BOOK REVIEW:

V.P. Gagnon, Jr., The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990’s

( Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2004)

Anthony Oberschall (Emeritus Professor University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Gagnon’s book has a provocative title that might renew controversy on the causes of the Yugoslav breakup and wars, and more broadly, on the role of ethnicity in civil strife. He brought to light and analyzed many public opinion polls and surveys in Croatia and Serbia from the late 1980s and 1990s, examined political discourse in elections, analyzed voting outcomes, documented the conflicts between reformers and conservatives within the Serb and Croat League of Communists in the waning years of communism, and described movements of popular protest, both nationalist such as the “anti-bureaucratic” revolution in Serbia, and those of the opposition, such as the mass protests for media freedom and against election fraud in Serbia and Serb draft resistance at the start of the Croatian war in 1991. There are lots of fascinating details, some in the footnotes, from interviews with mid-level political leaders and activists that are omitted from the usual accounts of the Yugoslav wars that tend to be based on news stories, commission reports, NGO reports, and the diplomatic conflict management record. Gagnon targets theories of ethnic conflict based on essentialist and primordial conceptions which he believes rest on shaky empirical foundations when it comes to the breakup of Yugoslavia. He writes that (p.200) “the dominant approaches to ethnic conflict …see ethnicity itself as the main cause of war” and assume (p.199) “irrational or emotional …ethnic hatred.” His book is a polemic against these views, and it explains the title of the book.

Gagnon’s narrative is that ethnic identities and animosities did not run deep in Croatia and Serbia. Most of the citizens, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe at the end of communism, wanted democracy, free multiparty elections, liberal reforms, and economic reforms, and accommodation between nationalities. As he puts it (p.xv), “The wars and violence in the 1990s were not an expression of grassroots sentiment…” Among political leaders, and the intellectual elites, however, there was a division between moderate reform communists and conservative hardliners, also as elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The conservatives feared losing their power and privileged status to the reform communists and the new liberal democratic opposition. Because the end of communism coincided with the crisis over a new constitutional design for Yugoslavia, the hardliners chose to maintain their grip on power with reckless nationalist politics and policies that risked and led to ethnic violence and war. They traumatized the public with exaggerated and false victimization stories of their fellow ethnics by ethnic adversaries. In mixed Croat/Serb areas in the Krajina and in Slavonia, the hardliners imported violent armed groups to create civil strife (p.xv): “ violence was imposed on plural communities from the outside by political and military forces from Serbia and Croatia.”. Awakening fears and insecurity from alleged threats to one’s ethnic group and a strategy of ethnic violence that spreads insecurity and fear was necessary precisely because ethnic identity and appeals in themselves are not a powerful motivating force. The moderate Serb and Croat leaders who sought to avoid violence with constitutional compromise were discredited, intimidated and silenced. The bottom line is that (p.30) “the wars were very much the product of the elites of those two countries [Croatia and Serbia].”

In Gagnon’s view, the wars and ethnic violence were not inevitable. A substantial part of the Croat and Serb electorate was attracted to parties and leaders that were promoting liberal democratic and economic reforms. The conservative leaders managed to divert them into backing aggressive nationalist policies and actions by creating violent incidents, controlling the mass media, and deception. These tactics Gagnon refers to as “demobilization…a process by which people who had been previously politically mobilized, or who were in the process of being mobilized, become silenced, marginalized, and excluded from the political realm.” The outcome of elections in Croatia and Serbia show that the hardliners barely edged out the moderates in key confrontations. Given that the electoral system favored the candidates with the most votes in single member districts, fraud by the regimes, and state media control by the incumbents, the regime parties won a disproportionate number of legislative seats which entrenched the conservative nationalists despite an evenly divided public.

What to make of Gagnon’s argument, and how persuasive is his case? Since I myself have written on the breakup of Yugoslavia in a similar vein [“The manipulation of ethnicity: from ethnic cooperation to violence and civil war in Yugoslavia, Ethnic and racial Studies 23 (6) November 2000, pp. 982-1001], albeit not with the details and depth that Gagnon has at his command, I am in a somewhat awkward position of distancing myself from Gagnon because of his underemphasis, bordering on omission, of the Yugoslav constitutional crisis and because of his conflation of ethnic hatred with ethnic nationalism. First the omission.

In a multinational state such as Yugoslavia, nationality (ethnicity) is a salient dimension of political contention. There will be leaders, intellectuals and parties with a nationalist ideology and agenda. The Yugoslav constitution and its political institutions were delicately crafted and balanced to deal with nationality. If the constitutional design is brought into question, who decides which peoples and territories belong to new and old political entities? Will all the peoples in the new units be equal citizens, or will majority ethnonational affiliation become the admission ticket for full citizenship?

