Balkan Cross-roads

AIM Tirana, January 3, 2001

Tirana-Pristina. Tirana-Sarajevo. Tirana-Sofia... In the course of the year 2000, I was often at the Balkan cross-roads. Even when I was not in the Balkans, when I was in Washington, Rome, London, Copenhagen, Brussels, I was in fact roaming around Balkan cross-roads.

It has already become fashionable to speak about the Balkans wherever one goes. It is discussed by known experts who know better than the people in the Balkans themselves the former and the current names of the streets in Sarajevo or Tirana, as well as their history, and young adventurers who, having learnt to say “faleminderit” in Albanian and “hvala” (thank you) in Serbian, note in their CVs that they are experts on geo-political issues of the region.

The people of the Balkans usually speak about the Balkans, and the Westerners talk about South-Eastern Europe. This other term was created for many reasons, mostly geo-political ones, but primarily in order to avoid the bitter taste use of the word Balkan leaves. In fact, to me it always seemed just the opposite, that the attempt to conceal the term Balkan is what leaves this bitter taste.

“I am not at all ashamed that I am from the Balkans, on the contrary, I can even be proud of it”, I said to my American colleague at a conference in Rome. “After all, democracy was born in the Balkans”.

“Yes, but you forgot it”, the American replied. There was no sense in adding any other arguments linked to the old or the new Balkan culture which would begin by mentioning Homer or Aeschylus and end with the names of Kadare and Kusturica and other prominent persons from the Balkans.

In the cross-roads of the Balkans, things are as complicated as they are simplified.

More on the Heroes

The inhabitants of the Balkans are tired, there is no doubt about that. The wars, emigration, poverty, long transition, have worn the people out. But it seems that the people are tired of heroes, as well, regardless of whether they are real or fictitious.

Terra Heroica of the Peninsula does not seem to have need for heroes any more. The inhabitants of the Balkans, the Serbs, the Romanians, the Albanians, the Croats, have started to reject heroes and this is a good sign.

The hero of the Croats Franjo Tudjman, is resting in his grave forgotten and instead of him Stipe Mesic and Ivica Racan, two normal men and mortals, are ruling the country with no heroes.

Vojislav Kostunica does not look like a hero either. Slobodan Milosevic had the aspirations to be one. Although there is much talk about some sort of Serbian velvet revolution or Serbian drawing-room revolution, Kostunica has not taken power heroically. Indeed, the most heroic of his deeds – the picture with a Kalashnykov in his hands during the war in Kosovo, is considered to be the darkest blemish on his political portrait.

Heroes have not even succeeded in Kosovo. Although they were the only ones who could have decorated themselves with laurels of the victors, the heroes of the Kosovo Liberation Army, have lost from Rugova who certainly cannot be compared with a hero. The people have refused immortals or more precisely the arrogance of heroes.

The pedestals have remained empty or almost empty in Tirana, Sarajevo and Bucarest, too. “Saviors” have been rejected. The terrible Vadim Tudor, Romanian Heider or Zhirinovsky, who had promised labour camps, won the votes of every third Romanian, but was certainly resolutely rejected.

It seems that the era of nationalistic or anti-communist heroes is closing down.

More on the Walls

All these explanations on the true and false heroes of the Balkans sprang up in my mind in the last days of 2000, during lunch in a restaurant in Copenhagen with Kiro Gligorov, former president of Macedonia who is 84 years old. Humble, with an astonishingly clear mind, Gligorov has no appearance of a hero at all, but of a typical Balkan elderly.

One of the most significant personages of the Balkan political scene in the past decade, the man who has brought independence to his country having avoided war, says that he looks upon the new political concept of Western Balkans with no enthusiasm. There is the danger of new divisions on the Peninsula, says Gligorov.

The term Western Balkans in fact means “former Yugoslavia minus Slovenia plus Albania”; in other words, the problematic part of the Peninsula.

Should we stick to geography, Western Balkans would consist of Croatia, a narrow part of Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania and Greece.

The summit conference in Sarajevo in 1999 promoted the Stability Pact for the Balkans. The summit conference in Zagreb in 2000 was devoted to rapprochement of the countries of Western Balkans (it was not said Western South-Eastern Europe) with the European Union.

It seems that things are going the same way, but in fact this is not true. It is clear that the countries of the Balkans are nowadays more interested in individual rapprochement with the EU than the Balkans on the agenda of the Stability Pact. There are two different rates of rapprochement. Bulgaria and Romania do not seem to be willing to wait for the others that are lagging behind.

