"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [7]

Chapter 3 [concluded]

Chapter 3 concludes with a consideration of the role that Slovenia played in the final breakup of Yugoslavia; and of a portrait of the moderate Serb region of Glina, who were traumatized and radicalized by the actions of the HDZ and later by agents from the Knin SDS.

Neither of these brief accounts ring false; yet there seems to be something missing in Glenny's account. It is not incorrect to note that Slovenia's exit from Yugoslavia was in many ways hasty, that it forced Croatia to follow suit while unprepared, or that the Slovenes and Croats were backed by many European governments which didn't fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. Yet at the same time, there seems to be very little awareness from Glenny of the fact that Slovenia was a small republic facing the very real specter of a Serb-dominated central state under Milosevic; he only mentions the economic disparities between the wealthier Alpine republic and its poorer neighbors to the south.

What seems to be in play here is that one of Glenny's strengths--he's a Serbo-Croat speaker who spent a lot of time on the ground and reported quickly--is also, if not exactly a weakness, at the very least has led him to narrow his focus just a little bit too much. For while the early part of this book demonstrated a solid grasp of recent political and economic events which fueled the crisis, in this chapter there seems to be a real disconnect between this larger context and the discrete local scenarios he describes.

In the case of the moderate Serbs around Glina; the larger story here is that the rise of nationalism and and nationalist politicians narrowed, and finally eliminated, the civic space in which is was possible to maintain a "Yugoslav" or non-ethnic identity. Ultimately, the Serbs around Glina were forced to join with the SDS because it was no longer possible to be anything but exclusively Serb.

I cannot shake the nagging feeling that Glenny is too hasty to shift the focus entirely to the heavy-handed, thuggish tactics of Tudjman's government; but at the same time Glenny had been so clear-headed in his analysis up to now it seems a bit unfair to be too quick to accuse him of downplaying the primary role of the Belgrade regime by engaging in some faux-objective 'even-handedness.'

What does seem to be clear at the conclusion of this chapter is that Glenny certainly regards the war in Croatia to have been much more of situation in which the Croatian government brought on the war just as much as the Yugoslav government did. This seems to fly in the face of his own admission that Tudjman, unlike Milosevic and the JNA, had not really prepared for war. It also raises the question--if Tudjman had been a wiser leader and the moderate wing of the HDZ had predominated, would the war in Croatia still have happened? Would it have been as brutal? And would ethnic cleansing still have entered the lexicon of the late 20th century? I am not at all convinced that the answers to any of these questions would be 'No'; and therefore, I have some serious reservations about Glenny's perspective.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [10]

Part Three: The Explosion of War

Part Three consists of three chapters which detail how the actual outbreak of hostilities in the former Yugoslavia, first in Slovenia and then in Croatia, and how the international community, most notably Europe, responded.

Chapter 12: "The Hour of Europe Has Dawned" Slovenia's Phony War, June-July 1991

Slovenia's 10 day long "war" of independence is now rightly regarded as a brilliantly-executed piece of political theater carried out by the Slovene and Serb leadership, with the JNA (and the people of Slovenia) largely in the dark as to the real game being played. Another party left out of the loop was the European Community, who sent a "troika" of leaders to Yugoslavia, where they managed to accomplish two things--"force" the Yugoslav leadership into concessions they already planned on making; and revealing just how naive European leaders were for the responsibilities of international diplomacy of this sort, and how fundamentally they misread the situation in the former Yugoslavia. The Europeans never seemed to grasp that the warring parties had clearly-defined goals and rational--if not moral--reasons for resorting to using armed force. The likelihood that European diplomacy was up the task was slim from the very beginning.

Chapter 13: "An Undeclared and Dirty War" The JNA in Croatia July-December 1991

While the war in Slovenia was a largely bogus and stage-managed affair with a pre-determined outcome, the war in Croatia was an all-too-real preview of the even greater horrors to follow in Bosnia. The use of heavy artillery against settled areas, followed by paramilitary forces; the cynical manipulation of the United Nations in order to consolidate gains; ethnic cleansing--it all happened in Croatia. Soon, it would all happen again, at greater extent and over a much longer period of time, in Bosnia.

