Bogdan Benitch TRAGEDY IN FORMER YUGOSLAVIA
Nationalism Berserk
By spring of 1991 Yugoslavia was activists. We had also gathered most former nearing terminal illness. The federal League of members of the Praxis circle, with the notable Communists had ceased to exist since the exception of Mihailo Markovic, a major withdrawal of the Slovenian and Croatian academic figure from Belgrade. His absence branches. Although the federal premier Ante signaled how many friends with whom we had Markovic's economic program managed to collaborated for years would soon be lost to maintain relatively high wages and a stable Serbian or Croatian nationalism. Markovic was currency, the political crisis was visible to all. a well-known democratic socialist dissident, a The presidents of the six republics were leader of the Belgrade Eight; he shocked us by holding endless sterile meetings trying to work becoming vice president and spokesman of out an impossible compromise between the Milosevic's ruling authoritarian Serbian Social- Slovenians and Croatians willing to accept at ist party, which was essentially the old Serbian most a loose confederation and the Serbians League of Communists with ever-more aggres- pushing for a more centralized federation. sive nationalist politics. There was an apocalyptic atmosphere in the My own situation was complicated. As a circles of intellectuals among which I moved dual U.S.-Yugoslav citizen I would now have that spring in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana. to opt for citizenship in one of the new states. A worn-out regime was on its last legs, but When not in New York I have lived in Croatia there was little joy and much fear about the on the Dalmatian coast since 1967; most of my prospects for the future. We did not expect any political and academic ties were also there, and velvet revolution or magical fixes from the new so I chose Croat citizenship. But by national mantra, "market and privatization." Yet none origin I am a Serb, with many ties in Belgrade. could even imagine just how terrible the next Increasing national polarization put me in a two years would be. Only in Sarajevo, of all difficult position as a known public opponent places, were dissident activists still relatively of the Milosevic regime and Serbian national- optimistic in early 1991. ists. This made me a target for both Serbian I was involved in the debates in the media and Croatian nationalists, the first because of throughout the country that year after having my politics and the second because of my joined with some democratic socialists in ethnicity. My position became even more organizing the first open noncommunist politi- uncomfortable after the right-wing nationalists cal group in Yugoslavia. The Association for won the first pluralist election in Croatia. I was Democratic Alternatives in Yugoslavia (UJDI) a Serb and, to make things worse, an active was organized in all the major cities including participant in left-wing Croatian politics. Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Sko- Armed paramilitary groups of urban lumpen pje, Rijeka, and Split. Most of us had known types were now increasingly visible on the each other through decades of meetings and streets of Zagreb and Belgrade. And it soon activities. UJDI included many of the student became a genuine issue whether or not to carry generation of 1968, some feminists, and peace licensed arms. My friends recommended it
26 • DISSENT Yugoslavia while traveling or speaking in small industrial parties, which in those two states had evolved towns and rougher neighborhoods, something into genuine social democratic organizations. 2 unimaginable during the long Titoist twilight. Many younger intellectuals preferred to work I remember my initial shock when I first saw with social movements, which in practice Chetnik insignia on bearded young thugs in the meant ecological, women's, and peace groups. center of Belgrade peddling chauvinist tape An important group in Belgrade around Vesna cassettes and blood-curdling pamphlets. They Pesic of the Democratic Reformist party argued looked like caricatures of the Chetniks from the that it was premature to raise leftist political Second World War. The only models the issues in Serbia, since the most urgent goal was young had were from the war movies that to establish peace, minimal democratic norms, glorified the Communist Partisans and treated a law-abiding state, and human rights. 3 The the Chetniks as collaborators, rapists, looters, advocates of these various views cooperated and killers. That was precisely what had made with remarkable nonsectarian amity and con- them attractive to the new converts! It was a tinue to do so to this day. I joined the Croatian Serbian folk version of the skinheads and social democratic organization led by Professor neonazis in the West. Similar cultural blends in Branko Horvat, arguably the leading demo- the Croatian paramilitaries mixed Ustasha cratic socialist economist in Eastern Europe. symbols with heavy-metal music and skinhead and Rambo images, sometimes topped off with Horror Shows Catholic prayer beads and a cross. These were the groups that would do some of the fighting By mid-summer 1991 an ever-more brutal and commit most of atrocities in the wars that armed conflict in Croatia evolved