Abstract
When the Yugoslav wars began in the early 1990s, many of us, as well as most Yugoslavs, were astonished by the violence that was rapidly unleashed. A prominent and quite liberal Yugoslav academic told me in 1990 that everyone knew that a breakup of Yugoslavia would be and unmitigated disaster, although he believed it wouldn’t happen. But it did, and he turned into an avid Serbian nationalist.
The Yugoslav wars unleashed a wave of pessimism among observers of postcommunist Eastern and Central European states. There were other ethnically and religiously diverse newly free countries that could easily suffer the same fate. But it turned out that none did outside the former Yugoslavia. Romania’s restive Magyar population did not try to secede, and despite the efforts of some Romanian hypernationalist politicians, there was no persecution of Hungarians. Bulgaria had a record of recent, violent persecution of its Turkish minority, but the fall of communism ended that. Czechoslovakia split peacefully into two parts in 1993. The former Soviet Union, as we know all too well, was a different story, however. Violent ethnonationalist conflicts broke out and continue on and off in the Caucasus and Central Asia. So why did this happen in some places and not others that might have seemed to have equally daunting and historically venerable majority–minority ethnic identity issues?
This book takes up three Balkan cases with different outcomes, despite some surface similarities. Postcommunist Kosovo had a lot of violence, Macedonia had some, and Bulgaria had very little. Author Maria Koinova tries to explain the differences and draw some general conclusions that might be more widely applicable.
One key is what she calls ‘critical junctures’, times of crisis that set the pattern for a long time by setting up institutions and elite thought patterns that become hard to change. Social scientists like to call this ‘path dependence’, because once a certain fork in the road is taken, many other possibilities are permanently excluded.
In Bulgaria, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw a very sharp reversal of policy that set the tone for the decades that have followed. In the 1980s, the communist regime, desperate to relegitimize itself in the face of growing dissatisfaction, promoted an ultranationalist, violent persecution of its Turkish minority, hoping that this would rally the majority Slavs to communism. It did not, and after the fall of the regime in 1989, at a moment when institutional arrangements were fluid, the policy was reversed. It helped that neighboring Turkey never pressed the case of its Bulgarian linguistic kin very hard and made no territorial claims. Bulgarian sovereignty and territorial integrity were never threatened. Also, the European Union (EU) made it clear that toleration toward this minority would help ease Bulgaria’s accession into Europe. The Turkish minority, in any case, had neither the numbers nor the significant territorial majority in Bulgaria to demand separation. So accommodations were made, most of the Bulgarian Turks who had fled to Turkey were able to return, and Turkish political elites were coopted into the (corrupt) new ruling system.
Macedonia was more dicey. Neighboring Albania after the 1991 fall of its communist regime did informally support the large Albanian minority in Macedonia against the Slavic majority; killing did occur through the 1990s and early 2000s, and the fate of the country hung in the balance. But ultimately, largely because, from the very beginning, the Europeans pressed for compromise and promised possible EU candidacy if Macedonia recognized the rights of the Albanians and compromised to hold the state together. Macedonia’s political elites were well aware of the fact that Greece disliked the very existence of a Slavic Macedonia, and though Bulgaria did not at this time press the irredentist claims on Macedonia that it had pursued in the late 19th and first part of the 20th century, these were potentially still there. As for Albania and Kosovo, they were linked by language and mostly by religion to the Albanian Macedonians. A failure to accommodate Albanian demands for greater cultural and political autonomy meant the sure dissolution of this fragile state, while compromise promised survival and the potential of substantial EU aid.
In Kosovo, everything went wrong from the start. Slobodan Miloşević and his corrupt gang rested their entire political legitimacy on Serbian ultranationalism and the venerable if historically dubious story of Kosovo was the heartland of Serbia. This made any compromise with Albanian demands in Kosovo, where they were a very large majority, impossible.
Koinova concludes that after the fall of communism, Kosovo’s Albanians in the crucial period of the late 1980s and early 1990s saw a sharp decline in their rights and political status, whereas the Turkish minority in Bulgaria had the opposite experience, making it much more amenable to the partial compromises offered by the state. In Macedonia, the Albanian minority saw a small drop in its status, but not one so severe as to make accommodation impossible. How majorities treat minorities, therefore, is a crucial element in outcomes. In the end, Serbia’s unwillingness to compromise and the reduced status of Kosovo Albanians made growing violence inevitable. Serbia tried to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of Albanians, and this led to the European and American intervention that drove the Serbs out of the province.
One of Koinova’s strong conclusions comes into play here, and it can be applied to many other cases in the world. International intervention (in this case by the EU and the United States) can work to pacify ethnic conflict if applied early and broadly by encouraging elites to meaningfully accommodate at least some important minority demands. The best way to do that is to impose conditions for rewards that might follow. On the other hand, preaching tolerance and hoping to change prejudiced minds (she calls it ‘socialization’) are pretty much a fools’ errand (see ‘Iraq: Sunnis and Shiites’). This means that the elites of both majority and minority communities have to see some advantages in compromises. That happened in Bulgaria and Macedonia, but not in Kosovo. Unfortunately, there are not many potential EUs outside of Europe able to make such realistic promises. But there are all too many leaders like Miloşević, ready to play up nationalist fantasies to stay in power.
Another related finding is that the ‘international community’ (in the Balkan case that meant Europe and the United States) actually prizes stability more than real democratization, reform of corruption, or any of the related deep changes that have turned out to be so hard to achieve in societies that don’t seem to really appreciate the need for them. If democratization actually brings more stability, so much the better, but stability is paramount. Even democratic Western powers can be wonderfully hypocritical about this. A subject not touched upon in this book is what happens when the ‘international community’ includes powerful actors whose preference for stability over democracy is not hypocrisy at all, but what they actually believe in.
There is a final conclusion readers might draw, but which Koinova did not touch, perhaps because it takes us into areas that social science cannot measure and so tends to ignore. One of these is the character of major leaders. Slobodan Miloşević was a dishonest, corrupt, and brutal leader who clung to power by encouraging the worst sort of hypernationalism. Whether he believed in it or not is hardly relevant. He probably did. This nationalism was in any case present in Serbia and had been at least since the 19th century. It resonated with the fears and bitterness created by the terrible experiences of this region during World War II, and reawakened in Yugoslavia’s last days. A leader like Nelson Mandela might just have been able to go in the opposite direction, and an earlier appreciation of Miloşević’s character by powerful Europeans and Americans might have prompted more decisive intervention at a crucial juncture. But Mandelas are rare in this world, and farsightedness by powerful international actors is not much more common.