Nationalism in Times of Crisis: What Can We Learn from the Balkans?

By Chip Gagnon
Assistant professor, Department of Politics

This is a slightly revised version of a talk given at the "Teach-in on the United Nations Conference on Racism and the Tragedy of September 11." Ithaca College, September 20, 2001.

The first two UN conferences against racism focused on South Africa, in particular the apartheid regime. But apartheid was not unique, and in many ways reflected the logic of nationalism. Indeed, here is one common definition of nationalism from a book I happen to be using for my seminar on nationalism (Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History From the Nation, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1995)

The nation is ... a historical configuration designed to include certain groups and exclude or marginalize others --- often violently. (p.15)

There is nothing controversial in this definition, and the history of the formation of nation-states and the role of nationalist ideologies in that process fully bear it out.

But this definition highlights an interesting fact about the Conference: Nationalism itself was not denounced or criticized. The UN Conference's full name was the "Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance." Note that "nationalism" is not in the title. Of course it could be said to fall within "xenophobia" or under "related intolerance." But I think that the focus on apartheid and Zionism, or the "bad nationalists" in the Balkans, for example, directs attention away from the fact that the essence of nationalism is exactly exclusion. This exclusionary aspect is something all nationalisms have in common.

But isn't nationalism in the US different? Isn't our nationalism more tolerant, more liberal, a positive force? One way to answer that question would be to examine it in times of war. You could argue that one's true colors come out in a time of crisis or war. So we need to ask, what forms is US nationalism taking in this time of crisis? Is it a force for exclusion or inclusion?

Learning from the Balkans

Perhaps it would be more comfortable to approach this question from another angle. What I'd like to ask at this point is, what can we learn from the Balkans? In particular I want to think about two countries, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, that were under massive, sustained military attack, whose main cities were being bombarded, in the case of Sarajevo for over three years. These countries saw massive civilian casualities (200,000 in Bosnia) as the result of violence that specifically and purposefully targeted civilians and civilian buildings.

Given that the Balkans and the wars in Yugoslavia tend to be portrayed as typical "bad" nationalistic kinds of conflicts, it is interesting to look at how people in those two countries reacted to this kind of sustained violence. I want to contrast the reaction in Croatia, in particular the actions and statements of the ruling right-wing nationalist party (the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ), with the actions and statements of non-nationalist parties. I should add that the United States consistently supported the non-nationalist parties in their emphasis on civil liberties and freedom of expression.

Croatia and nationalism

In Croatia, where the nationalist HDZ party was in power from 1990 to 2000, we saw a process by which the President and the ruling nationalist party sought to homogenize the population. That is, the nationalists declared who was and who was not worthy of being considered true Croats, using violence, threats, accusations of betrayal and "anti-Croat". The President argued that all true Croats would rally around him uncritically in that time of crisis. Anyone who criticized him was a traitor.

Who were these excluded others?

• non-Croats, especially Serbs
• Croats who identified along regional lines, that is, Istrians and Dalmatians
• people from regions that had voted against the President and his party
• anyone who dared to criticize the President and his party

"Real Croats" were defined as those who unquestioningly backed the President, his party, and their policies. Any dissent from those policies was portrayed as a betrayal, as the work of enemies. Those who did dissent were harrassed, threatened, and charged with being enemies of Croatia.

The actions of Croatian military forces were held to be beyond criticism. The ruling party's officials proclaimed that "It is not possible for Croats to commit war crimes" because Croatia had been attacked and any action, even the killing of children, was justified by the concept of collective guilt.

This collective guilt was clearly reflected in the language of publications controlled by or supportive of the ruling party. The enemy (including civilians and children) was characterized as animals, spoken of in terms of "hordes." The conflict was portrayed as one whereby the civilized world (defended by Croatia) was being attacked by the primitive, uncivilized world (Serbs and Bosnian Muslims). The word "Crusade" was even used to justify the Croatian military's policies of ethnic cleansing.

