Balkans and Balkanisation: Western Perceptions of the Balkans in the Carnegie Commission’s Reports on the Balkan Wars from 1914 to 1996

Abstract

The Yugoslav Wars broke out at a time when the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolutions in Czechoslovakia and other countries in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc had instilled a sense of hope that Europe would become ‘whole and free’, and that the end of the European wars heralded a millennia of peace and democracy. The crisis and the collapse of the former Yugoslavia ‘re-balkanised’ Southeast Europe and revived old Western stereotypes about the Balkans and ‘Balkanisation’. The author attempts to determine the origin of the ideas and values that influenced Western policy towards this crisis, through a comparative analysis of two reports on the Balkan Wars by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1914 and 1996, respectively. In the author’s opinion, the cause of the Balkan Wars in the 1990s was not ‘old hatreds’ between the Balkan nations, but the remnants of the old communist regimes, which in an effort to retain power had embraced nationalism as their policies, and thus came into conflict with the new values that brought an end to the Cold War. The author concludes that the conflict between conservative ‘Balkan’ and liberal ‘European’ values was the reason for the slogan “the flight from the Balkans”, and the political disputes that evolved into bitter armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia

Keywords

• Balkans, Balkanisation, war, ethnic conflict, the European Union, the Cold War, NATO.

References

1. 1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of a History and a Last Man, New York, The Free Press, 1992.
2. 2 Hans Stark, Les Balkans: Retour des Guerres en Europe, Paris, IFRI, 1993.
3. 3 Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?””, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 22-49; Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, New York, Vintage Press, 1993; Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History, New York, New York University Press, 1998.
4. 4 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997; Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: Imperialism of the Imagination, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998; Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History, New York, The Modern Library, 2002.
5. 5 Harry de Windt, Through Savage Europe, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1907.
6. 6 Charles Gati, “From Sarajevo to Sarajevo”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Autumn 1992).
7. 7 British journalist Tim Judah, writing in The New York Review of Books, likened Mr Malcolm’s task to “someone claiming that the Mayflower sailed from America to Britain or that Ellis Island had little to do with immigration to the United States”. Quoted in Eric Alterman, “Untangling Balkan Knots of Myth and Aftermath”, The New York Times, 31 July 1999.
8. 8 Former Belgian Minister and Secretary-General of NATO, Willy Claes, noted in 1992: “The countries of South-Eastern Europe in the cultural sense belong to the Byzantine Empire, which collapsed; they lack democratic tradition and tradition of respect for minorities. Therefore, it would be proper that the enlargement of the (European) Community be restricted to the ‘cultural circle’ of Western countries. The enlargement of the community should be restricted to the Protestant and Catholic cultural circles of European countries”. Quoted in the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, 16 October 1993, p. 9.

