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

Indeed, the entire text is marred by geographical errors, misspellings, and biographical inaccuracies. Ivan Pernar, a Croat Peasant Party deputy whom this reviewer met in 1960, is recorded as having been assassinated in 1928; the central Turkish city of Kayseri becomes a district of Istanbul; the son of the Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov is noted as having been killed in World War II when in fact he died of diphtheria in 1943. The examples run on.

What remain in the book are mostly descriptions of wars, massacres, and great-power meddling. Glenny claims that "consistently and conspicuously absent from Western reflections on the Balkans since the latter half of the nineteenth century has been any consideration of the impact of the West itself on the region." He evidently aims to correct this mistake, as he sees it. But little in this enormous book, except for occasional homilies, suggests an original account of the relationship between the great powers and the Balkans. Glenny's recounting of the great powers' maneuvering before World War I, for example, adds nothing fresh to the literature. Nor is it news that Soviet diplomats -- like Grigory Popov, Stalin's military mission chief in Athens -- could be as cold-blooded as any other imperialist.

Glenny's central argument is that the Balkans have constantly suffered from great-power interference. He cites the 1878 Congress of Berlin, World War I and its aftermath, and World War II as particularly egregious examples of how Western intervention can backfire. Exactly how these events went wrong is not spelled out -- except in the last instance, in reference to the Nazi-sponsored genocide throughout the Balkans. Was the 1878 Congress of Berlin wrong because it upset the rise of Greater Bulgaria? Was it wrong that Serbia and Romania expanded after 1918? If so, what was the alternative? Was the 1912 establishment of Albania a mistake? Should one assume that the imperialisms of the Balkan states are innately wiser than those of western Europe? Glenny has in fact broadened his criticism of Western intervention in the Balkans of the 1990s to make a case against all outside interference in the last two centuries. But his historical research is too limited to back up his sweeping claim.

Although reputedly a Yugoslav specialist, Glenny is weakest on the history of Yugoslavia. His account becomes less substantial as it discusses the 1960s, but it is the least adequate on the post-Tito 1980s and the rise of Milosevic. This enormously important and complicated period is reduced to a handful of events: the Pristina demonstrations of 1981 (although the larger issue of Kosovo's status is ignored); a paragraph on the economic difficulties of the mid-1980s; two promising but bland paragraphs on the Serbian Academy's Memorandum, which presaged the rise of new Serb nationalism; and finally, war's outbreak in 1991. In fact, Glenny offers no analysis of how the Titoist system contributed to the making and the unmaking of Yugoslavia. Likewise, he reduces the series of wars after 1991 to their Bosnian part, notably to the movement around the Milosevic-Tudjman vortex and the reactive (and inadequate) actions of the great powers. Bosnia was indeed the most important aspect of these wars, but Glenny overlooks the fact that the wars were driven by the ideological determination to build ethnically homogenous states and create a firm border between Serbia and Croatia. To accomplish this, Bosnia had to be destroyed.

Glenny is right to challenge NATO's claims to morality in the most recent Kosovo intervention -- and to argue that NATO's moral victory will ultimately depend on postintervention reconstruction and recovery. But he never addresses the more important issue: whether the West can be expected to protect the Balkans' unique traditions of religious pluralism if the West itself has lost its premodern, religious moorings. Nor does he ask whether this is a Western problem at all.

KOSOVO OR DEMOCRACY?

Tim Judah's graceful book is less ambitious but more analytical and better researched than Glenny's. He concentrates on Kosovo from 1912, when it was incorporated into Serbia, to the present: the Milosevic era, Ibrahim Rugova's "phantom state" of the 1990s (and corresponding developments in the other ex-Yugoslav lands), the rise of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and the new wave of Milosevic terror ending with nato's intervention last year. Everything worth knowing about contemporary Kosovo is included in this evenhanded book. Judah even discusses the emerging monopolistic policies of the KLA chieftain Hashim Thaci -- a trend that began with anti-Serb revanchism and will probably end with the repression of liberal Kosovar Albanians, perhaps under the noses of NATO peacekeeping troops.

Judah also clearly defines the meaning of Kosovo for the Serbs. Because compromise with the Kosovar Albanians was never an option before the war and force emerged as the only solution, Serbia had to choose between "Kosovo or democracy." The failure to find a solution to this dilemma, especially after the NATO bombing campaign, means that Serbia now has neither. The equivalent failure of Kosovar Albanians could mean that they will have Kosovo but no democracy -- or security.

Michael Ignatieff has written a book on the Kosovo war that is as engaging as Judah's but not as discerning. Ignatieff was there, and his reporting is as vivid and moving as his portraits of the leading figures -- U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke, Judge Louise Arbour of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and others. The victims are not forgotten, and neither are the voices with opposing views, like the Serb writer Aleksa Djilas. Ignatieff favored the NATO intervention, but he uses his book to reexamine its merits.