[Marxism] Basil Davidson on Balkanization

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(This is from the concluding chapter of "The Black Man's Burden," the 
late Basil Davidson's final book. Davidson was the preeminent African 
historian from a non-Eurocentric perspective and the author of more 
than 20 books on the subject. His final book is an examination of the 
failure of modern nation-states to succeed in Africa, which he 
attributes to a faulty imposition of European political structures 
upon indigenous societies, whose precapitalist trade routes and 
cultural affinities are at odds with the nation-state bequeathed 
through colonialism. He argues that the troubles in Yugoslavia are 
practically identical to those occurring throughout Africa. 
"Balkanization" and "tribalism" are two different words for the same 
phenomenon, in effect. Davidson formed strong connections to Africa 
and Yugoslavia at the same time, during WWII when he was a captain in 
the British army. In 1941, he had been on military duty in the 
Balkans, where he was captured by the Italian fascists. After a 
prisoner exchange, he was on his way back to his unit when his ship 
stopped to refuel in Lagos, on the coast of Nigeria. On a tour of the 
city's environs, he noticed a wall built of mud and timber. What was 
that, he asked his tour guide. It was a "lost city" called Kano he 
replied. He subsequently learned that Kano's history went back 700 
years. His fascination with such cities led him to a full-time 
profession in African history.)

  The "first Yugoslavia" was the "Triune Kingdom" of the Serbs, 
Croats, and Slovenes, born in 1919 and enduring until 1941; and while 
its ending was unforeseeably disastrous, one is still bound to say, 
and not only with hindsight, that here was a kingdom certain to fail. 
This was for the simple reason, apparent even at the time, that all 
the non-Serbian peoples of the country themselves to be, and in 
practice often were, subject to constrictive Serbian domination. This 
was why the kingdom could never achieve the democratic aspirations of 
its birth or even of Serbian history itself. For an African parallel 
one may en suggest, without any great distortion of the evidence, 
that the condition of seething discontent present in that first 
Yugoslavia, within some years of its birth, was much like the 
condition that could have been expected in postcolonial Ghana if, at 
independence in the 1950s, the whole of the country had been placed 
under the command of the king of Asante. The king would no doubt have 
felt that history warranted the domination all Ghana by the Asante 
kingship and its people; large numbers of other Ghanaians would 
surely have made violent objections. For this and other reasons the 
Yugoslav state formed in 1919 became rapidly a bureaucratized and 
militarized shell, and when the invading armies of Germany, Italy, 
Hungary, and Bulgaria fell upon it in April 1941, it collapsed within 
days. The invaders carved it into pieces. Slovenia fell under 
military occupation. Croatia became a puppet state under a 
Fascist-type regime promoted by Germany and Italy. Most of Serbia was 
left to Serbian puppets under strong German or Italian control. Other 
regions were variously occupied or divided. Much of Macedonia was 
handed to neighboring Bulgaria, with the rest remaining under 
military occupation. The Vojvodina, whose fortunes we have followed 
earlier, was dismembered into three pieces. One of these, the Banat, 
remained under direct German military control. Another, the Backa, 
also north of the Danube, was annexed to Hungary although 
three-fourths of its population was not Hungarian. And a third 
fragment, Srem, south of the Danube, was incorporated in the puppet 
state of Croatia even though most of its people were Serbs.

That was in 1941, and it invited trouble. But the Germans and 
Italians, or those who ruled them then, were confident that they 
could deal with any amount of rebellion. They were to learn better as 
the war proceeded, but in Yugoslavia they began to learn better 
almost at once. Armed resistance to enemy occupation began and 
persisted on a rising scale, and could not be mastered. In 1944 and 
1945 the partisan armies of Yugoslavia's self-liberation drove their 
enemies to final defeat, needing for this little more than peripheral 
Soviet assistance on their frontiers with Romania and Bulgaria, and 
some Western aid in arms, ammunition, and medical facilities.

Now this was truly a people's victory in the full sense of the term 
"people." No matter how dogmatic the Communist partisan leadership 
may have been--and it was at that time sharply dogmatic in its 
Stalinist loyalties--the partisan armies were drawn from all parts of 
Yugoslavia and from all sectors of society, while behind them stood 
the overwhelming support of a probably clear majority of Yugoslavs. 
The internal opponents of the partisans were in comparison small men 
more or less fatally stained by service with a ruthless enemy, or 
else by outright betrayal of every democratic principle. These 
internal opponents, mostly old-style nationalists when they were not 
blatant sellouts to the enemy, had nothing new to offer but a dismal 
repetition of past conflicts. The partisans, by contrast, had much to 
offer that was new. These sentiments may sound pro-partisan but were 
they not to be confirmed by the revived aggression of those same 
old-style nationalists after federal collapse, in the 1980s?

