TV REVIEW : ‘Belonging’ Tells Truth of Nationalism

The blitzed and gutted Olympic venues of Sarajevo are haunting the ’94 games, and not just because gold medal figure skater Scott Hamilton can’t believe that the site of his greatest victory is now a graveyard. Sarajevo is a rude slap at Olympic family-of-man idealism, a crudely potent statement of nationalism’s allure and deadliness.

It’s profoundly timely, then, that writer-host Michael Ignatieff’s brilliant six-part series, “Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism,” begins in the former Yugoslavia (though in Croatia, north of Bosnia and Sarajevo) and airs smack in the middle of Olympic prime time.

(The series shows nightly starting at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.)

Of course, the games themselves parade national pride--which is no bad thing, Ignatieff reminds. What seems most dubious, though, is the suppression of motherland attachments for some other goal: a United Nations-type governance or the kind of dictated federation successfully imposed by Marshal Tito on the Yugoslav ethnic groups for nearly 40 years. Contained for too long, the nationalistic impulse for ethnic cleansing will eventually explode.

Ignatieff finds a superbly cinematic metaphor for both Tito’s Yugoslavia and the current factionalism: the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity that cuts through the heart of the former nation, linking Belgrade in the center with Zagreb in the north. By traversing it, with U.N. press badge in hand, he comes in touch with a wide range of the players in the now-simmering war between Croats and the minority Serbs who have formed enclaves to resist Croatian domination.

As the program title suggests, it truly is a “Road to Nowhere”: Ignatieff finds senselessness everywhere, from the pillaging of a museum commemorating the Nazi Croat-run concentration camps to a Croat partisan insisting that he can’t live with Serbs even as he’s being aided by Serb women. Each group insists on its differences, yet Ignatieff can’t spot any, and the groups can’t tell him exactly what they are.

A lesson of Croatia, as Ignatieff sees it, is that “you can’t build a nation on lies,” but he wonders, as he ventures to Ukraine in the second segment, “Lifting the Yoke,” if the former Soviet republic is building its nationhood on a myth. It seems right that a country with a distinct language and culture should free itself of Russian domination, although it also seems impossible, considering Russian and Ukrainian economic interdependence.

This is a redolent place for Ignatieff: His grandfather built a Russian Orthodox church in Ukraine, and, as he observes his grandfather’s crypt and the church rituals, the nonbelieving grandson says he’s beginning to understand the passions behind nationalism. They are both the irrational desire for a long-gone home of your own kind, as well as the human need for a home and a foundation.

Because Ignatieff understands these so well--and articulates them with a thoughtful, conversational tone recalling Jacob Bronowski in his TV opus, “The Ascent of Man”--he is able to sit down with the lions and the lambs, the neo-Nazi skinheads and the liberals of modern Germany in the third segment, “The Nation Returns.” Here, as well as in the final three segments in Kurdish homelands, Quebec and Northern Ireland, Ignatieff is forever testing the beliefs of those he encounters--not for confrontational TV, but for truths that may define a humane nation-state.