ROUND TABLE

Mr. Chairmen, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to thank you for all the interesting papers we have heard in these past two days. It has been a stimulating discussion and presentation of the problems that have existed in South-eastern Europe in the last 150 years. I would also like to thank Mr. Harris for his eloquent speech. I am a mere historian who was just wondering how to deal with the larger issues of politics that are extremely important in this area.

Many of my reflections of the past two days come directly from my field as a historian. In fact, one of the interesting aspects of being a scholar is being able to go abroad and hear other people discuss their own national traditions and to see how that fits into the discourse of one’s own home country. Three of the issues that I have been thinking a lot about during and after these presentations are issues that are very much discussed in the United States today. These issues are multiculturalism, national identity, and the importance of national memory.

Multiculturalism in the United States has become a topic of discussion in the last decade primarily because the image we have had of American history has proven to be false. We believed that America was a nation of immigrants that had melted inside a melting pot when indeed this was not true. In fact, one student presented the same thing to me; the idea of a melting pot was not fulfilled in the American tradition, but rather used to exclude a massive number of people who came to North America.

For the last decade or so, a celebration of diversity has been talked about. Actually, I am not a great supporter of this idea primarily because I think it is highly problematical for a historian. One of the themes that is often discussed is teachers engaging in diversity to teach tolerance. For a historian, this is very difficult. If, for example, one discusses the contact between Colombians and the Native peoples of North America and the Caribbean, and presents it as victimization of the Natives, this is true enough. However, it also ignores other themes such as the Aztecs who victimized the local peoples surrounding their habitat. Basically, the point is that 16th century Aztecs and Europeans were not tolerant cultures.

If we were to pose the question that most Americans would ask, “Was the former Yugoslavia multinational or multicultural?”, I think we could answer by saying that it was multinational but not multicultural, with the possible exception of Bosnia. The multiculturalism in Bosnia was undermined by the idea of a Greater Serbia. It is a bad idea to say that we must discuss failures because I do not think that historians only want to talk about failures; they wish to discuss other aspects as well. Actually, multiculturalism is an ideology that is related to the future of society in the United States as well as the future of liberal democracy, and not the past.

There are two other issues that have been going through my mind these past two days which are more significant in regards to the presentations that we have heard; national identity and memory. The traditional presentation of nationalism is basically about the politics of identity. It usually consists of a list of characteristics which designate who is a member of what nation. In the last decade or so in the United States and in many other countries as well, there has been a discussion of what we call the politics of difference. The short hand for this is the designation of who we are not. When we think over the presentation of papers in the last two days, we can see a great many discussions of who we are and who we are not. Examples of this in the presentation were Professor Filipovia who talked about the historical experiences of Croats in Croatia, and Mr. Bogdan who discussed the Hungarians in Vojvodina. Some of these papers go beyond descriptions and into analytical points that reach beyond national identity if one is to consider Dr. Mirdita’s presentation for example. After describing the positions of the Albanians, Dr. Mirdita went on to ask a question of much larger importance; why does the West continue to view the problem as a human rights issue instead of seeing it as an issue of national rights? This reaches a major problem in international politics because of the difference in western political traditions that have looked towards civil rights as the basis of politics.

In the United States, the debate between the politics of identity and the politics of difference has begun to reach beyond some other issues. Most of this work is being done by anthropologists who are not historians. One of the young professors who is working on this is at UW Madison. He is an anthropologist who claims that one cannot simply have two poles which interact. He also says that identity and difference need to have a middle zone where they can both influence each other. This broadens the discourse of national identity beyond a nation talking about itself to nations reacting with their neighbors.

This is a very important idea to begin considering because no nation lives alone in the world. It has neighbors whether these neighbors always behave in a desirable fashion or not.

Then there is also the idea of discourse, or negotiation. Indeed, a person does not have only one identity, but a multiplicity of identities. What individuals do is negotiate their way through various situations using whatever promotes their interests the most. If one is to look at the American situation for example, one realizes that people can have a racial identity, a religious identity, an ethnic identity, and a class identity. All those identities can come into play given a particular situation. What this does is that it takes a very static model of national identity and its opposition and attempts to make it dynamic, while placing it in some sort of power structure to help us understand conflict and development. Many of the papers that we have heard today and in the last few days have discussed points brought up by these issues. In addition, most of the papers also fall under the discussion of American discourse which is the issue of memory. When it comes to power, every state creates various myths.

We have had continual references these last two days to rediscovering the history of the Croats, Germans, and Albanians. There was also an attempt to go beyond the description of what has happened in Bosnia to an actual analysis so as to understand how that memory must be preserved, and how it can be passed on to future generations. Of course, much of this involves taboo subjects which then become political issues in their own societies. This is not only true of the work of Ljubica Štefan on Anti-Semitism in Serbia, but of Mr. Tolstoy’s presentation which led to certain problems in England.

The two issues of national identity and memory for the historian indicate passive development. We may not directly contribute to the most important parts of society that Mr. Harris discussed. The fact is that boundaries in this part of the world have not been set and there is still war. The fact also remains that Serbia is not going to disappear as a nation, but will indeed remain a power in the Balkans. In general however, if historians continue with their historical work, they will not think of political issues but primarily their work in scholarship. It is very good that this group has got together to discuss the major problems that have occurred in this area in the last 150 years as well as to dismantle the myths of the past. Thank You.