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to Review of International Studies
Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse, London, Hurst and Co., 1995
Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia's Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transit
2nd edn, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1995
Mihailo Crnobrnja, The Yugoslav Drama, 2nd edn, London, I. B. Tauris, 1996
Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia, revised edn,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996
Sabrina Petra Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of T
to Ethnic War, 2nd edn, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1996
Laura Silber and Alan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia, revised edn, London, Penguin Boo
1996
Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Washington,
DC, Brookings, 1995
John Zametica, The Yugoslav Conflict, London, International Institute for Strategic Studies,
1992
Narrating events
* For comments and criticisms, I am grateful to Martin Coward, Alex Danchev, Kate Manzo, Hidemi
Suganami, one anonymous reviewer, and the editors of the Review.
1 Hayden WTiite, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore,
MD, 1973), Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD, 1978), and The
Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD, 1987). The
concern with narrative in history is, of course, not restricted to White's work. For an account of
others prior to V^hite who shared this focus, see David Carr, Time, Narrative and History
(Bloomington, IN, 1986), pp. 7-8. This article is drawn from the third chapter of my National
Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis, 1998), where a critical
examination of White's argument is pursued in greater detail.
261
Emplotting Bosnia
The historical profession, if it has paid any attention to White, has reacted with
hostility to his philosophy.8 White's arguments have been tarred with the brush of
'postmodernism' in a manner which echoes the conventional response to positions
so represented in International Relations. In his review of the sustained challenge to
the goal of objectivity in American historiography, Peter Novick argues that White
was caught up in the denunciations of a 'neo-objectivist' or 'hyperobjectivist'
minority who, reacting to the wickedness associated with 'the sixties', were influen
tial in their ability to lump together 'various relativistic, "postmodern" currents into
an undifferentiated and monstrous Other which had to be combatted if liberal
rationalism was to survive'.9
2 See, e.g., Hayden White, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality', in White,
Content of the Form, pp. 6-10.
3 Ibid., p. 16.
4 The number of story structures WTiite's argument explicitly deals with is limited to four?romance,
tragedy, comedy, and satire?though White stresses that this does not exhaust the modes of
emplotment; it only highlights those useful for classifying particular historical works. See White,
Metahistory, introduction, esp. p. 7. In deploying White in this argument, I am less interested in the
relevance of these specific story structures and their entailments for political accounts (though, as we
shall see, tragedy often comes to the fore) than in the general argument about narratives and their
emplotment.
5 Hayden White, 'The Fictions of Factual Representation', in White, Tropics of Discourse, p. 121.
6 Hayden White, 'The Historical Text as Literary Artifact', ibid., p. 82.
7 Hayden White, 'The Politics of Historical Interpretation', in White, Content of the Form, p. 75.
8 This neglect is, perhaps not surprisingly, even more obvious in International Relations. The sole
exception is Hidemi Suganami's On the Causes of War (Oxford, 1996), where the work of White is
addressed in an excellent consideration of the stories of war origins.
9 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge, 1988), pp. 606-7.
Given the assumptions which inform White's philosophy of history, the antago
nistic reception is puzzling. Rather than being a card-carrying 'porno' (as the
detractors might want to say), White has stressed on any number of occasions the
formalist and structuralist nature of his enterprise. His work is a major critique of
historical realism and thoroughly anti-positivist. Though some argue White has
recently been moving in post-structuralist directions, his work is far from embodying
the allegedly anarchical tendencies that so frighten the critics.10
Given the limitations of a review article, such concerns about White's arguments
cannot be fully resolved here. Nonetheless, although it can and should be subject to
sustained critical scrutiny, White's position provides a distinct and useful starting
point from which to examine recent writing about the Bosnian War. Most reviews of
specific literatures adopt a particular perspective on the issues they are considering,
and then judge selected writings accordingly.11 Such an approach is both proper and
valuable. But the perspective adopted usually concerns details of the event and/or
issues being considered, rather than the historiographical assumptions through
which the event or issue is rendered. As such, more conventional reviews occlude the
dimensions of interpretation and representation that are central to the production of
knowledge.
In contrast, by focusing on the narrativizing strategies of ostensibly objectivist
works dealing with the Bosnian War, this review wants both to highlight those issues
of interpretation and representation, and to suggest that a concern with those
dimensions informed by the arguments of WHiite can be important when it comes to
making judgments about competing accounts of contentious events and issues. This
is especially the case with regard to something as complex as the Bosnian War. As
the argument below shall demonstrate, many of the major assessments of the
conflict have reduced this complexity to the banalities of ethnic essentialism in order
to attribute responsibility to particular individuals or groups. They have thus been
complicit in the constitution of realities they merely claim to describe.