Many walls have fallen in the Balkans, but many still resist. Nowadays if you have a Schengen visa in your pocket you can travel all over Europe, but not across the Balkans. Albania applies visas for Bulgaria, Bosnia, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and vice versa. The situation is the same everywhere. Moreover, Albania and Yugoslavia still have not established diplomatic relations. They are waiting in Tirana for Belgrade to make the first step.

Perhaps the Stability Pact should begin with what is called the Balkan Schengen in Tirana – free communication of the people in the whole region.

Furthermore, if one wishes to fly from Tirana to Belgrade, or from Skopje to Zagreb, or from Sofia to Podgorica or from Bucarest to Sarajevo, one must first travel to Budapest or Vienna, and often it is impossible to arrive in one day. Nowadays when it seems that the wars are over, One Balkan airline company does not seem to be a luxury but a necessity. It seems that Budapest has the privilege of being the capital of the Balkans although it is not a part of the Balkans. Hungarian Malev flies to almost all the Balkan capitals, and nobody but the Albanians among the Balkan nations need a visa to travel to the Hungarian capital.

The Stability Pact will triumph only if it is going to be the Integration Pact as well, as Ivan Krastev from the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia wrote some time ago.

The only alternative to the walls which still exist would be the Balkans sans frontieres. That is what we dreamt about on a beach in Durres together with Zlatko Dizdarevic.

More on the Others

“Everything that has happened to us in the past ten years can be summed up in the words: Rejection of others”, Sonja Liht of the Open Society Fund from Belgrade told me one night last March in Washington while we were returning one night from a dinner organised by Aspen Institute. Sonja was right. Others, no matter what is said in the customary codes of the natives of the Balkans, is still rejected, thrown out, forgotten. He is as a rule the enemy, the traitor, mercenary sold to the great powers. He is also the criminal, murderer, bandit, a nobody. These are not assumptions. These are just some of the epithets from the pre-election vocabulary in 2000 Albania. And these were just local elections.

Besides, the Balkan syndrome of suspicion remains strong. Balkan suspicion is not some methodical Cartesian suspicion, nor philosophic skepticism. It is simple mistrust. This virus does not allow progress, it does not allow cooperation, communication. The one who has this virus can at the most build a booth thousands of which can be seen in Tirana, Skopje, Podgorica, but it is difficult for that one to unite with others, to build supermarkets or construct roads.

Rejection of others and suspicion about others rest on weak foundations of our non-liberal democracies. In other words intolerant. Greece is also a non-liberal democracy, but certainly a democracy. Greece is even a nationalistic country, but still a democracy.

Democracy and nationalism are not always opposed to each other, according to certain investigations. This is obvious not only in the case of Greece, but it does not seem to me to be an example that should be followed.

If Kostunica in Serbia or Rugova in Kosovo try to establish nationalistic democracies after blood has been shed during this decade, I am afraid they would be new democratic caricatures.

For a long time to come it will be difficult to distinguish between ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism in the Balkans. A pre-condition of civic nationalism is the existence of civic society which is weak in the Balkan states and still very slightly civic. Ethnic nationalism usually cannot do without walls, or without enemies.

That is why I hesitate to put words democracy and nationalism side by side.

More on History

The Serbian, the Kosovar, the Croatian, the Bosniac societies are post-communist and post-conflict societies at the same time. The clash between the two is quite authentic and just as unpredictable.

For instance, in Kosovo there is an understandable inclination to deal only with the problems of a society that has just come out of a war, but at negotiating tables more and more attention is devoted to the problems left by Yugoslav communism. The Kosovar society is also a post-communist society and as such, sooner or later, it will have to discuss and resolve all the problems other post-communist societies have faced. This is not the matter of letting the genie out of the bottle (because there is certainly no lack of genies), but it is necessary in order to take a lesson from history and to face the truth.

On the other hand, in Serbia there is an inclination (largely natural) to look upon the post-Milosevic's regime as another post-communist regime and to consider Serbian society as a post-communist one or post-dictatorial, forgetting that Serbian society is also a post-war society, even a society which has offered a nationalistic consensus for war.

If remedy for the wounds caused by dictatorship to their own nations can be found in reconciliation, justice, forgiveness or oblivion, as the Spaniards have done, for the wounds one nation has inflicted on the others there is but one formula. To ask forgiveness like the Germans have done.

... Because after all, catharsis was born in the Balkans. And I hope that we have not forgotten it.

AIM Tirana

Remzi LANI