Essay, Michael Hudson, Copyright©2002 BRIIFS 4, 2

In this essay, the author revisits and further develops the argument put forward in his book, Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, which describes the processes of ethnic unmixing and ethno-demographic engineering that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia. Instead of analyzing these conflicts in terms of irrational ‘ancient ethnic hatreds,’ the author argues that the violence in Yugoslavia had profoundly rational dimensions and was primarily ‘European’ in origin. Its aim was to put an end to the forms of mixing, symbiosis and coexistence that have been intrinsic to Balkan life and to create political communities based upon the dominant European principle of the nation-state. Second, the author claims that the West’s conceptualizations of these conflicts in ethnic terms actually strengthened processes of ethnic unmixing on the ground. Third, he makes the case that, based upon the secular and linguistically-based notions of ethnic and national identity in the West, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were perceived differently. Western reluctance to intervene largely evaporated when the issue was no longer violence in Bosnia, but violence in Kosovo, where the West stepped in on behalf of Kosovar Albanians. Finally, the author argues that, owing to the continued centrality of the nation-state, the concept of transnationalism--and not globalization--is the one that renders processes of ethnic unmixing in the former Yugoslavia most meaningful, even though the conflict could not have evolved in the way that it did without the conditions of a globalized world.

Before Yugoslavia descended into war in the early 1990s, only half or less of the territory of this multi-ethnic state was ethnically homogeneous. Except for Serbia proper and Slovenia, the other republics (especially Bosnia and Macedonia) and autonomous provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina) were mixed, forming complicated ‘ethnoscapes’ of territorially- dispersed groups that entertained multifaceted and ambiguous-- sometimes conflictual, sometimes symbiotic--relations with one another. As a result of the wars of the 1990s, this situation has changed radically. Ethnic cleansing and other less violent, but equally efficient, forms of ‘ethno-demographic engineering’ have simplified the look of the region. Parts with longstanding traditions of coexistence were appropriated by one of the contending groups and emptied of ‘others’. These processes of ‘ethnic unmixing’ 1 seem to be irreversible: Bosnia is divided, for all intents and purposes, into three largely ethnically-homogeneous entities, Croatia has expelled most Serbs and Serbia most Croats. As we have witnessed more recently, Kosovo and Macedonia have not been spared these processes. Serbian efforts to massively cleanse Kosovo of its Albanian population have been followed--after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) entered the province--by Albanian attempts to expel Serbs and Roma. It is salient to note that the expulsions of the non-Albanian minorities from Kosovo has occurred under the eyes of NATO and the United Nations, which have governed the province since June 1999. Former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army and other militants have been able to intimidate, harass and kill members of minority communities and Albanian ‘collaborators’ with virtual impunity. 2

The daily televised images of these wars and of the brutal violence that accompanied them led many in the world to believe that the Balkans experienced a resurgence of deeply-rooted ‘ancient ethnic hatreds,’ which had been only superficially and temporarily suppressed under communist rule. 3 Western politicians, academics and journalists suggested that Yugoslavia’s ethnic mix, as well as its geographical position between East and West and at the crossroads of several major civilizations and world religions, could only mean that conflict was natural and inevitable. “This is the land where at least three religions and a half-dozen ethnic groups have vied across the centuries. It is the birthplace of World War I. It has long been a cradle of European conflict, and it remains so today,” American Secretary of State Warren Christopher said in 1993, as the war in Bosnia went into its second year. 4 One of the most articulate and influential proponents of such views was the American political scientist, Samuel Huntington, who in “The clash of civilizations?” (1993) symbolically sealed Yugoslavia’s fate by drawing a line between the country’s ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ parts. 5

In the light of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the ways they were represented in the media, it was logical for the Western public to perceive the cultural cleavages in the country as hard and fast lines of division between groups that could not live together peacefully within one single state. These cleavages were primarily understood in ethnic terms, reinforced and strengthened by seemingly unbridgeable religious differences, especially between Muslims and Christians. In spite of initial attempts to keep Yugoslavia together, many Western leaders (pushed by the unilateral German recognition of Croatian and Slovenian independence) soon reconciled themselves to the idea that, under these adverse conditions and the grim realities of the war, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to save the country. Naturally, most nationalist leaders in Belgrade, Zagreb and elsewhere--obsessed with their self-assigned ‘historical task’ of carving out the territories of their new nation-states--espoused this view as well, emphasizing that multi-ethnic Yugoslavia had been a flawed and/or artificial construct from the beginning.