To achieve its goals, this essay focuses on single-authored monographs that aim to
offer a comprehensive account of the Bosnian War (or at least its place in the many
conflicts of former Yugoslavia). This is an arbitrary and restrictive criterion which
excludes a range of interesting literature, but it enables the question of comparing
narratives to be pursued with greater clarity.12 In order to analyse how these
10 For White's reflections on his position, see Ewa Domanska, Tnterview/Hayden V^hite', Diacritics, 24
(1994), pp. 91-100. The recent post-structuralist drift in White is noted by Wulf Kansteiner, 'Hayden
White's Critique of the Writing of History', History and Theory, 32 (1993), esp. pp. 285-6.
11 In this context, one such example is Christopher Cvviic, 'Perceptions of Former Yugoslavia: An
Interpretative Reflection', International Affairs, 71 (1995), pp. 819-26.
12 Excluded by this criterion are many writings on Bosnia, which are being added to all the time.
Though far from an exhaustive list, these include some accounts by journalists, including Mark
Almond, Europe's Backyard War: The War in the Balkans (London, 1994); Martin Bell, In Harm's
Way: Reflections of a War Zone Thug (London, 1995); Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbour: A Story of
War (London, 1996); David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York,
1995); and Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War (London, 1994). Likewise, a
number of edited collections have not been considered. These include Yugoslavia: The Former and the
Future: Reflections by Scholars from the Region, ed. Payam Akhavan and Robert Howse (Washington,
DC, 1995); Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War, ed. Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz (Stony
Creek, CT, 1993); International Perspectives on the Yugoslav Conflict, ed. Alex Danchev and Thomas
Halverson (London, 1996); Genocide after Emotion: The Postemotional Balkan War, ed. Stjepan G.
Mestrovic (London, 1996); The Black Book of Bosnia: The Consequences of Appeasement, ed. Nader
accounts narrativize events and issues, we need to be able to judge them in relation
to a set of events they consider important. That is, rather than impose an external
criterion upon them and see how they measure up, we need to isolate the events the
selected narratives deal with; consider how those events are included in some
narratives and excluded from others; and reveal the ways in which those events are
represented, and the manner in which they are articulated so as to construct an
argument.
Given White's contention that narrative has become the accepted historio
graphical mode because of its superiority to the annals and chronicles, isolating the
work that narrativizing strategies do, means considering those elements in particular
accounts which supplement the simple description and temporal location of specific
events. Isolating those events thus requires the retrospective construction of a
chronology of specific events from a period important to the understanding of the
Bosnian War. Any number of historical periods could be suitable candidates for this
exercise, but the period 1990-2 provides a good basis for comparison.
The period August 1990-April 1992, which covers the political debates about
Bosnia's future in the collapsing Yugoslavia up until its international recognition as
a state and the commencement of large-scale fighting in Sarajevo, is widely identified
in these accounts as pivotal for their various interpretations. That is because the
character of their accounts depends in large part on how they assign responsibility
for the fracturing of Bosnia, and assigning responsibility in this context depends in
large part on whom or what they regard as pursuing a different political
arrangement in this period. The importance of this parameter can be judged by
Lord Owen's claim that 'the recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina was the trigger
that many had predicted it would be to the formal outbreak of a war that was
already simmering in the background before recognition'.13
Of course, in the context of White's argument, the events selected for inclusion in
the chronology do not exist unproblematically in an extra-discursive domain, nor are
they independently deemed to be important. Nor is the language used to describe
them necessarily neutral. As such, they are included here because they have been
identified as significant by the various narratives in the monographs considered.
Moreover, the events are described in the terms used by the particular narratives from
which they are drawn. But no narrative covers all these events, and there is
considerable variation in who covers what and how. As we shall see, that variation
illuminates clearly the inescapable politics of representation involved in the
narration of events.
Mousavizadeh (New York, 1996); Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed.
Alexandra Stiglmayer (Lincoln, NE, 1994); and Yugoslavia's Ethnic Nightmare: The Inside Story of
Europe's Unfolding Ordeal, ed. Jasminak Udovicki and James Ridgeway (New York, 1995). Finally,
the criterion excludes recent books on important but particular aspects of the Bosnian conflict, such
as Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia
(Minneapolis, 1996); Francis A. Boyle, The Bosnian People Charge Genocide: Proceedings at the
International Court of Justice Concerning Bosnia v. Serbia on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide (Amherst, MA, 1996); Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: the Policy of 'Ethnic
Cleansing' (College Station, TX, 1995); Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York, 1993); Jan
Willem Honig and Norbet Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime (Harmondsworth, 1996); and
Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
CA, 1996).
David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (London, 1995), p. 46.