Chapter 14: Yugoslavia A La Carte Lord Carrington's Plan September 1991-January 1992

This chapter details the failed efforts led by Lord Carrington to get what became known as the "Carrington Plan" agreed to by the various republic leaders, as well as other European diplomatic initiatives, most notably the Badinter Commission, which was driven by German diplomatic pressure on the rest of the EC and which ultimately made the Carrington Plan--which Milosevic at any rate was not going to accept--a moot point. In the meantime, Cyrus Vance was able to broker another deal, one which brought "peace" to Croatia in exchange for a de facto ethnic partition; i.e., the Serbs agreed to let the UN do the dirty work of policing the border between the Serb-controlled areas of Croatia and the rest of the republic.

By the end, the independence of Slovenia and Croatia had been recognized, that of Macedonia was held up by Greek protests (which still reverberate today), and Bosnia was faced with the choice of declaring an independence it was ill-equipped to defend, or remaining in a "Yugoslavia" which by this point was rather nakedly a "Greater Serbia." The Badinter Commission's findings were duly ignored by the EC in the interests of political expediency and deference to German insistence (the commission had rejected Croatia's application), and Lord Carrington's plan was forgotten.

What this chapter makes clear is that his plan was not nearly as ill-conceived, unrealistic, and morally vacuous as many of the famous Western-designed plans for Bosnia which were to come. Carrington understood that the republics--not ethnicity--needed to be considered the constituent units of Federal Yugoslavia. This is the main reason his plan was rejected by Milosevic. His plan also demonstrated how far the international community was willing to go to assuage Serb fears and concerns, contrary to later propaganda claims that the Serbs were being railroaded by an "anti-Serb" international community.

**************************

This concludes Part Three. Part Four: Bosnia, is next.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [7]

Chapter 8: "You've Chosen War"
The Arming of Slovenia and Croatia, April 1991-January 1991

This chapter details efforts by the newly elected governments of Slovenia and Croatia to arm themselves. The JNA--which now viewed TOs as a danger to national unity in republics with multiparty elections--had already disarmed the TO (Territorial Defense) forces in Croatia, and made moves to do the same in Slovenia; although largely successful, the Slovenes managed to halt this move before it was completely sucessful. Small-scale smuggling was organized to augment the remaining stash of mostly small arms.

In Croatia, where the TO had largely already been eliminated, smuggling was carried out on a much larger scale. The JNA, unwilling (under the wavering leadership of Kadijevic) to take decisive action without orders from the Federal Presidency, watched with growing alarm as domestic spying accumulated damning evidence of what Croatia was up to.

The collective Presidency would ultimately never give Kadijevic the go-ahead he desired for legal legitimacy. While Milosevic had four of eight votes, Macedonia stayed out and Bosnia stuck to its guns and refused to give the JNA the majority it needed.

In the meantime, Milosevic was moving towards embracing the idea that nations--but not republics--had the right to leave Yugoslavia. He still paid lip service to Yugoslav unity, but this was increasingly a tactical position, not an inflexible belief. He would begin to move away from a strategy of keeping Yugoslavia united and towards a plan to keep all ethnic Serbs--and the land they lived on--united in one state. And he would begin the process of turning the JNA away from its traditional mission of defending Yugoslavia towards becoming, in mission and makeup, an instrument for creating Greater Serbia.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [5]

Chapter 6: "A Croatian Rifle on a Croatian Shoulder"

While Serbian nationalism had been unleashed and harnessed by Milosevic, in Croatia the two-decades long crackdown on expressions of Croatian nationalism still held sway; it took time for nationalist dissidents like Franjo Tudjman to test the waters and see how far they could push the envelope. The growth of the HDZ was greatly helped by Tudjman's relative freedom of movement--his Partisan past allowed him better treatment in prison after the crackdown, but also he was allowed a passport, which enabled to him to travel and network with the widely-dispersed Croatian emigre population, who would provide key support in the HDZs rise to power.

Tudjman was (unlike Milosevic) a genuine nationalist, and once he and the other members of the HDZ leadership found that they would be able to meet and campaign openly, he quickly became adept at using mass rallies and ostentatious displays of populist support. When the elections in Croatia were held, this support (combined with the British-style election rules) resulted in an electoral victory which gave the HDZ uncontested status as the ruling party (it's winning margin over the reformed Communists was not all that great, but the system was set up to reward the first-place party disproportionately).