Even though it was not too far-fetched to see the events in Yugoslavia as the last stage in a long process of European nation-state building, the Western media tended to present the conflicts not in modern political terms, but in terms of archaic and irrational fraternal hatreds. This had unquestionably to do with the fact that the violence was often excessive in character and that the combatants seemed to fight wars similar to the religious wars of a distant European past, engaging them with similar passion and using similar means and methods. A contributing factor was that Serbian, Croatian and Muslim nationalism had strong religious overtones: the frequent use by politicians, priests and paramilitaries of religious imagery and symbolism, in the public domain as well as on the battlefield, gave them a seemingly pre-modern and atavistic quality. What made the conflicts even less comprehensible to outsiders was the fact that all conflicting sides in Croatia and Bosnia spoke the same language. Consequently, the tendency was to see the violence as a regression towards pre-national religious or even tribal warfare. Some Western political leaders took this as an excuse not to get too deeply involved in the Balkans and to pursue a policy of containment, that is, to attempt to fence off the zones of conflict, until the irrational passions of ethnic hatred and religious fury had died down.

Nationalists in the region, aided by conditions of global communication and the dissemination of images and sound bites from the war, preferred to strengthen and reinforce such perceptions in order to prevent the West from meddling in the Balkans, as the anthropologist Cornelia Sorabji has argued. 6 Serbian nationalist forces, which had been most successful in carving out new territories with the help of the Yugoslav army and a host of paramilitary groups, were particularly interested in preventing intervention by the international community. While committing brutal atrocities, they emphasized that the West had nothing to lose in the region, the message being ‘we are fighting a dirty and irrational war so you’d better stay out of here!’ On the other side, those (militarily weaker) parties to the conflict that urged the West to intervene did their best to present their respective causes in terms of Western liberal political values, such as democracy, secularism, multiculturalism, human rights and tolerance. Whereas the Bosnian Muslims were unable to argue this convincingly because their identity was religiously-based--and inspired by Islam at that (Islam being perceived in the West, almost by definition, as fanatical and ‘fundamentalist’)--the Kosovar Albanians applied this strategy much more successfully. Through their policies of non-violent resistance and silent international diplomacy, they managed to present themselves to the outside world as a rational and moderate force. In my view, this was one of the reasons why the West intervened in Kosovo on their behalf in the spring of 1999: for the first time in its fifty-year existence, NATO attacked a sovereign state, Yugoslavia, and did so to fight a war on humanitarian grounds, another (controversial) novelty as well. 7

The purpose of this essay is threefold. The first aim is to demonstrate that, ethnographically, Western ‘Balkanist’ views are far from accurate. I will show how mixing, symbiosis and coexistence have been part and parcel of Balkan life. I will also argue that it is historically inappropriate to speak of ‘ancient ethnic hatreds,’ even when we acknowledge that the region’s modern (that is, twentieth-century) history has been turbulent. In my view, the violence in Yugoslavia was probably not, or not only, the result of opposite and incompatible ethnic identities; on the contrary, the violence was more than anything else a means to manufacture and impose such identities and to solidify divisions between them in places where they had not previously been overly important. Defining the political landscape in ethnic terms, dismissing all other (non-ethnic) explanations for the conflict and targeting ‘ethnic others’ with violence and terror were all ways in which the political arena was ethnicized and ethnic identities were made most salient. Violence was thus used as an instrument to create political communities based upon the European ideal of the nation-state.

Second, I will argue that Western politicians, academics and journalists conceptualized the conflicts in ways similar to local nationalists, namely, in terms of longstanding divisions and animosities between bounded, permanent and fixed ethnic groups. I believe that these Western perceptions strengthened processes on the ground and contributed to the creation of ethnic entities and enclaves (in the case of Bosnia and Kosovo) and nation-states (in the case of Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia).

A third and related aim is to point out the significance of international political and media ‘perceptions,’ in other words, the mindsets through which politicians and journalists view reality. In a globalized context, these perceptions are bound to have widespread consequences. 8 Yet, as I will argue, it is not the concept of globalization that renders these processes most meaningful, but rather that of ‘transnationalism.’ As Michael Humphrey has observed, these terms, which are used almost interchangeably when describing trends of global communication and exchange, convey different and contradictory realities. The concept of globalization refers to processes that are “deterritorializing, decentring and denationalizing,” while transnationalism is anchored in and predicated upon the continued centrality and hegemony of the nation-state as the most dominant and widespread form of political organization. 9 I will try to show that, in the case of the former Yugoslavia, transnationalism is the more appropriate term to describe the processes that have been at work there, even though the conflict could not have evolved in the way that it did without the conditions of a globalized world.

