-rational phenomenon. Each of these will be discussed in turn.
Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism as a Collective Phenomenon
One of nationalism’s most impressive qualities is its ability to transcend political and/or ideological boundaries. Nationalism “can coexist with a variety of other political doctrines and behaviors, including communism […]. All that nationalism innately opposes are doctrines that explicitly
9 See, for instance, Truman F. Bewley’s comments on the limits of rationality in Ian Shapiro / Rogers M. Smith / Tarek E. Masoud (eds.), Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics. Cambridge 2004, 381-385, 382. 10 See Amartya K. Sen, Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Eco- nomic Theory, Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (1977), n. 4, 317-344, 341, available at
deny the existence of nations and the possibility of states. In the twentieth century, however, such doctrines have been virtually non-existent.”14 In other words, nationalism’s power is most strongly seen in the willingness of people from across the political spectrum and representing different class interests to adopt a common view or position about the desirability of ethnic or national self-governance. Thus, “the strength of nationalism lies in its internal pluralism, and its ability to include liberal, socialist, conservative and other values and to tie and direct them toward one goal – the creation or the preservation of the nation-state.”15
This point can be illustrated by providing two different ways of understanding the political spectrum in what used to be Yugoslavia and in the post-Yugoslav states. The first example, “IdeologyFigure Trumps I. Ethnicity”, suggests that individu- The Balkan Political Spectrum als sharing common ideologicalIdeology positions Trumps Ethnicity but differe nt ethnic backgrounds will be able to overcome their ethnic differences and join forces for a common political purpose. Thus, the Balkan political spectrum according to this view looks something like this:
Figure 1. Ideology Trumps Ethnicity:
Extreme Moderate Moderate Extreme Nationalist (a’) (b) Nationalist (a) (b’)
Thus, Croat moderate (a') should be more willing to collaborate with Serb mod- erate (b) than with Croat extreme nationalist (a), or Serb moderate (b) should be more willing to collaborate with Croat moderate (a') than with Serb extreme nationalist (b'). In other words, ideology trumps ethnicity.
The Balkan experience shows that this understanding of the Balkan political spectrum is substantially off the mark. A more accurate way of understanding the Balkan political spectrum is to start from the premise that ethnicity trumps ideology. Thus, for the vast majority of people (roughly two-thirds to ninety percent), one’s ethnoconfessional identity determines their political positions vis-à-vis a host of issues, and trumps ideological similarities they may share with people from across the ethnoconfessional divide; to paraphrase Keith Brown, national identity does indeed determine perspective.16 Consequently, the Balkan political spectrum in reality looks something like this:
14 Alexander J. Motyl, Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities. New York 1999, 81. 15 Dejan Jović, Jugoslavija, država koja je odumrla. Belgrade 2003, 45. 16 Keith Brown, The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation. Princeton/NJ 2003, 19. Figure II. The Balkan Political Spectrum Ethnicity Trumps Ideology
Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism 197
Figure 2. Ethnicity Trumps Ideology:
Extreme Extreme Nationalist Moderate Moderate Nationalist (a) (a’) (b) (b’)
According to this view, Croat moderate (a') will find it much easier to collabo- rate with Croat extreme nationalist (a) than with Serb moderate (b), and Serb moderate (b) finds it easier to collaborate with Serb extreme nationalist (b') that with Croat moderate (a'). In fact, with very rare and politically irrelevant exceptions, the Balkan experi- ence of the past two centuries provides substantial evidence that ethnoconfes- sional identity has consistently trumped ideology – i. e. that individuals with different political programs or ideologies have found it much easier to unite around ethnic/national issues, whereas individuals with similar political ideolo- gies but from different ethnoconfessional backgrounds have found it difficult to bridge the ethnic divide. Thus, the Balkan historical experience has shown that the “right, the center, and the left all exploited nationalism and fostered national issues. They differed in methods as well as in substance but, basically, followed the same national endeavors.”17 A few empirical examples help illustrate this point. In Macedonia, a “‘Free Macedonia’ became the central plank in the program of virtually all Mac- edonian patriotic, revolutionary, and national organizations and movements after the 1878 Congress of Berlin […]. It was equally true of both the Macedonian right and left.”18 In Serbia in the 1980s, the plight of Kosovo Serbs became an issue that cut across ideological and political persuasions: “liberals”, “nationalists” and the “new left” all joined efforts to support their cause.19 In Slovenia, efforts in the 1980s to introduce a common core-Yugoslav curriculum “united critical intellectuals and the communist leadership” against the campaign.20 In the Titoist period, “Opposition groups [were] more ready to cooperate with the Communists of