This was all being watched by the Slovenes--who had a head start on multiparty elections and were working towards them carefully; ultimately, Kucan would win the Presidency and immediately quit his membership in the (renamed) former Communist Party--and the Serbs. In Serbia, the Milosevic regime played to very real fears among Croatias' Serbian minority that the Ustashe regime was being resurrected. Tudjman and his party did little to assuage such fears, and sometimes even exacerbated them.

The Army was also watching; the threats to take action to defend the integrity of Socialist Yugoslavia were repeated, and Kucan and Tudjman needed to consider how genuine the threat from General Kadijevic and others really were.

*************

And so Part One, "Laying the Charge", comes to an end. One theme which has been contstant through all six chapters is this--the breakdown of Yugoslavia happened along genuine, pre-existing fault lines of nationalism, national grievances, economic disparities, social unrest, and political dysfunction. All of this is true. But Yugoslavia did not fall apart 'naturally' or without further stress; it was not preordained to break apart violently once the ghost of Tito's iron fist had finally faded away. It took deliberate actions by political and cultural elites to align Yugoslavia's weakened fissures against the hard edges of intolerance, fear, insecurity, and paranoia. These actions were taken by real individuals, and their actions and words have been recorded and witnessed. The tragedy which is about to follow was not organic, it was not the inevitable product of deep-seated, almost animalistic impulses. Rational, powerful, calculating people made deliberate choices to exploit Yugoslavia's weaknesses for short-term political gain.

In Part Two, we will see many of these same actors apply the violent pressure to Yugoslavia, so that the breakup they placed into motion did, finally, become inevitable.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [4]

Chapter 5: Tsar Lazar's Choice

The new Yugoslave Prime Minister, Ante Markovic, believed that liberal economic reforms were the key to stabilizing, indeed saving, federal Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, by the time he took power, the Federal institutions were too weak to force the Republics into compliance, and the three most powerful republics--Serbia, Slovenia, and Croatia--were against him.

In the meantime, Milosevic fully embraced Serb nationalism as a political tool by leading and speaking at the huge commemoration of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo Polje. The unprecedented public display of the bones of Prince Lazar, and the move to transport those bones to Serb Orthodox monasteries around Yugoslavia was a provocative move to symbolically lay claim to "Serb lands." Milosevic, as President of Serbia, was flexing his political muscle in full view of his rivals.

Slovenia saw the writing on the wall, and moved to take action to protect itself from the moves towards centralization under Serb domination. Proposed constitutional changes (some of which was premised on selectively chosen economic grievances) would have made Slovenia virtually a sovereign nation, although the Slovenes answered Serb complaints by pointing out that Serbia, too, had altered its Constitution without input from the other republics. The Slovenes understood that Milosevic had figured out how to use the structure of the Federal government against itself, and felt they had no choice in order to protect Slovenian interests.

The Slovenes were able to go ahead with their plans when the constitutional court argued that it could not rule on proposed changes; and then again when the JNA surprised everybody by refusing to take action against Slovenia, which disappointed Milosevic.

Serbia responded by attempting to stage a Serb rally in Ljubljana, and then by pushing for a Serb boycott of doing business with Slovenia. The break was nearly complete.

This all culminated in the Fourteenth (and final) Extraordinary Party Congress, during which every single amendment proposed by Slovenian delegates--no matter what the content--was voted down by solid majorities from Serbia and Montenegro. It became clear to the Slovenes that they were not only to be humiliated but completely emasculated; eventually, they chose to walk out of the Congress to the cheers of Serb and Montenegrin delegates. Milosevic's attempt to carry on without them was foiled, however, because the Croatian delegation also walked out, a contigency Milosevic had not counted on. Without a quorum, the Congress was suspended, never to be reassembled. Yugoslavia as a functioning state was nearly finished.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [3]

Chapter 3: "No Way Back."

Subtitled "The Slovene Spring, 1988", this chapter begins with the sentence: "As Milosevic consolidated power, the authorities in Slovenia were relaxing their hold." This parallel development is crucial to understanding the dynamics of what happened next, but it is also important to look closely at the political dynamics in Slovenia in the final years of Yugoslavia in order to understand, as so many revisionists do not, how neither the Slovene leadership nor the Slovene nationalist opposition were not the drivers of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The liberalization of political and civil society in Slovenia did not necessarily lead inexorably towards the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

While the Slovenian leadership were dealing with the push towards democratization and economic liberalization, the one Federal institution with real power--the Army--took offense at some actions taken by the influential opposition magazine Mladina, including leaking of confidential documents as well as harsh criticism of the military leadership.

