THE BALKANS: Exploding the myth of the mad, bad region
The west blames the region's 'ancient hatreds' for its volatility. But Misha Glenny says it should blame itself
The Balkans, so every schoolchild is taught, are the powder keg of Europe and no event has defined perceptions of the peninsula so profoundly as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914.
"It is an intolerable affront to human and political nature that these wretched and unhappy little countries in the Balkan peninsula can, and do . . . cause world wars," American journalist John Gunther wrote in 1940 in his immensely popular book Inside Europe.
"Some 150,000 young Americans died because of an event in 1914 in a mud- caked primitive village, Sarajevo."
Gunther's contempt reflects a solid body of western popular imagination that regarded and still regards the Balkans as a toxin threatening the health of Europe. There was no antidote to the problem - Balkan politics were locked in an immutable pattern of destruction and violence.
So powerful and long-standing were the traditions of enmity in the Balkans, it was argued, that they had lodged themselves in the genetic make-up of the region's inhabitants. The Balkan peoples had followed a peculiar evolutionary path in which blood and revenge were the preferred forms of political discourse.
The conflict in the former Yugoslavia from 1991 onwards appeared to confirm this interpretation of the Balkans. These people, wrapped in their "ancient hatreds", as another British prime minister, John Major, has described them, were incapable of learning.
Sarajevo in 1992 was merely a novel variation of Gunther's "event in a mud-caked primitive village" that had sparked war in 1914.
But consistently and conspicuously absent from western considerations on the Balkans since the latter half of the 19th century has been the impact of the west itself on the region. The great powers, or the international community, have always been "dragged" into Balkan conflicts as apparently unwilling partners to local disputes whose nature has always eluded them.
The Great Eastern Crisis of 1875, when the Ottoman Empire began its final journey towards its break-up, was laid to rest in 1878 by the Congress of Berlin.
This was when the modern history of the Balkans began, as well as many of the practices which are erroneously assumed by people in the west to be the product of ancient Balkan enmities.
Through most of its history, the Ottoman Empire was not the fabled murderous despot. It was, rather, a complicated, flawed but stable form of imperial organisation which, with regard to matters such as religious tolerance, was by far the most liberal empire in Europe. Its reputation for violence inspired by religious bigotry emerged during the 19th century when the sultan's grip on the periphery of empire began to slip.
At the Berlin congress, the Great Powers decided they now wished to regulate the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. So, like every other decisive moment in modern Balkan history, including the Dayton Agreements, the outcome of crisis at the Berlin congress was dictated by the Great Powers.
The fateful imperialist decisions made at Berlin did not merely define much of the modern history of the Balkan peninsula. The cutting and pasting of territories was not a new idea; but the steady fragmentation of the Balkans created ever more baffling permutations.
The only immutable principle of imperialist carto-graphy was the advancement of great power interests. Julius Andrássy, the chief Austro-Hungarian delegate, summed up the general feeling of the congress: "In all delimitations the decisions should in the first instance be based on geographical and strategical considerations, and only on ethnographical grounds if no other basis for decision could be found."
The congress triggered a frenzied development of modern nationalism in the Balkans. Local politicians, diplomats, writers, geographers, folklorists and historians provided the flesh and organs of that nationalism.
But the spine of this nationalism was the army. All parts of that body politic, flesh and bones, gazed north to Germany and westward to Italy for inspiration. The great military model which the Serbs, Bulgarians, Turks and, to a lesser extent, Greeks and Romanians looked up to was Prussia.
Publications sponsored by the Serbian military, popularly thought to be hostile to all things German, devoted considerable praise to Prussia's military traditions and modernising ability. Many Serbian officers received their training in Germany, as did Bulgars and Turks.
>From the specific example of Italy and Germany, and from logic learnt
from the behaviour of all Great Powers, the small circle of Balkan
state builders learned one central lesson - force determines history.
And force means a strong state means centralisation and a powerful
army.
These were not Balkan traditions. They were western traditions.
These traditions then found an horrific expression in the Balkan wars of 1912-1913. The Balkan armies were largely funded by western loans, western companies supplied them with weapons and other technology, their officers were schooled and organised by Frenchmen, Germans, Russians and Britons. The armies were staffed, and in the case of Turkey actually commanded by westerners.
Representatives of Krupp, Skoda, Schneider-Creusot and Vickers participated as observers in the wars. Their reports on the effectiveness of their weaponry was used to advertise the superiority of their products over those of their competitors.
The compulsion of the new states to grab territory, with scant regard to the facts of demography or history, merely reflected the practices of their great power neighbours whose arbitrary and foolhardy decisions at the Congress of Berlin had ensured that there was plenty of territory to dispute.
The first world war started in the Balkans and devastated the region but it was a European war and not a Balkan war. The profound tensions between the Habsburgs and the Serbs over Bosnia, and over the wider South Slav question which triggered the war, had little to do with the almighty destructive force unleashed over Europe after the Serb government refused the Austrian ultimatum of July 1914.
The Balkans was not the powder keg but merely one of a number of devices which might have acted as detonator.
The powder keg was Europe itself.
The Balkans was the scene of horrific violence, comparable with both the Western and Eastern Fronts but routinely ignored by most historians. (How many people are aware that Turkey suffered over twice as many casualties at Gallipoli as the combined Allied forces, or that the decisive offensive of the Great War opened on the Salonika front was the product of Serbian military strategy and executed by a joint Franco-Serbian force?)
Mass violence between Serbs, Croats and Moslems in Bosnia-Hercegovina only erupted for the first time in 1941. The bloodshed was a direct consequence of the decision by Mussolini and Hitler to install in Zagreb a government of fascist thugs, the ustasha, who numbered about 300 members at the time.
The Balkans were then ripped to shreds by a Nazi invasion.
The end came in October 1944 when Churchill and Stalin divided up the region, imposing exceptionally repressive governments in Romania, Bulgaria and Greece that were entirely unrepresentative of local political aspirations.
These three interventions (1878, 1914, 1941) were so destructive that they guaranteed the Balkans' relative economic backwardness, compared with the rest of Europe.
Yet the Balkan countries are seen as culprits who force the reluctant outside powers into their unfathomable conflicts.
This imagined Balkans - a world where people are motivated not by rational considerations but by a mysterious congenital blood-thirstiness - is always invoked when the great powers seek to deny their responsibility for the economic and political difficulties the region has suffered as a consequence of external interference.
"The Balkans," Theodore Geshkoff wrote in 1940, "are usually reported to the outside world only in time of terror and trouble; the rest of the time they are scornfully ignored."
It is during these long periods of neglect that the Balkan countries have badly needed the engagement of the great powers.
The Nato campaign of 1999 inflicted severe damage on Serbia and Kosovo, while their Balkan neighbours suffered collateral economic damage. Early estimates from the Vienna Institute for Economics suggests that as much as $100bn will be needed to create stability in the Balkans.
It is these issues of reconstruction and recovery that will, in retrospect, define the morality of the Kosovo war, rather than the Manichean battle proclaimed by Nato and the leadership in Belgrade. The west's claim to a moral victory in the Balkans when Yugoslavia surrendered in early June 1999 was unsurprising but irrelevant, within the larger historical context of relations between the great powers and the Balkans.
To claim such a victory honestly would require the reversal of a pattern that has persisted for over a century.
* The Balkans, 1804-1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers by Misha Glenny, Granta Books, £25