17 Dimitrije Djordjević / Stephen Fischer-Galati, The Balkan Revolutionary Tradition. New York 1981, 232f. 18 Andrew Rossos, Great Britain and Macedonian Statehood and Unification, 1940-1949, East European Politics and Society 14 (2000), n. 1, 119-142, 121f. Emphasis added. 19 Jasna Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism. Montreal, Kingston 2002, 139. 20 Ibid., 166. Emphasis added. 198 Gordon N. Bardos their own nationality than with the opposition of some other nationality”.21 It also bears noting that in the final days of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, govern- ments of national unity were formed in most of the former Yugoslav republics composed of parties from across the political spectrum. Given these considerations, instead of understanding nationalism as an elite- construct, it is better viewed as “a deep, horizontal comradeship […] regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail”.22 This suggests that nationalism is also an ideology that transcends class differences. Thus, “regardless of what the particular interests of Croatian peasants, merchants, sail- ors, priests, and intellectuals may have been, they united to support the same program in the conviction that their principal foe was one and the same (Serbian hegemonism).”23 Such monolithic group interests explain why widely dissimilar parties, such as Vladko Maček’s Croat Peasants’ Party and Ante Pavelić’s Ustaša movement, were able to collaborate with each other.24 To take a more recent Bosnian example, Sulejman Tihić, the head of the Stranka Demokratske Akcije (Party of Democratic Action, SDA), noted that in discussions on constitutional changes in Bosnia, the Serb delegation (which included people from across the political spectrum such as Mladen Ivanić, Milorad Dodik, and Dragan Kalinić), “was united, they only expressed themselves in different ways”.25 In Albania and amongst Albanians in general, one of the few issues that politicians across the left-right divide agree upon is Kosovo; thus, “in a generally bitterly divided political arena, Kosovo is one of the few issues to cross the left-right divide”.26 In Slovenia, although the political spectrum consists of the full range of left-of-center socialist par- ties to right-of-center Christian Democratic parties, “virtually all parties which emerged post-1989 were in some sense ‘Slovene nationalists’”.27 That Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism is a collective phenomenon rather than an elite-construct can also be seen in the views of many of the former Yugo-
21 Vladimir Gligorov, The Discovery of Liberalism in Yugoslavia, East European Politics and Societies 5 (1991), n. 1, 5-25, 15. 22 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. London 1991, 7. 23 Sabrina P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia: 1962-1991. Bloomington/ IN, Indianapolis/IN 21992, 7. 24 Ibid., 7f. 25 See the interview with Tihić in Dani (Sarajevo), 29 March 2002, 10. A Serb member of the Bosnian collective state presidency, Nebojša Radmanović, expressed the same view, claiming that “there was no great difference between Bosniac politicians” regardless of whether they were from the SDA, the SBiH, or the SDP, when it came to their views of the RS or the future of Bosnia. See the interview with Radmanović: Za treći entitet u BiH, Politika (Belgrade), 01.08.2007. 26 See Frida Malaj, In Politically Split Albania, Independence for Kosovo Is One of the Few Issues that Cause No Controversy for Berisha, Balkan Insight, 2 November 2006, available at
28 Cited by Carsten Wieland, Izetbegović und Jinnah – die selektive Vereinnahmung zweier “Muslim-Führer”, Südosteuropa-Mitteilungen 39 (1999), n. 4, 351-368, 351. 29 As quoted by Stephen L. Burg / Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention. Armonk/NY 1999, 77. Emphasis added. In a similar vein, former Yugoslav and Croatian president Stipe Mesić has argued that the role of his predecessor as president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, in gaining independence for Croatia has been overestimated, noting that “every tramway driver could have been president […]. Croatian independence was an historical inevitability.” Mesić o precijenjenom prethodniku: Značaj Franje Tuđmana? Svaki vozač tramvaja je mogao biti predsjednik, Nacional, 22 June 2011, available at
Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism as a Chronic Phenomenon
In 1809, the leader of the First Serbian Insurrection, Karadjordje (Black George) Petrović sent a letter to the French vice-consul in Bucharest asking for support for Serb efforts against the Ottomans. In passing along his regards to Napoleon, Karadjordje wrote, “the Serbians reassure his Imperial and Royal Majesty that their compatriots, the inhabitants of Bosnia and of the duchy of Herzegovina, and those who live in the Kingdom of Hungary, not excepting the Bulgarians who derive, so to speak, from the same branch, will follow their example at the first move which is made.”33 Karadjordje’s confidence in the Serb consciousness of the Orthodox popula- tions scattered throughout Bosnia, the Herzegovina, and the Pannonian plains reveals the belief that regardless of the political jurisdiction a group of people fell under, their sense of common identity would compel them to join in a Balkan- wide struggle against the Turks. Several decades later, the leaders of the Serb revolt in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1876 issued what has become known as the “Unification Proclamation”: “After so much waiting and without hope for any type of help, we resolve that from today we forever break with the non-Christian rule of Constantinople, and desiring to share our fate with our Serb brothers, […] proclaim that we are uniting our homeland Bosnia to the Principality of Serbia.”34 In 1918, the Serbs of the Bihać region would again call for unification with Serbia.35 In 1991-92, this was the overwhelming preference of a vast majority
32 Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington/DC 1995, 204. 33 Leften Stavros Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453. New York 2000, 212. 34 “The Unification Proclamation” of 1876, as quoted by Nebojša Radmanović in Krajiški Vojnik, 28 June 1997, 34. 35 Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: History, Origins, Politics. Ithaca/NY 1983, 131. Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism 201 of Serbs in Bosnia, and was codified when theRepublika Srpska was granted the right to have a “special parallel relationship” with Serbia in 1995’s Dayton Peace Accords. In 2006, a majority of Serbs in Bosnia continued to support unification with Serbia, or at least for the Serb entity in Bosnia to become independent. Similar historical evidence can be found for efforts in support of a “Greater Albania”, “Greater Croatia”, the megali idea in Greece, etc. A convincing understanding of Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism has to provide a satisfactory explanation for the stability of such preferences and their enduring strength across many generations and over long periods of time. Karl Mannheim, for instance, looked at the difference between Enlightenment approaches to time, seen as a unilinear progression of events understood in quantitative terms, to the understanding of time influenced by German ro- manticism, which believed in the existence of “an interior time that cannot be measured but only experienced in purely qualitative terms”.36 In this view, the chronological overlap of generations within distinct human groups transfers knowledge and collective experiences through time. This transfer of knowledge and experience creates links between individuals and generations living in dif- ferent eras and compresses the elapsed time between generations or historical events. Gavrilo Princip, for instance, was raised listening to stories about the 1875 Serb rebellion in Herzegovina. His role in the events of 1914 are well known. In 1941, his nephew would lead an attack that destroyed a German armored column east of Sarajevo.37 Thus, while outsiders may pride themselves on having a more “objective”, unilinear understanding of time, in the Balkans (or any other geographical area with its own historical legacy), where people often seem consumed by “irrational historical grievances”, part of the explanation for such obsessions with history – victories, defeats, massacres, who settled which piece of land first, etc. – lies in the infinitely more direct and subjective impact such events have had on the local populations. As L. S. Stavrianos has noted, “[…] the past – even the very distant past – and the present are side by side in the Balkans. Centuries chronologically remote from each other are really contemporary. Governments and peoples, particularly intellectuals, have based their attitudes and actions on what happened, or what they believed to have happened, several centuries ago. The reason is that during the almost five centuries of Turkish rule the Balkan peoples had no history. Time stood still for them.”38