The resulting crackdown--which was clumsy and overbearing, and mostly revealed how out of touch the army leadership had become--united the Slovene opposition and rallied the normally conservative Slovene public behind them. It also put Kucan and the rest of the republics Party leadership under pressure to pick a side; ultimately, they would side with the public against the Army and the Federal institutions.

The situation was not yet critical and the damage was not yet irreparable; it would take the calculated and cynical manipulation of the situation by Milosevic to make sure that there was truly "No Way Back."

Chapter 4: Comrade Slobodan: Think Hard"

Slobodan Milosevic was a calculating petty tyrant who was capable of appearing to believe whatever ideology was convenient at the moment. He was also a master manipulator of the complex Federal and republican bureaucracies in the former Yugoslavia; and he was the first politician in that country to understand the power of populism as a force and of the mob as a political weapon.

This chapter details the systematic way Milosevic used these abilities to stymie attempts by the leadership of other republics and even the Federal government to halt his destructive path to gaining power over first Serbia, then Kosovo, then Vojvodina, and finally Montenegro. It lays bare how cyncially and proactively popular sentiment was finessed, channeled, and harnessed by Milosevic and his cronies in order to intimidate and defeat rivals within his growing sphere of political power; claims by revisionists and apologists that the wars in Yugoslavia were the regrettable but unavoidable consequence of the loosening of Federal authority are exposed as patronizing falsehoods.

One sentence in particular is worth quoting: "With this move, Milosevic made clear his strategy towards the Yugoslav federation: when it was opportune he invoked the supremacy of the federal institutions over the republics; but when it was in his interest, he claimed that Serbia would not obey the dictates of the federation." Two things are noteworthy about this statement. One; it is no exaggeration. Many times, Milosevic explicitly declares that the Serb people will not allow any Yugoslav institution stand in their way (such statements were often made in the context of carefully planned and stage-managed mass rallies, complete with the threat of violence), and at other times he is a stickler for the letter of the law; he was a master at using the complex rules of the Yugoslav constitution to his own benefit, even as he sought to destroy it. Two; this statement must be remembered whenever revisionists and apologists for the Greater Serbia project utilize arguments based on the technicalities of Yugoslav law. Milosevic only played by the rules of the system when it was in his tactical interest to do so, even though his larger strategic aim was to destroy the system. He openly flouted his contempt for the rule of law time and time again; something which his pathetic minions of admirers consistently fail to acknowledge.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [25]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

AN OBSCURE FRATRICIDE

I don't have a lot of time tonight. Fortunately for me, this section won't take much time.

The "obscure fratricide" refers to the barbarous Ustashe regime during World War II. I'm going to assume that anyone reading this blog already knows enough about the subject; no need to reiterate that not-so-obscure bit of history here. Johnstone--normally breezy and glib with the details of history--is painfully detailed and anecdotal in this section. Rather than the broad outlines of events from Slovene and Croat history, we get specific dates and events here. It goes without saying that her version of Yugoslavia's WWII was a black-and-white struggle between fascist Croats and their Muslim allies versus heroic, anti-fascist Serbs.

I feel dirty writing stuff like the above paragraph; it makes me sound dismissive and callous to the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Ustasha regime. I don't wish to convey that impression. However, the one-sided, grossly oversimplified version of history Johnstone is peddling here is stifling and claustrophobic; it is nearly impossible to change the subject from the victims of Ustasha terror without appearing unfeeling. To point out that only a minority of Croats supported the Ustasha, or that the quisling Serb regime in Belgrade was also guilty of atrocities against Jews and others, or that the civil war between Partisans and Chetniks was multi-faceted and involved members of all the ethnic groups fighting on all different sides might only seem to clutter the table.

Johnstone throws the corpses of the Serbs and others murdered by the government of Ante Pavelic on the table like the most obscene of trump cards. Her willingness to indulge in the pornography of war at the expense of the convoluted reality of the time (where's her 'nuance' now?) is infuriating and insulting. And, ultimately, not worth discussing.

