Don't Mourn, Balkanize!

Essays after Yugoslavia

Andrej Grubačić

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781604864700
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Baltique

Don't Mourn, Balkanize! is the first book written from the radical left perspective on the topic of Yugoslav space after the dismantling of the country. In this collection of essays, commentaries, and interviews, written between 2002 and 2010, Andrej Gruba?i? speaks about the politics of balkanization—about the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, neoliberal structural adjustment, humanitarian intervention, supervised independence of Kosovo, occupation of Bosnia, and other episodes of Power which he situates in the long historical context of colonialism, conquest, and intervention.

But he also tells the story of the balkanization of politics, of the Balkans seen from below. A space of bogumils—those medieval heretics who fought against Crusades and churches—and a place of anti-Ottoman resistance; a home to hajduks and klefti, pirates and rebels; a refuge of feminists and socialists, of antifascists and partisans; of new social movements of occupied and recovered factories; a place of dreamers of all sorts struggling both against provincial "peninsularity" as well as against occupations, foreign interventions and that process which is now, in a strange inversion of history, often described by that fashionable term, "balkanization."

For Gruba?i?, political activist and radical sociologist, Yugoslavia was never just a country—it was an idea. Like the Balkans itself, it was a project of inter-ethnic co-existence, a trans-ethnic and pluricultural space of many diverse worlds. Political ideas of inter-ethnic cooperation and mutual aid as we had known them in Yugoslavia were destroyed by the beginning of the 1990s—disappeared in the combined madness of ethno-nationalist hysteria and humanitarian imperialism. This remarkable collection chronicles political experiences of the author who is himself a Yugoslav, a man without a country; but also, as an anarchist, a man without a state. This book is an important reading for those on the Left who are struggling to understand the intertwined legacy of inter-ethnic conflict and inter-ethnic solidarity in contemporary, post-Yugoslav history.

I. BALKANIZATION
FROM ABOVE

Introduction

The Serbs are two-dimensional people with a craving for simplicity and an ideology so basic it can be understood without effort. They need enemies, not friends, to focus their two-dimensional ideas. Life for them is a simple tune, never an orchestration, or even a pleasant harmony. Animals make use of their resources with far greater felicity than these retorted creatures, whose subscription to the human race is well in arrears.

The above quote does not belong to the days of German propaganda and struggle of the Nazis against Yugoslav partisans. It is a recent statement of British humanitarian Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov, who, according to the journal aptly named The European, “had a magical way with children.”

The sentence is not altogether surprising. Karl Marx referred to the Balkan Slavs as “unhistorical people.” They were, in his view, and the one of Engels, “the racial dregs of a thousand years confused development,” who “although pretending to fight for liberty, they were inevitably found on the side of despotism and reaction.” They “lack the primary historical, geographical, and economic prerequisites of independence and ability to exist.”

This deep-seated cultural derision of the Balkan peoples is the crucial aspect of what I am here calling “balkanization from above.” I use this expression to describe a project, remarkably consistent in history, of breaking Balkan interethnic solidarity and regional socio-cultural identity; a process of violently incorporating the region into the system of nation-states and capitalist world-economy; and contemporary imposition of neoliberal col nialism. Both Europeans and local self-colonizing intelligentsia have in common a contempt for everything that comes from this “wretched peninsula.” The events described in the following chapter are nothing but the most recent phase in colonial ordering of the Balkans and its “retorted creatures.” The history of the Balkan peninsula is written in blood of the Great Powers’ attempts to prevent movements towards Balkan unity. Although essays in this chapter cover only the latest manifestations of elite balkanization, my contention is that the destruction of state-socialist Yugoslavia was a project of the same century-long process of balkanization from above. In contrast, Socialist Yugoslavia was a result of a long tradition of movements for Balkan unity, a manifestation of balkanization from below. After the defeat of real existing socialism, the Yugoslav state, with its indigenous socialism, and its global south, nonaligned orientation, could no longer be tolerated. Through the historically well-established pattern of imperialist intervention and local collaboration, this typically Balkan experiment has been destroyed in a series of bloody ethnic wars. Europeans and Americans have successfully blocked every peace initiative during the conflict. Balkanophobic racism in “the civilized world” has diverged into “paternalistic balkanism,” reserved for the helpless and childlike Bosnians and Kosovars, and “raw balkanism,” exemplified in Sir Peter’s quote, meaning the evil Serbs. Former Yugoslav republics were immediately transformed into veritable laboratories of “state-building,” “multicultural-ism,” “truth and reconciliation,” “democracy-promotion,” and economic privatization. Political choices became restricted to local chauvinist and pro-European options. Alternatives were declared non-patriotic or anti-European. The so-called nongovernmental organizations and other organs of civil society, that monstrous creation of American democracy- promotion, joined hands with nationalists and outright fascistic extremists against the pro-Balkan Left.

