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History lessons

My colleagues over at TransConflict have posted my reflection, prepared some months ago, on one chapter of the Scholarly Initiative, led by Charlie Ingrao:

Rereading the Scholarly Initiative’s Confronting Yugoslav Controversies in its second edition on TransConflict is déjà vu all over again. The sections on “Kosovo Under Autonomy” remind us of the growing demographic predominance of Albanians, the province’s declining economy, heightened demands for political equality and republic status, deteriorating interethnic relations, the 1986 Serbian Academy memorandum claiming genocide, Serb migration from and political agitation within Kosovo. In Momcilo Pavlovic’s well-crafted narrative, impeccably written to achieve acceptance on both sides of the ethnic divide, the evolution is clear and the outcome seems all too logical and inevitable – a violent confrontation leading eventually to Kosovo independence.

That is not, however, the Scholarly Initiative’s point. Nor would it be a valid one. It is not difficult to imagine many junctures at which wise politicians in a less stressed environment might have intervened to stop the spiral towards violence and dissolution of the former Yugoslavia.  But the anti-nationalists in power who might have been so inclined were also, for the most part, Communists.  Their autocratic methods were ill-suited to the requirements.  Once the Soviet Union came apart, the nationalists—some like Milosevic recent converts from Communism—were unleashed. They were far more likely to aggravate the situation than ameliorate it.  What happened in Moscow in 1990 and 1991 was the trigger that enabled what happened in former Yugoslavia in the next decade. Read more