36 Karl Mannheim, The Problem of Generations, in: Werner S. Sollors (ed.), Theories of Ethnicity. New York 1996, 109-155, 114. 37 Robert Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism: The Habsburg ‘Civilizing Mission’ in Bosnia, 1878-1914. Oxford 2007, 212. 38 Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (above fn. 33), 13. In a similar vein, discussing the thought-processes of his fellow Montenegrins in the eighteenth century, Milovan Djilas would note that “Obilić and Kosovo were not something that happened some time ago and far away, 202 Gordon N. Bardos
In concrete terms, time perceived in terms of a chronological overlap of genera- tions rather than a unilinear progression of events suggests that what appears to be a relatively stable equilibrium in multiethnic and multiconfessional states might not be quite so stable, and that demands for ever-greater amounts of ethnoconfessional self-government (or dreams of national expansion) are never far beneath the surface in Balkan politics. For instance, in Tito’s Yugoslavia, repeated rounds of de-centralization and governmental devolution in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s consistently led to even greater demands for de-centralization and devolution, ultimately culminating in proposals in 1990-91 that Yugoslavia be- come a confederation of independent states. In many such cases, then, calls for greater regionalization and outright independence should more appropriately be understood as a “strategic expression of preferences” in which “entrepreneurs take up regionalism or independence as circumstances warrant”.39 An example of this can be seen in the case of Macedonia. At the turn of the twentieth century, Macedonian nationalists kept their options open regarding their ultimate political goals. Thus, although they all sought the establishment of a Macedonian state – a “free Macedonia”, to use the most frequently employed term – statehood did not necessarily or always denote total independence. Many Macedonian spokesmen, conscious of the relative weakness of Macedonian nationalism and the comparative combined strength of its opposition, assumed a more pragmatic stance. They sought a place for a free or autonomous Mac- edonian state in a larger unit or supranational association: a Balkan federation, a Balkan socialist federation, a reorganized Ottoman Empire in the period before 1912, and a Balkan communist federation, a South Slav federation, a Yugoslav federation, and so forth in the years after the partition of Macedonia.40 Further support for the claim that ethnoconfessional nationalism is a chronic problem can be found in the fact that there are rarely “solutions” to such prob- lems. Albanian-Serb competition over Kosovo, Bosniak-Croat-Serb competition over Bosnia and Herzegovina, etc., are in many ways long-term structural prob- lems built into the very nature of group competition, and as such may be man- aged with greater or lesser degrees of success, but rarely eliminated altogether.41 but they were here – in daily thoughts and feelings and life and struggle with the Turks”. See Milovan Djilas, Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop. New York 1966, 11. 39 Hudson Meadwell, A Rational Choice Approach to Political Regionalism, Comparative Politics 23 (1991), n. 4, 401-421, 402. 40 Rossos, The Macedonian Question and Instability in the Balkans (above fn. 30), 153. 41 As Lake and Rothchild note, there are “no permanent solutions [to ethnic conflicts], only ‚temporary fixes‘. In the end, ethnic groups are left without reliable safety nets. There is no form of insurance sufficient to protect against the dilemmas that produce collective fears and violence. We can only hope to contain ethnic fears, not permanently eliminate them.” See David A. Lake / Donald Rothchild, Containing Fear: The Origins and Management of Ethnic Conflict,International Security 21 (1996), n. 2, 41-75, 57. Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism 203
All of this suggests that the ethnoconfessionally divided states of southeast- ern Europe are inherently brittle, and although the intensity of social traumas resulting from World War II or the more recent violence of the 1990s will wax and wane over time, they will continue to have an impact on future genera- tions – sometimes more, and sometimes less, depending upon the degree of stability or crisis Balkan societies undergo at any particular moment in time.42 Here it is important to place a limitation on the term “chronic”. As George and Bennett have noted, “there are no immutable foundational truths in social life. Thus, most social gener- alizations are necessarily contingent and time-bound, or conditioned by ideas and institutions that hold only for finite periods […].“43 Consequently, the point here is not to argue that Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism will always be collective, chronic, and non-rational; however, it is to argue that over the past approximately 200 years, these are the traits that characterize it, and there is little sign of significant change in this regard in the foreseeable future.
Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism as a Non-Rational Phenomenon
As noted above, theories of ethnic identity formation, nationalism, and ethnic conflict focusing on the rational economic and material bases of these phenom- ena suffer from a number of problems. First, they are generally unable to predict which states will suffer from ethnic or nationalist problems, or which ethnic group will adopt a nationalist position. In recent years, for instance, states as dissimilar as relatively affluent Belgium and underdeveloped Sri Lanka have both suffered from serious nationalist problems. In the Yugoslav case, Kosovo Albanians enjoyed much higher levels of economic prosperity and political freedom than their ethnic kin in neighboring Albania for much of the post-1945 period; nevertheless, they remained hostile to the Yugoslav state and favorably disposed towards Albania.44 Similarly, both the most economically advanced
42 See Ivan Šiber, Povijesni i etnički rascjepi u hrvatskom društvu, in: Mirjana Kasapović / Ivan Šiber / Nenad Zakošek (eds.), Birači i Demokratija: Utjecaj ideoloških rascjepa na političkom životu. Zagreb 1998, 51-94, 52. 43 Alexander L. George / Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. Cambridge 2004, 130. 44 As Hugh Poulton notes, “in the 1980s the Kosovo Albanians were not repressed cul- turally. Kosovo was in effect an Albanian polity with the Albanian language in official use, Albanian television, radio and press, and with an ethnic Albanian government. Even the courts which were used to persecute those calling for a republic for Kosovo were staffed by ethnic Albanian judges.” See Hugh Poulton, Macedonians and Albanians as Yugoslavs, in: Dejan Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918-1992. Madison/WI 2003, 204 Gordon N. Bardos
Yugoslav republic (Slovenia) and the most economically underdeveloped prov- ince (Kosovo) favored less central control and more autonomy for their own peoples and territories.45 Rationalist and materialist theories have also proven weak in predicting the timing of nationalist movements: for instance, they cannot explain why the former Yugoslavia experienced its most serious ethnic tensions just as the coun- try was experiencing its most impressive post-World War II economic success (Yugoslavia enjoyed some of the highest growth rates in the world in the 1960s). The Croatian national movement of the late 1960s – early 1970s, for instance, followed upon a decade in which Croatia experienced rapid economic growth, and the same period saw unrest in Belgrade and Kosovo as well.46 Similarly, in the period leading up to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, substantial financial rewards to keep the country together failed to deter the various republics from their nationalist goals.47 And the degree to which a desire for economic gain was driving many of the group demands for sovereignty and/or independence was also questionable; as Rodney Bruce Hall puts it, “one might argue that Slovenia was sufficiently economically better off than its former Yugoslav partners to rationally seek separation from Yugoslavia, but could a Bosnian Serb republic governed from Pale be economically viable?”48 Numerous more recent examples also suggest that economic incentives are of only limited utility in promoting or coercing compromise when perceived vital national interests are at stake. In Bosnia’s September 1998 elections,
115-135, 131. Dejan Jović further points out the scale of the Yugoslav government’s efforts in Kosovo when he notes that in 1948, 62.2 % of Kosovo’s population was illiterate. In 1981, Kosovo had the third largest university in Yugoslavia, with some 50,000 students. Kosovo had some 30 students per 1,000 inhabitants, giving it the highest concentration of students in Yugoslavia. As a federal unit within Yugoslavia, Kosovo received the following shares in the distribution of the Fund for the Development of the Under-Developed Regions: 1971-75: 33.3 %; 1976-1980: 37 %; 1981-85: 42.8 %. Of the 136 billion dinars invested in Kosovo from 1981-86, only 8.7 billion came from Kosovo, the rest coming from other Yugoslav republics. See Jović, Jugoslavija, država koja je odumrla (above fn. 15), 265-267. 45 Jović, Jugoslavija, država koja je odumrla (above fn. 15), 32. 46 Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia (above fn. 27), 90; and Jović, Jugoslavija, država koja je odumrla (above fn. 15), 29. 47 See Gale Stokes, Solving the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, in: Norman M. Naimark / Holly Case (eds.), Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Stanford/CA 2003, 193-207, 204. 48 Rodney Bruce Hall, National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems. New York 1999, 27. As Hall goes on to note, rational economic logic would have suggested a different historical trajectory in the 1990s: “Rational instrumental accounts of the motivations and interests of international actors suggest that instrumental advantage ac- crues to the creation and maintenance of large states, not smaller, ethnically, linguistically, or culturally homogenous states.” Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism 205
“strong international backing for reformist candidates – including pledges of ad- ditional financial assistance – seems to have contributed to their defeat, as some voters resented the intervention of the international community”.49 Such mistakes were made yet again in Bosnia’s October 2002 elections, when the then U.S. ambassador in Bosnia made an implicit threat only two weeks before the elections that a victory of the nationalist parties in the RS would lead to a cutoff of U.S. aid to that entity.50 Despite the warnings, the nationalist parties nevertheless won, again suggesting that the belief that financial incentives can reduce or moderate nationalist aspirations seems weak. Still later, from 2006- 2007 international observers noted that “the carrot of EU membership is an incentive for Serb cooperation, but not a decisive one. In both words and deeds, Serb leaders have made it clear that ‘when the choice is made between Brussels and Republika Srpska, we choose Republika Srpska’.”51 Given the unclear causal relationship between economics and nationalism, emphasizing the former only distracts us from grappling with the true essence of the problem. Consequently, managing the problems confronting southeast- ern Europe based on policies which emphasize rational or economically-based interests have repeatedly failed to draw the popular support needed for these “solutions” to succeed.
Managing Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism
What are the implications of an understanding of Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism that sees it as a collective, chronic, and non-rational phenomenon?
