Review of International Studies (1998), 24, 261281 Copyright British International Studies Association

261

* For comments and criticisms, I am grateful to Martin Coward, Alex Danchev, Kate Manzo, HidemiSuganami, one anonymous reviewer, and the editors of the Review.

1 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore,MD, 1973), Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD, 1978), and TheContent of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD, 1987). Theconcern with narrative in history is, of course, not restricted to Whites work. For an account ofothers prior to White who shared this focus, see David Carr, Time, Narrative and History(Bloomington, IN, 1986), pp. 78. This article is drawn from the third chapter of my NationalDeconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis, 1998), where a criticalexamination of Whites argument is pursued in greater detail.

MetaBosnia: narratives of the Bosnian War*DAV I D C A M P B E L L

Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavias Bloody Collapse, London, Hurst and Co., 1995

Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavias Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transition,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

Paul Mojzes, Yugoslavian Inferno, New York, Continuum, 1994

Edgar OBallance, Civil War in Bosnia, London, Macmillan, 1995

Sabrina Petra Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Titoto Ethnic War, 2nd edn, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1996

Laura Silber and Alan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia, revised edn, London, Penguin Books,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

In Metahistory and subsequent publications, Hayden White has articulated a philo-sophy of history which has highlighted the importance of narrative in theproduction of historical knowledge.1 In brief, White has argued that narrative is theparadigmatic historical style because of the insufficiency of any account in the form

of an annals or chronicle to encapsulate a story. In the annals, a diarist simplyrecords events for each year in the period covered (often leaving some years blank),without any suggestion of a connection between events.2 As the subsequent stage inthe development of historical representation, the chronicle maintains the priorityaccorded temporal ordering, but through its concern with a specific issue or areaprovides more detail than an annals, and thereby suggests meaning even as it refusesclosure.3

For White, narratives are a performance. Through the operation of emplotment,facts are structured in such a way that they become components in a particularstory.4 White is careful to argue that historical events are different from fictionalones; the former can be assigned to specific timespace locations, events which are(or were) in principle observable or perceivable, while the latter are imagined,hypothetical, or invented.5 But he wants to insist that historical narratives areverbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms ofwhich have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they havewith those in the sciences.6 This leads to his most controversial claim: the centralityof narrative means that when it comes to apprehending the historical record thereare no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way ofconstruing its meaning over another.7

Emplotting Bosnia

The historical profession, if it has paid any attention to White, has reacted withhostility to his philosophy.8 Whites arguments have been tarred with the brush ofpostmodernism in a manner which echoes the conventional response to positionsso represented in International Relations. In his review of the sustained challenge tothe goal of objectivity in American historiography, Peter Novick argues that Whitewas caught up in the denunciations of a neo-objectivist or hyperobjectivistminority who, reacting to the wickedness associated with the sixties, were influen-tial in their ability to lump together various relativistic, postmodern currents intoan undifferentiated and monstrous Other which had to be combatted if liberalrationalism was to survive.9

262 David Campbell

2 See, e.g., Hayden White, The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality, in White,Content of the Form, pp. 610.

3 Ibid., p. 16.4 The number of story structures Whites argument explicitly deals with is limited to fourromance,

tragedy, comedy, and satirethough White stresses that this does not exhaust the modes ofemplotment; 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 therelevance of these specific story structures and their entailments for political accounts (though, as weshall see, tragedy often comes to the fore) than in the general argument about narratives and theiremplotment.

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 Suganamis On the Causes of War (Oxford, 1996), where the work of White isaddressed 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. 6067.

