YUGOSLAVIA R.I.P.
By Gwynne Dyer
AZG Armenian Daily
25/05/2006
Within days of Montenegro’s successful referendum on independence on
Sunday, Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic will be arriving in Brussels
to open talks on joining the European Union, while other Montenegrin
diplomats arrive in New York to seek admission as the 193rd member
of the United Nations. A country that was extinguished 88 years ago
has risen from its grave — and the mini-empire that absorbed it has
finally come to an end.
With Montenegro’s independence, the last vestige of former Yugoslavia
is gone: Serbia has lost its seacoast and reverted to its land-locked
borders of 1918. Yugoslavia was a project that was bloody at the start,
bloody again in the middle, and exceedingly bloody in its last years
in the 1990s. The lesson we should draw from this is: no more shotgun
marriages in the name of tidiness.
As the Ottoman (Turkish) empire retreated down the western side of the
Balkans during the 19th century, half a dozen Christian ethnic groups
who spoke closely related South Slavic dialects were candidates for
nationhood, but not all of them got it. The Slovenes and Croatians
became part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which eventually absorbed
the Bosnians as well. Serbia and Montenegro became independent states
in 1878, but after the Balkan wars of 1911-12 the Macedonians were
just handed over to Serbia (which almost doubled in size).
As early as the mid-19th century, many Serbs believed that all the
western Balkans should eventually be ruled from Belgrade. In his famous
Nacertanije (Programme) of 1844, Ilija Garasanin, Minister of Internal
Affairs in a Serbia that was still technically under Ottoman rule,
outlined the stages by which Serbian control might gradually extend
to include the whole of the region, and generations of Serbs were
taught to dream of that Greater Serbia.
Their opportunity came with the First World War, which destroyed the
Austro-Hungarian empire and left the Slovenes, Croatians and Bosnians
free to seek their own destinies.
Where they all ended up, however, was in the new, Serb-dominated
state of Yugoslavia. The victorious great powers let the Serbs
have their way in part because they owed Serbia a favour (since it
had fought on the winning side), but mainly because it was a tidier
arrangement than cluttering up the western Balkans with half a dozen
small countries. They even bundled long-independent Montenegro into
the new Yugoslavia (although some Montenegrins immediately revolted
against rule from Belgrade).
The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was dominated by Serbia from the start: all
of its prime ministers were Serbs, as were 161 of its 165 generals. So
it fell apart at once when Nazi Germany invaded in 1941, and a Croatian
fascist regime set out to take revenge on Serbians and assert its own
independence: over half a million people died in Croatian concentration
camps. Then Communist guerillas took power after the Second World
War and reestablished Serbian domination, killing all those (mostly
Croatians and Bosnians) who had collaborated with the Germans.
Communist Yugoslavia lasted almost half a century, but when it started
to break apart in 1992 the Serbs would not let go, and it took four
wars and a quarter-million deaths before Serbia finally accepted the
loss of its South Slav empire. Even after that the European Union tried
to hold Serbia and Montenegro together, bullying the Montenegrins into
accepting a lopsided two-country federation (Serbia has twelve times
as many people as Montenegro) in 2003. But the Montenegrins insisted
on the right to a referendum on breaking up that union after three
years, and last Sunday they exercised that right.
Kosovo will almost certainly also get official independence from
Serbia by the end of this year, and there will then be seven countries
where fifteen years ago there was only one. It is very untidy, and you
could certainly accuse some of these countries of being driven by the
“narcissism of small differences.”
But THEY cared about these small differences, and bad things happened
when they were ignored.
Serbia wanted to rule the western Balkans, but it never conquered
the other ethnic groups. They were pushed into Serbia’s arms by great
powers that wanted to keep things simple, and the result was almost
a century of resentment and intermittent murder. Now it’s over, and
they have to learn to live alongside one another again. It will be
much easier if they have some larger context in which to submerge
their differences, and there is one at hand: the European Union.
Slovenia is already an EU member, and Croatia and Macedonia are
candidates. Montenegro is applying now, and Serbia would open talks
tomorrow if it could get around the EU’s insistence that it hand over
the worst Serbian war criminals first. Bosnia will take much longer,
as it remains deeply divided between its Serbian, Croatian and Muslim
“Bosniak” communities, and Kosovo isn’t even officially a country yet.
Will the EU actually take them all in? For the sake of peace in
Europe, it should, but it will be up to 27 governments when Romania
and Bulgaria join next year.
Adding the western Balkans would increase the number of EU member
states with full voting rights by another 20 percent while increasing
the total population by only 5 percent. It’s a lot to ask, and we
won’t know the answer for years.