1) The collective nature of Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism means that it is a widespread social phenomenon, and not the creation of small groups of leaders. What this means most importantly is that institutions reflect the socie- ties and political cultures they are a part of, rather than the conventional view
49 Richard Caplan, International Authority and State Building: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Global Governance 10 (2004), n. 1, 53-65, 59. 50 The U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Clifford Bond, emphasized that his country could not consider the nationalists in the governments as legitimate, and particularly criticized the Serb Democratic Party (Srpska Demokratska Stranka, SDS). Nevertheless, in the subsequent elections, the SDS again was confirmed as the most popular political party in the RS. See Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Analysis of the Process and the Results of the General Elections Held on 5 October 2002, available at
52 Ibid., 2f. For a similar analysis, see also SofiaSebastián, Leaving Dayton Behind: Constitu- tional Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina , FRIDE Working Paper 46. Madrid November 2007, 2, available at
Such political, historical and social realities suggest that the institutional de- sign most appropriate for southeastern Europe is based on consociationalism and federalism. Hundreds of years of Balkan history, beginning with the Otto- man millet system and continuing to today, have resulted in a political culture in which ethnoconfessional groups put a premium on self-governance, and efforts to impose majoritarian democracy on the region’s peoples have usually proven both dangerous and tragic. In the early 1990s, as Slobodan Milošević was attempting to reform the Yugoslav federation along the lines of “one person, one vote”, Slovenian president Milan Kučan argued, “can the imposition of majority decisionmaking in a multinational community by those who are the most numerous be anything else but the violation of the principle of the equality of nations, the negation of its sovereignty and therefore the right to autonomous decisionmaking […]?“54 More recent attempts to do essentially the same thing under the guise of increas- ing “governmental efficiency” have evoked the same concerns; for instance, with reference to former BiH presidency member Haris Silajdzić’s demands for a more centralized government, one critic has charged that, “[…] the relationship of Haris Silajdžić to Bosnia and Herzegovina reminds me of what Slobodan Milošević was doing abusing the idea of Yugoslavism […] the way in which [Silajdžić] interprets the idea of Bosnianism, or the idea of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is the way in which Milošević forced everyone away from him. In the same way, Haris Silajdžić is now forcing the Republika Srpska, Serbs, Croats and all unsuitable Bosniacs from this country.”55 Consociationalism has, of course, had a mixed record, as shown by experiences from Lebanon to the former Yugoslavia. Yet in multiethnic states and societies where divisions between communal groups run deep, it is difficult to avoid such mechanisms, which is why international efforts to mediate ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia have consistently reproduced many of their features.56 principal national groups had one or more developed national ideologies […]. To act as if that were not the case, to ignore the fact that the South Slavs were not one nation, one culture, and one loyalty, or to insist that they could acquire these unitary characteristics in due course, only weakened the already fragile state and diminished the prospects for good neighborli- ness based on the rejection of all forms of assimilationism and on respect for Yugoslavia’s multinational character, the only policy that could strengthen the Yugoslav polity.“ Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia (above fn. 35), 407. 54 As quoted by Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia. Boul- der/CO 1993, 62. 55 See the interview by Vildana Selimbegović with Srdjan Dizdarević, Haris Silajdžić je prvi zlotvor BiH, Dani, 28 September 2007, 13 , available at
Thus, as Sumantra Bose rightly concludes, “there may be no alternative to consociationalism in deeply divided societies”.57 Moreover, despite the limitations of consociational-federal systems, many of the supposed problems associated with such systems are not as serious as crit- ics contend. A frequent charge against the Dayton system, for instance, is that it has created an unwieldy, top-heavy, and expensive governmental structure. For instance, in May 2008 then-High Representative Miroslav Lajčák criticized the fact that Bosnia was a state that had “two entities with three constituent peoples … fivePresidents, four Vice-Presidents, thirteen Prime Ministers, fourteen parliaments, one hundred and forty ministers and seven hundred members of parliament, all of whom serve a population of just under four million people”.58 Yet a comparative analysis of Bosnia’s system with that of other European countries shows that its governmental apparatus employs only 5 percent of the country’s population, as opposed to 5.3 percent in Croatia, and 8.1 percent for the Czech Republic. The overall average in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union is 6.9. Thus, “there is no reason to believe that federalism itself makes the Bosnian state too expensive”.59 Nor are consociational systems necessarily less efficient than more central- ized systems. Markus Crepaz, for instance, has argued that an analysis of 162 elections in eighteen different countries shows that consociational constitutional structures have favorable impacts on a state’s macroeconomic performance, and, when a larger number of parties are included in government (hence increasing popular perceptions of governmental legitimacy), governmental policies tend to be more responsive to popular opinion.60
57 Sumantra Bose, Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Interven- tion. New York 2002, 248. 58 Office of the High Representative and EU Special presentative,Re Speech by High Repre- sentative/EU Special Representative Miroslav Lajčák at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies: Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Future in the European Union, 21 May 2008, available at