Given the assumptions which inform Whites philosophy of history, the antago-nistic reception is puzzling. Rather than being a card-carrying pomo (as thedetractors might want to say), White has stressed on any number of occasions theformalist and structuralist nature of his enterprise. His work is a major critique ofhistorical realism and thoroughly anti-positivist. Though some argue White hasrecently been moving in post-structuralist directions, his work is far from embodyingthe allegedly anarchical tendencies that so frighten the critics.10

Given the limitations of a review article, such concerns about Whites argumentscannot be fully resolved here. Nonetheless, although it can and should be subject tosustained critical scrutiny, Whites position provides a distinct and useful startingpoint from which to examine recent writing about the Bosnian War. Most reviews ofspecific literatures adopt a particular perspective on the issues they are considering,and then judge selected writings accordingly.11 Such an approach is both proper andvaluable. But the perspective adopted usually concerns details of the event and/orissues being considered, rather than the historiographical assumptions throughwhich the event or issue is rendered. As such, more conventional reviews occlude thedimensions of interpretation and representation that are central to the production ofknowledge.

In contrast, by focusing on the narrativizing strategies of ostensibly objectivistworks dealing with the Bosnian War, this review wants both to highlight those issuesof interpretation and representation, and to suggest that a concern with thosedimensions informed by the arguments of White can be important when it comes tomaking judgments about competing accounts of contentious events and issues. Thisis especially the case with regard to something as complex as the Bosnian War. Asthe argument below shall demonstrate, many of the major assessments of theconflict have reduced this complexity to the banalities of ethnic essentialism in orderto attribute responsibility to particular individuals or groups. They have thus beencomplicit in the constitution of realities they merely claim to describe.

To achieve its goals, this essay focuses on single-authored monographs that aim tooffer a comprehensive account of the Bosnian War (or at least its place in the manyconflicts of former Yugoslavia). This is an arbitrary and restrictive criterion whichexcludes a range of interesting literature, but it enables the question of comparingnarratives to be pursued with greater clarity.12 In order to analyse how these

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10 For Whites reflections on his position, see Ewa Domanska, Interview/Hayden White, Diacritics, 24(1994), pp. 91100. The recent post-structuralist drift in White is noted by Wulf Kansteiner, HaydenWhites Critique of the Writing of History, History and Theory, 32 (1993), esp. pp. 2856.

11 In this context, one such example is Christopher Cvviic, Perceptions of Former Yugoslavia: AnInterpretative Reflection, International Affairs, 71 (1995), pp. 81926.

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 MarkAlmond, Europes Backyard War: The War in the Balkans (London, 1994); Martin Bell, In HarmsWay: Reflections of a War Zone Thug (London, 1995); Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbour: A Story ofWar (London, 1996); David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York,1995); and Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnias War (London, 1994). Likewise, anumber of edited collections have not been considered. These include Yugoslavia: The Former and theFuture: 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 (StonyCreek, CT, 1993); International Perspectives on the Yugoslav Conflict, ed. Alex Danchev and ThomasHalverson (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 relationto a set of events they consider important. That is, rather than impose an externalcriterion upon them and see how they measure up, we need to isolate the events theselected narratives deal with; consider how those events are included in somenarratives and excluded from others; and reveal the ways in which those events arerepresented, and the manner in which they are articulated so as to construct anargument.

Given Whites contention that narrative has become the accepted historio-graphical mode because of its superiority to the annals and chronicles, isolating thework that narrativizing strategies do, means considering those elements in particularaccounts which supplement the simple description and temporal location of specificevents. Isolating those events thus requires the retrospective construction of achronology of specific events from a period important to the understanding of theBosnian War. Any number of historical periods could be suitable candidates for thisexercise, but the period 19902 provides a good basis for comparison.

