ROUND TABLE

Thank you very much. I would like to begin by saying how much I enjoyed and appreciated this symposium. I also apologize for having some rather miscellaneous reflections to present to you which I shall try to put into some order as I go along.

I absolutely agree with Robin Harris’ beginning remarks. It is quite extraordinary to consider the degree to which British politicians have mishandled and displayed extreme ignorance in the situation in the former Yugoslavia. Actually, they have also told lies. It is quite difficult sometimes to distinguish between deliberate lying and expressions of ignorance. One of the areas in which I think the ignorance predominates is when they discuss the historical background to the wars of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia. The key phrase which is always on their lips is ancient ethnic hatreds. For them, this had become the ultimate excuse for having a policy which was pro-Serbian.

I heard a British politician say that one cannot do anything about the war in the former Yugoslavia because the people there had been fighting one another for thousands of years. He said thousands in the plural, which already gives one a sense of his grasp on Balkan history. In the last two days, we have also heard that there has been a modern history of the conflict. It is a political and ideological history, and it comes with the development of a modern nationalist doctrine. It is a rather uneven development in which there has been a driving force of Serb nationalism for the last 150 years. However, this is modern history. In the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, we did not hear that Croats were killing Serbs because they were Serbs or vice-versa. We did not even hear that from these distinguished historians. This whole idea that people in this part of Europe have a built-in instinct to kill neighbors that are different from them is one of the most offensive pieces of historical ignorance which has been used by western politicians to justify their policies.

During the presentations at this symposium, I have been thinking about the peculiar nature of a Greater Serbian project which has indeed been the dominant theme of these discussions. It is quite peculiar that in modern European history, there were other examples of imperialistic pressures on neighboring peoples, as well as territorial expansions, and so many of the same techniques were used. Major examples of this imperialistic pressure were the German Reich in the Nazi period, and the whole history of Communist Russia along with its attempts to colonize areas outside of its empire. Those attempts were in a different category and their genuine imperial projects were on an imperial scale. They were also driven by a peculiar ideology which in both cases was not pure national ideology. It was more of a general political quality in both cases. Looking at the case of the Greater Serbian project, I am trying to find parallels or other examples. It has occurred to me that there is one very significant and close parallel which has not been discussed or mentioned during these papers. That parallel is the modern history of Greece. Two histories of the growth of the Serb and Greek states exist. In both cases, there was a phased territorial expansion. In the case of Serbia, it was in the years 1830, 1833, 1878, and 1912. In the case of Greece, the original small independent Greek state expanded into Crete in 1881, and then largely expanded into Macedonia in 1898 after the Balkan wars. In both cases, there was an aggressive expansion into areas that had a different ethnic or national composition. Even in the earlier stages of the Serb territorial expansion, a city like Nis in the 1870s, for example, was not a pure Serb city at all. What one would have heard in the street would have been more like the local dialect of the Bulgarian language. One would have also found very large Albanian quarters around that town and around other towns as we heard from Dr. Mirdita as well. In Greece, there was an advance into territory which in the final day of expansion was not Greek at all in its ethnic composition. If one was to look at an ethnic map in the 1920’s around the ex-Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, one would see no Greek villages there at all. One would see Slav Macedonian, Albanian, Vlach, and Turkish villages.

