Imagining Peace in the Balkans

As wars are planned during peacetime, so peace must be planned during wartime; and the planning must begin with an attempt to imagine how a given war will look in retrospect to the defeated. As what some have started to call the Third Balkan War rages on, can we imagine how it will look to the Serbs when today’s victories turn, as inevitably they will, to tomorrow’s defeat?

THE PAST: During World War I, Serbia sided with Britain, France and Russia against Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Turkey and, early in the war, suffered horrendously for its choice. Afterward, defeated Austro-Hungary’s South Slav territories--Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina--dreamed of a new nation, Yugoslavia (the name means South Slavia), that would include all three of them as well as Serbia and Montenegro. Their dream, like the Czechoslovak dream, was typical of the romantic Slavic nationalism that attended the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Political liberalism, each constituent nation guaranteed perfect equality with all the others, was implicit in it.

That dream became reality of a sort with the founding of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918. The Serb dream, however, proved to be somewhat different from that of the other South Slavs.

Nikola Pasic, Serbia’s prime minister during World War I, believed that the South Slavs already had in Serbia the all-embracing Yugoslavia they were seeking. The Serbs, unlike the Czechs or the Slovaks, were already a nation-state and, much to the point, were victorious at last after centuries of struggle against first the Turks and then the Austro-Hungarians. Other South Slav regions, including Vojvodina and Montenegro, had welcomed Serb sovereignty. Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Pasic argued, should do the same. “Serbia does not want to drown in Yugoslavia, but to have Yugoslavia drown in her,” he wrote.

By the letter of the kingdom’s founding documents, Austro-Hungary’s erstwhile South Slav territories were not to drown in Serbia. Pasic had had to compromise to bring the kingdom into existence. And yet the Croats, in particular, soon felt that they were drowning. To some extent, Serbia treated Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina as the spoils of war.

Instead of a new Slavic dispensation and a restoration of the political sovereignty they had not enjoyed since 1102, the Croats felt they had merely exchanged a harsh master for one harsher still. The kingdom, as a result, entered a long downward spiral of civil unrest climaxing in 1928 when a Montenegrin Serb assassinated four Croat leaders in the Parliament itself and the ensuing unrest led the Serb king to dissolve Parliament and abrogate the constitution. In 1929, King Alexander reorganized the state and renamed it Yugoslavia, attempting to restore order and re-integrate the Croatians. But to no avail: In 1934 he himself was assassinated by Croats in Paris.

Subsequent reform efforts by his successor were promising, but they came to an abrupt end with the Nazi invasion of 1941. Though the Nazis quickly set up collaborationist states in both Belgrade and Zagreb, their invasion clearly meant one thing for the Serbs and another for the Croats. For the Serbs, it was the return of an ancestral enemy. For the Croats, it was liberation from the Serbs. The death camps of the Ustashe, the collaborationist Croat regime, were Croatia’s unspeakably savage revenge on the Serbs for the excesses of the previous two decades.

In time there were many Croats in the resistance, of course, but organized Serb resistance was undeniably quicker and stronger. This time, however, the Chetnik (Serb nationalist) resistance under Draza Mihailovic did not enjoy the support of Russia, Serbia’s perennial patron. Josef Stalin, putting ideology ahead of Slavic purity, backed, instead, the Partisans of his fellow communist, the Croat Josip Broz, whose nom de guerre was Tito. The two South Slav groups fought each other as well as the Germans; and after the war, Tito had Mihailovic executed.

Tito (though, as noted, a Croat) ruled from Belgrade, the Serbian capital, and his government and army were eventually Serb-dominated. To this extent, he may be said to have co-opted Serb opposition. In other ways, however, his political formula for the South Slav state owed much to post-World War I proto-Yugoslav federalism. He stripped Greater Serbia of Montenegro and Macedonia and constituted the Serb provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, with their Hungarian and Albanian minorities, as autonomous regions. Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and an enlarged Croatia he made separate federal republics, the latter two serving as home to large, notably non-autonomous Serb minorities. His solution, in brief, was divide and rule; and it collapsed in 1991 with the communist power that had imposed it.

The collapse returned the Balkans to what we might call the dilemma of 1918. Divide South Slavia into several states, and a Serb minority results in all but Slovenia. Enclose it all in a single state, and that state becomes Greater Serbia with an unreconciled Croat minority. Serb dominance may be equally odious for the Hungarian, Muslim and Albanian minorities, but alone those groups are simply too weak to resist the Serbs. The Croats are not too weak to resist, and therein lies the dilemma.

Just possibly, had newly independent Croatia extended itself to reassure its Serb minority of its peaceful intentions toward them, the multistate solution might have worked in the obviously crucial instance. Unfortunately, no such reassurance was forthcoming. The Serb belief that Croatian separatism is a German plot (and Bosnian separatism a Muslim plot) is all but pure paranoia, but such paranoia bears witness, in its own way, to the memory of real, recent and extreme Serb suffering. No postwar, multistate peace plan can afford to ignore that memory. No division of the Serb population, in short, that does not provide elaborate assurances of Serb safety can possibly succeed.

THE FUTURE: And, for all its difficulties, such a multistate solution is--in the wake of Serbia’s ferocious aggression against Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina--the only viable solution. The Serbs themselves have destroyed the alternative. Since neither the Croats nor the Bosnians have acquiesced in Serbia’s conquests, what lies ahead for the temporarily enlarged Serbian domain is a vista of endless warfare against a set of foes who will inevitably grow stronger as Serbia grows weaker.

The great and perhaps fatally misleading precedent for “ethnic cleansing” is the expulsion of ethnic Germans from northern Yugoslavia, especially Slavonia and Vojvodina, after the war. Those Germans fled in fear of the local population, but it was the power of the victorious Allies that put them to flight. With no such backing, the comparable expulsion of any one South Slav group by any other can be resisted indefinitely. Thus, either the Serbs will return their conquests, or they will be quagmired forever in a Vietnam to end all Vietnams. It is this which makes their adventure such a doomed one.

And yet the rights of ordinary Serbs to safety and a peaceful life will not end with the knell of that doom. Precisely because, unlike the Germans, the Serbs have no safe haven in a far country, their rights will need to be secured at home. And so, beyond stern talk of war crimes trials for the Serb leadership, a farsighted Atlantic Alliance must begin now to speak in equally stern tones of postwar safety for ordinary Serbs trapped in this twisted adventure. Paradoxical as this may seem, to imagine peace in the Balkans, one must first imagine safety for the children of the aggressor.