Ancient ethnic hatreds or very modern wars?

The image of fixed, stable and permanent ethnic groups and of ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ in the Balkans is misleading and inaccurate from both historical and anthropological perspectives. In Ottoman times, it was religious differences and not ethnic ones that formed the basis of social and political organization within the region. Through the millet system, the Ottoman state assigned an important role to the churches as vehicles of communal identity: existing ecclesiastic structures were used to administer the large Christian and other non-Muslim populations of the Ottoman territories. The millets nurtured a strong sense of belonging that was dependent upon religious affiliation, rather than ethnicity or language. The identities that mattered were defined in religious terms. 10 In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman millets were nudged aside by the European concept of the nation. New notions of identity and community emerged, especially among the Christians of the empire, and the millets became the kernels of new imagined ‘national’ communities based primarily upon ethnic and linguistic criteria. This process occurred first among the Orthodox populations of the empire (the Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians). Though many nationalist ideologues initially advocated a secular and linguistically-based nationalism grounded in the rationalist principles of the Enlightenment, there were strong pressures from the clergy and more traditional layers of society to make religious identity a part of the national heritage. 11 Orthodox priests and the Church came to play a role in Balkan nationalist movements and religious ideas and doctrines became crucial in articulating nationalist discourse. Only at a later stage, at the end of the nineteenth century, did Muslims make the first steps in the same direction: a shift occurred from communal identities based solely upon Islam to ones in which ethnicity was an important factor.

Even when ethnic and national identities had gained primacy, people still retained a consciousness of religious community and belonging inherited from the Ottoman millet system. The millet ethos survives until the present day and is particularly resilient among Balkan Muslim minorities, despite the fact that Muslims did not form millets under the Ottoman system, but belonged to the privileged majority. Maria Todorova has demonstrated this continuity in religious self-conception for the Bulgarian Pomaks: they still see themselves primarily as Muslims and have kept a fluid consciousness as far as their ethnic or national allegiances are concerned. 12 Among Christians, as well, religion continues to play an important, if not decisive, role in processes of ethnic identification and group demarcation. Religious symbols and imagery, sometimes only cultivated in vague and residual forms, have become part of the national heritage and, as such, help to delineate ethnic boundaries. In some regions, such as Bosnia, it is primarily religious affiliation that defines ethnic identities owing to the fact that groups there speak the same language. In the most general terms, however, religious identification has been made subordinate to ethnic identification and the old religious rivalries have been transformed into new ethnic and national antagonisms. In Kosovo, for instance, the Serb-Albanian conflict has now replaced the old confessional divide between Muslims and Christians. Ethnic lines of division have become more important than religious ones, even though the latter continue to play a crucial role in defining the former.

Because religious identities and antagonisms were paramount during most of the Ottoman period--creating boundaries between people who, on the basis of linguistic criteria, might have been considered to belong to the same ethnic or national group--it seems more appropriate, strictly speaking, to consider them ancient religious, rather than ethnic hatreds, if ‘hatred’ plays any role at all. Yet, this position is also questionable. From historical and (proto)ethnographic sources, it is clear that the Balkans had a longstanding tradition of coexistence that was as strong as the tendency toward conflict. This tradition took shape through trade, cultural diffusion, religious syncretism and conversion. Many cultural traits were (and still are) shared across ethnic and religious boundaries and, throughout the Ottoman period, barriers between groups were anything but watertight. Therefore, instead of perceiving the Ottoman state in terms of a multitude of separate ethnic or religious communities, it is preferable to speak of one essentially mixed and complex society in which exchange and cooperation existed alongside conflict, prejudice and animosity. In general sociological terms, it is not conflict or coexistence that is the hallmark of such a complex society: both aspects are present in whatever group relations that we might study, combining in a variety of ways over time. If we accept that, in periods of peace, relations may still involve an element of strife (if only to mark difference), we may also assume that cooperation and cross-cutting ties will not be completely absent in times of conflict. Ethno-religious relations, whether characterized as peaceful or conflictual, are usually much more multifaceted and subtle than these dichotomous labels suggest. Although the wars in the former Yugoslavia may cause us to think in terms of separate and self-contained groups, it is clear that boundaries are not always as clear and impenetrable as one may believe.