[1] August 1990 Brawl between Serbs and Muslims, near Foca
[2] September 1990 Bosnian Serbs establish paramilitaries
[3] November 1990 Bosnian elections; national coalition govern
ment formed
[4] March 1991 Tudjman and Milosevic meet at Karadjordjevo
and discuss the partition of Bosnia
[5] April 1991 Autonomist Serbs declare the formation of a
regional parliament for Bosanska Krajina based
in Banja Luka
[6] June 1991 More than 50,000 Muslims, Serbs and Croats
demonstrate in Sarajevo for the unity of
Yugoslavia and Bosnia-Herzegovina
[7] 11 July 1991 Bosnian Serbs (SDS) release a party statement
announcing a boycott of parliament and
denounce Izetbegovic as an illegitimate ruler
[8] 16 August 1991 Izetbegovic announces a referendum on the
future of Bosnia within Yugoslavia
[9] September 1991 Four Serb Autonomous Regions established;
request Yugoslav National Army (JNA) aid
[io; 14-15 October 1991 Bosnian parliament debates and adopts a
declaration of sovereignty; Serb delegates walk
out before vote
[11 17 October 1991 Bosnian Government creates a new coat of
arms and flag for the republic
[12; 24 October 1991 Bosnian Serbs leave power-sharing coalition
and establish their own parliamentary assembly
[13; 29 October 1991 Bosnian Government informs Yugoslav federal
parliament that it is a sovereign state
[14; November 1991 Assembly of Bosnian Serbs holds first session
[15; 9-11 November 1991 Assembly of Bosnian Serbs conducts referen
dum for Serbs in which an overwhelming
majority vote to remain part of Yugoslavia
[16; 12 November 1991 The Posavina community of eight communes
establishes a Bosnian Croat autonomous entity
in northern Bosnia
[17; 18 November 1991 Eighteen Bosnian Croat communes set up
Herzeg-Bosnia in western Herzegovina
[is; 15 December 1991 European Community (EC) makes a provi
sional offer of recognition to Bosnia
[19 20 December 1991 Bosnian presidency requests diplomatic recog
nition from the EC
[2o; 21 December 1991 Assembly of Bosnian Serbs announces the
creation of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia
Herzegovina
Narrating Bosnia
What, then, do the various narratives concerning the Bosnian War make of these
and other events, and what does that allow us to say about those narratives? Those
White, 'Value of Narrativity', p. 20.
15 Mojzes, Yugoslavian Inferno, pp. 87-91; Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, pp. 7-8.
16 O'Ballance, Civil War in Bosnia, p. ix.
17 Ibid., p. vii.
18 Ibid., p. 3.
19 Ibid., p. 21.
20 Ibid., p. 6.
21 Ibid., p. 5.
22 Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 276.
are shared around. In a moral levelling that is common to the 'civil war' accounts,
the participants are cast as 'factional leaders' of 'warring militias', with all sides sai
to be equally guilty of atrocities such that there is 'little to choose between them'.2
Equally common is the notion that the character of the violence can be explained i
terms of 'old hatreds and prejudices, involving slaughter reminiscent of medieval
times', such that the war showed 'tribalism and ethnic nationalism' were victoriou
over regionalism.30 History was crucial here: 'When aroused, the Bosnian com
batants reacted in much the same way as their forebears, as confirmed by events in
Yugoslavia during the Second World War. King Alexander's rule and Tito's fir
administration were misleading interludes of comparatively peaceful coexistence?
but old hatreds, feuds and prejudices had not been eradicated, they simply la
dormant'.31
John Zametica's The Yugoslav Conflict offers some interesting reflections on the
nature of history. In its conclusions, Zametica writes that 'of course, history, with its
infinity of facts, will always be subject to selective interpretation'.32 Nowhere mor
so than in former Yugoslavia where complexity requires added care, he notes. This
leads Zametica to a particular recommendation: Analysis as a guide to policy which
is divorced from self-interest is presumably of the utmost importance to th
international community. If the international community, benevolently inclined,
continues its growing involvement in conflict areas around the world, its principa
weapon must be knowledge'.33 Few have been better placed than Zametica to
fulminate on the relationship between knowledge and self-interest. Shortly afte
completing this Adelphi Paper, Zametica restored his Slavic forename (Jovan) and
went off to Pale as a senior adviser and spokesperson for Radovan Karadzic.
Zametica's self-interest is amply evident in his monograph. Politics and it
participants are represented solely in ethnic and religious terms, with specia
attention paid to the 'strong streak of clericalism' in 'the Muslim Party',34 and th
negative resonances supposedly to be found in Izetbegovic 's Islamic Declaration,
points which Zametica provided for O'Ballance's argument. All of this is wrapped
up by the observation that 'there was nothing secular' in Izetbegovic 's outlook, an
the resultant conclusion that all 'this was quite enough for the Serbs'.35
The narrative of The Yugoslav Conflict, although it notes the elections of 1990,
does not begin a discussion of Bosnia's troubles until the EC offer of international
recognition, which it claims 'provided the deadly catalyst for the Bosnian
d?nouement\36 While the result of the elections is said to have produced a powe
sharing arrangement which furthered the notions of constitutional equality centra
to Tito's Yugoslavia, whereby decisions that affected national groups could not b
taken without the consent of those groups, Zametica argues that the situation afte
the end of 1991 violated this important code: 'Once the Muslim-Croat coalitio
made an effective attempt to hijack Bosnia-Herzegovina through the dubiou
legitimacy of a referendum, followed by international recognition, it brushed asid
to its own peril?the only principle which in the past held the republic together: the
constitutional equality of all three constituent nations'.37 Zametica was there
referring to the EC-mandated referendum which was a prerequisite for international
recognition. But if that was contrary to constitutional equality, could not the same
be said of the exclusive Bosnian Serb referendum held three months earlier? Or any
of the Serbian autonomist initiatives in the period prior to that? Or those of the
Croat community? Not surprisingly, these events are absent from Zametica's
monograph. Had they been considered, it would not have been possible to speak of
one side 'hijacking' the republic to the detriment of the others.
