This is now a quiet business street. Not long ago, it was hell on earth. It has been completely rebuilt.
The Balkans is one of the most interesting areas on the globe. Michael Ignatieff wrote a series of excellent books that focuses a lot of attention the region, and were supplemented by some documentary films. Michael Ignatieff was a much better writer and thinker than he was a political leader. As he said in one of the series of books I mentioned, Blood and Belonging,
“…huge sections of the world’s population have won the ‘right-of-self-determination’ on the cruelest possible terms: they have been simply left to fend for themselves. Not surprisingly their nation states are collapsing… In critical zones of the world, once heavily policed by empire—notably the Balkans—populations find themselves without an imperial arbiter to appeal to. Small wonder then, that, unrestrained by stronger hands, they have set upon each other for that final settling of scores so long deferred by the presence of empire.”
It is not good enough to blame the melee on the assertion that this area of the world was filled with sub-rational intractable fanatics. Though it was more than its fair share of those. We have to think more deeply than that. We have to ask why people who had lived together for decades were transformed from neighbours into enemies? That was the crucial question that has to be answered.
It was that great British philosopher Thomas Hobbes who wrote about the war of all against all that occurs in the state of nature (when there is no state) and requires the creation of a state to protect all and to provide a platform for morality when all give up the means of violence in favor of the sovereign. As Ignatieff said,
“Thomas Hobbes would have understood Yugoslavia. What Hobbes would say, 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 terror that arises when legitimate authority disintegrates.“
This was the basis of the film Civil War shown a couple of years ago, speculating what might happen in the United States if their state broke down. Not at all an impossibility. It was brutal.
Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia, with his brand of Coca Cola Communism, had realized that the unification of each of the 6 major Slav peoples required a strong federal state to keep it together. Like Canada. Who knows what would happen in Canada if the state collapsed as it did in Yugoslavia? If later any group wanted to secede it would have to deal with the minorities within in its own territory. After all, people don’t live in neatly separated enclaves. In the case of Yugoslavia, in too many cases, this led to the forcible expulsion of whole populations. They called it ethnic cleansing, an expression now known around the world, thanks to Yugoslavia. Remember that as much as 25% of both Croat and Serb populations have always lived outside the borders of their own republics.
The big mistake that Tito and the Communists had made was to fail to provide for divorce or succession. They failed to provide for the eventual emergence of civic, rather than ethnic based multi-party competition. His doctrine of socialist rhetoric had lauded, not without some moral attraction, the “brotherhood and unity of all Yugoslavs.” This was a lofty goal, but it provided no mechanism for that to be accomplished when the state disintegrated. That idea swiftly melted in the face of the profound hatreds that were released between the combatants. As Ignatieff said,
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 successor 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. …
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 nationalistic hatred only when the surviving Communist elites, beginning with Serbia, began manipulating nationalist emotions in order to cling to power.
That is precisely the issue; people have to learn to live in plural cultures. If difference leads to hate, as it often does, bloodshed soon follows when the dogs of hell are let loosed. No one should insist on my way or the highway, but many do. Who doesn’t like variety? Who thinks they have a monopoly on the truth? Many conservatives in the US now want a country without those nasty liberals. Of course, many liberals would like to get rid of the conservatives too. How could that happen peacefully?
Well, the extremists think they have a lock on the truth. Sometimes they even come to believe their own lies. This can even happen in modern countries such as the United States. Or Canada.
We all need to learn to live in pluralistic societies. If we can’t look out for those hounds. That is why Yugoslavia is so important. Even in Canada.