from a local summer. revolt by the Serbian minority into a war of The Swedish Institute of the Workers' aggression by the Yugoslav Army and the Movement* had given me a modest grant to try Serbian government. By the fall all communi- to help democrats and social democrats in cations between Croatia and Serbia had been Yugoslavia though a project optimistically cut, and travel and phone messages between called "Transitions to Democracy in a World eastern and western parts of former Yugoslavia Perspective."' The grant made possible mini- now had to go through Hungary or Bosnia. mal material aid to the democratic left, such as Throughout that summer and fall, as the war in fax machines and a newsletter (in English) to Croatia accelerated, the democratic opposition maintain a network of individuals and institu- from the various republics still managed to tions. We also organized meetings with new organize round-table meetings of the federal unionists in the media, and shipyards, and government and opposition, mostly in Sara- among teachers in Croatia and Serbia. jevo, where we had mass and institutional As the war spread in 1991, UJDI became an support. anachronism. Most of our members turned to My own project was to pull together a fall organizing social democratic parties in their conference near the Hungarian border with respective republics. If Yugoslavia were to participants from the democratic opposition and come apart we wanted to make sure that our some independent intellectuals, as well as new states were, at least, democratic, had democratic socialists from Western Europe, reasonable social programs, and were open to Russia, and Eastern Europe. International cooperation across the new frontiers. Most of participants and solidarity helped the morale a us believed that this could only be done by little. We tried to make sense of what was organizing social democratic parties and happening and to work out some joint propos- unions, because that would be the only way to als. These were modest efforts to keep some compete against populism and nationalism. kind of nonnationalist and democratic leftist Some of my friends in Macedonia and Slovenia community together. stayed in the reformed former Communist Old personal ties and friendships crumbled as many of the intellectuals I knew rallied to * Now the Olof Palme International Center the defense of their own nations. The pressure
WINTER • 1993 • 27 Yugoslavia to do so was immense. Revived images in the hate mail. But there were also letters from media of the near-genocidal massacres of the pensioners, school teachers, and ordinary Serbs in Croatia during the Second World War workers and members of the traumatized traumatized people who had seemed immune to Serbian minority who were grateful for the nationalism. My Croatian friends were bom- campaign. Desperate union activists asked for barded with current pictures of Serbs burning specific advice about how to handle the layoffs cities, including Dubrovnik, which is a cultural and massive takeovers of the worker-managed icon, and the massive destruction of churches enterprises by the nationalist government. In and monuments. Television on both sides semiclandestine late-night meetings in the repeatedly showed horrendous pictures of shipyards we urged them to stick to absolutely mutilated bodies in vivid color. This reached a rigid seniority, with no management preroga- point where child psychologists in Belgrade tives whatsoever, lest solidarity be destroyed and Ljubljana protested that children were by nationalist demagogery and management displaying massive war neuroses. By spring favoritism. Although we had a major impact, in 1992 television in Belgrade and Zagreb had the end we lost that battle too, and a purge of become unbearable and the relatively objective Serbs and Croat unionists followed. station run by the federal government from A larger unified party of the democratic left Sarajevo an early casualty of the war in Bosnia. should emerge this year since much of what we predicted about the economy and politics of Croatia unfortunately did happen. The econ- War in Bosnia, Politics in Croatia omy continues in a tailspin, there are endless The second Croatian pluralist elections took financial scandals as the streets fill with the place in August 1992, when the new war in young, the unemployed, miserable pensioners, Bosnia had been raging for months. Although and abandoned veterans. During the campaign Tudjman's ruling Croatian nationalists imposed the government emphasized its support of an an electoral law grossly tilted in their favor, we independent Bosnia against Serbian aggression. decided to participate anyway, as did all By now the scandalous complicity of the Croat opposition parties. We failed to negotiate a authorities is clear in the partition of Bosnia general coalition with other democratic leftists through setting up a separate Croat state in and the regional parties from Istia and Dalmatia Bosnia much as the Serbs did. While the major in time for the election. The best that we could aggressors are the Serb nationalits and the do was to have a joint democratic socialist army, Croat troops have also occupied large candidate for president, who got a respectable parts of Bosnia and are in combat with the 4.5 percent of the vote in a field of