Blood and Belonging Read Online Free PDF

national self to worship and adore.
    In Croatia, Franjo Tudjman’s ruling HDZ (Croatian Democratic Alliance) party presents itself as a Western-style political movement on the model of the Bavarian Christian Democrats. Actually, the Tudjman state resembles the Serbian regime of Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević much more thaneither resembles anything on the Western European parliamentary model. They are both post-Communist one-party states, democratic only in the sense that their leaders’ power derives from their skill as manipulators of popular emotion.
    An outsider is struck, not by the differences between Serbs and Croats, but by how similar they seem to be. They both speak the same language, give or take a few hundred words, and have shared the same village way of life for centuries. While one is Catholic, the other Orthodox, urbanization and industrialization have reduced the salience of confessional differences. Nationalist politicians on both sides took the narcissism of minor difference and turned it into a monstrous fable according to which their own side appeared as blameless victims, the other side as genocidal killers. All Croats became Ustashe assassins; all Serbs became Chetnik beasts. Such rhetorical preliminaries, needless to say, were an essential precondition of the slaughter that followed.
    Yet what remains truly difficult to understand about the Balkan tragedy is how such nationalist lies ever managed to take root. For ordinary people know that they are lies: all Croats are not Ustashe; all Serbs are not Chetniks. Even as they use these phrases, people know they are not true. It cannot be repeated too often that these people were neighbors, friends, and spouses, not inhabitants of different ethnic planets.
    A nationalist minority on both sides went to work on their deeply intertwined common past, persuading all and sundry, including outsiders, that Serbs and Croats have been massacring each other since time immemorial. History has no such lesson to teach. In fact, the protagonists were kept apart for much of their past, in separate empires and kingdoms. It was only the assassination of Croat politicians in theParliament in Belgrade in 1928 that set off the slide into ethnic warfare during the Second World War. While the present conflict is certainly a continuation of the civil war of 1941-45, this explains little, for one still has to account for the nearly fifty years of ethnic peace in between. It was not merely a truce. Even sworn enemies on either side still cannot satisfactorily explain why it broke down.
    Moreover, it is a fallacy to regard either this war or the civil war of 1941-45 as the product of some uniquely Balkan viciousness. All the delusions that have turned neighbors into enemies are imports of Western European origin. Modern Serbian nationalism dates back to an impeccably Byronic style of national uprising against the Turks. Likewise, the nineteenth-century Croatian nationalist ideologue Ante Starčević derived the idea of an ethnically pure Croatian state indirectly from the German Romantics. The misery of the Balkans stems in part from a pathetic longing to be good Europeans—that is, to import the West’s murderous ideological fashions. These fashions proved fatal in the Balkans because national unification could be realized only by ripping apart the plural fabric of Balkan village life in the name of the violent dream of ethnic purity.
    Likewise, even genocide in the Balkans is not a local specialty but an importation from the grand Western European tradition. Ante Pavelić’s wartime Ustashe regime, which Serbs mistakenly regard as the true face of Croatian nationalism, couldn’t have lasted a day in office without the backing of the German Nazi regime, not to mention the tacit approval of that eminently European authority the Catholic Church.
    In sum, therefore, we are making excuses for ourselves when we dismiss the Balkans as a sub-rational zone