Retrogressive Little Wars: Honor Forgotten

The case of the former Yugoslavia seems to engage Ignatieff most. It is in his discussion of the violent breakup of that country in the early to mid-1990s that he poses the question of how people who grew up and lived amicably side by side can end up killing one another. One explanation-powerfully expressed by Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Gray Falcon (1941) and taken up much later by Robert D. Kaplan in Balkan Ghosts (1993)-is that these are blood feuds, centuries old, that haunt the Balkans and may do so until the end of time. But it is with Samuel Huntington, he of "clash of civilizations" fame, that Ignatieff chooses to cross swords, appointing the eminent Harvard political scientist spokesman for all who, for one reason or another, trace today's civil wars to the distant past.

There are many old fault lines that one can claim run through the former Yugoslavia. Constantine split the Roman Empire roughly a millennium and a half ago into a Latin-speaking west and a Greek-speaking east. Today's Serbs and Croats are heirs to rival civilizations: Serbia is Greek Orthodox and uses the Cyrillic alphabet, while Croatia is Roman Catholic and uses the Latin alphabet. The peoples of the western empire have had about 1,500 years to restructure their state system, reassemble along national lines, and agree in the main on which states should appear on the map-a process completed only a little more than a century ago with the birth of Italy and Germany. But the peoples of the east, mostly transferred from one multinational empire to another, from Byzantine to Ottoman to (in some cases) Hapsburg rule, having just started on the path of self-determination, have had only about 80 to 170 years in which to sort out their national identities and frontiers-which may not have been enough time. Finally, with the wars of religion following the Reformation, Western Europe underwent a profound experience that the Balkans did not. In ending those wars, the countries of the West learned to live as a single multistate community despite differences in religious beliefs. The former Yugoslavia did not have the benefit of that lesson.

Nonetheless, the current hatreds in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia have not welled up out of the past, Ignatieff says. The Yugoslav peoples, he argues persuasively, cannot have been engaged in a clash of civilizations, since the South Slavs of today, lacking a classical education, know nothing of the western or eastern empire in which their ancestors lived. Those empires were divided by language, but Serbs and Croats, ignorant of Latin and Greek, came to speak a common language, Serbo-Croat. It is not civilization that divides them, nor language. Neither is it creed: educated for decades by an atheist communist dictatorship, these are peoples, says Ignatieff, on whom religion has little hold. Nor is it nationalism, the bogey of the modern world, or ethnicity, by which he seems to mean the same thing. The subtitle of Blood and Belonging described contemporary mini-wars as embodying "the new nationalism"; in the subtitle of Warrior's Honor, Ignatieff categorizes the mini-wars as "ethnic war." In fact, most cannot properly be described by either term. The Hutu-Tutsi wars in Africa are tribal, while in Northern Ireland the natives are fighting a war of religion. But Ignatieff is on target when he depicts nationalism (or ethnicity) as a vision summoned up by a group of terrified individuals seeking a group to protect them. He dubs it a "fantasy."

In chronicling the South Slav war, Ignatieff begins with the death of Tito in 1980 and the consequent disintegration of the Yugoslav state. As Ignatieff tells the story, the demagogue Slobodan Milosevic,, in a grab for power, successfully appealed to Serbs' fears. This terrified Croatia, which took measures that further frightened Serbia, and before long the politics of paranoia were in full swing. It was mutual fear more than mutual hate, asserts Ignatieff, that drove the belligerents to torture, mutilation, rape, and massacre. The fear was there to exploit, he says, because of the Tito regime's failure to face not the distant but the immediate past of World War II, during which Yugoslavs betrayed and massacred one another. The Tito government functioned by promoting the lie that Yugoslavia had united as one nation against the Nazi invaders. Yet parents told the forbidden story to children, so everyone was haunted by a dread, the more powerful for having to be kept quiet, that some dark night the past would come alive and vengeance would be exacted for the crimes of the 1940s. There was no ghost in the house, but there was a skeleton in the closet.

Like so many answers in history, however, the one above provides no resting point. Let's say that the Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and other Yugoslavs betrayed, tortured, mutilated, raped, and slaughtered in the 1990s because they did so in the 1940s, but why did they do so in the 1940s? Ignatieff does not confront that question, and indeed takes a wrong turn here in his discussion. He follows a theory of Freud's that must have struck him as a brilliant, if paradoxical, revelation. Freud wrote that "it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike" that cause hostility between them-"the closer . . . the more hostile." Conversely, the greater the differences between people, the less hostility they feel.

Alas, that Freudian theory is not the key to understanding; if anything, it locks the door. Consider conflicts where differences are conspicuous, where hostility, according to Freud, should be least: for example, those between blacks and whites. Can anyone believe that race riots are characterized by a lack of bitterness? Is racial hatred never intense?