Unfortunately, rather than working within the framework and traditions of the Balkans’ indigenous political culture, much of the international effort in southeastern Europe over the past two decades has involved attempts to impose political solutions in the region incompatible with local history and traditions. As a result, such attempts usually prove counterproductive for stability and political reconciliation in the region. As Nina Caspersen has argued, “the imposition of an unpopular integrative structure may make it even more dif- ficult to create a self-sustaining peace […]. In the Bosnian case, the consociational model has been more effective in promoting stability, despite the international presence which makes the need for local acceptance less pressing.”61 Moreover, it bears noting that some of the externally-imposed efforts at politi- cal reform in the region have also been at odds with normal understandings of democracy and rule of law as well. In the Bosnian case, for instance, one critic of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) found agross “ lack of due process” in the High Representative’s exercise of his “unlimited legal powers”, noting that “the right to amend legislation, and to dismiss public officials, could be exercised without any prior reference to any affected party. Bosnia’s democratically elected parliaments did not have to be consulted. Where officials were removed, they did not have to be given any notice, or an opportunity to respond to the evidence against them. Indeed, the evidence did not even have to exist. There was no possibility of appeal or review of a decision, even if one lost one’s job or otherwise suffered direct and individual harm as a result.” Just for the record, the above critique is not that of some extreme-nationalist malcontent. It is the view of the former head of the OHR’s own legal depart- ment.62 As one international official put it, the powers ofthe High Representative are “outrageous and embarrassing”. Ironically (or unfortunately), this was the opinion of High Representative Ashdown himself.63
The Case of Belgium as a Possible Example, South-East Europe Review 2 (1999), n. 3, 79-94, 89. Italics in the original. 61 Nina Caspersen, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors? A Comparison of Conflict-Reg- ulation Strategies in Postwar Bosnia, Journal of Peace Research 41 (2004), n. 5, 569-588, 585. For similar views on the importance of consociational arrangements for the states of southeastern Europe, see Sherrill Stroschein, What Belgium Can Teach Bosnia: The Uses of Autonomy in “Divided House” States, Journal of Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 3 (2003), 1-30; Marc Weller / Stefan Wolff, Bosnia and Herzegovina Ten Years after Dayton: Lessons for Internationalized State Building, Ethnopolitics 5 (2006), n. 1, 1-13, available at
2) The chronic nature of Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism suggests that attempts to “solve” such conflicts within the one to two years of the average international official’s secondment or between the three to four year cycles of American presidential elections are relatively futile. As seen from numerous examples around the world – Israel-Palestine, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, to name but a few – ethnic conflicts are both long-lasting and usually difficult to resolve through negotiations. One study found that of the 57 civil wars fought between 1945 and 1993, only fourteen were resolved through negotiations.64 In the Balkan case specifically, Florian Bieber has found that over half of the fourteen cases of international intervention in the Balkans between 1991-2002 resulted in failure.65 Unfortunately, patience has not been one of the hallmarks of international ef- forts in the Balkans. Debates over exit strategies and deadlines often encourage protagonists in ethnic conflicts to wait the foreigners out, create considerable fear that security arrangements arrived at today can be reversed tomorrow,66 and foster unrealistic expectations about the rate at which war-torn, divided societies can reform themselves and act more “European” or “Western”. Thus, “not only are [war-shattered states] expected to become democracies and market economies in the space of a few years – effectivelycompleting a transformation that took several centuries in the oldest European states – but they must carry out this monumental task in the fragile political circumstances of states that are just in the process of emerging from civil war”.67 Thus, in many ways the most that can be hoped for from the international community’s Balkan interventions is that they provide the peace and security needed for the polities and societies of southeastern Europe to evolve along democratic lines in their own way, and according to their own timetables. Liberal democracies, as Kimberly Marten has argued, are unlikely to have the
64 Roy Licklider, The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945-1993, American Political Science Review 89 (1995), n. 3, 681-690, available at
3) The non-rational nature of Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism similarly has a number of implications. Most importantly, as noted above, economic tools should not be considered the primary method for dealing with the prob- lem. Understanding Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism as a non-rational phenomenon means that it is wrong to assume that individual identities or loyalties can be manipulated or refocused using economic incentives. As Donald Horowitz has argued, “the psychological sources of ethnic conflict do not readily lend themselves to modification by the manipulation of material benefits that is so often the stuff of modern policymaking”.70 While promoting economic development in southeastern Europe is of course a positive thing, the political effects that various economic strategies might have in the region are far too often overestimated and exaggerated. Dealing with Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism successfully requires greater ap- preciation of the fact it is more of a political and social phenomenon than an economic one, and as such, apart from providing a secure, peaceful environ- ment in southeastern Europe, outsiders have shown little ability to control the phenomenon over the past 150 years.