sixteen. We mostly Moslem troops of the Bosnian govern- also helped elect five members from the ment. regional parties in a parliament of 137. Both Serbian and Croatian national myths What we did manage was to campaign in the emphasize the centuries of wars against the teeth of wartime nationalist hysteria and get a Ottoman Turks. Moslem Slays, though ethni- respectable hearing and high visibility. Horvat, cally and linguistically identical to the Croats Viskovic (a popular gadfly member of the and Serbs, are somehow transformed into the outgoing parliament), and I campaigned in the legendary Turkish enemy and made to pay for media, temporarily accessible during the elec- the years of Turkish dominance. Given that tions, and before grim audiences of unem- most urban "Moslems" are secular and cultur- ployed workers and veterans from the Slavo- ally indistinguishable from their Serbian and nian front, where we received a surprisingly Croatian neighbors I find this hard to under- respectful hearing. I remember massive ap- stand. Most Europeans, especially East Euro- plause when attacking President Tudjman as a peans, do not accept a multicultural and puffed-up provincial authoritarian, a former multi-ethnic environment as normal; most communist general who has all of Tito's vices American intellectuals do. Only consciously and not a single one of his virtures. There were internationalist and cosmopolitan Europeans innumerable threatening phone calls and much do. Internationalism was always very fragile in
28 • DISSENT Yugoslavia the communist movement, where it was turned of aggression in two short years, is now an into a caricature of Soviet "patriotism." E.P. international pariah subject to an ever- Thompson and others have always stressed the tightening blockade. Open clashes between the intimate link between communitarian localism relatively moderate federal president, Cosic, and class consciousness. And yet during the and Prime Minister Panic with the hard-fisted years I lived and worked in Yugoslavia it had Serbian nationalist regime of Milosevic seemed that a new heterogeneous popular threaten an intra-Serbian civil war. Large parts culture was emerging among the young and of Croatia are now protectorates of the United among the urban workers. Multi-ethnic Sara- Nations, while the country tries to cope with jevo was the major source of popular music and almost a million refugees. Bosnia's govern- culture. The current wave of nationalism ment is reduced to a few enclaves and is now strikes me as the revenge of provincial forced to fight a two-front war against Serbian language and history teachers and all who insist and Croatian nationalist armies. Macedonia that they must preserve that which is specific to hovers on the edge of economic and political their nation. The war in Bosnia is obviously disaster because the Greeks vetoed its recogni- also an urbicide; cities I have known and loved tion by the European Community and the have been relentlessly bombed into shambles. United States. Slovenia's living standards have This is the revenge of the local villagers who been pushed back two decades to those of have always hated the cities. The cities where 1972, but it is still the least unfortunate of the massive intermarriage and denationalization new states. Before breaking up in 1990-91 take place, where various national groups mix Yugoslavia had a better case for European and make friends, where women enter profes- Economic Community (EEC) membership than sions, where the young reject tradition—these Hungary, Poland, or Czecho-Slovakia; by now cities are the source of modernity. The villagers that is obviously an unattainable goal. have always hated and envied the cities, and The elites of former Yugoslavia are not this war permits the destruction of these alone. Throughout Eastern Europe and the "dangerous" places. former Soviet Union destructive over-ambi- Being a citizen of Yugoslavia had meant to tious bunglers, often uncritically supported by me being a member of a very heterogeneous a West relieved to see the last of the community. The new identities we are now communists in power, were able to get more or forced to assume are so much narrower, more less popular mandates. The self-indulgent parochial, and less flexible. A bridge between electorates as well as a large part of the the old and new civic identities is only partially intelligentsia wanted to release their repressed created by the community of the democratic nationalist urges. They engaged in a politics of socialist movements. I now feel personally theater, indulging in a little "harmless" asser- poorer, as I believe will many citizens of tiveness against their minorities and neighbors. former Yugoslavia. However, that Yugoslavia "Just a little harmless funky national self- which I mourn is now clearly dead. The assertiveness," after decades of prim preachy aggressive nationalism of my own people is insistence by the old communist rulers that mainly responsible for this unnecessary death. chauvinism was forbidden and nationalism suspect. As the simultaneously playful and Can We Make Sense of This? thuggish soccer riots and recent skinhead riots against immigrants in Western Europe have The political elites of the states of former already demonstrated, that theater can also be Yugoslavia have wrought a massive disaster on deadly. In fact, many soccer fan clubs became their peoples. They have also reduced their the core of the nationalist paramilitary bands in actual independence. The shell of former Serbia and Croatia. Yugoslavia, now reduced to Serbia with its two Democracy in most postcommunist states is restive formerly autonomous provinces of a form of expressive politics bred by the Kosovo and Vojvodina and an ever more weakness of the dissidents and communist reluctant Montenegro, having waged two wars repression. There was no chance to learn a