Juan Linz refers to this dilemma as the “stateness” issue. It can lead to armed conflict even if all the adversaries are democrats and support free elections, freedom of the media, and human rights. The United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland were and are democratic, but the stateness issue (shall Northern Ireland remain part of the UK or become part of the Republic of Ireland) occasioned a violent civil war that lasted thirty years and has not been resolved with finality despite the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement of 1998. There is a subtext in Gagnon on democrats versus conservatives in Yugoslavia: if only the democrats had prevailed, as in other East European countries at the end of communism, the stateness issue would have been settled in a peaceful mode. I am not so sure. The reconfiguring of multinational/multiethnic states – whether into new confederal arrangements (as in Spain) or into separate states (as at the end of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia) - has its own political dynamic which intersects but does not coincide with the autocracy to democracy and socialist to market economy transitions.

When stateness became contested in Yugoslavia, it set on a collision course the two largest nationalities, the Serbs and the Croats. With a quarter of Serbs living outside Serbia, a recentralized Yugoslav state was a guarantor of security for Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. For Croats a decentralized state and a weak federation meant control of their own destinies. Steven Burg describes the dynamic as follows [Helen Fein, ed. The Prevention of Genocide: Rwanda and Yugoslavia Reconsidered, 1994, New York, Institute for the Study of Genocide, p.16] : “..while Serb nationalism was fueled in part by popular fear of the consequences of greater regional autonomy for Serbs outside Serbia, the nationalism of other peoples was fueled by fear of the consequences of Serb domination of a recentralized political order.” In his study of ethnic cleansing, Michael Mann [The Dark Side of Democracy. Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, 2005, Cambridge UP, p.3ff] found that when two ethnic groups lay claim to their own state over all or parts of the same territory, and the claims have some legitimacy and a chance of realization, the likelihood of ethnic cleansing is high. Though Gagnon in chapter one is mindful of the alternative principles for resolving the Yugoslav constitutional crisis – ethnically defined nation-states versus civic nationalism based on tolerance and liberal minority rights for all inhabitants – the stateness crisis receives short shrift in his subsequent account.

The second disagreement I have with Gagnon is over ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism does not rest on “ancient hatreds” of other ethnic groups. Gagnon demonstrates the absence of such hatreds prior to the wars from the Serb and Croat opinion surveys and polls; most scholars agree. Threat and fear of domination by others is more important than hate, or as Vesna Pesic put it, “ethnic conflict is caused by fear of the future, lived through the past.” Anthony Smith argues [Chosen People, 2002] that ethnic nationalists believe in their own group’s superiority and in a historical destiny of domination in a multinational environment. Such latent nationalism in the population can be awakened and manipulated by political leaders, and it may be pervasive even among democrats. One can be a democrat on political institutions for one’s own ethnic group, and oppose full citizenship and political rights to other groups (e.g. Serb opposition to confederation and to local autonomy for Albanians in Kosovo). To take an extreme case, the white population of South Africa was democratic within, but excluded the Africans until recently. When Gagnon writes that (p.44) “…there is little evidence to support the contention that violence , ethnic cleansing and a nationalist state were the top priorities for the people of Serbia,” he is creating a straw man because no one contends that ordinary Serbs were blood thirsty and consumed with ethnic hate. But they did want a nation-state. Their pursuit of a nation-state in a multinational environment ran up against reactive nationalisms, and that clash escalated into violence and ethnic cleansing. This said, Gagnon, I and most others agree that the resolution of the stateness crisis might have been more peaceful and that the political leaders bear responsibility for the Yugoslav tragedy. Aleksa Djilas puts it best [“Fear Thy Neighbor” 1995, p.85 in Charles Kupchan, ed. Nationalisms and Nationalities in the New Europe]: “The nationalist ambitions, fears and frustrations of Yugoslavia’s constituent groups …were not the inventions of nationalist intellectuals and political elites. However, the Yugoslav civil war would not have happened if elites…had not irresponsibly and deliberately manipulated nationalist sentiments with their propaganda and policies.”

Because of his deemphasis of ethnic nationalism in Yugoslavia, I have to take issue with some of his interpretations. I will mention only a few instances that involve Serbs.

1.Gagnon describes the division among the Krajina Serbs between the “moderates” under Rascovic and the secessionist “extremists” led by Babic (pp.142,147, 149). The Babic faction, backed by the Milosevic regime, won the secession battle. But what sort of a “moderate” was Rascovic? In a YUTEL interview in January 1992, after his ouster, he stated, “ I feel responsible for this [Croatian] war because I prepared for this war even if not in terms of military preparation. If I hadn’t created this emotional stress in the Serb people, nothing would have happened. My party was the fuse of Serb nationalism not only in Croatia but everywhere in Bosnia and Hercegovina.” [quoted in Kemal Kurspahic, Prime Time Crime. Balkan Media in War and Peace. 2003, p.53].

