The Balkans in the New Millennium

In the Shadow of War and Peace

Tom Gallagher

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415349406
• eBook ISBN: 9781134273034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Can the Balkans ever become a peaceful peninsula like that of Scandinavia? With enlightened backing, can it ever make common cause with the rest of Europe rather than being an arena of periodic conflicts, political misrule, and economic misery?

In the last years of the twentieth century, Western states watched with alarm as a wave of conflicts swept over much of the Balkans. Ethno-nationalist disputes, often stoked by unprincipled leaders, plunged Yugoslavia into bloody warfare. Romania, Bulgaria and Albania struggled to find stability as they reeled from the collapse of the communist social system and even Greece became embroiled in the Yugoslav tragedy.

This new book examines the politics and international relations of the Balkans during a decade of mounting external involvement in its affairs. Tom Gallagher asks what evidence there is that key lessons have been learned and applied as trans-Atlantic engagement with Balkan problems enters its second decade. This book identifies new problems: organized crime, demographic crises of different kinds, and the collapse of a strong employment base. This is an excellent contribution to our understanding of the area.

1 Greece
A peace-making role lost and re-found

In Greece, nationalist energies were channelled away from the Balkans and towards the island of Cyprus, especially during the 1967–74 dictatorship of the Greek Colonels. The year 1981 marked the start of a long political ascendancy of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). It would be in charge of the government except for the years 1989–93 until 2004. Andreas Papandreou, its leader, came to represent the political attitudes of Greece for much of the rest of the world during the fifteen years he held the limelight after 1981. He wished to bury the civil war legacy of the 1940s when the communist-dominated Left was suspected of wishing to place the Greek part of Macedonia in a large communist Slavic state. Papandreou felt that his leftist party with its neutralist Third World orientation would need to strengthen its nationalist credentials (Kofos 1999: 233). This chapter explores the effect of this approach on Greece’s relations with its northern neighbours during the fifteen years in which conflict in the former Yugoslavia superseded the Cold War.

In Bulgaria and Romania, ruling Leftists of the Marxist–Leninist persuasion had already been trailblazers in this regard. Like Papandreou, they had a credibility problem because of their failure to make good on their economic promises to their citizens. They provided extravagant doses of ‘national communism’ in an effort to shore up their popular legitimacy. PASOK’s first extended period in office from 1981 to 1988 enabled this ‘patriotic’ strategy to enjoy important popular success. Turkey was usually the focus of PASOK’s ‘patriotic’ orientation but Papandreou continued to bar the 67,000 refugee Slavs from Greece – who settled mainly in Yugoslavia after the civil war – from returning even for visits unless they signed a document declaring themselves as ‘Greeks of Greek origin’ (Reuter 1999: 31).

Even before the Yugoslav crisis, alarm was being expressed in sections of the Greek press and the intelligentsia, and by some political figures, about a cultural offensive emanating from Skopje, designed to place in question Greece’s entitlement to the Aegean part of Macedonia, which had been under its control since 1913. Intellectuals used Radio Skopje to argue that the concept of ‘Macedonianism’ extended beyond the southernmost Republic of Yugoslavia. The government in Athens responded by stepping up assistance to archaeologists and by promoting international exhibitions in order to reassert the links of ‘Macedonia with Hellenism over three millennia’ (Kofos 1989: 257).

The European Union (EU) proved to be an ineffective restraining force over Greece as well-placed individuals and groups started to argue that cultural pretensions in Skopje were becoming a mask for full-blown irredentism. The crisis in Yugoslavia and the collapse of internal borders in 1991–2 raised the possibility that Greece’s own borders with the crumbling South Slav state might be called into question. Brussels arguably hadn’t thought through the implications of inviting Greece, with its strongly nationalist political culture and difficulties with neighbouring states, to be part of its post-nationalist project. Admittedly, Greece had to fulfil a range of economic, financial and administrative conditions to secure membership. But apparently it was not pressed by its sponsors to promise to behave with realism and restraint over sensitive identity questions.