The period August 1990April 1992, which covers the political debates aboutBosnias future in the collapsing Yugoslavia up until its international recognition asa state and the commencement of large-scale fighting in Sarajevo, is widely identifiedin these accounts as pivotal for their various interpretations. That is because thecharacter of their accounts depends in large part on how they assign responsibilityfor the fracturing of Bosnia, and assigning responsibility in this context depends inlarge part on whom or what they regard as pursuing a different politicalarrangement in this period. The importance of this parameter can be judged byLord Owens claim that the recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina was the triggerthat many had predicted it would be to the formal outbreak of a war that wasalready simmering in the background before recognition.13

Of course, in the context of Whites argument, the events selected for inclusion inthe chronology do not exist unproblematically in an extra-discursive domain, nor arethey independently deemed to be important. Nor is the language used to describethem necessarily neutral. As such, they are included here because they have beenidentified as significant by the various narratives in the monographs considered.Moreover, the events are described in the terms used by the particular narratives fromwhich they are drawn. But no narrative covers all these events, and there isconsiderable variation in who covers what and how. As we shall see, that variationilluminates clearly the inescapable politics of representation involved in thenarration of events.

264 David Campbell

Mousavizadeh (New York, 1996); Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed.Alexandra Stiglmayer (Lincoln, NE, 1994); and Yugoslavias Ethnic Nightmare: The Inside Story ofEuropes 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, suchas Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia(Minneapolis, 1996); Francis A. Boyle, The Bosnian People Charge Genocide: Proceedings at theInternational Court of Justice Concerning Bosnia v. Serbia on the Prevention and Punishment of theCrime of Genocide (Amherst, MA, 1996); Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: the Policy of EthnicCleansing (College Station, TX, 1995); Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York, 1993); JanWillem Honig and Norbet Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime (Harmondsworth, 1996); andMichael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley and Los Angeles,CA, 1996).

13 David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (London, 1995), p. 46.

Chronology: Bosnia 19902

[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 basedin Banja Luka

[6] June 1991 More than 50,000 Muslims, Serbs and Croatsdemonstrate in Sarajevo for the unity ofYugoslavia and Bosnia-Herzegovina

[7] 11 July 1991 Bosnian Serbs (SDS) release a party statementannouncing a boycott of parliament anddenounce Izetbegovic as an illegitimate ruler

[8] 16 August 1991 Izetbegovic announces a referendum on thefuture of Bosnia within Yugoslavia

[9] September 1991 Four Serb Autonomous Regions established;request Yugoslav National Army (JNA) aid

[10] 1415 October 1991 Bosnian parliament debates and adopts adeclaration of sovereignty; Serb delegates walkout before vote

[11] 17 October 1991 Bosnian Government creates a new coat ofarms and flag for the republic

[12] 24 October 1991 Bosnian Serbs leave power-sharing coalitionand establish their own parliamentary assembly

[13] 29 October 1991 Bosnian Government informs Yugoslav federalparliament that it is a sovereign state

[14] November 1991 Assembly of Bosnian Serbs holds first session[15] 911 November 1991 Assembly of Bosnian Serbs conducts referen-

dum for Serbs in which an overwhelmingmajority vote to remain part of Yugoslavia

[16] 12 November 1991 The Posavina community of eight communesestablishes a Bosnian Croat autonomous entityin northern Bosnia

[17] 18 November 1991 Eighteen Bosnian Croat communes set upHerzeg-Bosnia in western Herzegovina

[18] 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

[20] 21 December 1991 Assembly of Bosnian Serbs announces thecreation of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina

MetaBosnia 265

[21] December 1991 A separate Croatian state in westernHerzegovina, Herzeg-Bosnia, is declared afterTudjman makes Mate Boban leader of theCroatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in Bosnia

[22] January 1992 Milosevic issues secret order to transferBosnian-born JNA officers back to theirrepublic

[23] 9 January 1992 The independence of the Serbian Republic ofBosnia-Herzegovina proclaimed

[24] 27 January 1992 Another Bosnian Croat entity is formed fromfour communities in central Bosnia

[25] 26 February 1992 Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats meetsecretly in Graz, Austria, to discuss territorialpartition

[26] 29 February1 March 1992 Referendum on Bosnian independence[27] 1 March 1992 Shots fired at a Serb wedding party in Sarajevo[28] 2 March 1992 Serbs set up barricades in Sarajevo[29] 3 March 1992 Bosnian Government declares independence[30] 18 March 1992 First international agreement to partition