The International Tribunal in The Hague was established in order to promulgate and further refine the official (European and American) truth of humanitarian ideology. Intervention on behalf of this ideology (“humanitarian intervention”) was wildly popular among Euro-American elites, and subsequently used as a justification in every imperialist adventure from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The essays in the following section hold up for ridicule the almost hysterical tone directed primarily against the Serbs, especially extreme in British and French newspapers, in many ways paralleling American public discourse on the Middle East. This is not to say Americans are innocent of defaming the Balkans: Clinton’s advisor Robert D. Kaplan, a self-styled philosopher, wrote Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, a spectacularly vicious book having less to do with Balkan reality than the movie Ghostbusters. An official in President Obama’s administration, Samantha Powers, perpetuates this fantastical approach in her book A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. New York Times journalists, meanwhile, compete to outdo each other in imperial arrogance whenever they write on the Balkans and its chronically violent inhabitants.

These imperial and colonial attitudes still define the terms “civilized world,” “international community” and “civil society.” Balkan people were never too impressed by civilization. As early as 1871, the founder of the Balkan socialist movement, Svetozar Marković, ridiculed the entire “civilized world,” from Times to the obedient Serbian press. The civilized world, he wrote, “was composed of rich Englishmen, Brussels ministers and their deputies (the representatives of the capitalists), the European rulers and their marshals, generals, and other magnates, Viennese bankers and Belgrade journalists.” Marković was an anti-authoritarian socialist who believed, as do I, in pluricultural Balkan Federation organized as a decentralized, directly democratic society based on local agricultural and industrial associations. This is the kind of antinomian imagination that needs to be rediscovered: a horizontalist tradition of the barbarians who never accepted the civilized world that is now collapsing.

For readers interested in the topic of European universalism, I would recommend Edward Said’s classic Orientalism. Another useful book is Immanuel Wallerstein’s European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power. Recent scholarship on Eurocentrism includes some truly groundbreaking writings building on traditions of dependency theory and world systems analysis, such as Coloniality of Power by Anibal Quijano, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking by Walter Mignolo, and The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor and the Philosophy of Liberation by Enrique Dussel. Among the books devoted to Europe and the Balkans, few studies stand out: Maria Todorova’s fascinating critique Imagining the Balkans; Vesna Goldworthy’s cultural study Inventing Ruritania: Imperialism of the Imagination; Milica Baki?-Hayden’s Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia; and Božidar Jezernik’s anthropological study Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers. Bogoljub Šijaković wrote the short but powerful A Critique of Balkanist Discourse: Contribution to the Phenomenology of Balkan’s “Otherness.” Outstanding work on balkanism has been done by Tamara Vukov, whose essay “Military Neo-Balkanism” is forthcoming.