WINTER • 1993 • 29 Yugoslavia responsible politics, to learn that what they right-wing emigres, especially in Croatia, who decide can sometimes matter a great deal: that had preserved a nasty kind of traditional it can well be a matter of life and death, war xenophobic nationalism during the long years and peace. For almost half a century, politics in diaspora. Centrists and liberals did not had been a sham and had bred a bone-deep arouse passionate commitment; the democratic cynicism. left was weak, fragmented, and compromised by the similarity of its language to that of the communist reformers. Organic right-wing na- Titoism was a history of repeated attempts, tionalism was at least "authentic." It fit nicely all ultimately unsuccessful, at internal reform with a crude and selfish Social Darwinism of a communist regime. They were defeated by associated with fashionable new economic the contradiction between an increasingly dogmas of privatization and an uncontrolled attenuated authoritarian Leninism and a demo- market—the devil take the hindmost, especially cratic empowerment through self-management. if he is nationally different. The Yugoslav party theorists had experimented Much of the hostility to communism in with various mixes of decentralization and Yugoslavia in the late eighties, 4 even among party (League of Communist) control for the beneficiaries of their rule, was based on an almost four decades. They introduced semisyn- "echo effect" of the general collapse of dicalist models of workers' councils, decentral- communism throughout the bloc. It did not ization down to the level of county govern- matter that the performance of Yugoslav ment and ever-greater autonomy for the communism was substantially different from republics and provinces. The League of that of the communism of Eastern Europe or Communists also tried introducing market the Soviet Union. It was tarred with the same criteria in the economy. They even withdrew brush. Countries one admired for being or- from direct control of culture and the arts. The derly, progressive, and with a high living decades-long experiment in workers' self- standard, that is, Western Europe and a United management was not merely a sham. It did States mostly known through movies and substantially limit the powers of managers and consumer products, were not communist. it did involve large numbers of workers, over Communism had to be gotten rid of for many prolonged periods of time, in managing their reasons, and for most people love of democ- own enterprises. The basic weakness was that racy was one of the least important. Alas, it all these experiments, good and bad, were never held a candle to the love for consumer brought in from the top down by the party. goods. They thus provided no genuine sense of Nationalist politics in Serbia and Croatia empowerment and responsibility that victories include a mish-mash of clericalism, romantic gained in prolonged political and economic historiography, pseudoscientific nationalist eth- struggles bring to the mass of the people. nography, and arcane plot theories involving The League's systematic repression of a the freemasons, Jesuits, and espionage agen- normal development of responsible opposition cies. All that was now made available to the groups, journals, and parties created an intel- new anticommunist, nationalist politicians. lectual and moral desert. That human-made Plot theories and political paranoia had long desert became a happy hunting ground for been widespread in former Yugoslavia and charlatans, adventurers, and demagogues who throughout Eastern Europe. This was encour- came to prominence overnight as the system aged by the ceaseless efforts of the political collapsed. There had' been no time to develop police and their favorite journalists to develop a alternate views and politics to be tested in "security consciousness" —a general paranoia debate and mutual criticism. Instead the "new" about all foreigners, potential spies, and all non- and anticommunist politicians had to who were different and might threaten the develop immediately. Quite naturally, the new political order. There was ample room for an politicians did not build their programs out of alliance of the right-wing emigres and the whole cloth. A substantial part was played by communist police-inspired journalists. Both