----------------

That's pretty much it for this section. In the next post, we will examine the point she makes at the end of this disagreeable little history lesson--the involvement of the Catholic Church in the Ustasha reign of terror.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [21]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

WHAT ARMIES ARE FOR

This final section of part 2, "Slovenia: The End of Solidarity," gets in one final snide shot at the anti-militarism of the Slovenian ruling elite. Similar to the previous section, there's less than meets the eye here.

The first paragraph notes that independence for Slovenia meant the loss of privileges by JNA army staff and their families. Yes, Diana Johnstone seems to believe that a primary motivation for Slovenia's secession was a run on real estate--the homes of career officers and staff. Apparently, she feels the eviction of JNA staff from their state-owned homes was a human rights catastrophe. I don't wish to trivialize the genuine hardships such actions certainly had on the families involved, and the loss of pensions she also cites counts as a genuine hardship and tragedy in my book. But her outrage at the loss of access to state-owned assets by high-ranking military personnel contrasts rather badly with her indifference to many of the victims of the Yugoslav conflicts.

She goes on to note that the Yugoslav army was designed for defense, and that many people in the army sincerely believed in the Yugoslav ideal and in the Titoist slogan of "brotherhood and unity." All of which is true, but hardly of central importance. The country was breaking up, being torn from the inside by inflamed nationalist passions insufficiently restrained by a federal government ill-equipped to function without Tito at the top.

Johnstone imagines she has caught Slovenia's elite in a hypocritical bind when she notes how eagerly the leadership embraced the possibility of joining NATO. The revamping of the military to meet NATO standards means that local, territorial defense is no longer to be a priority of Slovenia's military.

Well, what of that? The idea is that NATO members look out for each other, and that individual nations, particularly the smaller ones, should no longer focus their resources on (hopefully) redundant defensive forces. Johnstone ignores the obvious rationale behind membership in a military cooperative pledged to mutual defense of its members. It would, indeed, be wasteful and counter-productive for a small member state to focus on autonomous defense of its sovereignty in such a situation. But I doubt very much that she cares about the reality of the situation. It simply provides her with more material with which to insinuate without any constructive argument emerging.

This section--and the part on Slovenia--concludes with the observation that the secession of Slovenia set the stage for a far bloodier conflict in Croatia. This is true enough; it is also an observation made by just about every observer and student of the conflict. Johnstone could have saved the reader a lot of time had she skipped her facetious analysis of Slovenian nationalism and merely stated so.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [20]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

SUCCESS STORIES

One notably theme running throughout Johnstone's book has been the viciously condescending snideness applied to the victims of the war; Slobodan Milosevic receives far more empathy than Muslim rape victims. This second section of Part 2 "Slovenia: the End of Solidarity" is essentially four pages of pointless and irrelevant innuendo disguised as an expose. The theme of this section appears to be "Let me throw in any stray fact which might shed a bad light on the Slovenes."

Her first point is that Slovenian nationalism is what she calls "bureaucratic nationalism," which means that it was driven by an entrenched elite. The entire first paragraph points out that Slovenia is a small country, so independence allowed the republic's political, economic, and cultural elites to suddenly become big fish in the new big pond of independent Slovenia. Once again, the sophisticated and nuanced Ms. Johnstone is shocked and appalled to discover that sometimes, political and business leaders do not act entirely out of altruism and idealism.

The second paragraph claims that Slovenia's transition to democracy (which she puts in quotes--no explanation why) "had much in common with that of Serbia." The parallels she draws are legitimate if, considering that we are considering two republics in the same country, rather unsurprising--politicians were usually former Communist Party leaders, she notes, although why this should be surprising in a formally one-party dictatorship is not explained. She does attempt to slip in an aside about "nationalist dissidents who had been jailed under Tito" who joined the ruling coalitions; in Slovenia's case she names the previously mentioned Janez Jansa; in Serbia's--Vojislav Seselj. Nice equivalence there. Of all the things I can think of to call Seselj, "dissident" is pretty low on the list. Technically true or not, it is clear that is yet another example of her ceaseless efforts to create false equivalences.

Another insinuation she makes--both Milan Kucan and Janez Drnovsek were former Communists, yet nobody in the West complained about this like they did with Milosevic. The point, of course, is to imply that the real problem with Milosevic was that he was a socialist; a common Bosnian revisionist theme.