If we take Kosovo as an example, we need only go back two decades to find a fundamentally pluriform (albeit conflictual) society in which a variety of groups coexisted, diverse languages were spoken and all of the major religions of the Balkans were represented. In my book, Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, which is based upon fieldwork in the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, I give many ethnographic examples of the religious symbiosis that forms just one aspect of this coexistence. 13 I present Kosovo not as an ‘ethnic’ Albanian territory (which it has largely become), but as a mixed frontier or ‘ethnic shatter zone,’ the result of its incorporation into an Ottoman state embracing a wide variety of ethnic and religious groups. 14 Although, at first sight, Kosovo seemed to be less of an ethno-religious patchwork than Bosnia, its ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity was more profound. In Bosnia, all groups (Serbs, Croats and Muslims) speak the same language, which is not the case in Kosovo: Albanians and Serbs--or Turks and Roma, for that matter--use different tongues. Moreover, in Kosovo (unlike Bosnia), religious divisions cut across ethnic ones: Albanians might be Sunni Muslims, Roman Catholics, or members of a community of Shi`a-oriented dervish orders, for example.

My studies show that Kosovo society was characterized by a high degree of complexity and that the chemistry of intergroup relations was such that it is much too simple to speak of a segregated society, at least until the end of the 1980s. Although there was recurrent conflict, there was also intimate and varied contact, for instance, in the field of popular religion. Other studies of frontier societies similarly suggest that, in spite of existing political or cultural boundaries, contacts may be frequent and categories may be blurred. Because of the liminal and contested nature of frontiers, identities alongside or across borders are often shifting and multiple in nature. 15 These studies further indicate the usual discrepancies between state ideology and frontier practice: the centres of political and religious authority emphasize the fixity and impenetrability of cultural barriers and do much to sustain these divisions and maintain them ideologically but, in everyday life, the frontier is more a zone of communication and interchange than one marked by divisions. 16 Also, in Kosovo, owing to its longstanding position at the peripheries of successive states, group boundaries have tended to be more fluid and less institutionalized and identities more ambiguous and situational. The conscious development of stable, fixed and unambivalent identities is a more recent phenomenon.

Another important programmatic point that I would like to make is that ethnic divisions are not always the most salient ones in a given context. Many conflicts and tensions evolve along other lines of division, for instance, between families, clans, or villages, or between town and countryside. I have tried to demonstrate this in my recent book on the local history of the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, the site of the largest massacre of the Yugoslav wars (in which Serb forces killed more than 7,000 Muslims in July 1995). Many of these local divisions feed into and are reinforced by ethnic and nationalist conflicts that develop at another (higher) level. 17 One must not forget that some of the major crisis areas of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, such as eastern Bosnia and Kosovo, are poor, peripheral and conflict-ridden places, where the central authority of the state has traditionally been weak. The urban centres represent the interests of the state and try to implement its policies, but their role is limited and frequently obstructed and resented in the countryside. These are societies with low levels of integration, where loyalties beyond family or kin are highly unstable, changeable and fluid. Lack of societal integration has inhibited the development of firm and fixed wider identifications. Hence, one must be sceptical about analyses of conflicts in generic ethnic or religious terms.

What I have tried to show in my ethnographic work, both in Kosovo and Bosnia, is that ethnic and religious identities are not set in stone: people have often changed their ethnicity or faith and shifted their loyalties; consequently, identities show many ambiguities. Historically, contacts between ethnic and religious groups have been marked by cases of reciprocal assimilation and (incomplete) conversion. If we look, for instance, at the effects of Islamicization, we see that some Christian elements are often retained and that Christian features (like baptism, the veneration of particular Christian saints and the use of icons) may coexist with Muslim ones. People or groups of people can have more than one ‘exclusive’ ethnic or religious identity at the same time (for instance, by being both Muslim and Christian) and frequent migrations have further contributed to the blurring of ethnic and confessional boundaries. The instability, ambiguity and fluidity of identities in these regions should be seen, in the first place, as coping or manoeuvring strategies that come into play in circumstances of flux and existential insecurity, where the role of the state is limited. In other words, flexibility with regard to one’s identity--through conversion or the adoption of another ethnic identity--may be crucial for survival. When sheer physical or social survival is at stake, forms of ethnic and religious dissimulation and identity transformation may be the only ways to avoid death or deportation. Because of the historical experiences of migration, conversion and mimicry (the outward adoption of an identity for the sake of survival) and the consciousness of the mixed and composite origins of the population, there is a general awareness among Balkan inhabitants that identities should not be taken for granted: they are often regarded as ‘guises’ or ‘constructs’ that may be accepted or rejected. The phenomenon of contesting the identities of others is widespread and is even part of the political game.