In the Croatian media, television, newspapers, and magazines supportive of the right-wing government spewed vitriol and incited violence against anyone critical of the President and his policies, labeling them as traitors and enemies to be destroyed for the good of the nation.

Meanwhile the President proclaimed that Croatia was "the most democratic country in the world."

Any foreign criticism of the government's authoritarian, repressive, and racist policies was labeled as anti-Croat, as a failure to recognize all that Croatia was doing for the civilized world.

In short, a nationalist government acted in a nationalist way, excluding not only those who were ethnically different, but also those who disagreed politically, who had a different vision of what Croatia was and what it should be. A vision, by the way, that the United States consistently and vocally supported.

Bosnia and anti-nationalism

Let's shift our attention now to Bosnia. In Bosnia too there were nationalist parties that acted and spoke in ways identical to the way the ruling nationalists did in Croatia. But there were also strong anti-nationalist and non-nationalist political forces active in Bosnia throughout the war.

Remember, the situation in Bosnia was much worse than in Croatia. The war in Bosnia raged for
three years. Bosnia's capital city was subjected to three years of bombardment; villages and
towns were burned to the ground, including churches and mosques. Civilians were specifically targeted by armies and snipers. The death toll was enormous. In short, the very existence of Bosnia as a state, and of the Bosnian Muslims as a people, was in question.

Yet a significant number of Bosnians reacted in a way quite different from the nationalists. They defined Bosnia in an inclusive rather than exclusive way; Bosnia was the country of all who lived their, regardless of religion or ethnicity, regardless of political opinion.

The non-nationalists were also the firmest defenders of the need for open debate, the absolute necessity of dissent at a time of existential peril. Indeed, the non-nationalist independent media in Bosnia was openly critical of the President, of the ruling parties, of the government's policies, including, especially, military policies. This criticism continued even after journalists and editors were harrassed, beaten up, threatened with death.

The non-nationalists were self-critical, questioning the actions undertaken in their name by the state and the ruling parties. The non-nationalists denounced atrocities on all sides, including those perpetrated against civilians in their name. They did not use the rhetoric of collective guilt. They did not divide the world into a simplistic us-them, black and white scenario.

The non-nationalist forces in Bosnia, at a time when the country was undergoing something more horrific even that what happened in the US on September 11, had a very different reaction than the nationalists, a non-racializing reaction that emphasized the importance of dissent, debate and self-reflection, that recognized that at times of crisis and war more than in normal times, such debate was essential to the survival of the community.

During this entire time the United States was very critical of the nationalists, exactly because of their stifling of debate, dissent, independent media, criticism of the ruling parties. The United States government actively encouraged pluralism, and in particular the non-nationalist parties in both Croatia and Bosnia. These were the forces that the US identified as reflecting our own values.

Home

Let's return home. How is the United States responding to our crisis? Here, we need to look within. We need to ask hard, uncomfortable questions.

The killing of a Sikh store owner by a self-described American patriot in Arizona did not come out of nowhere. It is rooted in, and expresses, a certain vision of America. Is it the dominant vision?

The parallels between the actions and words of the ruling nationalists in Croatia, and some voices on the right in this country in the past week or so, is striking, and frightening.

Thus we see not only the targeting of people who "look" different.

We also see targeted people who think differently, who see it as their duty to criticize the President and his policies, who seek to get a deeper understanding of the context in which these attacks took place, the context of the various reactions to the attacks that we are seeing around the world.

We see a strategy of silencing through threats in the accusation that CUNY professors who, at a teach-in about the September 11 attacks, actually ask people to think about the effects of US foreign policy on the rest of the world, are "un-American" and "seditious."

In short, Americans who are doing exactly what the non-nationalist forces in Bosnia did are being treated in the same way that they were, by the same kinds of forces.

We need to think about the advice that the US has been giving to others around the world, and in particular in Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia; we need to take seriously the US's emphasis on the importance of open debate and dissent, on the importance of inclusiveness, on the importance of self-criticism.

Sometimes the US gives good advice. Maybe we should take it.