Zametica, however, is not the only one to maintain that in these matters
culpability rests with the Bosnian Government. In Broken Bonds, the inflections of
Cohen's narrative clearly assign responsibility. In the context of the Bosnian
presidency requesting the diplomatic recognition that the EC had offered, Cohen
argues that Izetbegovic ignored Serbian protests, went ahead 'irrespective of Serbian
fears', and thus contributed to heightening the anxiety of Bosnian Serb leaders,
which Cohen describes as 'perfectly understandable'. The referendum which the EC
required was thus 'a red flag to most members of the Bosnian Serb community'.38
Once recognition came, Cohen observes that 'for the Serbs, the fact that EC
recognition came precisely on April 6, 1992, the anniversary of the date in 1941 that
the Germans bombed Belgrade, added insult to injury'.39 But like Zametica's and
O'Ballance's narratives, Cohen's pays no attention to the prior unilateral Serb and
Croat initiatives to wrest sovereignty from Bosnia. Moreover, his representation of
the political participants in the conflict, including the Bosnian Government, as
'ethnic delegations' engaged in a 'savage ethnic and political conflict on the territory
of the former Yugoslavia', effects certain claims concerning legitimacy.40
Like O'Ballance's account of the civil war, Cohen's argument recurs to notions of
historical hatred to try and make sense of the conflict and explain why international
recognition would not put a dampener on the crisis. Although he argues that the
'various ethnoreligious groups' had maintained some sense of coexistence under
Tito's authoritarianism, 'intense latent hatred and psychological distance existed
among the various groups'. Indeed, 'glib media claims' about good group relations
were said by Cohen 'to [have] seriously misjudged the real situation of underlying
interethnic animosities'. All this meant that in 1992 and 1993 the fighting in Bosnia
was especially violent because, 'just as half a century earlier', the citizens 'were
intent on "settling accounts of centuries of hatred'" .41
Explaining how this cycle of violence came about is a task, says Cohen, for
'systematic psychological research'. And while all nationalist political leaders
whipped up hatred and intolerance, 'the historically conditioned proclivities of large
segments of each ethnoreligious community ... to embrace programs of aggressive
nationalism must also be taken into account'. This is not, argues Cohen (impressions
to the contrary notwithstanding), to suggest that the fighting was a spontaneous
continuation of history. Accounts which focus only on peaceful coexistence or
permanent hatred are equally blind to 'the region's complex pattern of ethnic
relations and reciprocal fear'.42 Nonetheless, Cohen is adamant that attention must
be focused on 'the important historical factors that have conditioned Balkan and
South Slav political life'.43
Paul Mojzes' Yugoslavian Inferno, though sensitive to the political implications of
the 'civil war' versus 'international conflict' narratives, nonetheless promotes a
particular reading of history which favours the former over the latter.44 Mojzes'
specific concern is to consider the significance of religion for the region and the
conflict. Hence his choice of title: '"Inferno" suggests a situation of real and
symbolic conflagration, unrelenting suffering, the prevalence of unmitigated evil,
futility and hopelessness. It can be appropriately applied to the former Yugoslavia,
where ethnoreligious warfare has consigned millions to hell and where a return from
hell is by no means assured'.45 Later in the book, Mojzes stresses that 'the fear and
hatred-induced acts that brought about the war cannot be explained rationally. They
were evoked by human destructiveness and self-centredness. Sinfulness and
intransigence are at the motivating core of the war.'46
The irrationality of the Balkan 'cataclysm' is a product for Mojzes of a number of
historical and psychological dispositions. Historically, he notes that 'the Balkan
economies are perpetual war economies' with 'no tradition of nonviolent resistance
or pacifism'.47 A long-established situation of 'colonial dependency' has meant that
the peoples of the Balkans, now that they are in a position to take charge of their
destiny, 'act belatedly like juvenile delinquents'.48 As a result, psychologically the
people 'oscillate between extremes, with little propensity for moderation', manifest a
cultural norm of revenge, and exhibit the character traits of obstinacy, stubbornness,
loathing, and inflexibility.49 In consequence, 'life in the Balkans has never been
intrinsically respected, because the individual is relatively unimportant in a
collectivist climate'.50
With the conflict overdetermined in this manner, it is not surprising to note that
Yugoslavian Inferno is largely uninterested in the historical and political field
signified by the chronology. Mojzes does, however, list a number of secular
developments central to the conflict?the unresolved national question, politicians
manipulating nationalism, and intellectuals providing the rationalization for it being
the key three?which he regards as comprising a hierarchy of culpability.51 They
derive their responsibility from the fact that 'ethnic nationalism' has been the pre
eminent historical force in the Balkans throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.52 This combination of historical determination and political volition leads
Mojzes to a general conclusion. 'This accursed land', he writes, 'was always prone to
tectonic collisions . . . and those who have reignited the ethnoreligious hatreds have
hurled entire nations into the inferno.'53
The orientalism of Mojzes' argument is all the more extraordinary given the
personal reflections he offers at the beginning of his book. Mojzes recognizes the
'many contradictory narratives' about the conflict, but argues that the interpret
ations 'vary according to the background of the author. Serbian authors tend to
write pro-Serbian narratives, Croatians pro-Croatian, Muslims pro-Muslim, and so
forth.'54 In this context, Mojzes argues it is important that he set forth his back
ground and biases. Somewhat surprisingly, given the Balkan character argument he
offers, we find he was born in Croatia to a religious but non-nationalist family, was
raised in Serbia, but considered himself a Yugoslav, admiring Tito's socialist policies
of brotherhood and unity. Even more astonishingly, he then 4reject[s] the notion that
we are determined by our past?not in spite of being an historian but because I am
an historian'.55 It seems, in a somewhat contradictory manner, that what applies to
him does not apply to the Balkans (at least in his argument), and while the past is
not personally determinate, ethnicity nonetheless governs interpretations.
