Blood and Belonging Read Online Free PDF Page B

ofintractable fanaticism. And we are ending the search for explanation just when it should begin if we assert that local ethnic hatreds were so rooted in history that they were bound to explode into nationalist violence. On the contrary, these people had to be transformed from neighbors into enemies.
    Thomas Hobbes would have understood Yugoslavia. What Hobbes would have said, having lived through religious civil war himself, is that when people are sufficiently afraid, they will do anything. There is one type of fear more devastating in its impact than any other: the systemic fear that arises when a state begins to collapse. Ethnic hatred is the result of the terror that arises when legitimate authority disintegrates.
    Tito achieved the national unification of each of the six major south Slav peoples. He understood that a federal state was the only peaceful means to satisfy the national aspirations of each people. For each ethnic group to unify on its own, they would each have had to initiate the forcible deportation of populations. As much as a quarter of both the Croat and Serb populations have always lived outside the borders of their republics. Tito created an intricate ethnic balance which, for example, reduced Serbian influence at the heart of the federal system in Belgrade, while promoting Serbs to positions of power in Croatia.
    Tito’s containment of nationalism, built as it was on a personal dictatorship, could never have survived beyond his death. Even by the early 1970s, his socialist rhetoric of “brotherhood and unity” was falling on deaf ears. In 1974, he compromised with nationalism, allowing the republics greater autonomy in the new constitution. By the end of his reign, the League of Communists, instead of counterbalancing the ethnic clientism among the elites in the republics, was itself fragmenting along ethnic lines.
    This fragmentation was inevitable given Tito’s failure to allow the emergence of civic, rather than ethnic-based, multi-party competition. Had Tito allowed a citizens’ politics in the 1960s or 1970s, a non-ethnic principle of political affiliation might have taken root. Tito always insisted his was a Communism with a difference. In the end, his regime was no different from the other Communist autocracies of Eastern Europe. By failing to allow a plural political culture to mature, Tito ensured that the fall of his regime turned into the collapse of the entire state structure. In the ruins, his heirs and successors turned to the most atavistic principles of political mobilization in order to survive.
    If Yugoslavia no longer protected you, perhaps your fellow Croats, Serbs or Slovenes might. Fear, more than conviction, made unwilling nationalists of ordinary people. But most people did not want it to happen; most people knew, if they drew back for a second, that rushing to the protection of their ethnic group would only hasten the disintegration of their common life.
    Ethnic difference per se was not responsible for the nationalistic politics that emerged in the Yugoslavia of the 1980s. Consciousness of ethnic difference turned into nationalist hatred only, when the surviving Communist elites, beginning with Serbia, began manipulating nationalist emotions in order to cling to power.
    This is worth emphasizing, since most outsiders assume that all Balkan peoples are incorrigibly nationalistic. In fact, many people bitterly lament the passing of Yugoslavia, precisely because it was a state that once gave them room to define themselves in non-nationalist ways. In a poignant and bitter essay, “Overcome by Nationhood,” the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić describes how, until the late 1980s, shehad always defined herself in terms of her education, profession, gender, and personality. It was only the maddened atmosphere of the Croatian-Serbian war of 1991 that finally stripped her of all of these defining marks of identity except simply being a Croatian. What is