Among many excellent works on Balkan history, I would single out L.S. Stavrianos’ political history The Balkans Since 1453. The most impressive account of Balkan civilization can be found in many works of Traian Stoianovich, and especially his Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe. M. Mazower’s The Balkans is an excellent short rebuttal of the balkanist idea that people are born into the Balkans with some special quality that makes them want to kill one another. For those interested in the process of destruction of Yugoslavia, Ed Herman and David Peterson provide an extensive bibliography in their essay “The Dismantling of Yugoslavia: A Study in humanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse).” I have found particularly useful the works by Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War and Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990, as well as Robert Hayden’s study of the complicity of the international legal community in Yugoslav break up, Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts. Misha Glenny authored a couple of very informative books, including The Balkans: Nationalism, War & the Great Powers, 1804-1999.

Among the best works on humanitarian intervention-ism in Kosovo are two books by Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo and A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor, and the Standards of the West. A more general work on the subject of humanitarian intervention is Jean Bricmont’s Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. David Chandler gives a thoughtful and well-researched account of Bosnian humanitarian misadventure in Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton, and extends the account further in the more recent From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention. Mahmood Mamdani explains how the same civilizational complex was applied to the reality of Darfur, in Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. John Grow wrote a useful book on the international community during the Yugoslav war in his The Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War. William Robinson’s Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony is still one of the few books on the topic of so-called democracy-promotion and building of civil societies in exotic places.

Should Milošević Be Tried at The Hague?

June 2002

The recent arrest of Yugoslavia’s ex-president Slobodan Milošević provides a context in which to offer a brief analysis of the current Yugoslav intellectual climate.

It is most expedient, for our purposes, to begin by identifying the phenomenon hereafter referred to as “the Belgrade consensus”—a set of positions unanimously advocated by non-governmental organizations and liberal intellectuals in Belgrade on the question of Milošević's legal fate, and concerning the somewhat more complicated problem of what intellectual engagement in today’s Yugoslavia entails. The Belgrade consensus is informed by three arguments: the argument about the validity of The Hague Tribunal; the argument about the political expediency of cooperating with that institution; and the argument about collective guilt. In this treatment, I will try to bring into question the legitimacy of all three of these arguments which currently exercise public opinion in Yugoslavia and which—strange as it may sound-are almost universally accepted in Belgrade’s progressive circles. The intellectuals and activists who oppose this consensus have conveniently been labeled “ultra Leftists” and thereby have been successfully eliminated from the public debate.

Is The Hague Tribunal really legal and legitimate, as Belgrade’s liberals contend? The supporters of Milošević's extradition most often begin with the assertion that The Hague Tribunal is an administrative body created by the UN Security Council; they seek the legal basis for the assumed duty to cooperate in UN declarations, which require member states to accept and carry out its decisions. Furthermore, they see no legal obstacle in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, since, according to article 17, the option of extraditing a Yugoslav citizen is excluded only in cases involving another state.

And yet, an entirely different picture emerges from our own analysis. It is indeed true that UN member states have an obligation to carry out decisions of the Security Council, but only in cases in which such decisions are legally valid, i.e. when arrived at in accordance with the specific powers conferred upon it by the UN Charter.

It is well known that the Security Council has been entrusted with the “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” which implies its right to investigate any dispute capable of endangering the fundamental values of the so-called international community, as well as the right to recommend appropriate procedures with a view to resolving a particular dispute (Chapter VI of the Charter.)

In case these recommendations prove ineffective and, as a result, there is a breach of peace, the Security Council has the right to apply coercive measures, including those of a military nature (Chapter VII of the Charter.)

Evidently, there is no provision for the Security Council’s authority to establish any type of international institution, especially not one of a judicial nature. For this reason, article 29 of the Charter, which the Security Council invoked in establishing The Hague Tribunal does not constitute a legally valid basis, as it merely authorizes it to “establish such subsidiary organs as it deems necessary for the performance of its functions.”

However, subsidiary organs can only be considered bodies of an expert or operative nature, such as commissions, subcommissions, committees or bodies of a similar scope.