30 • DISSENT Yugoslavia loved dark plots with undefined alien forces of won a victory. The 1991 war fought entirely on great malignity. Protofascist and communist- Croat soil was massively destructive, destroy- inspired paranoias fit together neatly and ing whole cities and creating some 600,000 helped corrupt and infect an already insecure refugees; in 1992 another 400,000 refugees public opinion faced with the collapse of from the Bosnian war poured in. Croatia also known comfortable beliefs and social and lost effective control of the one-quarter of its political systems. territory where large concentrations of the These are politics for intellectually and Serbian minority live. The war has encouraged morally lazy people; almost everything is the already strong existing tendencies toward explained by conspiracies against our very own authoritarian presidential rule by decree and poor victimized nation. For the Serbian nation- censorship. By 1992 the last of the independent alists it is self-evident that the Albanians and press had been taken over. Bosnian Moslems are in cahoots with the world When the war moved from Croatia to Bosnia conspiracy of Islamic fundamentalism and in spring 1992, intercommunal violence and eternally lust after pure Serbian womanhood. open warfare reached near-genocidal propor- The Croats are obviously an extension of the tions. By far the largest number of the victims permanent plot of the Vatican against Orthodox were Moslem civilians, but all sides murdered Christianity or, alternately, the German march civilians and ran concentration camps mainly to to dominate Eastern Europe. For the Croat create ethnically "pure" cantons in what had nationalists the Serbs represent the barbarian been an exemplary multi-ethnic society. A state non-European hordes of treacherous "byzan- based on all the citizens as distinct from ethnic tines" out to destroy Western civilization and or national groups is rejected by the Serb and Christian (that is, Catholic) culture; they are Croat nationalist leaders in Bosnia. Both now also "natural Bolsheviks" and even biologi- war against the Bosnian government. Partition cally inferior. This helps to increase the is the only answer that the Croat and Serb circulation of a mass yellow press and corrupts nationalists will tolerate. However, it is television and radio. It is a politics of identity impossible to have an ethnically based partition reduced to its crudest form, "we" versus without massive transfers of population. These "they." transfers will not be voluntary. Small towns- people and peasants do not readily leave their ancestral homes; they have to be terrified out of A democratic solution to the Yugoslav crisis their minds. Cantonization of Bosnia and the is now almost unimaginable. And yet it is all creation of nationally "pure" states thus leads the more urgent. Bosnia has been destroyed as in a straight line to massacres, atrocities, a viable multi-ethnic polity through the brutal looting, rape, and concentration camps as war and massive ethnic "cleansing" by the instruments of the new demographic policy. Serbian nationalists aided by the army and with The Serbian nationalists have done by far the Croat nationalist complicity in partitioning that most of this, but there have also been massive state. Democracy is endangered in both Serbia transfers of Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia. and Croatia as well, because two bitter dirty One-quarter of Croatia is under indefinite wars have been waged for maximalist national UN control, and an ever-more suspicious aims with horrendous losses of lives and German sponsor supervises its human and property. No one has won. Those responsible minority rights performance. International aid for the policies that led to the wars and who cannot begin to make up for the destruction by proved so incompetent in waging them are the Yugoslav army and the loss of the desperately struggling to stay in power. The Yugoslav-wide markets. The Croatian authori- price for the Milosevic regime's staying in ties are at best inefficient, when not complicit, power could well be an extension of military when faced with massive dismissals, denials of aggression to Kosovo, the Moslem areas of citizenship papers, and destruction of the Serbia, and even Macedonia. homes of an isolated and frightened Serbian On the other hand, the Croats have hardly minority. This is despite the fact that the
WINTER • 1993 • 31 Yugoslavia
Croatian constitution and legal systems have was on the verge of a coup to upset the incorporated enlightened provisions for the reformist Markovic federal government. It protection of minorities. But these guarantees believed that the Soviet Army, which faced remain a dead letter. Just as no real democracy similar foes in its own country, would be a firm is possible in Belgrade so long as the Serbian ally. That last chance vanished with the failed government represses Albanians in Kosovo, no coup against Gorbachev in the summer of real democracy is possible in Croatia so long as 1991. Had that coup succeeded, the army its Serbian minority is treated as second-class would have struck, assuming the backing of citizens. what would still have been a Soviet Union, with a ruling Communist party. The Yugoslav Army leadership had tied its fate to antireform- Conversations with top officials of the last ist military and political conservatives in the legal federal government' make clear that the Soviet Union. The defeat of the coup in Yugoslav National Army (YNA) had become Moscow left the Yugoslav army faced with an independent force at least a year before the total international isolation and also made it breakup of Yugoslavia in June 1991. That