Personal authorizations for narratives on the conflict in former Yugoslavia are not
uncommon. In The Yugoslav Drama, Mihailo Crnobrnja writes from the perspective
of a Yugoslav ambassador to the EC who served during the conflict. Cast in four
parts?the stage, the actors, the plot, and the final curtain?Crnobrnja's account is a
story of 'national awakening and the victory of aggressive nationalism'.56 As such,
and particularly in the case of the Bosnian conflict?where it was 'a confrontation
among three ethnic communities within a state that has been internationally
recognised'?Crnobrnja argues it is not possible to understand the conflict as an
international war. It might not have been 'civil' in so far as it was 'ethnic', but it was
at the beginning no more than 'an internal confrontation of the people of one
country'.57
Whether that 'one country' was Yugoslavia or Bosnia does not matter for
Crnobrnja, because the issue was whether either could avoid 'the ugly virus' of
aggressive nationalism.58 Once the former had unravelled, the latter was imperilled.
The danger came not from any pseudo-naturalistic working out of history or
hatreds?for all ethnic groups had 'lived together for centuries without warring with
each other'?but from the political ambitions of the representatives of those
groups.59 Unlike Mojzes' Yugoslavian Inferno, therefore, Crnobrnja's The Yugoslav
Drama pays attention to some of the key political developments within Bosnia in the
run-up to large-scale fighting in April 1992.
Crnobrnja's invocation of those events, however, is not designed to discriminate
between sides. While O'Ballance's Civil War in Bosnia, Zametica's The Yugoslav
Conflict, and Cohen's Broken Bonds ignore these and other such events as a means of
directing responsibility for the ethnic conflict towards the (so-called) Muslims, and
Izetbegovic in particular, Crnobrnja does not seek to redress the balance by utilizing
the events to reassign responsibility. This supports the contention that the events do