The next trivia she throws out is the case of Andrej Bajuk, the Argentine expat brought in to be part of the new Slovene government. After noting his right-wing credentials (ties to the Junta in Argentina; ties to conservative Catholicism), she briskly notes that the government he was to join after gaining citizenship was voted out of office, and he was gone. No matter--she gets to smear the Slovenes as fascists by proxy. Or so she seems to believe.

The final two pages concern Slovenia's involvement--led by Jansa, the former anti-militarist turned defense minister--in arms smuggling and covert arms sales to the Croats and Bosnians. The Slovenes apparently made out like bandits. It's not the most inspiring reading; but one wishes Johnstone could summon a fraction of the outrage she displays at Slovenia profiting from violating the UN arms embargo against all of the former Yugoslavia (which, naturally, benefited the well-armed Serbs at the expense of the ill-prepared Bosnian government; and which was applied to all the former republics even after the breakup of Yugoslavia, to which it was originally applied) when she discusses moral outrages like Srebrenica. I have remarked on this many times before, but it bears repeating--for all her pretensions to sophistication and hard-headed thinking, Johnstone consistently displays a naivety about international relations which makes her very hard to take seriously.

As for the snideness I mentioned above, here is the closing paragraph of this section:

"Slovenia, reported the New York Times in March 2000, is described by experts as "a jewel," "a chocolate box," or "Eastern Europe's best-kept secret." Indeed, Slovenia has its secrets, and if they are the best kept, it may be that interest is widespread in keeping them."

Thus Johnstone takes a parting shot at a sinister conspiracy which exists only in her own mind. The hyperbole is laughable.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [19]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

2. SLOVENIA: THE END OF SOLIDARITY

I can't shake the feeling that this review has become bogged down; perhaps this is because I'm trying, and failing, to get to the core of Johnstone's argument against Slovenia. I have concluded that there isn't much of an argument to detect. In the interests of moving on, I'm going to summarize the remaining four pages of this section in a more perfunctory manner than I have been. Johnstone has her criticisms of the Slovene leadership and the Slovene people in general, but they are, frankly, mostly petty gripes which fail to add up to a coherent, believable critique. Therefore, I won't quote much, either.

----------------

Janez Jansa, a leading Slovenian opposition figure from the late 1980s, is introduced in a short paragraph which Johnstone seems to have written so she can point out how he tried to have the word "socialist" dropped from the name of the "Alliance of Socialist Youth of Slovenia." Jansa's claim to fame, at least here, was his involvement in the theft of a secret military document. Johnstone has nothing to say about the document or the case against Jansa and his colleagues; she only wants you to know that their cause was taken up by Western human rights organizations. She notes that their anti-militarism was certain to be popular in "the atmosphere created by Germany's big 1980s peace movement," which performs the neat trick of damning the Slovenes for being too pro-Western and she gets to bring the evil Germans on stage as well.

The Slovene complaints that wealthier, more free-market oriented Slovenia was being stifled and exploited by the centralized economic system, and that its wealth was being siphoned off to fund underdeveloped regions in the south are worthy of discussion--one could argue that while those complaints might have been legitimate, such an imbalance is inevitable in a large nation. Some regions are going to do better than others. Most Americans realize that Montana gets more in federal tax dollars than it pays in. Needless to say, Johnstone is not interested in a sincere discussion of the pros and cons of the Slovene argument.

Instead, she claims that this complaint applies "primarily to Kosovo," which while possibly true (I wonder about Macedonia as well), ignores the elephant in the room which she never mentions; the seat of the Federal government was in Belgrade, the capital of the largest republic, which was poorer and less dynamic economically than Slovenia.

At any rate, she accuses the Slovenes of duplicity, claiming solidarity with Kosovar Albanians after the unilateral elimination of Kosovos' autonomy by the Serbian Republic while refusing to contribute to the development fund. Of course she portrays Serbian actions at this time as part of Milosevic's "constitutional reforms" while ignoring the gist of Albanian grievances, which she dismisses as "secessionist" without elaboration.

One quote worthy of mention:

"From the Serb viewpoint, the Slovenian support to people in a region they would not even deign to visit on account of its "backwardness" was nothing but a totally hypocritical way to promote Yugoslav disintegration in pursuit of their own narrow interests, which had nothing to do with the Kosovar Albanians."