Bosnia[31] 57 April 1992 Bosnia recognized by US and EC[32] 6 April 1992 War in Bosnia begins

This composite chronology demonstrates immediately two important facets of theargument concerning the centrality of narrative. First, it does not (and, therefore,the narratives from which it is derived do not) encompass everything that happenedin or pertaining to Bosnia between 1990 and 1992. After all, are we to believe thatnothing occurred between November 1990 and March 1991? Nothing between 27January and 26 February 1992? Or in any of the other numerous gaps? Thehistorical field is simply too heterogeneous and too disparate for any account toencompass everything. Whites observation, therefore, that the events in a chronicleare real not because they occurred but because they are remembered by post factumaccounts is vividly demonstrated.14

Secondly, the act of recording the thirty-two events in a sequential record doesnot in itself constitute an historical account. Listing the events in this form does notprovide a narrative account, for the events cannot reveal by themselves either theexistence of a story or its salience over another. In particular, there is nothing inchronology which points unproblematically towards the notions of tragedy, inferno,death or drama so common in the titles of books on Bosnia. To confirm Whitesgeneral thesis, therefore, we can see that for there to be an historical account of theabove events their emplotment in a narrative is required.

Narrating Bosnia

What, then, do the various narratives concerning the Bosnian War make of theseand other events, and what does that allow us to say about those narratives? Those

266 David Campbell

14 White, Value of Narrativity, p. 20.

accounts sensitive to the possibility of different interpretations of the Bosnianconflict identify two predominant stories. One is the tale of a civil war in whichantagonism between various groups emerges for a variety of reasons. The other is ofinternational conflict, in which aggression from one state threatens another.15 Otherelementsethnicity, historical hatred, aggressive nationalism, religious ideologies,political and economic failures, and genocideare mobilized in the respectivenarratives to support their overall explanation. As we shall see, although there issome overlap, civil war accounts make greater reference to ethnicity, historicalhatred and religion than do those which focus on international conflict by drawingattention to aggressive nationalism, economic and political developments, and thepursuit of genocide.

The first story is obvious in Edgar OBallances Civil War in Bosnia, a book thatwould not normally warrant sustained attention. Containing no information on theauthor or his expertise, and marked by an absence of references for its argument,this book is an unlikely candidate for the imprint of a reputable press. For thepurposes of the argument here, however, its declaration that the Bosnian War shouldbe understood as a vicious three-sided . . . civil war, a confused struggle betweenterritorial warlords and rival militias, makes it the clearest example of the civil warargument.16 At the centre of OBallances account stands the figure of the BosnianPresident, Alija Izetbegovic, a dedicated Muslim who had almost single-handedlyworked and planned to turn his multiethnic country . . . into a unitary sovereignstate, while his secret agenda was to give it a predominantly Islamic-orientedcharacter.17 Izetbegovic s Islamic fixation was most apparent, according toOBallance, in the Islamic Declaration, which supposedly advocated a united IslamicCommunity from Morocco to Indonesia, and for which he was imprisoned by theTito regime.18 Similar opprobrium is not forthcoming in his discussion of otherleaders deficiencies; with regard to Tudjman, OBallance offers an account lacedwith equanimity. After noting Tudjmans imprisonment, OBallance writes that thefuture Croatian President wrote books reassessing Croatian history, one beingWasteland, which caused him to be accused of being a fascist and anti-Jewish, whichhe denied.19

As a result of the centring of one leader, OBallance writes the story of Bosnia asthe story of Izetbegovic , with everything done or not done so as to enhance, inorder of priority, his power, the power of his political party (the SDA), and thepower of the Muslims.20 As a consequence, OBallance begins his account with thebrawl that opens the chronology, although he maintains the clashes took place inSeptember 1990. More importantly, he asserts that the clashes were alleged to havebeen instigated by Izetbegovics SDA.21 Susan Woodward provides a rather differentaccount in Balkan Tragedy, where she writes that since early September [1991],paramilitary gangs from Serbia had stirred up interethnic conflict in towns ofeastern Bosnia such Bijeljina, Foca, Visegrad, and Bratunac.22

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15 Mojzes, Yugoslavian Inferno, pp. 8791; Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, pp. 78.16 OBallance, 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.