was more desperate and adventurist. Within months when military intervention against the unilat- the old Titoist generals were pensioned off and eral Slovenian declaration of independence replaced by a younger and more nationalist lot. passed the point of no return. The army's This means that it was essential from the military and political failure encouraged the very beginning to unmistakably demonstrate to Croat separatists to follow. However, the both the army leadership and the Milosevic secession of Croatia, with a large Serbian government that their murderous goals were minority both manipulated by Belgrade and not achievable except at unacceptable cost. thoroughly frightened by the maximalist ora- That is why a real blockade was a necessary tory of the Croatian nationalists, guaranteed a step, but only a step, to changing Serbian war in Croatia. The army lost this war as well. policies. Complete and enforced air interdiction The Serbs remaining in Croatia, both innocent of Bosnia, permitting the Bosnian government and guilty, now suffer from an assumption of to arm itself and taking out most of the Serbian their collective guilt by the majority Croat artillery that freely bombed civilian targets in population. Sarajevo and other major cities in Bosnia for Why did the Yugoslav army push ever six months, could have been effective much further into this doomed adventure? The earlier. Now it is too late to prevent hundreds answer is both nasty and simple. Although of thousands from dying in the bitter mountain committed to preserving Yugoslavia, the Army winter. These deaths could have been pre- leadership was even more concerned with vented or at least much reduced. Half of the preserving communist political power. There- Bosnian population will now be turned into fore, it opposed the only kind of Yugoslavia refugees, while Europe is ever more unwilling, that could have been preserved: a decentral- and Croatia ever less able, to accept more ized, economically reformed, and pluralistic refugees. Most of this was avoidable, the result Yugoslavia—in other words, a noncommunist of human activities, not of fate. Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavia that the army sought to preserve could only be preserved by A Free Association of naked force. In that aim it wrongly believed Yugoslav States? that it had a reliable ally in Milosevic's Serbian regime. It was wrong because Milosevic What might be imagined as a decent, if not banked on an alliance with Serbian nationalists, optimal, outcome emerging from the wreck- who were anti-Titoist, and whose aims required age? What is essential is for the new frontiers the destruction of any kind of Yugoslavia that between the new national states to be (1) could have been acceptable to the other absolutely inviolable and (2) not too terribly national groups. relevant to the lives of most people and for the At least twice before June 1991 the army functioning of most economic institutions and
32 • DISSENT Yugoslavia transportation networks. The first step is peace way to deal with long overdue human rights in and mutual recognition, within their present Kosovo and with rights of minorities. borders, of all states emerging from Yugosla- A second step should be to create a via. Any attempt to redraw these frontiers free-trade zone, if at all possible with a would lead to military conflict. Attempts to customs union. This is necessary for many redraw the frontiers along "ethnic" lines obvious reasons, including the interdependence reinforce two deadly myths. First, that it is of much of the industry and services in former possible to draw frontiers in such a way as to Yugoslavia. It would be a good idea to revive create ethnically "pure" national entities and the old proposal that the whole area become a second, that this is desirable. Both myths are military free zone. This would make both civil born of a desire to create ethnically homoge- society and democracy considerably safer than neous national states. This is inimical to they are in the presence of national armies. democracy in a real world where states are What forces might fight for such a program? increasingly multi-ethnic. Instead, there should Is it any more than wishful thinking? I believe be a systematic de-linking of exclusive ethnic that the ethnic mobilization has very shallow and national symbols from those of the state, roots. There were seventy years of Yugoslavia, which should be a state of all of its subjects, forty-five after the Second World War. A great who should all be equal citizens. deal of cultural and economic integration took The populations of whatever national iden- place. This is why I believe that once all states tity who fled the war zones must be permitted that have emerged from Yugoslavia recognize to return with guarantees of safety. Therefore, each other's independence and borders, the all "patriotic" paramilitaries must be disarmed, tendency will be toward increasing coopera- and for some time both the police and courts tion. There are more than two-and-a-half- must be under international supervision. An million people in mixed marriages. international court to try war criminals is The present widespread popular anticommu- essential. An international court might also be a nism and antileftism is also only skin deep.