Against old-style nationalism, drenched as it was with the blood of 
countless nationalistic massacres perpetrated between 1941 and 1944, 
the partisan leadership in 1945 offered an enlightened and innovating 
federalism. The men and women in their fighting brigades had marched 
to no tunes and slogans of nationalism, but for the ideals of 
'bratsvo i jedinstvo', of brotherhood and unity, such as could and 
did rise above old conflicts, and promise to establish a real ground 
for postwar reconciliation among all these harried peoples.

Launched in 1942 in the midst of many battles and appalling enemy 
reprisals, above all in this period in Croatia and Bosnia, this 
federalizing program was refined and improved until, at war's end, a 
new Yugoslavia could take shape. A modernizing society arose from the 
ruins of the old. It now consisted of six federated republics and two 
self-governing regions, each with far-reaching powers of internal 
self-government and an undoubted scope for the promotion of these 
various national cultures. This decentralizing and participatory 
achievement was and has remained, all recent events notwithstanding, 
innovative and impressive; but its virtues have been little 
appreciated in the outside world. The Soviets rather understandably 
feared that a federalized Yugoslavia, following lines of democratic 
participation (however reduced by one-party rule), would develop 
outside the centralized rigidities of Moscow's control, while the 
Western powers, enwrapped in their Cold War worries and myopia, 
thought that it must in any case be hostile if only because it took 
place in a Communist-ruled country.

Yet this federalism, judged also in hindsight, may far better be 
reckoned as one of the truly developmental initiatives to have 
derived from the upheavals of the Second World War. Except in the 
case of Kosovo-Metohija, where the claims of a local Albanian 
population struck hard against Serbian traditionalism, the new 
dispensation proved to be shrewd and successful. Old sources of 
dissidence and rebellion were impressively relieved. The Macedonians, 
for example, achieved a national autonomy for the first time in 
modern history, at least so far as their people inside Yugoslavia 
were concerned. While Macedonians in neighboring Bulgaria continued 
to be treated as Bulgarians, and those in neighboring Greece as 
Hellenized Slavs, the majority of Macedonians acquired a republic of 
their own as part of federal Yugoslavia. The same was true of Bosnian 
Muslims after suffering, during the war, from ferocious massacres at 
the hands of Croat Fascists.

This strong program of reconciliation, forged though it had to be in 
the midst of harsh warfare against enemy powers, drew its strength 
from various traditions. One of them was an old conviction that there 
could be no peace in the Balkans as long as Balkan states and 
governments were powerless to resist external influence or control. 
The need, therefore, was to overleap a nation-statism which was bound 
to play into the hands of stronger powers. This need would be met 
only if nationalist enmities and rivalries could be made to give way 
to intra-Balkan forms of federalizing unity. What united this mosaic 
of peoples, in short, could then become stronger than what divided 
them, provided that an equality of rights and interests could be made 
to prevail. In other words, so long as "the national question" had 
priority over "the social question," there would be no peace; any 
such peace that might be patched up would always fall victim to 
rivalries couched in nationalist terms. That is what had happened in 
the first Yugoslavia between 1919 and 1941. But the partisan 
resistance had introduced the factor of social revolution, and a 
different outcome could be possible.

One may remark in passing that this introduction of the factor of 
social revolution was essential to the possibility of widespread 
partisan insurrection and its eventual success. This was not because 
the partisan brigades and their civilian support organizations were 
filled with men and women fighting for Communism or socialism or any 
such doctrine. The slogans might say that. But the reality was 
different. What they were undoubtedly fighting for was to end a hated 
and feared enemy occupation, yet to end it in such a way that some 
wide if often vaguely understood social renewal might become 
possible. They wanted a modernization of these peasant societies that 
could thrust old hatreds and disabilities behind them. They wanted a 
clear and positive break with the past.

This was what their internal opponents, whether old-style Serbian 
nationalists (known as Chetniks) or new-style Croat (ustasa and the 
like), could not offer. All they could was a return to the past under 
narrowly nationalist dogmas. Here in the partisan movement, in other 
words, the "social" had overtaken the "national," even while it 
remained no less true that the partisans were also fighting for a 
nationwide liberation from enemy control. These peoples went to war 
in excruciating conditions of loss and danger not for "the ideas in 
anyone's head"--as Amilcar Cabral was to say of the insurrectionary 
peasants whom he led in West Africa in the 1960s-- but "in order to 
see their lives go forward, and be able to live in peace." This being 
so, the concepts of a practical and self-regulating democracy could 
become real and appealing for the first time in every Yugoslav region.

