Sorting Out the Balkans: Three New Looks at a Trouble Region

Western policy toward eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been a vast improvisation since communism's collapse. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the Balkans. In the 1995 Dayton Accord, the West ratified the division of Bosnia and Herzegovina by failing to commit resources to Dayton's most important civilian mandate, the return of refugees. The very negotiations at Dayton depended on the promotion, enhancement, and legitimization of the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, the primary engineer of the Bosnian war. The results were a divided Bosnia and inevitable turmoil in Kosovo. In spring 1999, NATO fought a war in Kosovo without any plan to budge Milosevic from power, thereby ensuring that his grip over Serbia became stronger than ever. Meanwhile, the West continues to hold Montenegro and Kosovo back from independence, even though both will likely be future battlegrounds.

Given the West's inability -- or unwillingness -- to grasp the realities of the current Balkan scene, fresh accounts on Balkan history, including reevaluations of the most recent Kosovo developments, should be welcomed. Now three writers have tackled the subject in different ways, with mixed results. Misha Glenny provides an account of the last two centuries of Balkan history but in a highly contemporary key, Tim Judah continues his study of Serbian politics with a judicious account of the Kosovo issue, and Michael Ignatieff offers his own version of what the NATO action in Kosovo meant in the annals of modern warfare.

ENTER GLENNY

Glenny's work is lowbrow history on a grand scale. A master scriptwriter, Glenny has produced a book that could easily be broken into a series of Hollywood romances. As befits the genre, the narrative has little original interpretation. Instead, in a show of directorial fancy, he carefully blocks out the entrances and exits of the notable names of Balkan history: Karadjordje Petrovic, the leader of the first Serbian uprising against the Turks in 1804; the great nineteenth-century statebuilders (Nikola Pasic, Stefan Stambolov, and Eleutherios Venizelos -- but, curiously, not Ion Bratianu); the royal dictators of the interwar period (King Zog, Aleksandar Karadjordjevic, Boris III, and Carol II); and finally the communist dictators (Enver Hoxha, Tito, and Nicolae Ceausescu).

Glenny's views are not as Serbocentric as some critics have charged. Were he Serbocentric in earnest, he would have given some prominence to such antihegemonist Serbs as Svetozar Markovic and Dimitrije Tucovic, or perhaps to such uncompromising anti-Milosevic figures as Latinka Perovic, the leader of Serbia's liberal Communists who was purged in 1972, or Bogdan Bogdanovic, the former mayor of Belgrade. He would have said something about the Serbian Orthodox church, including its seminal figures of the twentieth century: Nikolaj Velimirovic and Justin Popovic. But that would have meant a focus on ideas -- and one cannot make a movie out of ideas.

It would be exhausting to cite everything missing in Glenny. Definitions are missing, including the most crucial one: What are the Balkans -- an area of the Ottoman Empire's legacy? If so, what is the legacy? Ideologies and social thought are missing. The first noun in the subtitle -- "nationalism" -- is never defined or analyzed; it is merely assumed. The same can be said of liberalism, socialism, communism, and fascism. This history of the modern Balkans does not even discuss the nature of partisan conflict, other than in terms of foreign patronage. Glenny deems Yugoslavia's King Aleksandar important, but he never mentions his political decisions, like the creation of the banovinas in 1929 that redrew the borders of the country's historical provinces. Religion, politics, society, and culture are missing. Whole nations (Slovenia) and movements (Nationalist Youth, Orthodoxism) are missing. Glenny has produced a history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Balkans with no reference to Petar II Petrovic-Njegos, Montenegro's great poet and prince-bishop. Indeed, there are hardly any references to Montenegro itself.

Despite a few references in the bibliography, Glenny also fails to refer to some of the most notable contemporary scholars of the Balkan countries, including those writing in Western languages. He discusses Macedonia -- one of his favorite subjects -- without referring to the works of such specialists as Fikret Adanir, John D. Bell, Anastasia Karakasidou, Andrew Rossos, or Stefan Troebst. This cannot be a result of ignorance; Glenny uses many more obscure texts by lesser-known authors. Rather, it is a result of choice. Glenny's favorite sources are travelers, soldiers, diplomats, and journalists like himself -- colorful and quotable types.

But this approach is no excuse for sloppiness. Take the case of the revolution of 1848 in Croatia. Here Glenny draws on the wonderfully literary synthesis by the writer Josip Horvath, written before World War II. There is nothing wrong with that, even though Glenny seems to be aware of the far more authoritative postwar works by the Croat historian Jaroslav Sidak. But Glenny's use of Horvath is quite creative. He first quotes Horvath's own citation from the diary of Baron Josip Neustadter, a Croatian general and a friend of Josip Jelacic, the loyalist Hapsburg viceroy of Croatia. He follows by throwing a Horvath sentence into the supposed Neustadter quote. The next sentence is Glenny's paraphrase of the following Horvath sentence. And then he quotes Jelacic from Horvath -- without attribution.