In both cases, the same methods were used. First there was conquest by force, especially those territories conquered in the Balkan wars. There was terror and the destruction of cultural monuments specific to that other group. In the Greek case, they were systematically defacing grave stones in cemeteries in Macedonia all through the 1920s because those gravestones were in the Slav language. There was also the use of bogus ethnography. In the Serbian case, there are the writings of Jovan Cvijic, which progressively became more and more unscientific and more the expressions of propaganda requirements of the Belgrade regime. There is a doctrine that claims that the Albanians of Kosovo are just Albanized Slavs which became a part of the official doctrine. In the Greek case of Macedonia, there is something very similar; a whole series of Greek ethnographers writing pseudo scientific treatises to show that there is no such thing as a Macedonian Slav. They are Slavic Greeks. Another most important technique was that of the transfers of population and forced colonization. In the Greek case, the transfers began soon after the Balkan war with Bulgaria and others who were being transferred against their will. Then there were the massive transfers with Turkey, and the techniques used for resettling people were brought into Northern Greece parts. These techniques were very similar to the ones used in the 1920s and 1930s in Kosovo in order to colonize parts of that region that were regarded as strategically and economically important. Throughout cultural oppression, there was the suppression of local languages and an almost historical application of a state doctrine which required people to not just identify as citizens of a state, but required them to identify with all the ethnic and cultural myths that that state had created for certain purposes. When looking at the recent history of diplomatic activity of the war in the former Yugoslavia, one is not surprised to find very close contacts between Belgrade and Athens, and to find people like Vuk Draskovic going to Athens and being welcomed by huge crowds when giving his most extreme Serb national speeches. There is even an extreme right wing press in Greece, as well as a movement of the recreation of the Byzantine Empire which as proposed would be a Greek empire in the Balkans. Draskovic refers to this in his speeches when he goes to Greece and flatters the Greeks by saying that they would be the brains of the Empire and that the Serbs would be its strong arms.

Now, why do I mention this? Not just because of the parallelism, but because these two histories are similar as they are both emerging insteps out of the Ottoman Empire. It seems to me that there is one very important connection and that is the mental and cultural background of Eastern Orthodoxy. It is important to ask why the Orthodox countries of South-eastern and Eastern Europe exhibit this peculiar sorting of family resemblance in their political history and political culture. We have already heard one explanation during the last two days which I think is important; the argument about the structure of the Orthodox church not being in a unitary hierarchy. The patriarch in Constantinople was never the equivalent of the Pope of Rome in the Roman church. This led to the identification of religious identity with national identity and so on. But I do not think that this is a full explanation. I would like to look more at the basis of the Orthodox political culture or actually speak about the lack of it. It is also said that Eastern Orthodoxy created the principle of Caesar, an extreme identification of religious authority or state authority which explains the political cultures of those countries. Historically, I think this is a rather misleading way of looking at the question. There is a distinctive difference between the Orthodox tradition and the Latin Christian tradition. Curiously enough, this comes from the fact that there was no identification between church and state in Constantinople after the first and earliest Byzantine period. The church was not required to evolve itself constantly in political or social affairs. The state was very well organized in its own terms and it looked after things like education, hospitals and so on. In western development, the church was involved in things like education, hospitals, and social activities of all kinds. In the Eastern tradition, the Church was able to remove itself into a spiritual realm that was concerned only with liturgy. Liturgy was the essential role of the eastern church and it was focused on much more than its western equivalence. In the western church, the church was involved in social and political affairs at all levels. The Franciscan, Dominican and other orders involved themselves in social questions, developing important bodies of social and political doctrine. This helped to create a religious and intellectual culture which was engaged in political realities and not separated from them. There were traditions of critical thinking about social and political questions which simply did not exist in the main body of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. This led to a culture in Eastern Orthodox lands which was very ill prepared to engage in critical thinking about these issues. It is often said that ordinary Eastern Orthodox peasants make very good people, that they’re warm-hearted, hospitable, and generous. However, it is also said that they are very easily led by political leaders who tell them that there is an absolute value that they must follow, obey, and do. I have gone on long enough now and have put in some of the thoughts that have been going on in my head these last few days. But I would like to return for just one moment to the parallel with Greece because only last week in the magazine Economist, I read an article which stated that transfers of population are not a bad thing. My blood went cold when I saw how the Greeks and Turks solved their differences. If intelligence commentators in the West are going to say that forced mass expulsions of people is the way to create a more stable and just society, then I fear for the future of the so-called Western civilization as well. In response to the question of mass murders of the Jews, Hitler responded by bringing up the genocide of the Armenians in 1915. Nobody remembers that now. And if people were to refer to the forced expulsion of more than half a million Muslims from Greek territory in the 1920s, nobody would worry about that either. Well then, I fear our moral position will not be much better. Thank you.

Ante Beljo: Thank you Dr. Noel Malcolm. Our next speaker is Dr. Norman Stone, professor of modern history at Oxford University. He has written about the history of Russia in World War I. In recent years, he has written a lot about the different aspects of political life in British, French and German newspapers. Since 1991, he has been actively involved in supporting Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Norman Stone