In ethnic ‘core’ zones, such as central Serbia, where political and ecclesiastical power are concentrated, populations are more homogeneous and identities are more firmly established, for the state has had an enduring presence and reduced the room for manoeuvre. It is clear that the role of the state in eliminating ambiguity and in developing, imposing and sustaining firm and fixed ethnic categories and national identities is crucial, as social scientists and historians have pointed out. The work of Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson has been particularly helpful in demonstrating how modern polities have managed to forge nations out of diverse human material. 18 The functioning of these states requires certain ‘simplifications’ or categorical ‘grids,’ by which they can master their physical space and populations: the creation of unambiguous ethnic and national identities, with clear criteria for inclusion and exclusion, is part of the process. Katherine Verdery has worked out this idea most interestingly by showing that ethnic identities in Western Europe are more fixed than elsewhere, suggesting that the very notion of a self-consistent person who ‘has’ a stable and permanent ‘identity’ is the outcome of a historical process: the process of nation-state formation. As she notes, the state requires persons to have only one identity of a certain basic (ethnic, national, religious) kind, “as it cannot keep track of people who are one thing at one point, another thing at another.” 19 A further aspect of this process is that the nationalizing state will do its best to reduce the anomalies and ambiguities of identity existing within its borders: for instance, the small minorities that are ‘betwixt and between’ undermine existing demarcations and muddle any neat system of ethnic classification. States usually aim at reducing their ambivalent position, either by absorbing them into the main categories or by expelling or eliminating them. 20

Nationalist élites may thus want to use violence to reduce the intricacies and complexities of existing identities, to homogenize the population and to bolster the nation. War has often been the engine of nation-building and the Balkans seem to be no exception. In Bosnia, as Cornelia Sorabji has argued, violence was central to altering the local understandings of identity and community and to narrowing down the multi-layered pre-war identifications to merely one: that of the ethnic nation. Violence changes perceptions held by both victims and perpetrators about the very nature of groups and boundaries. It helps to deconstruct the legacies of a common existence--one fraught with difficulties, to be sure, but also much more complex than nationalists would have us believe--and to establish clear unambiguous identities and undivided loyalties. Particularly brutal and personalized violence is capable of creating ‘blank spaces,’ erasing memories, altering mental categories, changing beliefs and constructing solid and impenetrable boundaries. Violence is thus useful--or even essential--for the creation of new identities and communities. For instance, it helps to substitute wider national identities for local and regionally-based ones. Hence, violence is not simply evidence of disintegration, but a force for integration as well. Through its ability to engineer new situations, it also produces self-fulfilling prophesies, making reality resemble the (nationalist) ideological constructs that underpin it. 21

In short, it appears that, in the end, the violence in the former Yugoslavia was not only the result, but also the means for the achievement of opposite and incompatible ethnic identities. The wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo seem to have been primarily motivated by the perceived need to forge single and unequivocal identities out of populations that were quite mixed in origin and, under normal peaceful circumstances, lacked any strong attachment to the wider ‘imagined’ community of the nation. Violence was used to erase the elements of mixture and the ‘polluting’ ambiguity that threatened the newly-established nation-states. This explains, perhaps, the ferocity and brutality of the violence in Bosnia, where more effort was required to ‘unmix’ Muslims, Serbs and Croats in comparison to Kosovo, where the Albanian and Serb populations were already at some distance after a prolonged period of ethnic polarization and segregation. Years before war brought an end to ethnic coexistence in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo already was a deeply divided society, in which Albanians and Serbs lived separately in parallel worlds, with as little contact as possible. But, also in Kosovo, it was (Serbian) violence--though initially counteracted by (Albanian) non-violent resistance--that produced a sense of national solidarity unprecedented in Albanian history.

Kosovo and the ‘other’ Yugoslav wars

Some authors, such as Bogdan Denitch, Cornelia Sorabji and, most clearly, David Campbell, have argued that the West has contributed to the processes of ethnic unmixing in the former Yugoslavia by interpreting the conflicts in ethnic terms and by accepting political solutions put forward by nationalist politicians. Through the narratives that it produced, the West also played a role in transforming these conflicts into intractable ethnic questions that could only be solved, as Campbell argues, by partitioning Bosnia into separate ethno-territorial entities. 22 Without wanting to question the fundamentals of Campbell’s post-structuralist approach, I would like to offer a slightly different perspective, one that I believe to be more sensitive to the basic distinction that many in the West tend to make between ethnic and religious nationalism. This perspective may explain, in part, why the West handled the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo in different ways.