The concern to demonstrate at every opportunity that Izetbegovic sought toexpand his power base leads OBallance to make particular judgments. With regardto the elections of 1990, he has Izetbegovic elected President on 18 November 1990,but the multiparty parliamentary elections not taking place until 2 and 9 December1990.23 OBallance then argues that a representative government was formed,including Serb and Croat ministers as well as Muslim ones, dominated byIzetbegovic and his SDA. At this uncertain moment a national-coalition power-sharing government of the three main ethnic groups, instead of a unitary one, mighthave had a unifying and calming effect on restless ethnic activists, and stultifiedswings towards separatism; but it was not part of Izetbegovics plan to share powerwith any of them.24 Others, however, explicitly contradict his understanding. In TheDeath of Yugoslavia, Silber and Little state that, despite their differences, the threenationalist parties formed a united front against the Communists before the poll,and maintained that agreement afterwards despite electoral results which made itunnecessary.25

To enable his story of a civil war driven by the self-interested calculations of onecentral actor, OBallances account makes no mention of the Serbian autonomyinitiatives of 19901, recording only a brief mention of the Bosnian Serb parlia-mentary assembly before focusing on the moves towards Bosnian sovereignty. As aresult, his narrative does not take a sustained look at any of the events whichindicated unilateral Serbian moves towards autonomy in advance of the BosnianGovernments pursuit of sovereignty and international recognition. Having givenpre-eminence to the latter, and placed the personality and political programme ofIzetbegovic to the fore, such omissions were necessary. As Sabrina Petra Rametarguesin a narrative which makes a contrary argumentby paying attention toSerbian moves of this kind it is not possible to script Serbian policy as simplyreacting to (so-called) Muslim initiatives. As she notes in Balkan Babel, with regardto the creation of Bosnian Serb paramilitaries, these formations were set up, thus,before the elections that would place Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic in thepresidency and cannot, therefore, be portrayed as a response to his election.26 Thisordering of responsibility goes against the central thrust of OBallances account ofthe Bosnian conflict, which shares with a number of other interpretations the desireto diminish the culpability of the Serbs by casting their activities as responses toprovocations by the non-Serbs. As OBallance argues with respect to the firstBosnian parliamentary declaration of sovereignty, this was a direct challenge andthe inevitable watershed towards eventual civil war.27 But the same could equally besaid of earlier Serbian moves for autonomy which challenged the governmentelected in November 1990.

OBallances criticisms of Izetbegovic persist to such an extent that the BosnianPresident is portrayed as the major obstacle to all the peace initiatives, supposedlyrejecting earlier proposals and making insistent and repeated demands forrevisions.28 But this partisan account does also have moments where the criticisms

268 David Campbell

23 OBallance, Civil War in Bosnia, p. 6.24 Ibid., pp. 67.25 Silber and Little, Death of Yugoslavia, p. 210.26 Ramet, Balkan Babel, pp. 2434.27 OBallance, Civil War in Bosnia, p. 7.28 Ibid., p. 207.