9. 9 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York, Vintage Books, 1979.
10. 10 To the question of why the EU opposes Turkey’s admission, former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim responded to this author in 2003 in the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna: “the Union does not want Iraq and Syria on its borders.”
11. 11 A different interpretation may be found in the Balkan studies that derives the word Balkan from the Persian name Bala-Khana (high proud mountain), referring to the two mountain ranges east of the Caspian Sea inhabited by the Turkmens. See, Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 27.
12. 12 “Thus, a British surgeon in the Ottoman army in the middle of the nineteenth century understood Balkans to signify ‘mountains of defence’”, Božidar Jezernik, Europe and Its Other, at http://revista-redes.rediris.es/ Periferia/catala/numero6/Jezernik.pdf. [last visited 1 September 2012].
13. 13 According to a well-known Turkish historian Halil İnalcık, the word Balkan was initially used in the Ottoman Empire to denote the mountainous areas of Rumelia (Emine-Balkan, KodjaBalkan, Küçük-Balkan, Ungurus-Balkan, etc.). On this point, see, Halil İnalcık, “Balkan” The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Leiden, Brill, 1960, pp. 998-1000.
14. 14 Jezernik, Europe and its Other.
15. 15 Frederick Calvert and Lord of Baltimore, A Tour to the East, In the Years 1763 and 1764. With Remarks on the City of Constantinople and the Turks, W. Richardson and S. Clark, London, 1767.
16. 16 John Morritt, for instance, remarked in his journal in the 1790s: “We slept at the foot of a mountain (the Shipka Pass), which we crossed the next day, which separates Bulgaria from Romania (the ancient Thrace), and which, though now debased by the name of Bal.kan [sic], is no less a personage than the ancient Haemus”, see, John B. S. Morritt, The Letters of John B. S. Morritt of Rokeby Descriptive of Journeys in Europe and Asia Minor in the Years 1794-1796, London, John Murray, 1914, p. 65.
17. 17 Johan August Zeune, Gea: Versuch Einer Wissenschaftlichen Erdbeschreibung, Berlin, Wittich, 1808, quoted in Vesna Goldsworthy, The Balkans in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Writing; in Tim Youngs (ed.), Travel Writing in the Nineteen Century: Filling the Blank, London, Anthem Press, 2006. The Serbian anthropologist Jovan Cvijić offered this interpretation in his study La péninsule balkanique: géographie humaine, Paris, Armand Colin, 1919. It is today widely accepted in Balkanology.
18. 18 On that point, see, Predrag Simić, Marksizam i Kineska revolucija [Marxism and Chinese Revolution], Beograd, IMPP, 1986.
19. 19 On that point, see, Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, Forge Village, Yale University Press, 1957.
20. 20 “Under Turkish rule, Constantinople has become the most retrograde capital in Europe. Under such rule, Athens, Bucharest, Belgrade, and Sofia, eighty years ago, were mere collections of mud huts, occupied by dejected and poverty-stricken people. Since their inhabitants got rid of Turkish oppression, these villages have rapidly grown into towns, have adopted the appliances of civilisation, and are all making good progress. The first two, which have enjoyed freedom for a longer time than the others, are now well-built and well-governed cities with bright, intelligent and progressive populations, and Sofia will soon run them close. To pass from any of these towns to Constantinople is to pass from a civilised to a barbarous city”, see, Luigi Villari (ed.), The Balkan Question, London, John Murray, 1905.
21. 21 Otto Von Bismarck quotes, at http://thinkexist.com/quotes/otto_von_bismarck/ [last visited 31 August 2012].
22. 22 On that point, see, Bram Stoker, Dracula, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986; Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios, London, Fontana Press 1983.
23. 23 Guy Gauthier, Les aigles et les lions, Histoire des monarchies balkaniques, Paris, Frances Empires, 1997.
24. 24 See, Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania.
25. 25 See, Leon Trotsky, The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky: The Balkan Wars 1912-13, New York, Pathfinder 1993; see also, Maria Todorova, War and Memory: Trotsky’s War Correspondence from the Balkan Wars in this issue.
26. 26 John Lewis Garwin, editor of the London newspaper The Observer, is considered to be the first to use this term in 1920, writing about the Baltic states, whereas the historian Arnold Toynbee believed that the term was used by German socialists following the peace treaty between Germany and Soviet Russia in Brest-Litovsk. Maria Todorova, however, claims that the word ‘balkanisation’ appeared for the first time on 20 December 1918 in the text titled Rathenau, Head of Great Industry, Predicts the Balkanization of Europe published in The New York Times. The text discussed the consequences of the economic crisis in Germany after World War I., see, Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, pp. 33-34.
27. 27 Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, London, Macmillan, 1942.
28. 28 “Travellers on our Balkan tour may in addition notice a curious fact: while the Balkans is now making every effort to be part of Europe as it once was, Europe now defines itself on the basis of its difference from the East, the Balkans included, and claims to be what the Balkans used to be for centuries.” Jezernik, Europe and Its Other.
29. 29 One of the results of the First Hague Conference was the establishment of the International Court of Arbitration, today known as International Court of Justice, based in The Hague.
30. 30 On the basis of these ideas and movements, the American president Woodrow Wilson, together with over 150 American leading experts, formulated ‘Fourteen Points’, a program that defined U.S. objectives in World War I, and was the basis for the Paris Peace Conference and the creation of the League of Nations. This school of thought in international relations is known as liberal internationalism, or Wilsonian liberalism.
31. 31 Carnegie also financed the construction of the ‘Peace Palace’ in The Hague, which today houses the International Court of Justice.