68 See Kimberly Marten, Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past. New York 2004, 147f. 69 Ivan Cvitković, Hrvatski identitet u Bosni i Hercegovini: Hrvati između nacionalnog i građanskog. Zagreb, Sarajevo 2006, 296. 70 Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (above fn. 7), 566. It is interesting to note that the relationship between economic conditions and nationalism was a question Habsburg-era of- ficials were studying almost a century ago. For instance, Benjamin von Kállay’s successor in Bosnia, István Burián, had noted in December 1914 that both poverty and economic progress promoted nationalism. See Okey, Taming Balkan Nationalism (above fn. 37), 192. 212 Gordon N. Bardos Conclusions
The understanding of Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism presented in this article – that it is collective, chronic, and non-rational – has numerous implica- tions for the choice of policies appropriate for dealing with the problem. The collective nature of Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism suggests that policies designed to deal with “uncooperative” elites will be superficial and only deal with the symptoms of the problem, not with its root causes. A serious effort to deal with Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism must focus on transforming the political culture of southeastern Europe as a whole, which is obviously a long- term project, and, ultimately, the task of the peoples of southeastern Europe themselves. It will largely depend upon their willingness to change their at- titudes and beliefs about the nature of political and social relations within their respective states. Such a transformation cannot be imposed; it will have to be a voluntary decision by the general population to adopt a new framework for governing their societies. The chronic nature of Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism means that we should recognize the inherently weak foundations on which “stability” in south- eastern Europe is built, at least as long as the fundamental premise upon which the contemporary international political order is based – the nation-state – is not superseded. Thus, until this change occurs, politics in these states will remain more conflictual and time-consuming, and they will remain especially prone to disintegration during times of geo-political upheaval. As has been repeatedly evident over the past two-hundred years, breakdowns in the European order have given the various Balkan ethnoconfessional groups opportunities to try to realize their national projects. Consequently, we should beware the temptation to think that national problems in the region have been “solved”. Finally, the non-rational nature of Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism sug- gests that economic strategies intended to combat the phenomenon will be of only limited utility. The various Balkan ethnoconfessional groups have quite often sacrificed economic goals for national ones. While international donor’s conferences and World Bank loans are good things in and of themselves, the belief that financial or material gain will ultimately prove more seductive to the various ethnoconfessional groups in the Balkans than their desire for self- governance has repeatedly shown itself to be futile. Ultimately, this analysis suggests a modest, conservative approach to deal- ing with Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism. In the final analysis, the ability of outsiders to control ethnic conflicts is limited. Even as brilliant and original a thinker as Ernest Gellner, for instance, has admitted that the solutions he could propose for dealing with nationalism were relatively “banal”. All Gellner could recommend was Balkan Ethnoconfessional Nationalism 213
“[…] a preference for stability, an avoidance of destabilization without strong cause and without provision for an orderly passage to a successor regime; affluence; centralization of major order-maintaining functions and a cantonisation of social ones; cultural pluralism, de-fetishisation of land. These recommendations may be banal, but they are at least set in the context of a coherent overall theory of what constitutes the problem.”71 Realistically, the most that outsiders can do is to avoid policies that exacerbate the particular pathologies of Balkan ethnoconfessional nationalism. Even this, however, will be a significant step forward, because there is a tremendous differ- ence between peacefully managing a complex problem and making a complex problem even worse.
71 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (above fn. 2), 108. For similar views on the limited ability of outsiders to control ethnic conflict, see Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (above fn. 7), 564-566; Lake / Rothchild, Containing Fear (above fn. 41), 42; Roger Petersen, Un- derstanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe. Cambridge 2002, 267.