By this in her book, Johnstone has so deeply drank from the well of collectivism--to the point where she assigns corporate identities to ethnic groups, that she quite naturally, and without explanation or citation, is willing to assign thoughts and prejudices to these collective bodies. And, for the umpteenth time, why the quotes around "backwardness"? It's not a quote. In this case, Johnstone seems to be paraphrasing a collective Serb impression of a collective Slovene inclination.

At any rate--the Slovenes smartly chose Western-friendly tactics while Johnstone makes the following claim:

"...in Serbia the reform movement went into the streets in mass demonstrations supporting Milosevic's program of constitutional reform."

Well, that's one way to put it...

---------------

She goes on to compare the slick, Western-friendly Slovenes playing on Western sympathies while successfully smearing Serbian "reformers" as backward communists and dangerous nationalists intent on subjugating the peoples of Yugoslavia. Which, of course, had absolutely no basis in reality. The most important aspect of this section is that while she attributes all Slovene actions and rhetoric as being directed by a manipulative elite, Serbian actions at the time are portrayed as reflecting grassroots origins. There was a strong and sizable anti-Milosevic and pro-democracy element in Serbian society even during Milosevic's salad days before war and deprivation began to corrode his support, but you wouldn't know it from reading this book. All Serbs think, act, and feel alike--and Milosevic merely followed their bidding.

Meanwhile, the conniving Slovenes portrayed themselves as civilized Catholics against a decadent, oriental/Byzantine East. Not a very flattering aspect of the Slovene struggle, but the former Yugoslavia had no shortage of xenophobic and jingoist rhetoric; while such talk is always regrettable and never desirable, all such comments need to be put in context. The Slovene rhetoric, while distasteful, was merely designed to justify a pulling away. There was no desire for partition of a republic and the concurrent expulsions of populations in Slovene plans or nationalist discourse. Johnstone, of course, has not to this point in the book had a word to say about Serbian nationalist claims of Islamic fundamentalists plotting jihad in the cafes of Sarajevo.

A one-page summary of the Slovene 'war' of independence follows; she mostly sticks to the basic facts and lets Warren Zimmerman make the point that the Slovenes had pulled off an enormous PR coup internationally; the real issue of Slovene culpability for the beginning of the war, and the indifference shown to the fate of the rest of Yugoslavia by their actions, gets no real discussion in Johnstone's book. She merely wants us to know that Slovenes were arrogant, elitist snobs with lots of German friends.

And so the first section of part 2, "Slovenia: the End of Solidarity" comes to a ho-hum conclusion.

The next section, "Success Stories," will be the topic of my next post.

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [16]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

2. SLOVENIA: THE END OF SOLIDARITY

The fourth paragraph ostensibly describes the process by which Slovenia established and strengthened ties to Austria and Italy in the late years of the Yugoslav period; it actually serves to insinuate that the Slovenes were conniving capitalists and snobbish elitists who sought to break up Yugoslavia in order to distance themselves from the non-Catholic riff-raff to their south.

The facts are not spectacular or amazing; one is almost tempted to conclude "Nothing to see here," except for Johnstone's trademark sinister tone. Having established that the decline of Federal power, combined with communist Yugoslavia's relatively open borders and openness to trade with the West, she describes Slovenian participation in this process thusly:

"In 1978, neutral Austria sponsored the foundation of an association called Alpen-Adria to foster such exchanges between provinces within Italy, Yugoslavia, and Austria, which had all formerly belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Cross-border regional groupings were promoted as a way of overcoming outdated nationalisms and ideological differences in the interests of the environment, trade, and cultural exchange. In theory, they were apolitical; in reality, with the benevolent encouragement of Otto von Hapsburg, heir to the throne of the defunct empire, and the blessings of the Catholic Church, Alpen-Adria promoted a strong sense of the superiority of "civilized" Mitteleuropa over the "backward, barbarous" Balkans."

[As always, underlined words and phrases in quoted passages were italicized in the original.]

What's interesting about this passage is how little of interest there really is, despite Johnstone's obvious attempts to imply underhanded and elitist motivations to the Slovenes. Their leadership took advantage of open borders to develop ties with regional economies? These ties had a strong religious, cultural, and historical basis? This organization was patronized by an heir of the former nobility? And there was a chauvinist slant to this organization? Oh, the horror...

I'm sure there were some insufferably elitist and smug Slovenes looking down at their poorer, less-educated countrymen down south. I'm not defending elitism; I am saying that such an attitude is a pretty lame scapegoat for a war that would tear a country apart and leave tens of thousands dead. The Slovenes were snobs who preferred the company of Catholic, formally Hapsburg peoples. That seems to be Johnstone's case against them.