not, in and by themselves, give rise to a particular interpretation. Rather, The
54 Ibid., p. xvi.
55 Ibid., p. xvii.
56 Crnobrnja, Yugoslav Drama, p. 3.
57 Ibid., p. 160.
58 Ibid., p. 176.
59 Ibid., p. 174.
Yugoslav Drama seeks to diminish the need for a judgment about responsibility
making a particular judgment: that all ethnic groups played an equal part.60
This forced impartiality is central to Crnobrnja's argument, and figures in
number of subsequent places. For example, after noting that it is difficult to establi
who gave the orders for 'ethnic cleansing' operations, he declares that 'the ent
chain of command, up to and including the principal leaders?Milosevic, Tudjm
and Izetbegovic?bears heavy responsibility for not putting an end to th
gruesome methods of "cleansing" and for not publicly denouncing them'.61
When Crnobrnja departs from his strategy of treating all sides equally regardl
it is to redress what he sees as the bias of Western media 'which set out to rep
only on Serb brutality in the first place'. Serb atrocities were more visible, Crnobrn
argues, because although Croats and Muslims 'engaged in similar atrocities', Se
had 'conquered a larger territory'.62 That this greater conquest was the product
disproportionate level of violence, rather than an unrelated outcome which sim
heightened 'visibility', seems not to have disturbed the author of The Yugosla
Drama. Indeed, the Serbs' right to an amount of territory well beyond th
proportion of the population (which was how it was usually calculated) is justi
by Crnobrnja as flowing from the proportion of Bosnia's rural territory on wh
they farmed.63
In coming to terms with the Bosnian conflict, a common attitude, when one f
the limited options of 'civil war' or 'international aggression', is to avoid a deci
and argue either that it is a combination of the two or that a focus on one to t
exclusion of the other is a half-truth. Bogdan Denitch's Ethnic Nationalism evin
similar ambivalence. On the one hand, he talks of the second Yugoslavia (1945
being 'murdered' rather than simply ending, and argues that the leaders of Ser
and Croatia are 'tearing apart and partitioning Bosnia-Herzegovina, a sover
member of the United Nations'.64 On the other hand, he speaks of a 'civil war'.6
Denitch's essay, which is concerned with the rise and use of ethnic nationalism
Yugoslavia as a basis for considering the general relationship between national
and democracy, contains other equivocations. While he favours a focus on
political manipulation of ethnicity and nationalism, and thus seeks to avoid th
determinism of a Balkan character or history which runs counter to suc
argument, Denitch nonetheless gestures towards the latter position by talking
'Rip Van Winkle [which] staggered back to life in 1989 and has had a desperat
difficult time in trying to catch up with the long lost years'. He argues that 'it is as
all the predemocratic political movements, folkish sentiments, populist prejudi
and vaguely religious nationalist identities had been preserved in amber during
long years of Communist power in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union'.66
Denitch's concern is less with the political history of the Yugoslav conflict and
Bosnian manifestation, and more with the thematic consequences pertaining t
ethnicity, nationalism, multiculturalism, and democracy it suggests. His main o
of concern, therefore, is the way in which the political construction of the demos h
60 Ibid., p. 178.
61 Ibid., p. 186.
62 Ibid., p. 182.
63 Ibid., p. 187.
64 Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism, pp. 69, 2.
65 Ibid., pp. 62, 72.
66 Ibid., p. 128.
73 Ibid., p. 243.
74 Ibid., p. 248.
75 Ibid., p. 259.
76 Bennett, Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse, p. vii.
Hercegovina been left to Bosnians there was still a chance that they could have come
to an understanding among themselves. But it was not left to Bosnia and conflict
was imported from outside, principally from Serbia'.77
To establish that this is the case, Bennett refers to all the initiatives undertaken by
Bosnian Serbs to undermine the sovereignty of the new republic, noting that they
replicated strategies already used to good effect in the war against Croatia.78 A good
number of these same events are discussed in Crnobrnja's The Yugoslav Drama. But
there they function as part of an argument which attributes responsibility to three
constituent groups equally. In contrast, Bennett reads these events as local evidence
of the overall plan for a Greater Serbia: 'the Yugoslav wars were not the
consequence of an unfortunate series of events and misunderstandings, but of a
calculated attempt to forge a Greater Serbia out of Yugoslavia'.79 Moreover, he
highlights the significance of discussing these events in this manner: 'though Serb
apologists consider the recognition of Bosnia-Hercegovina the spark which ignited
the conflict, this explanation ignores the order of events. The war had already begun
before the international community recognised Bosnia-Hercegovina; the events were
not the other way around.'80
Whereas O'Ballance's narrative placed Izetbegovic at the critical centre, for
Bennett Milosevic is the culprit. Yugoslavia was destroyed rather than just fell apart,
and 'it was destroyed by at most a handful of people, and to a great extent by a
single man, Slobodan Milosevic'.81 That 'militant Serbs set out in a blitzkrieg-stylQ
operation to exterminate the non-Serb population as well as any Serbs who refused
to go along with the Greater Serbian vision of the republic's future' meant that
Milosevic could, in an invocation of the politically resonant and culturally powerful
World War II script, only be compared to Hitler, and the international community's
response could only be compared to Europe's in the 1930s.82
If there is one event that anchors a narrative of Serb nationalism's responsibility
and Milosevic's complicity, it is his statement to Kosovo Serbs in April 1987. It sets
the scene for Silber and Little in The Death of Yugoslavia, an account which shares
the premise of Bennett's Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse, albeit phrased more mildly.