The NATO intervention in Kosovo formed an important turning-point in the Western approach to conflict in the former Yugoslavia. For the first time, the West intervened militarily on behalf of one party to the conflict: namely, the Kosovar Albanians. During the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, the approach of Western nations had been to try to contain the conflicts in order to reduce the risk that they might be drawn into them. Apart from geopolitical reasons (the fact that the Kosovo conflict might easily have spread to Macedonia and upset the delicate balance in the southern part of the Balkans), the wish to prevent a repetition of the mistakes of the Bosnian war (where the lack of political will to intervene had led to such atrocities as the Srebrenica massacre) and the fact that NATO’s credibility (on its fiftieth anniversary) was at stake, the intervention in Kosovo was also connected, in my view, with a specific perception of Kosovo’s Serbian-Albanian conflict that differed from the way in which Western politicians had understood events in Bosnia. In Western eyes, the conflict in Kosovo was a more clear-cut case of a clash between the principles of democracy and human rights, on the one hand, and religious intolerance, ethnic exclusivity and totalitarianism, on the other. As noted above, the Kosovar Albanians were much more successful in presenting themselves to the outside world as a rational, moderate and secular force, unlike the Serbs, Croats and Muslims, whose nationalisms had strong confessional overtones. The Albanian nationalist leaders pursued their goals without the seemingly irrational and pseudo-religious passions so characteristic of the Bosnian conflict. Hence, to Western observers, two different types of nationalism were confronting one another in Kosovo: Serbian nationalism, which was religious, exclusive, violent, atavistic and irrational in outlook, and Albanian nationalism, which appeared to be peaceful, modern, secular and rational.

As I have argued elsewhere, this makes the Kosovo conflict arguably the least ‘Yugoslav’ and perhaps the most genuinely ethnic of the outbreaks in the former Yugoslavia, if we take the common Western understanding of ethnic and national identity as our point of reference. 23 The fact is that, in the West, shared language is usually perceived as the sine qua non of ethnic groups and nations. Many (also scholarly) approaches to ethnicity and nationalism are based upon this assumption, namely, that a common language is the central unifying element of ethnic groups and nations without which they are somehow incomplete. 24 Although religion is often mentioned as one of the key markers of ethnic and national identities, it is usually not considered sufficient in itself--at least, not in everyday parlance. It is language that is viewed as the most clear and decisive element, the one without which a nation cannot pass the test of nation-ness. Many outside observers, therefore, have had difficulties in recognizing the Bosnian Muslims as forming a nation in their own right, considering a religiously-defined ethnic group to have an insufficient basis to justify the political claims that ‘real’ nations, such as the Serbs and the Croats, can make (a view shared by Serbian and Croatian nationalists). It is significant, in this context, to note that the Bosnian Muslims now prefer to use the term Bosnjaci (Bosniacs) for themselves and to cultivate a separate ‘Bosnian’ language alongside ‘Serbian’ and ‘Croatian’ (all three of which, in spite of politically-motivated trends of linguistic divergence, are still mutually intelligible). 25

Because the linguistic variation is minimal, Serbs, Croats and Muslims distinguish themselves primarily through religion, religious affiliation being the main marker of difference. 26 The fact that religion has played such a crucial role has encouraged a number of authors to stress the importance of it in the Croatian and Bosnian wars. Even though they agree that it goes too far to characterize the conflicts as religious wars, they emphasize that the violence was imbued with religious meanings. 27 Generally speaking, religion provides the means to sacralize the nation and demonize its enemies, to reduce complex social and historical realities to a clear and simple distinction between the forces of good and evil. The nation is seen as a ‘sacred community’ and individual members should be ready to die for it. As such, religiously-inspired nationalism promotes the values of sacrifice and martyrdom, making it appear, more often than not, violent and irrational in character. Serbian nationalism is a good example: its ideological cornerstone is a religious myth, the Kosovo myth, which centres around a battle once lost against the Ottomans. It cultivates the theme of Serbian suffering and victimization under Islam and urges the Serbs to reconquer Kosovo and take revenge upon the ‘Turks.’