Perhaps Greece’s main west European champion was Valery Giscard d’Estaing, president of France from 1974 to 1981. He saw modern Greece as the inheritor of the ancient civilisations that shaped the humanistic cultures of modern Europe. In 2002, it emerged that he shared some of the Islamophobia of sections of the Greek political elite and public when he said that the adherence of the majority of Turks to Islam disqualified the country from joining the European Union.¹

Post-Cold War trauma

The Yugoslav crisis first manifested itself in Kosovo where the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević cracked down severely on the Albanian population there. He was perhaps inspired by events in Bulgaria where the large Turkish minority was suffering state persecution without undue concern in the rest of Europe. Fear of Serbia’s wish for domination prompted Macedonia to pull out of the disintegrating federation in 1991. Despite Slavic-Albanian tensions, Macedonia avoided internal unrest. It was fortunate to have as its founding President a moderate and tactically astute former communist Kiro Gligorov. He was assisted by the fact that Milošević was focusing his attention on expanding Serbian power in the western Balkans.

Towards the rest of the neighbourhood, Bulgaria also behaved in a low-key manner after the removal of Todor Zhivkov in 1989. It failed to revive the territorial claims which had led it to back the wrong side in both world wars. It was the first country to recognise Macedonian statehood. As for Albania, it was too preoccupied with a daunting range of internal problems to look much beyond its borders until the late 1990s (Kola 2003: 383–95).

Instead, it was Greece that reacted with undisguised hostility to the emergence of a Macedonian state on 17 November 1991 (with the promulgation of a new constitution). Nerves had been stretched by the trial-of-strength with Turkey. Following the upheavals in the hitherto frozen communist bloc to its north, it feared a replay of past events. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO) quickly emerged as a major contender for power in Macedonia. It claimed to have descended from the pre-1939 party of the same name, which had often resorted to terrorism in a bid to create an independent Macedonia. As well as expressing anti-Turkish and anti-Albanian sentiments, VMRO reiterated the desire to reincorporate the ‘lost’ parts of ‘the nation’ located in Bulgaria and Greece and announced that it wished to hold its second conference in Thessaloniki (Schwartz 2000: 387). The party’s young leader, LjubTo Georgievski even managed to become the first vice-president of the newly independent state. There was an electrifying reaction in Greece to this perceived threat to its northern frontiers which didn’t die down after VMRO failed to enjoy any lasting breakthrough. Irredentist dreams were not just harboured by romantic nationalists. Cvitejo Job, a well-connected diplomat from pre-1991 Yugoslavia, recalling the communist leadership in Skopje, has written:

Not one Macedonian leader out of many whom I personally knew, would even in private admit that ‘all Macedonians in one state’ is a dangerous pipe dream. Some of these leaders were otherwise very sophisticated, with impressive experience in international relations. But no, they would insist, we must not declare Yugoslav borders as definitely settled, as final. Why should we deprive, they would carry on, future generations the chance of ‘amicably reaching progressive solutions’.

(Job 2002: 118)

What can be described as Aegean Macedonia was only acquired by Greece in 1913. Constantin Karamanlis (1907–98), President of Greece from 1990 to 1995, had actually been born a subject of the Ottoman Empire. The Greek Civil War of the late 1940s showed how many Slavic Macedonians were receptive to calls emanating from their co-ethnics in southern Yugoslavia to establish a free Macedonia (Koliopoulos and Veremis 2002: 75). By 1949, the last year of the civil war, Greek Macedonians made up more than 50 per cent of the communist army (Koliopoulos and Veremis 2002: 89). In 1948, the rebels had carried away 28,000 children aged between 2 and 14 and taken them to communist countries. To official Greece this was mass kidnapping, but to an émigré group such as the Macedonian Human Rights Movement of Canada, it was a bid to save them from hunger in which the help of the Red Cross was enlisted.² Some reached Austria, Canada, the United States and Australia thanks to Western philanthropic efforts. In adult life not a few enlisted in irredentist movements associated with the VMRO line. In Greece it was widely assumed that such movements were being directed from Skopje in Yugoslav Macedonia in order to destabilise Greece (Koliopoulos and Veremis 2002: 95). For this reason they were exempt from the general amnesty which became law in 1982. It allowed for the repatriation of all political refugees of Greek nationality, a restoration of their human rights and a reinstatement of their property. But those child exiles, who in adult life declared themselves Greek citizens of Macedonian ethnicity, were exempt from the amnesty and could not re-enter Greece until 2003.