32. 32 Morton Abramowitz, Preface, The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913. Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections of the Present Conflict by George Kennan, Washington, D.C., Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993. p. 1.
33. 33 The doubts expressed by Serbia and Greece regarding the objectivity of Brailsford and Milyukov were the reason why these two commission members did not participate in the entire mission of the Carnegie Commission in the Balkans. Nevertheless, Milyukov and Brailsford were the authors of the bulk of the Commission’s report. On reasons why the Greek and Serbian governments distrusted these two Commission members, see the essay by George Kennan and the book by the Russian diplomat Basil Strandman, Balkanske Uspomene [Balkans Memoirs], Beograd, Žagor, 2009.
34. 34 The Other Balkan Wars, p. 1.
35. 35 Ibid., p. 18
36. 36 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, New York, Pantheon Books, 1994.
37. 37 Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts.
38. 38 Ibid., p. X.
39. 39 Ibid., p. XXVII.
40. 40 Telegram, George Kennan to James Byrnes [“Long Telegram”], 22 February 1946. Harry S. Truman Administration File, Elsey Papers, at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/ whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/ documents/index.php?documentdate=1946-02- 22&documentid=6-6& studycollectionid=&pagenumber=1, [last visited 1 September 2012].
41. 41 The Other Balkan Wars, p. 1.
42. 42 On that point, see, Dragan Bisenić, Mister X; Džordž Kenan u Beogradu [Mister X: George Kennan in Belgrade 1961-1963], Klub Plus, Beograd 2011.
43. 43 The Other Balkan Wars, p. 9.
44. 44 Ibid., p. 13.
45. 45 At the time I was the director of the Belgrade-based Institute of International Politics and Economics, some colleagues from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked me to meet Abramowitz and share with him my views on the Yugoslav Wars. Our conversation opened with a disagreement over his thesis about the ‘ancient hatreds’ as reasons for the wars. I was of the opinion that the causes of the wars lay in the political opportunism of ex-communists, who revived nationalist passions in an attempt to remain in power after the Cold War. Today this is a widely accepted view, but in the mid-1990s Western perception of the Balkans was still strongly shaped by the stereotypes created at the beginning of the 20th century. Abramowitz and I did eventually agree upon some of the ideas that the new Carnegie Commission needed to explore.
46. 46 Part of the Commission visited Belgrade in early 1996. At the request of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I organised a dinner, to which we invited, in addition to the Commission members, some of the leading experts of the Institute of International Politics and Economics, such as Milan Šahović, the former chairman of the Sixth Committee of the UN (international law), Ljubivoje Aćimović (the founder of the group of non-aligned and neutral countries at the Helsinki Conference of 1975), Branislava Alendar (the author of the project for the accession of Yugoslavia to the EC in 1989) among others. Although we expected the conversation to focus on the situation in the Balkans following the Dayton Peace Accord, we only had casual informal conversations, in which the topic of the Balkans was barely touched upon. That is why we were very much surprised to see our names figuring in the annex to the report, which was published later that year by the Carnegie Endowment, under the title Unfinished Peace. We subsequently discovered that our colleagues from other Balkan countries had a similar experience with the Commission members they had met.
47. 47 Leo Tindemans et al., Unfinished Peace: Report of the International Commission on the Balkans, Berlin & Washington, Aspen Institute & Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993, pp. 2-3.
48. 48 “The war in Bosnia has occasioned the first significant debate over foreign policy of the postCold War period. It has thereby done what the War against Iraq did not do [...] In the case of Bosnia, the identity of the participants has changed. In Congress the debate over whether to pursue an interventionist course has not followed party lines. The Democrats can no longer be identified with an anti-interventionist position. The same is true of a number of public figures who had once been ‘reliably’ anti-interventionist. Indeed, some of the most insistent criticism of both the Bush and Clinton administrations for failing to give military support to the Bosnian Muslims has come from those whose anti-interventionist disposition had long been taken for granted.” Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson, “America and Bosnia”, The National Interest, (Fall 1993), p. 14.
49. 49 “The first six months of the Yugoslav crisis coincided with the final stages of the negotiations of the Treaty of Maastricht on the European Union, involving complicated trade-offs on other sovereignty issues, and an ambivalent spirit of rivalry and common interest. There were those who felt that precedents might be created by the way in which Europe acted in Yugoslavia that could affect the future institutional pattern. The problem of foreign policymaking by consensus was illustrated by Greece’s exercise of its veto on the question of recognition of Macedonia.” See also, Leo Tindemans et al., Unfinished Peace, p. 58.
50. 50 Refworld, “Mr President, Milosevic is the Problem”, http://www.refworld.org/cgi-bin/texis/ vtx/rwmain?page=country&category=&publisher=ICG&type=&coi=SRB&rid=&docid=3a e6a6d70&skip=0, [last visited 27 April 2013].
51. 51 It should be emphasised that the bombardment of Serbia by the Allied Force in the spring of 1944 (so-called Eastern bombardment) left more civilian casualties than the Nazi bombing of 1941.
52. 52 On that point, see, Jasminka Simić, U potrazi za novom misijom: NATO i jugoslovenska kriza 1990-2001 [In Search of the New Mission: NATO and the Yugoslav Crisis 1990-2001], Beograd, Službeni glasnik, 2010. Also, see, David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents, New York, The Free Press, 1998.