A Vacuum Full Of Hatred

After the disintegration of Yugoslavia seven states were formed, some were recognized and some were not. Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina which subsequently became a confederation of Croats and Muslims, Macedonia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, then two Serbian enclaves the so-called Republic of Srpska Krajina (in Croatia) and the Republic of Srpska (in Bosnia-Herzegovina). The Czech Republic and Slovakia are the inheritors of the former Czechoslovakia, while the former USSR has 15 inheritor states.

In Central and East Europe alone, there are 37 different ethnic and linguistic groups whose controversies reflect world tendencies towards "nation-building run amok" (a race to death among some aborigines).

The paradox lies in the fact that all this is happening at the same time as tendencies towards global economic integration. Karl Ulrik Sirup of Umeo University (Sweden) has used the phrase "the ethnocentric commonwealth", not without irony, to describe this phenomenon. Sirup has noticed that multi-culture is undergoing a crisis, and that within this context, Europe is increasingly becoming a "continent of structural and institutionalized racism".

"All that has happened in recent years has been characterized with a renewal of the ethnic issue and nationalism... Yugoslavia is an instructive example, and when there are no mechanisms for controlling conflicts, they end in war," said sociologist Dusan Janjic of the Institute od Social Sciences (IDN) at the international gathering: "The status of minorities in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" held last week and organized by the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences SANU). Stefano Bianchini, a professor at the University of Bologna and the coordinator of "The International Network Europe and the Balkans", said: "The transition of these societies depends on the ethnic issue, something that no one anticipated a few years ago..."

New SANU President Aleksandar Despic said that the conference "represented an attempt at resolving the minority issue in Yugoslavia in the best possible way". The gathering forecast positive changes, even though the participants were handicapped by the fact that those most talked of - the Albanians, weren't present. During the state-democracy-minorities debate, the participants favored the setting up of civic, liberal and social states, and the development of a civil society. The members of the conference cautioned that it was necessary to regulate the status of national minorities with the participation of their representatives, and that they should be represented in parliament. It was pointed out that the question of education in the languages of the national minorities had not been dealt with adequately, and that there were great regional differences in Yugoslavia with regard to the standard of education and culture, and that because of the big territorial concentration of minorities these differences could be revealed through an ethnic basis...

Director of the US-based "Project on Ethnic Relations" (PER), conceived with the idea of encouraging a peaceful solution to ethnic clashes in Central, East Europe and Russia, Alen Kassof, also attended the gathering and called on the Serbian and Yugoslav governments to take positive steps with regard to the Hungarian and Albanian minorities.. Kassof believes that "when it comes to bloodshed among ethnic communities then the problem increases one hundredfold, which, unfortunately, is what happened in these parts".

Parallel analyses show differences between nationalism in Western societies (a strong middle class, the idea of renaissance, universal messianism) and Eastern nationalism (a weak middle class, irrational romanticism). Dijana Vukomanovic took part in the debate on ethnicity in transition and said that nationalism in the East had Janus's face - it can be "civic nationalism", and at the same time it can also be "ethnic nationalism". What started out in East Germany as "D-Mark Nationalismus" led to racist violence against foreign guest workers. She also believes that Germany has given legitimacy to the national principle in post-Cold War Europe.

Dusan Janjic (IDN) said that Serbian nationalism probably wouldn't have had much of a chance in Serbia if it hadn't been supported by the state during the so-called "anti-bureaucratic revolution" (when Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic took over power).

Vera Markovic (IDN) refutes this claim: "Inter-ethnic hatred led to the war and the disintegration of the state!" Research into ethnic distance have registered, as a rule, a high degree of tolerance and acceptance among the Yugoslav nations, while Serbs and Croats show the lowest degree of mutual distance with regard to other nations. A rapid change took place with the induction of tensions caused with the culmination of the social, economic and political crisis...

Miroslav Janicijevic (IDN) said that an author by the name of Moynihan recalled a debate on multi-national societies in 1965 under the auspices of the United Nations in Ljubljana: "I returned to Washington to report that the Serbs and Croats would come into conflict one day, regardless of what they told me". Moynihan recalled that the USSR had fallen apart along the "ethnic line", and that the decisive factor was the unpreparedness of Slav Ukraine to remain under a regime controlled by a Slav Russia. Yugoslavia also disappeared when the brutal conflict between Serbia and Croatia started, this time between nations with the least number of differences with regard to genealogy, and practically the same language. "Ethnic clashes don't require great differences - small ones suffice!"

National heterogeneity has destroyed all three socialist federations, a fact which in different ways, but in great part burdens Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania (where political tensions have been on the rise recently in connection with the Hungarian minority), as well as practically all the states in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Conflicts in the Central-East European region have often been linked to constitutional arrangements and controversies over who represented a "titular nation" and who did not have the status of a "titular nation".

Ethnicity has become one of the main criteria in regulating citizenship; once "constitutional nationalism" has been established, then it puts down roots among the people. The Croatian Constitution proclaims Croatia to be the state of the Croatian people, while Serbs, after being a "constitutive nation" are now regarded as a "minority". Macedonia is the "national state of the Macedonian people and guarantees coexistence with Albanians, Turks, Vlachs, Romanies and other nations living in Macedonia. Serbia is defined as the "democratic state of all citizens", but at the same time it remains the unwanted framework of the largest minority - ethnic Albanians who, by boycotting institutions and norms, have created a parallel infrastructure, parliament, educational system and market within the framework of the Serbian state. In the Baltic countries, in Slovakia and in the states of the former Yugoslavia citizenship is based on explicitly narrow national notions. In the majority of the East European states formal equality is recognized to big minority groups, but there are cases when other ethnic groups are exposed to threats, or tolerated on "our territory", which is then presented as a "historical gesture"...

Nenad Dimitrijevic of the Central European University in Budapest upholds the view that democracy in post-socialism is not the end result of a national state, but, on the contrary, it is possible once this concept has been abandoned. He believes that national aspirations for one's "own" state do not just threaten democracy but the very existence of post-socialist countries. "The pseudo-mystical nonsense" of post-socialist nationalism which wishes to present itself as a natural state of affairs, one which can be defended only through violence, directed against those who don't belong to the naturally "defined" community and those from ones own ranks who refuse to accept the "objectivity" of being a member of a community based on national exclusiveness.

In many states of the former USSR, including Rumania, Bulgaria and Slovakia the state upholds a "soft" nationalist variant (the criteria in differentiating "soft" and "hard" is, of course, war). The physical extermination and collective expulsion of minorities is replaced here with a policy which favors the dominant national identity.

Nenad Dimitrijevic concluded that the nationalist threat to post-socialist democracy has two sources: the majority of post-socialist countries are ethnically heterogeneous and characterized by the pre-political division into a majority and minority, which functions not just as a cultural factor but as the structural determinant of all social relations. Its destructive potential in these parts is due to heritage in these regions and a deficit of political culture.

The second source is the conceptual closeness between socialism and nationalism which represent forms of collectivism. The fall of Real Socialism left behind a devastating heritage, which should not be regarded as the consequence of revolutionary radicalism (these evolutions, at least in the way in which they were carried out, were not radical). The matter concerns exceptionally strong socialist regimes which did not leave anything which in the changed social context could be taken over as a positive heritage. Nenad Dimitrijevic concluded: "After the Berlin Wall was torn down, and after monuments to the founders of communism and their followers were removed and the names of streets and squares changed, the only way of recognizing that socialism ever existed, are the people: the post-communist man is still marked by living under the yoke of immaturity. Socialism completely destroyed the civic component of society, making the learning of democracy all that more difficult..."