Albanian nationalism, on the other hand, has been profoundly secular in character. Because individual Albanians may belong to any of the three different faiths in the Balkans (Islam, Roman Catholicism, or Christian Orthodoxy), Albanian nationalist ideologues have always regarded the diverging religious orientations of the Albanians as an obstacle to national unity, an obstacle that needs to be neutralized. Since none of these faiths is in a position to join all Albanians together to share a religious common platform, language has become the main vehicle of national identity: the Albanian languageŒvery distinct from the languages of its direct (Slav and Greek) neighboursŒis seen as the only element that can bridge the internal differences, while religious belonging, which cannot, is necessarily de-emphasized.

This ideological pattern applies to Kosovar Albanian nationalism as well. Even though almost all Albanians in Kosovo are Muslims, Islam has played no role in political mobilization. Indeed, Catholic Albanians have been as prominent members of the resistance against Serbian hegemony as their Muslim compatriots. Although the political aims of nationalists on both sides are very similar in nature, the Albanians have been more pragmatic than the Serbs: Serbian ‘religious’ nationalists never wished to compromise over Kosovo and saw their rule over the province as a natural and sacrosanct right. I believe that the secular or ‘ecumenical’ character of Albanian nationalism might partly explain why the West has supported the Albanians more readily than the Bosnian Muslims.

Conclusions

In this essay, I have tried to challenge the common Western approach to ethnic violence and nationalist wars in the Balkans, which are generally seen as evolving around ancient and irreconcilable hatreds between fixed and clearly-bounded ethnic groups. This image has to be approached with scepticism: when we take a long-term historical perspective, it is clear that populations in the region have been shifting their loyalties and (trans)forming their identities, uniting (or hiding) behind various and ever-changing banners, and often disregarding and cross-cutting other boundaries. In many parts of the former Yugoslavia, identities have been ambivalent and unstable until quite recently and the effect and purpose of the wars was to eliminate these ambiguities. The West, by its very perception of the situation in the Balkans and the policies that it developed actually helped to facilitate these processes. By understanding the conflicts exclusively in ethnic terms, it contributed to the triumph of nationalist forces and encouraged the use of ethnic principles in organizing political and social life, leading to the establishment of new nation-states and ethno-territorial entities in the region. The West made, however, a qualitative distinction between the religiously-inspired nationalism of Serbs, Croats and MuslimsŒwhich led to its perception of the Bosnian conflict as one dominated by irrational and atavistic passionsŒand the secular and moderate ‘ethnic’ nationalism of the Kosovar Albanians, which was more in line with the democratic and civic ideals of the European nation-state.

I have argued that, partly as a result of this, the West found it easier to intervene in Kosovo than in Bosnia, where it confined itself to a policy of containment. But I would argue as well that, also in the case of Bosnia, the violence, even if it was irrational and atavistic in appearance, had profoundly rational dimensions and was ‘European’ in origin: it was the European ideal of the nation-state that was the objective of most of the ethnic cleansing and other forms of ethno-demographic engineering that took place there. From this viewpoint, even the most brutal and ‘irrational’ violence can be explained rationally. If a level of irrationality was involved on the part of the actual perpetratorsŒwho often were convicted criminals or football hooligans recruited into paramilitary units to do the ‘dirty’ workŒthis was made functional at a higher (political or military) level. In Bosnia, people were frightened away by terror and excess and the cleansing of ‘undesired’ populations was accomplished swiftly and efficiently. The violence had rational dimensions in other respects as well: it accomplished important goals by homogenizing the population and by establishing undivided loyalties, unambiguous identities and clear boundaries in a situation of mixture that was perceived by most nationalists as one of ‘impurity’ and ‘contamination.’ Violence strengthened new national identities among populations that lacked, in my opinion, a well-developed sense of loyalty to the national community. Thus, a view from the Balkans shows that the modernist project of creating nation-states is still a very important force in the world and that transnational processes seem to take priority over globalizing ones.

Notes

1 Rogers Brubaker, “Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples. Historical and Comparative Perspectives,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 18, no. 2 (April 1995) : 189-218.

2 See the sobering regular reports of the UNHCR/OSCE concerning the position of ethnic minorities in the province, the last of which was published in March 2003; electronic versions are accessible on the internet at <http://www.unhcr.ch>.

3 For a fundamental scholarly critique of such ‘Balkanist’ notions, see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

4 Tim Allen and Jean Seaton, eds., The Media of Conflict: War Reporting and Representations of Ethnic Violence (London and New York: Zed Books, 1999), 1.

5 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993) : 22-49.

