The Balkans' Lethal Nationalisms

William W. Hagen

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 1999

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Summary:  Kosovo has reinforced the Balkans' image as a cauldron of ethnic hatred. Many commentators argue that the region has always been wracked by ancient hatreds, while others maintain that today's strains are artificially created by cynical postcommunist demagogues looking to legitimate their rule. Neither school has it right. Balkan ethnic strains are neither as ancient as time nor as recent as the rise to power of Slobodan Milosevic; rather, they are about as old as the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. To a historian, today's Balkan crises are rooted in, above all, a crippling dependence on the ideology of expansionist nationalism.

William W. Hagen is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis.

THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF THE KOSOVO WAR

The war in Kosovo has reinforced the Balkans' image as a cauldron of ethnic hatred. Many commentators argue that the region has always been wracked by ancient hatreds. Others argue that today's strains are artificial, manufactured by cynical postcommunist demagogues looking to legitimate their rule. Neither school has it right. Balkan ethnic strains are neither as ancient as time nor as recent as the rise to power of Slobodan Milosevic; rather, they are about as old as the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of nationalism. To a historian, today's Balkan crises are rooted in, above all, the crippling dependence of all Balkan peoples on the ideology and psychology of expansionist nationalism. With the West now drawn deeper than ever into the struggle between Serbs and Albanians, we must better understand the roots of their passions.

Today's tensions are the result of the region's absorption into the Ottoman Empire, which led to the extraordinary dispersion and intermixture of ethnic groups in Balkan and Danubian Europe. Premodern state-formation in the Balkans was short-circuited by the Ottoman Turkish conquest of the region during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. As elsewhere in the world -- India and imperial Russia are good examples -- empire went hand in hand with great ethnic-cultural diversity and, at the local level, political autonomy. Under the Ottomans, the subject populations were organized above all by religion. Such a schema did not require that the adherents of any particular faith live in any compact area. From the viewpoint both of the Ottoman Empire and the various religious hierarchies, personal identity was, so to speak, extraterritorial. In some cases, as with the Serbian Orthodox Church, religion fostered national cultural identity. But religion also fractured groups speaking the same language, like the Albanians -- some three-quarters of whom until 1945 were Muslims, either of the Sunni or Bektashi orientation, while the remainder were followers of Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism (as exemplified by the late Mother Teresa). Similarly, Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosnians, and Orthodox Serbs all speak the same language but are deeply divided by religion and political history.

As the Ottoman Empire began to break down in the eighteenth century, the ideology of European nationalism penetrated the Balkans in support of the Balkan Christians' claim to liberation from increasingly oppressive Turkish rule. Eager for territorial gains or Balkan Christian clients, some European great powers, notably Russia, became patrons of this process. Others, such as Great Britain, lost faith in the ability of the "sick man of Europe" to go on living and resigned themselves to the empire's partition. Thus the foundations of independent national states were laid in Serbia in 1815, in Greece in 1830, in Romania in 1856, in Bulgaria in 1878, and in Albania in 1913. In each case, the liberated state territory contained various minorities besides the new ruling nationality. The new states were all also mere fragments of the ideal territorial nations in the minds of ...

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