The domestic political context also helps to explain this defensive approach by the Athens state to a painful civil war legacy. The eruption of a regional security challenge to the north coincided with a period of political instability at home. Greek democracy was not under threat as in the 1960s, but the political scene was overshadowed by a bitter struggle for supremacy between two fierce rivals: PASOK and New Democracy (ND). PASOK had been forced to relinquish power in 1988 owing to the economic profligacy of Andreas Papandreou who had reneged on promises of economic distribution but had boosted the incomes of the lower-paid by undertaking costly loans.

Greece has been described as ‘[A] triangle upside down with its peak in the sea and a vulnerable base touching upon four neighbours’ (Svolopoulos 1999: 24). This vivid description underlines the vulnerability that its geographical position appeared to bestow. Its advantages vis-à-vis its northern neighbours might have elicited a lower-key response. It was the only Balkan state fully integrated into the Euro-Atlantic economic and security community. There was a developed market economy with Greece having a per capita income of $10,981 (1995) compared with Bulgaria’s $1,476 (Ioakimidis 1999: 171). Greece enjoyed military superiority over all its northern neighbours; in the 1990s its annual defence spending exceeded the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Albania and Macedonia (Constas and Papasotiriou 1999: 217). It had a record in promoting regional multilaterism which gave it the chance to exercise a leadership role over its post-communist neighbours (Veremis 1999: 34).

All these factors gave it enviable immunity from shock waves further north. But instead worst-case scenarios were stressed, in no small measure due to the domestic political context. Neither of the two electoral titans, PASOK and ND was able to offer economic inducements to voters after the unwise spending sprees of the 1980s. Nationalism was seen as a handy device to prolong their credibility and gain advantage over the other. It was not difficult to mobilise voters on nationalist grounds, given their strength in Greek political culture.

The country had witnessed a long struggle against foreign domination and had been badly affected by both world wars. Threats to Greek sovereignty were seen in the 1970s and 1980s not as emanating from the Warsaw Pact but from the United States. Deep-seated anti-Western and anti-American sentiments existed on both the Right and Left of politics. They were increasingly promoted by the Orthodox Church which enjoyed a pre-eminent place in political life. Since the nineteenth century it had been encouraged to promote the secular values of Greek nationalism. The ministries of religion and education had overseen the official Church (Pollis 1994: 12). Sometimes the state intervened quite blatantly in the Church’s affairs as during the Colonels regime. But Greek Orthodoxy recovered from its entanglement with that dictatorship. Indeed its popular influence was growing just as that of national churches elsewhere was declining in the face of post-modern secularism. This influence sometimes appeared to supersede that of the political elite burdened by domestic policy failures.

The constitution of 1975 recognises the Orthodox Church as the dominant religion in Greece. Its prior approval is required for building or repairing a non-Orthodox Church or mosque. The teaching of a course on the Orthodox religion is compulsory at all levels of education.³ Until 2002, the inclusion of religion in identity documents was normal and an EU regulation requiring its abandonment was complied with only after a fierce struggle led by Archbishop Christodoulos, head of the Church. He mobilised those Greeks fearing change most:

those who have been worst hit by the demands of a global economy and government cutbacks in the bloated state sector; and those who see the Church as the embodiment of Greece’s defensive national identity. A televangelist par excellence, he has drawn his support from a heady mix of the marginalized petit-bourgeoisie, unskilled workers, disgruntled civil servants and small-time self-employed people . . . To many of the archbishop’s supporters, the Church is the only bulwark left against the threat of a multicultural, open society, symbolised for them by yuppies who work for multinationals, drive jeeps and wield mobiles like firearms.