2. Two observers highlight Serbian liberal democrats’ failure to oppose repression in Kosovo in 1990 and ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia in 1992-93. Tim Judah refers to the “silent approval” of what was happening in Kosovo, from “people who would otherwise be considered democrats in Belgrade”, and quotes a similar statement by Warren Zimmerman, the US ambassador [Judah, Kosovo, 2000, p.57]. On ethnic cleansing, Judah writes [The Serbs, 1997, p.238] “A courageous band of individuals at Vreme magazine, in the human rights group Human Law Fund, in the intellectual Belgrade circles and among protesting Women in Black did what they could. In the end, however, they failed to rouse the righteous indignation of people who increasingly came to be concerned with how to feed their family rather than the latest horror story in Bosnia.”

3.Gagnon portrayal of the Serb voters underplays their nationalism. A case in point is his analysis of the December 1992 Serb presidential election in which Milan Panic confronted Milosevic. Panic ran for democratic reforms, minority rights, recognition of the ex-Republics as independent states, ending the Bosnian war and complying with the UN conditions for ending economic sanctions. Mindful of Panic’s appeal to the voters (p.114), “Milosevic stressed ethnic tolerance , the equality of all citizens of Serbia, and even stated, while in Kosovo, that most Albanians were blameless…only a small minority of separatists…were the cause of problems…[I]n his political rhetoric Milosevic consistently recognized the continuing primacy of non-ethnic issues.” He put the accent on social justice, economic development and ethnic peace. Contrary to the assumption of “ethnic outbidding” as a winning strategy that appealed to nationalist voters, Gagnon (p.46) underlines the opposite “ethnic underbidding” by parties in Croatia and Serbia, including Milosevic and his SPS, “trying to seem more moderate and less nationalistic,” and “consistently succeeding” doing so.

Vladimir Goati, the scholar of Serb elections and politics, has a different view of the 1992 presidential elections [Elections in FRY, 1990-1998, Belgrade, 2000, pp.100-101]: “Deciding to choose Slobodan Milosevic and not Milan Panic, the voters have in fact decided the fate of the country in the years to come…the presidential elections of 1992 might be understood as a crucial ‘political crossroads’ in the political life of Serbia…” He agrees with Gagnon on what Panic stood for, but not about Milosevic. For Goati, “Milosevic pursued the continual domination of the ruling SPS and decisively rejected all demands for reform aimed at balancing the positions of opposition and the ruling party…In the economic sphere, Milosevic advocated the economic system dominated by ‘social ownership’, in other words upholding the status quo.” On foreign policy, he “presented his programme promising the continuity of rigid policy towards Bosnia-Hercegovina” which meant not yielding to the UN economic sanctions imposed because of that policy, and “closing the country from the international community. Panic was attacked on nationalist grounds as “compromising …the independence and dignity of the country in favor of the foreign powers, above all the USA.” For Goati then, far from blurring his policies against the Panic challenge, Milosevic stood on a nationalist and a “no political and economic reforms program,” and won 55% to 34%. To be sure, there was election fraud and media bias against Panic. Gagnon (p.115) argues on the basis of exit polls and other information that the Milosevic regime stole the election. Goati and I believe that a majority of the electorate responded positively to Milosevic’s Serbian nationalism.

4. I also believe that an analysis of the entire set of 1990s elections in Serbia shows that the candidates and parties standing for Serb nationalism repeatedly won the majority of the voters, and that even the democratic opposition accepted the legitimacy of the Serb nationalist discourse, though not necessarily the war policies. An analysis of DEPOS (the coalition of democratic opposition) party slogans from October 1992 to December leading to the presidential and assembly elections found that their nationalist slogans were twice as frequent as those on socio-economic issues [Goati, op.cit. pp70-71]. According to Goati (p.72), DEPOS “claimed – just like SPS and SRS [the nationalist and ultranationalist parties], that the differentiation of Serbia from the ex-Yugoslav republics is possible only by the ethnic and not the republic borders”, which meant endorsing the right of Serb secession in Croatia and Bosnia and the legitimacy of Serbia’s military assistance to Serb secessionists. Goati concludes that “The identical attitude was also advocated by DS [Democratic Party, also in the opposition], therefore it is possible to conclude that a full consensus on this issue existed among the relevant parties in Serbia.”