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 saidto be equally guilty of atrocities such that there is little to choose between them.29

Equally common is the notion that the character of the violence can be explained interms of old hatreds and prejudices, involving slaughter reminiscent of medievaltimes, such that the war showed tribalism and ethnic nationalism were victoriousover 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 inYugoslavia during the Second World War. King Alexanders rule and Titos firmadministration were misleading interludes of comparatively peaceful coexistencebut old hatreds, feuds and prejudices had not been eradicated, they simply laydormant.31

John Zameticas The Yugoslav Conflict offers some interesting reflections on thenature of history. In its conclusions, Zametica writes that of course, history, with itsinfinity of facts, will always be subject to selective interpretation.32 Nowhere moreso than in former Yugoslavia where complexity requires added care, he notes. Thisleads Zametica to a particular recommendation: Analysis as a guide to policy whichis divorced from self-interest is presumably of the utmost importance to theinternational community. If the international community, benevolently inclined,continues its growing involvement in conflict areas around the world, its principalweapon must be knowledge.33 Few have been better placed than Zametica tofulminate on the relationship between knowledge and self-interest. Shortly aftercompleting this Adelphi Paper, Zametica restored his Slavic forename (Jovan) andwent off to Pale as a senior adviser and spokesperson for Radovan Karadzic.

Zameticas self-interest is amply evident in his monograph. Politics and itsparticipants are represented solely in ethnic and religious terms, with specialattention paid to the strong streak of clericalism in the Muslim Party,34 and thenegative resonances supposedly to be found in Izetbegovic s Islamic Declaration,points which Zametica provided for OBallances argument. All of this is wrappedup by the observation that there was nothing secular in Izetbegovics outlook, andthe 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 Bosnias troubles until the EC offer of internationalrecognition, which it claims provided the deadly catalyst for the Bosniandnouement.36 While the result of the elections is said to have produced a power-sharing arrangement which furthered the notions of constitutional equality centralto Titos Yugoslavia, whereby decisions that affected national groups could not betaken without the consent of those groups, Zametica argues that the situation afterthe end of 1991 violated this important code: Once the MuslimCroat coalitionmade an effective attempt to hijack Bosnia-Herzegovina through the dubiouslegitimacy of a referendum, followed by international recognition, it brushed aside

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29 Ibid., pp. viii, ix, x.30 Ibid., pp. xi, 245.31 Ibid., pp. 2456.32 Zametica, Yugoslav Conflict, p. 75.33 Ibid., p. 76.34 Ibid., p. 37.35 Ibid., pp. 389.36 Ibid., p. 38.

to its own perilthe only principle which in the past held the republic together: theconstitutional equality of all three constituent nations.37 Zametica was therereferring to the EC-mandated referendum which was a prerequisite for internationalrecognition. But if that was contrary to constitutional equality, could not the samebe said of the exclusive Bosnian Serb referendum held three months earlier? Or anyof the Serbian autonomist initiatives in the period prior to that? Or those of theCroat community? Not surprisingly, these events are absent from Zameticasmonograph. Had they been considered, it would not have been possible to speak ofone side hijacking the republic to the detriment of the others.

Zametica, however, is not the only one to maintain that in these mattersculpability rests with the Bosnian Government. In Broken Bonds, the inflections ofCohens narrative clearly assign responsibility. In the context of the Bosnianpresidency requesting the diplomatic recognition that the EC had offered, Cohenargues that Izetbegovic ignored Serbian protests, went ahead irrespective of Serbianfears, and thus contributed to heightening the anxiety of Bosnian Serb leaders,which Cohen describes as perfectly understandable. The referendum which the ECrequired 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 ECrecognition came precisely on April 6, 1992, the anniversary of the date in 1941 thatthe Germans bombed Belgrade, added insult to injury.39 But like Zameticas andOBallances narratives, Cohens pays no attention to the prior unilateral Serb andCroat initiatives to wrest sovereignty from Bosnia. Moreover, his representation ofthe political participants in the conflict, including the Bosnian Government, asethnic delegations engaged in a savage ethnic and political conflict on the territoryof the former Yugoslavia, effects certain claims concerning legitimacy.40