(Smith 2001: 141)

Under Christodoulos, the Church could appear less concerned with saving souls than in preparing the ground for the further homogenisation of the Greek nation (Michas 2002: 143). The sizeable population of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses, comprising 10 per cent of the population, have often not fared well in a climate where Greekness is commensurate with Orthodoxy (Pollis 1994: 12). Until 1997, Greece was the only EU state that did not offer civilian service as an alternative to military service.⁴

In the early 1990s, the Greek Intelligence Service (EYP) commissioned a study into dangers posed by various religious groups. It divided Greeks into ‘authentic’ and ‘non-authentic’ ones (Michas 2002: 125). It stated that ‘[I]t would not be too much to say that any Greek who is not Orthodox is not completely Greek. It then went on to call for a purge of “heretics” from the media and to propose that the Orthodox religion should form the basis of Greek foreign policy and that Greece should create an Orthodox Christian axis in the Balkans . . .’.⁵

Matching the Orthodox Church in vigilance about threats to national security were journalists and academics who ‘chose . . . to sensationalise the “Macedonian question” with an assortment of distorted historical facts and half-truths’ (Kofos 1999: 234). A ‘bandwagon’ of ‘nationalist fundamentalism’ gathered speed with historians, archaeologists, theologians as well as journalists in the vanguard. Evangelos Kofos, a Balkan regional policy expert who had been writing on the Macedonian question since before the 1990s, argued that they drew up ‘a theoretical framework’ for the policy and wider public debates on the revived Macedonian question (Kofos 1999: 250).

What were the chief elements of the Macedonian dispute? The most persistent cause of Greek complaint was the name. Taking Macedonia as the title of a new state was seen as a misappropriation of Greek cultural heritage by a Slavic people for a contemporary political end, which was to acquire Western Thrace lying immediately to the south of them. Second, there was the question of the flag. It was deep red with a bright yellow sun in the middle from which sixteen points radiated. This is the Vergina Sun, the emblem of the ancient royal dynasty of Macedonia. It decorated the funeral cask of Philip of Macedonia, which archaeologists discovered on a site south-east of Thessaloniki in 1977. Greece argued that by adorning their flag with this symbol, the Slav Macedonians were expropriating ancient Greek history and laying claim to the region of northern Greece also known as Macedonia (or Western Thrace).⁶ There was also the understated but very real anxiety about the way that an independent Macedonia might act as a rallying-point for the inhabitants of northern Greece who still clung to a Slavophone outlook. Slav Macedonians couldn’t exist ‘for the very simple reason that nobody who is not Greek’ can properly be said to exist in a Greece where the ethnic Greek identity enjoyed monopoly status.⁷ For the view that the spur to minority consciousness in a country that prided itself on its supposed homogeneity was the essence of the problem, reference can be made to the words of the former Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis in 1995: ‘I saw from the first moment the problem of Skopje in its true dimensions. What concerned me from the very first moment was not the name of the state. The problem for me . . . was that [we should not allow] the creation of a second minority problem in the area of western Macedonia [in Greece]. My main aim was to convince the Republic [of Macedonia] to declare that there is no Slavomacedonian minority in Greece. This was the real key of our difference with Skopje’.⁸

Only with the greatest reluctance had Greece granted minority status to the Turkish population of Eastern Thrace under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. There was a widespread fear that the recognition of minorities was the first step in the dismemberment of a country. The idea that multi-ethnic states were, by their very nature, unviable, became the cornerstone of official policy towards the rest of the Balkans at least in the first half of the 1990s.⁹ The view that the multi-ethnic state model was a recipe for break up also had much popular resonance. Was it a good thing for societies to be mixed, asked a Eurobarometer poll in a survey carried out in 2001 after passions had died down. The average for the European Union was a 64 per cent vote in favour of heterodoxy, but in Greece the corresponding percentage was much less at 36 per cent (Michas 2002: 122). Eight years earlier, another Eurobarometer poll on European identity foun...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acronyms
• 1. Greece: A Peace-Making Role Lost and Re-Found
• 2. The Road to War In Kosovo
• 3. Milošević and NATO Collide Over Kosovo
• 4. Macedonia Internal Dangers Supplant External Ones
• 5. Serbia from 2000: Milošević’s Poisonous Legacy
• 6. Bosnia: Redesigning a Flawed Peace Process
• 7. Still a Danger-Point: Kosovo Under International Rule
• 8. The European Union In Search of Balkan Answers
• Conclusion: An Uncertain Political Future for the Balkans
• Notes
• Bibliography