Far from being “demobilized,” as Gagnon holds, the Serbian democratic opposition to the Milosevic regime mounted mass protests on the issues of media freedom, political reform, and election fraud, as in the winter of 1996-97 with 87 consecutive days of street demonstrations in Belgrade. Yet it did not challenge the regime on Serb nationalism, though it advocated it in a less strident and more nuanced manner. Gagnon’s interpretation of the democrats’ and moderates’ actions and political beliefs in Serbia consistently underestimates the resonance and hold of Serbian nationalism on their leaders and the rank and file, which was to be sure not the aggressive nationalism of the regime parties and ideologues, but which was nevertheless Serbian nationalism.

Manipulative elites, election fraud, coercion and intimidation of regime opponents, regime control of the media, fear and hate propaganda, demand for political and economic reforms, mass protests, as Gagnon extensively documents, all played a part in the Yugoslav wars, but does not fully explain why the stateness crisis was resolved in such a violent manner. There is only a brief mention of the 1986 Memorandum of the Serb Academy of Sciences and Arts which dislpays the full spread of Serb grievances and fears within the Serb victim frame. He is silent on the “Greater Serbia” and the “all Serbs in a single state” ideology. Gagnon omits Albanian nationalism and the causes of the Kosovo war. It was the clash of Albanian and Serbian nationalisms in the 1980s that triggered the Yugoslav constitutional crisis. Gagnon writes (p.44) that “...the only sustained violence in Serbia took place in the province of Kosovo, and even then not until the late 1990s.” The late 1990s? In 1989 and 1990, there were strikes, hunger strikes, a general strike, mass demonstrations, security forces firing on civilians killing dozens and wounding hundreds, mass arrests and detentions without charges, in what amounted to a military repression of a nationalist uprising, and mass demonstrations by Serbs backing the repression, which was termed “retaking Kosovo.” He writes very little about the Bosnian Serbs. This group voted 98% in November 1991 for an independent Serb Republic should Bosnia-Hercegovina secede from Yugoslavia. That happened prior to the outbreak of ethnic violence which in Gagnon’s view is needed to demobilize civil society. The Bosnian Serbs formed crisis committees, and seized dozens of municipalities by force before the start of the Bosnian war, and organized detention camps where they tortured and killed many Muslim fellow citizens. And they are still avid Serb nationalists ten years after the signing of the Dayton Accords. Many look upon indicted war criminals as national heroes. These omissions unnecessarily weaken the overall thrust and purpose of the book.

I agree with Gagnon that we don’t know enough about micro-nationalism of ordinary citizens as the Yugoslav crisis unfolded. Gagnon (p.70) dismisses the Serbian mass rallies of 1988 and 1989 that Milosevic rode to power as stage managed and organized from the top down and thus not genuine manifestations of populist nationalism. But did not the even more grandiose and stage managed Nazi Nurnberg rallies of the 1930s depicted in The Triumph of the Will express German nationalism? What exactly went on in the hearts and minds of ordinary people in Pakrac, in Prijedor, in Vukovar after the 1990 elections put the stateness issue on the agenda? Retrospective interviews with IDPs and refugees in Mostar and Vukovar documents the fragility of inter-ethnic bonds between neighbors, friends and peers as the crisis deepened, and the persistence of broken bonds and sense of betrayal after the war ended [Eric Stover and Harvey Weinstein, eds., My Neighbor, My Enemy. Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity, 2004, Cambridge UP]. I was fortunate to have a Croat-American undergraduate whose family originated from the small island of Olib in Dalmatia and who regularly spent summer holidays there during the 1990s. He wrote an ethnography of Croat nationalism that he personally experienced [Wesley Pulsic “Olib nationalism” 1998, Honors thesis, Sociology Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill]. Here are some of his observations: use of Croat words in preference to local Obliski dialect; singing Croat and Ustasha songs in taverns; a new “Croatian” way of saluting drinking pals; removal of Tito portraits from public places, and replacement by Croat crest and flag; vandalization of local WWII partisan hero’s grave and memorial; looting and occupation by squatters of Serbian summer homes; public rudeness to the Serb wife of an Olib native; anonymous threats letters sent to ex-communists and moderates; and replacement of village leaders in the Olib government by HDZ members. There was no threat, no war, no ethnic violence on Olib, just TV viewing and contact with mainland friends and relatives. Except for a few non-Croat summer residents (who stopped coming), everyone was Croat.

Gagnon has written a fascinating and useful book. He argues for a nuanced and contingent explanation of the Yugoslav breakup and wars. He masterfully describes the internal politics, election campaigns, rivalries, intrigues and popular movements within Croatia and Serbia during the war years, and not just before the outbreak of war. But he consistently underestimates the dynamic of the stateness crisis in a multinational state and the force of ethnic nationalism in the Yugoslav story.