WINTER • 1993 • 33 Yugoslavia
There is a discreet but widespread nostalgia for the antiwar young and from increasingly the "good old Titoist days," days of job militant unionized workers. security, rising incomes, and law and order in It is not at all certain that these forces can what was the most open communist-ruled win. Much will depend on the support they get country in Europe. Real incomes in Croatia, from the social democratic left in Europe, even Serbia, and Bosnia have dropped from an more from their courage in the face of average of 600 to 800 German marks a month repression in some of the new states. However, in 1990 to well under 100! Massive dismissals they do represent a hope, a possibility worth purely at the discretion of management face fighting for. huge numbers of workers. All vestiges of Modem nationalism, not only in Eastern workers' control and self-management have Europe, moves by rules of strange and been abolished. Pensions have been cut in half. convoluted logic, sometimes explicitly antira- Inadequate social services are sharply reduced. tional and antimodern. The hard-line national- Women's social gains—the rights to abortion ists in the 1920s in Europe, in France, Spain, and a place in the work force—are all under Italy, and Germany were quite aware of this harsh attack by the nationalist and clerical right. Every fourth person in Croatia, fifth dimension of nationalism. They gloried in it person in Serbia, and third person in Bosnia is and produced authoritarian nationalist move- now a refugee. More ethnic warfare looms in ments, some immersed in Jungian symbols. Kosovo and the Moslem areas of Serbia. More Nationalism is a thing of passion and emotion, refugees will result from the fall of Sarajevo. nonrational and postuniversalist; it is meant to My best hope rests on the notion that the be felt and believed and not coldly analyzed. It broad, class-based left has more resonance in is also utterly nondemocratic although populist, the memories and politics of Croatia, Bosnia, and it is not open to the compromises and and Serbia than does the nationalist right. negotiations that are the heart of modern There are social democratic and leftist parties democratic politics. Nationalism awakened is in all of the former Yugoslav states that inconsistent with building "cool and rational" maintain loose networks and share a common complex federal or confederal states that are democratic politics. They are in the govern- essential if any kind of democratic arrange- ments of Macedonia and Slovenia and the ments are to work in multi-ethnic states. This is opposition in Croatia, Bosnia, and new "Yugo- not merely a problem for the states of former slavia." They have broad support from dissi- Yugoslavia or the former Soviet Union. In an dent intellectuals and from former communist era of awakened nationalisms in multi-ethnic democratic reformers. They draw support from states democracy is often the first casualty. ❑
Notes
The "world perspective" was initially provided by the nevertheless must not be forgotten that the Yugoslav Com- Mexican and Egyptian institutes, which wanted to see what munists did respectably well in the first free elections in 1990 they could learn from the problems of the transition to in all the republics, winning in three (Serbia, Montenegro, democracy in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe. This and Macedonia), and being the largest opposition parties in formula also enabled West European social democrats to two. Thus, they did better than East European Communist participate in some of our activities. parties on the whole. To be sure, continued evolution of the 2 In both Slovenia and Macedonia these social democratic Serbian party turned it into a party that rejected the positive former reform Communist parties are now in coalition heritage of Yugoslav communism, keeping only the link with governments. the political police and repressiveness.
3 Pesic is now a major leader of the Citizen's Group, 5 This information is based on my own lengthy interviews which unites the leading opposition to Milosevic's regime and conversations with former cabinet ministers and and provides backing for the more moderate federal prime ambassadors of the federal government of Ante Markovic. minister Panic and federal president Cosic. The situation in Through cross checking I am convinced that it is true. Both Serbia is close to an internal civil war. Things may still end the prime minister and the secretary for international affairs with an army coup. were among the first targets of the military "hards" during That hostility was quite real in many social circles, but it the first half of 1991.
34 • DISSENT