'One of the central themes of our book', the authors write, 'is that under Milosevic's
stewardship, the Serbs were, from the beginning of Yugoslavia's disintegration, the
key secessionists. This is not to say that Milosevic was uniquely malign or solely
guilty. The foot soldiers of Yugoslavia's march to war were legion and were drawn
from all nationalities in the country.'83
The great virtue of The Death of Yugoslavia is its rich reportage of the complexity
of the Yugoslav conflicts. To support their central contention, Silber and Little are
able to deploy from their copious interviews indigenous political voices to make
their points. Thus we hear Ivan Stambolic, the Serbian President ousted by
Milosevic, declare that Milosevic's populist methods were 'the red rag to the bull of
other nationalisms. When the biggest nation begins to wave flags, the smaller nations
were obviously afraid.'84 Although the Serb leadership is centre stage, their Croatia
counterparts are not exonerated in the same way Bennett dismisses Tudjman as no
more than a scapegoat for the country's disintegration. The telling case of Josip
Reihl-Kir, the moderate Croat police chief in Slavonia, is testament to this. Kir was
unable to prevent an April 1991 military raid organized by Gojko Susak designed to
provoke conflict around Borovo Selo, a Serb village near Vukovar. Nonetheless,
because of this and other efforts at moderation, he was assassinated by his politica
compatriots. As Silber and Little conclude, 'it is a striking commentary on the
direction in which Croatia was moving during those crucial weeks leading to the
outbreak of full-scale war, that Kir's moderation, his conciliatory approaches to the
Serbs, had cost him his life, while Susak's activities, stoking tension and provoking
conflict, were to win him one of the most prominent places in Tudjman's
government [as Defence Minister]'.85
The Death of Yugoslavia also contains important points which question thos
'civil war' narratives, like Cohen's, which emphasize credible Serb fears as a rational
for their actions. Although the insensitivities of the Croatian authorities in relatio
to the Krajina Serbs are well documented by Silber and Little, they nonetheless
point out that Lord Carrington's 1991 peace plan contained important initiatives
which could have accommodated the interests of Serb communities in Croatia and
Bosnia. In a similar vein, Silber and Little offer an account of Izetbegovic 's religiou
convictions and political aspirations markedly different from O'Ballance's or
Zametica's. According to Silber and Little, Izetbegovic 's Islamic Declaration 'was a
work of scholarship, not politics, intended to promote philosophical discours
among Muslims. In it, he excluded "the use of violence in the creation of a Muslim
state, because it defiles the beauty of the name of Islam".'86
The comprehensiveness of The Death of Yugoslavia can be seen in the fact that it
is the narrative which encompasses more events from the chronology than any other.
That it does so does not make it impartial, or free from contestation, for those
events are still read in terms of the narrative's central plot of the Serbs being the
primary secessionists. But it does mean that it is superior to less complete an
obviously more partial narratives, such as O'Ballance's, and the contrasting but
equally particular account of Bennett.
Susan Woodward's Balkan Tragedy is even more comprehensive than Silber and
Little's account. Although it shares with The Death of Yugoslavia a concern for the
international context and dimension of the conflict, the understanding of the
international employed by Woodward's narrative is somewhat different. Woodward'
initial concern is to differentiate Balkan Tragedy both from arguments that focus on
the conflict as a war of aggression committed by one state (Serbia) against another
(Bosnia)?the interpretation which Woodward identifies with the US Government
and from accounts which stress 'that the Yugoslav and Bosnian conflicts constituted
a civil war based on the revival of ethnic conflict after the fall of communism'?
view more common in Europe and Canada, Woodward notes.87 Instead, Balkan
Tragedy aims to demonstrate the manner in which 'the Yugoslav conflict is
inseparable from international change and interdependence', such that it is not
something 'confined to the Balkans but is part of a more widespread phenomenon
of political disintegration'.88 As a result, Woodward writes that 'the story recorded
and analysed in this book begins a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when
the economic austerity and reforms required by a foreign debt crisis triggered a slide
towards political disintegration'.89
Woodward notes that insofar as the Yugoslav conflict has been understood as an
instance of a more general phenomenon, this has been done in terms of 'ethnic
conflict', whether internally generated or externally sourced.90 Woodward has no
doubt that the Yugoslav wars are a form of aggression. But against that represent
ation, and what she sees as the capacity of that representation to distract attention
from the immediate causes, Woodward wants to articulate 'real origins and
fundamental issues' of the conflict. For Balkan Tragedy these are to be found at the
intersection of domestic upheavals brought on by transformations in the European
and international orders. This involves 'the collapse of states, the problematic
meaning of national self-determination in relation to human rights and borders, and
the process of incorporating (or excluding) former socialist states into the West'.91
More specifically, Woodward maintains the real origin of the Yugoslav conflict lies
in 'the politics of transforming a socialist society to a market economy and
democracy' and the way in which that meant for Yugoslavia 'the disintegration of
governmental authority and the breakdown of political and civil order' which
resulted in the collapse of the Yugoslav state.92
The argument in Balkan Tragedy rests on an economic logic allegedly common to
the dynamic of disintegration evident in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, the Soviet
Union, and Czechoslovakia in 1989-91.93 Nationalist politics is said to have emerged
in those areas closer to and more integrated with Western markets, and to have been
pushed by politicians in those wealthier regions who had support from Western
sources for their reforms. However, once this drive overflowed into areas less able to
cope with the austerity measures required by liberalization strategies, adverse
political consequences associated with 'personal insecurities and social anomie'
emerged.94
Whether such a causal mechanism can comprehensively account for the numerous
developments examined in the study is a matter of judgment. After all, if economic
deprivation is what fuels nationalist politics, why (as the argument claims) does
nationalist politics emerge in the first instance in regions of relative affluence?
Moreover, a reliance on an economic logic of this kind diminishes the insightful
analysis Woodward offers with respect, for example, to the way the politics of
87 Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 7. Despite this move, some have read Woodward's account as deeply
sympathetic to Serbian nationalism. See Attila Hoare, 'An Ideological Ally for Belgrade', Bosnia
Report, 15(1996), pp. 10-11.