In this respect, as representative bodies would qualify the many expert commissions attached to other UN organs (the International Law Commission which prepares the blueprints for international conventions) or committees like the well known Legal Committee. As an international court can in no case be a “subsidiary body” but only an independent institution, so too can this tribunal have no legal foundation, especially not in the above-cited article of the Charter. Consequently, the tribunal is illegal under international law, and all its decisions so far can accordingly be considered not legally binding.

Jurists are well acquainted with the tenet that the independence of the judiciary is the primary basis for its legal competence. Otherwise, courts are subject to the political dictates of another authority (usually the executive), which is an element of dictatorship.

Moreover, one of the intrinsic characteristics of the contemporary systems of capitalist democracy is precisely the strict division of power into three branches—legislative, executive and judicial—a division that, above all, assumes their mutual independence in the exercise of authority.

In the case of The Hague Tribunal, however, the principle of the independence of the judiciary has been entirely invalidated, although it is a legal and political principle that ought to be fundamental.

In addition, all previous practice in establishing international courts further refutes the claims of those who accept the authority of The Hague Tribunal: in all cases so far on record, the formal and factual shaping of any kind of international tribunal has rested exclusively on the will and interest of states, thereby securing its requisite legitimacy.

Thus, the UN Charter provided the basis for the establishment of the International Court of Justice with authority to resolve disputes between states; all the members of the Charter are ipso facto members of this court’s statute.

The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea was established in 1982 by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as a tribunal with a specific jurisdiction.

The European Court on Human Rights was established by the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which was adopted by the members of the Council of Europe as long ago as 1950.

The Allied agreement of 1945 established the so-called Nuremberg trials for the purpose of prosecuting suspected Nazi leaders; their statute was adopted by the many states with an interest in these trials. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide provided for the establishment of a special criminal court for this type of crime; the fact that it has not been established to this day is a direct consequence of the absence of will on the part of a number of states.

The same reason prevented the establishment of a criminal court for the prosecution of U.S. crimes in Vietnam, which resulted in the formation of the Russell Tribunal as a kind of “court of conscience.”

Finally, at the international conference held in Rome under the auspices of the UN, the statute for a permanent International Criminal Court was adopted by the will of 120 states (the U.S., of course, voted against it); its taking effect was conditional upon ratification by sixty signatory states.

The examples cited above offer clear insight into the procedure for securing legitimacy for international courts. In the case of The Hague Tribunal, this procedure was patently disregarded, whereby this institution was stripped of its legitimacy and this tribunal turned into a scandalous precedent in international practice of this sort.

Such a precedent indicates the likelihood of future disrespect for international standards in this area, particularly the use of such quasi-tribunals to effect the political interest of capitalist elites.

As for the above-cited constitutional article on extradition, the estimate of it as legal grounds for the extradition of a citizen of a sovereign state is more than suspect.

As an instrument of international legal aid for criminal cases, extradition applies to citizens of a foreign state; both the procedure itself, as well as the conditions under which it is carried out, is subject to strict regulation by internal legislatures.

As a rule, however, domestic citizens are not liable to such measures, and a statement to such effect is usually articulated on a constitutional level.

International practice has so far shown that the question of extradition is most often regulated by bilateral or multilateral contracts or else it is executed under the principle of reciprocity.

For our purposes, the European Convention on Extradition concluded by the member states of the Council of Europe in 1957 and amended in 1975 to extend to [those who commit] war crimes and crimes against humanity may serve as an illustrative example.

A particularly interesting detail of the convention is the contractual provision by which states reserve the right to refuse the extradition of their own citizens, even those accused of severe breaches of the laws and customs governing war (article 6. paragraph 1a.)

Here again the standard negative stance on the extradition of a state’s own nationals has been expressed.

For this reason, I do not see why the FRY (Federal Republic of Yugolavia) should be considered outside the established framework of such practice.

Keeping in mind these facts, which dispute the legality and legitimacy of The Hague Tribunal and indicate the common understanding regarding the option of extraditing...