The acid test of this truth could perhaps best be seen at work and 
evolution in the plains of the Vojvodina. There the peasants rose and 
fought in multitudes--no matter that they had no mountains or deep 
forests in which to shelter--so as to end a hated foreign tyranny and 
then "to see their lives go forward." Often they were relatively 
privileged peasants in fertile lands where there was normally plenty 
to eat and drink or trade with; a Marxist would have described them 
as kulaks, peasants who in the usual run of things might be counted 
as prudently conservative. But they still responded far more eagerly 
to the partisan call for social change and progress than to any 
appeal based on the ideas of Serbian nationalism: here in these 
sundered fragments of northern Serbia, there was no nostalgia for the 
Great Serbianism of royal Yugoslavia.

Why, then, was the collapse of the whole Stalinist project in Eastern 
Europe accompanied also by Yugoslav disintegration? Why should the 
vividly imaginative federalism of the liberation movement yield so 
readily, and tumultuously, to the old slogans of separatist 
nationalism, bidding Serbia "to arise," or Croatia "to arise," or 
some other variant on bankrupt ideas and doctrines? Such questions 
seemed all the more pressing because the Yugoslav Communists, unlike 
their neighbors, had cut loose from Soviet control in 1948 and, 
having done that, began soon after to cut loose from internal 
Stalinist programs and oppressions as well. They held to their 
federalism but went further. They persisted in policies and efforts 
designed to reduce the heavy-handed centralism of their Stalinist 
state system. They introduced complex and ambitious forms of economic 
self -management. They went far to hand over power to local bodies 
and initiatives.' They tried to achieve a system of mass 
participation that should be able to defend itself from bureaucratic 
rigidities and corruptions.

But in this they had, and perhaps could only have had, a mixed 
success and eventual failure. The reasons lay both in structural 
breakdowns and the frailties of human nature, for the project was 
splendidly innovative and difficult. But it seems likely that 
history's judgment, if one may imagine it, will say that the 
principal reason for failure lay in the persistence of a single-party 
authoritarianism unable or unwilling to reform itself. For it appears 
to have remained largely true, as journalist Misha Glenny has 
observed, that "the structure of the Yugoslav League of Communists, 
as the party was renamed in the mid-50s, remained Stalinist in 
essence. . . and those who disagreed were either isolated or 
imprisoned," while "Yugoslavia's internal security machine," at any 
rate up to the end of the 1970s, "was one of the most powerful in the 
whole of Eastern Europe."

Thus it came about that federalist decentralism, in practice, was not 
what it claimed: to a more or less large degree, the single 
all-Yugoslav oligarchy was displaced (at any rate for nonmilitary 
affairs) not by decentralized organs of democracy, but by six or 
seven regional (republican) oligarchies which behaved as outright 
rulers. These oligarchies were at first in loose alliance with each 
other but soon in fractious and eventually destructive conflict. 
There developed an increasingly abrasive free-for-all between and 
among these oligarchies for possession of scarce resources. The ideal 
of brotherhood and unity became more and more a camouflage, as more 
and more citizens came to see it, for unfair discriminations and nest 
featherings, or worse.

There was thus induced the kind of atmosphere, and sometimes of hard 
reality, of political disintegration that had led to the collapse of 
Triune Yugoslavia in 1941. Ambitious demagogues, beating the 
chauvinist-separatist drum, began to flourish. Slovenia and Croatia 
drew ever more sharply away from a Serbia now gripped by nationalist 
dementia; and the malady unavoidably spread. Anxious eyes in Western 
Europe, having welcomed the demise of Tito's Yugoslavia, were now 
dismayed by a prospect of the "gates of the West" being besieged by a 
mob of mutinous Balkan states which had not been viable in the past, 
or in some cases had not even existed in the past. While Western 
Europe was turning toward federalist structures of one kind or 
another (however labeled), it appeared that Eastern Europe had fallen 
back on the nation-statism of the 1920s, yet with no better hope of 
making this work)'

In the ideological and cultural void induced by Stalinism, it was no 
doubt entirely natural to "turn to the West," and to look for 
solutions in a more or less blind aping of Western ideas and 
structures. But to find escape in that direction was to suppose that 
the scope and time and resources to bring into existence a groundwork 
for Western structures in Eastern Europe were present, or could 
rapidly be summoned. They were not so present, and summoning proved 
more than difficult. The 1990s opened on a scene of nation-statist 
uproar and confusion. 


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