Basil Davidson on Yugoslavia

(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.



Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)