One last point of interest, in the final sentence--yet another example of her use of quotes when she is neither quoting anyone OR using words or phrases in an unconventional manner. Why is 'civilized' in quotes? Who, exactly, described the Balkans as "backward, barbarous"? She doesn't say.

She goes on to describe a Western left that had lost interest in working-class interests to "issue-oriented" advocacy; that is, for what it's worth, a fair assessment. She claims that this signaled a broader rejection of support for socialism in any form, in exchange for the idealization of "civil society."

So we learn that:

"In the late 1980s, attractive young Slovenian intellectuals toured Western European capitals to alert human rights activists and anti-militarist journalists to the dangers of Yugoslav militarism. These youthful Slovenes spoke in terms of the values shared notably by German Greens, such as pacifism and human rights."

Sounds great, doesn't it? Not if you're Diana Johnstone. Tune in next time...

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [12]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS

2. SLOVENIA: THE END OF SOLIDARITY

Johnstone's scorn for nearly all the non-Serb peoples of the former Yugoslavia takes many forms and adopts a wide variety of tactics. She sets up her assault on Slovenia and Slovenes at the end of the section on Serb nationalism. Having claimed that the vagaries of the 1974 constitution empowered increasingly nationalist elites in each of the republics at the expense of the Federal government (an argument that is not without merit), she turns her attention to the elites in each republic--rather selectively.

Having argued that secession was nothing more than a continuation of the breakdown of the Federal center after Tito's death (not a word about the rise of belligerent Serbian nationalism, or of Slobodan Milosevic at all in this chapter), she makes the further claim that the republics weren't fleeing from oppression or inequity but towards Western European markets and capital. The leadership of the individual republics scrambled to be first in line to suck up to the European Community (this was before the switch to the EU). This, essentially, is the core of the Michael Parenti the-West-destroyed-Yugoslavia-because-it-was-socialist delusion.

Since all the nations of the former Eastern Bloc were also jockeying for a piece of the pie, the republics of Yugoslavia had to find their own trump cards in order to play on western capitalist sympathies. Their answer, Parenti and Johnstone want you to believe, was to cynically claim they were fleeing Communist oppression from Belgrade.

It's an interesting theory, hampered somewhat by its complete disengagement from reality, but we'll let that pass. Our concern here is the uses to which Johnstone puts this interpretation:

"Throughout East-Central Europe, the light at the end of the tunnel of the Soviet Bloc was the prospect of membership of [sic] the European Union. Far from contributing to a sense of solidarity in the region, this shared ambition often took the form of a race between leaders of East-Central European countries to win the favor of the Brussels institutions by demonstrating that they were more "Western" and "European" than the others."

I always thought that the criteria the EU was looking for involved things like free markets, judicial transparency, human rights records, functioning infrastructure, and so on--maybe Johnstone knows something that the rest of us, including diplomats, economists, and government officials are somehow unaware of.

At any rate, she's established her sordid picture of desperate post-Communist nations scurrying to prove their "Europeaness" to the powers that be in the West (jettisoning a unity that she wants the reader to believe would have otherwise existed between these varied states with often contentious histories) not only to paint a scornful general picture of the immediate post-Cold War aftermath. This is, as I said, a very deliberate segue to the section on Slovenia. The above-quoted paragraph--the end of section 1--concludes thusly:

:As the richest, most northern and most western of the federated republics, ambitious Slovenians (with encouragement from Austria in particular) saw their republic as most eligible to jump the Yugoslav ship and get aboard "Europe." This prospect was by far the most powerful incentive to Slovenia's political class to secede. Slovenia's declaration of independence in June 1991 was the immediate trigger for the disintegration of Yugoslavia."

I don't think I need to point out to an even moderately informed reader that she's got the cart so far ahead of the horse it almost would be better to look for a new horse entirely. What is most aggravating about the above statement is that it is almost true. But not quite. Milosevic had already concluded that Yugoslavia could get by without Slovenia--there were no Serbs there.

But Johnstone wants us to believe that tiny Slovenia and it's lightly-armed troops, on their own, were sufficient to instigate the process by which Yugoslavia feel apart. We will examine her case for this rather startling claim in the next few posts.