88 Ibid., p. 3.
89 Ibid., p. 4.
90 Ibid., p. 14.
91 Ibid., p. 13.
92 Ibid., pp. 15,378.
93 Ibid., pp. 349-50.
94 Ibid., p. 35.
The question how one goes about making a judgment as to which narrative of the
Bosnian War is better raises the thorniest of historiography's issues. While it is not
difficult to argue that one should give greater credence to those accounts which are
more comprehensive, or more self-reflexive about their own presuppositions and
their impact on the representation of particular events, in the end the above review
demonstrates that the basic point of White's argument holds. Events in a chronology
do not by themselves legitimate one particular narrative over and above others.
Those events, which attain that status by being emplotted in the first place, can be
narrated in different ways (or overlooked entirely), often to support contradictory
conclusions. The consequence of that, uncomfortable though it may be, is that a
recourse to the historical record will not by itself resolve the issue of which is better
or worse.
Which is not to argue that objectivity is totally pass?. What we need to think
through is an understanding of objectivity that is far removed from the logic of
positivism. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche sets forth a spirited defence of a
95 Ibid., p. 45.
96 Ibid., p. 334.
The narratives on Bosnia which this essay has examined, even if they think of
themselves as being objectivist enterprises, manifest the unavoidable perspectivism of
political representations. But for all their differences, they are united in materializing
an ethnically ordered Bosnia to the detriment of understandings which might have
been more politicizing.98 This is evident in the constant citation of the 1991 census
statistics for Yugoslavia that predominate in the narratives.99 These numbers write
Bosnia as '44% Muslim, 31% Serb, 17% Croat, 6% Yugoslav', with a small
remainder. The effect is to establish these markers of identity above all others as
socially salient, and assume that they obscure no other complexities. The result is
that ethnic divisions are posited as the community fault-lines around which politics
in Bosnia has revolved and will inevitably revolve. Such a conclusion effectively
attributes responsibility for the conflict and its conduct to specific regional actors,
thereby absolving others from being called to account for their role.
Although an appreciation of the genealogy of 'Muslim' as a national category in
Yugoslavia would contest large elements of this picture, one cannot deny that the
mobilization of 'ethnicity'?a category about which a good many anthropologists
(but sadly few political scientists or International Relations scholars) have grave
Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New
York, 1989), p. 119.
This is pivotal to the widely held and structured way of seeing Bosnia. For a discussion of a way of
seeing which disturbs the 'geopolitical eye', see Gear?id ?. Thuathail (Gerard Toal), An Anti
geopolitical Eye: Maggie O'Kane in Bosnia, 1992-93', Gender, Place and Culture, 3 (1996), pp.
171-85.
See Bennett, Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse, p. 180; Cohen, Broken Bonds, pp. 139, 241; Crnobrnja,
Yugoslav Drama, p. 22; Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism, pp. 28-9; Mojzes, Yugoslavian Inferno, p. 33;
O'Ballance, Civil War in Bosnia, p. vii; Ramet, Balkan Babel, pp. 1, 186, 244; Silber and Little, Death
of Yugoslavia, p. 231; Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, pp. 32-5; Zametica, Yugoslav Conflict, p. 36.
doubts?has been pivotal to the Bosnian War.100 But there is some distance between
the latter point and the unquestioning acceptance of the political effects of such a
representation that most narratives are seemingly happy with. More work in this
regard is clearly needed; new perspectives cognizant of the politics of representation
and responsibility are urgently required.
In the end it is perhaps beyond the capacity of any single narrative to provide the
best account. Nietzsche's remonstration that objectivity is best served by the
pluralization of perspectives, with an attentiveness to the politics of their
production, is a timely reminder that only through the clash of competing narratives
are we likely to assemble justifiable knowledge. Continual contestation, rather than
the aspirations of synthesis and totality, should be the aim of inquiry.
100
For the doubts about ethnicity, see Marcus Banks, Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions (London,
1996). For the genealogy of 'Muslim', see Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 429n. According to Borden,
though there had been a category of 'Muslims ethnically undeclared' prior to 1961, the revision of
that year made the significant categorical switch to 'Muslims in the ethnic sense'. This transformation
of the census then culminated in 1971 with the category 'Muslim' being a distinct and equal
nationality. Anthony Borden, The Bosnians: A War on Identity (London, 1993), pp. 4-5. Silber and
Little, Death of Yugoslavia, p. 229, argue the nationalization of 'Muslim' is not complete until the
1974 constitution. For reflections on the problematic character of 'Bosnian/Muslim' in contemporary
discourse, see Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, pp. 298-302; and Norman Fairclough, '"Mainly Muslim":
Discourse and Barbarism in Bosnia', Discourse and Society, 5 (1994), pp. 431-2. The best single
account of the complexities of 'Muslim' identities in Bosnia can be found in Tone Bringa's
ethnography, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way (Princeton, NJ, 1995).