6 Cornelia Sorabji, “A Very Modern War: Terror and Territory in Bosnia-Hercegovina,” in War, a Cruel Necessity?: The Bases of Institutionalized Violence, edited by Robert A. Hinde and Helen E. Watson (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995), 80-95.

7 Mary Buckley and Sally N. Cummings, eds., Kosovo: Perceptions of War and Its Aftermath (London: Continuum, 2001).

8 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

9 Michael Humphrey, “Transnationalism in a Globalizing World,” Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 3, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter 2001) : 1-5. (This is the introduction to a special issue of the journal on transnationalism.)

10 Hugh Poulton and Suha Taji-Farouki, eds., Muslim Identity and the Balkan State (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1997), 3. The term millet referred to non-Muslim communities in the empire, designating the organization of each group under its ecclesiastic leaders. Rather than being a ‘system’ imposed from above, it was a form of indirect rule exercised through the existing religious institutions of each religious community. Muslims were directly subject to the sultan’s bureaucracy and enjoyed a privileged position.

11 E. Arnakis, “The Role of Religion in the Development of Balkan Nationalism,” in The Balkans in Transition: Essays on the Development of Balkan Life and Politics since the Eighteenth Century, edited by Charles Jelavich and Barbara Jelavich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 115-144.

12 Maria Todorova, “Identity (Trans)formation among Pomaks in Bulgaria,” in Beyond Borders: Remaking Cultural Identities in the New East and Central Europe, edited by László Kürti and Juliet Langman (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 75.

13 Ger Duijzings, Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2000).

14 John W. Cole, “Ethnicity and the Rise of Nationalism,” in Ethnicity and Nationalism in Southeastern Europe, edited by Sam Beck and John W. Cole (Amsterdam: Antropologisch-Sociologisch Centrum, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1981), 105-134; here, see.116-17.

15 Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, “Nation, State and Identity at International Borders,” in Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, edited by Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1-30.

16 See, for instance, Henk Driessen, On the Spanish-Moroccan Frontier: A Study in Ritual, Power, and Ethnicity (New York: Berg, 1992); Wendy Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry, and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century Adriatic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

17 Ger Duijzings, Geschiedenis en herinnering in Oost-Bosnië: De achtergronden van de val van Srebrenica (Amsterdam: Boom, 2002).

18 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

19 Katherine Verdery, “Ethnicity, Nationalism, and State-Making: ‘Ethnic Groups and Boundaries’: Past and Future,” in The Anthropology of Ethnicity: Beyond ‘Ethnic Groups and Boundaries,’ edited by Hans Vermeulen and Cora Govers (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1994), 37.

20 Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 1993), 156.

21 Sorabji, “A Very Modern War.” See, also, Mart Bax, “Maria en de mijnwerpers van Medjugorje: De dynamiek van etnische zuivering in ruraal Bosnië-Hercegovina,” Amsterdams sociologisch tijdschrift 25, no. 3 (December 1998) : 371-94; Michael Humphrey, The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma (London: Routledge, 2002).

22 Sorabji, “A Very Modern War,” 33; Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 6; David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

23 Ger Duijzings, “Il conflitto nel Kosovo e altre guerre ‘Jugoslave,’” in Uomini in armi. Costruzioni etniche e violenza politica, edited by Marco Buttino, Maria Cristina Ercolessi and Alessandro Triulzi (Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2000), 25-33.

24 It was the writings of the German Romanticist philosopher, Johann Herder, that put language at the centre of ethnic and national identities. As Hann writes, Herder’s “romantic equation of language, culture, people and state” has led to the idea that “language provides the most natural basis for the existence of nations”; see Chris Hann, “Ethnicity, Language and Politics in North-East Turkey,” in The Politics of Ethnic Consciousness, edited by Cora Govers and Hans Vermeulen (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 121-22). For more on the centrality of language in thought about ethno-national identities, see Richard Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity. Arguments and Explorations (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 10; Marcus Banks, Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions (London: Routledge, 1997), 135.

25 Arguably, then, they are still variants of one and the same language, previously called Serbo-Croat and now usually knownŒwithin international organizations like the UNŒas ‘BCS,’ an acronym for Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian.

26 It is this close equation between religion and ethnicity in the case of Bosnia that, in my view, justifies the separate status of the Bosnian Muslims as a nation.

27 See, for example, Paul Mojzes, The Yugoslavian Inferno: Ethnoreligious Warfare in the Balkans (New York: Continuum, 1995); Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

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