Like OBallances account of the civil war, Cohens argument recurs to notions ofhistorical hatred to try and make sense of the conflict and explain why internationalrecognition would not put a dampener on the crisis. Although he argues that thevarious ethnoreligious groups had maintained some sense of coexistence underTitos authoritarianism, intense latent hatred and psychological distance existedamong the various groups. Indeed, glib media claims about good group relationswere said by Cohen to [have] seriously misjudged the real situation of underlyinginterethnic animosities. All this meant that in 1992 and 1993 the fighting in Bosniawas especially violent because, just as half a century earlier, the citizens wereintent on settling accounts of centuries of hatred .41

Explaining how this cycle of violence came about is a task, says Cohen, forsystematic psychological research. And while all nationalist political leaderswhipped up hatred and intolerance, the historically conditioned proclivities of largesegments of each ethnoreligious community . . . to embrace programs of aggressivenationalism must also be taken into account. This is not, argues Cohen (impressionsto the contrary notwithstanding), to suggest that the fighting was a spontaneouscontinuation of history. Accounts which focus only on peaceful coexistence orpermanent hatred are equally blind to the regions complex pattern of ethnic

270 David Campbell

37 Ibid., pp. 37, 3940.38 Cohen, Broken Bonds, pp. 242, 243.39 Ibid., p. 245.40 Ibid., pp. 260, xvii.41 Ibid., p. 245.

relations and reciprocal fear.42 Nonetheless, Cohen is adamant that attention mustbe focused on the important historical factors that have conditioned Balkan andSouth Slav political life.43

Paul Mojzes Yugoslavian Inferno, though sensitive to the political implications ofthe civil war versus international conflict narratives, nonetheless promotes aparticular reading of history which favours the former over the latter.44 Mojzesspecific concern is to consider the significance of religion for the region and theconflict. Hence his choice of title: Inferno suggests a situation of real andsymbolic 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 fromhell is by no means assured.45 Later in the book, Mojzes stresses that the fear andhatred-induced acts that brought about the war cannot be explained rationally. Theywere evoked by human destructiveness and self-centredness. Sinfulness andintransigence are at the motivating core of the war.46

The irrationality of the Balkan cataclysm is a product for Mojzes of a number ofhistorical and psychological dispositions. Historically, he notes that the Balkaneconomies are perpetual war economies with no tradition of nonviolent resistanceor pacifism.47 A long-established situation of colonial dependency has meant thatthe peoples of the Balkans, now that they are in a position to take charge of theirdestiny, act belatedly like juvenile delinquents.48 As a result, psychologically thepeople oscillate between extremes, with little propensity for moderation, manifest acultural norm of revenge, and exhibit the character traits of obstinacy, stubbornness,loathing, and inflexibility.49 In consequence, life in the Balkans has never beenintrinsically respected, because the individual is relatively unimportant in acollectivist climate.50

With the conflict overdetermined in this manner, it is not surprising to note thatYugoslavian Inferno is largely uninterested in the historical and political fieldsignified by the chronology. Mojzes does, however, list a number of seculardevelopments central to the conflictthe unresolved national question, politiciansmanipulating nationalism, and intellectuals providing the rationalization for it beingthe key threewhich he regards as comprising a hierarchy of culpability.51 Theyderive their responsibility from the fact that ethnic nationalism has been the pre-eminent historical force in the Balkans throughout the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies.52 This combination of historical determination and political volition leadsMojzes to a general conclusion. This accursed land, he writes, was always prone totectonic collisions . . . and those who have reignited the ethnoreligious hatreds havehurled entire nations into the inferno.53

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42 Ibid., pp. 2467.43 Ibid., p. 331.44 Mojzes, Yugoslavian Inferno, pp. 8791.45 Ibid., p. xv.46 Ibid., p. 153.47 Ibid., p. 41.48 Ibid., p. 52.49 Ibid., pp. 43, 501.50 Ibid., p. 60.51 Ibid., pp. 15275.52 Ibid., p. 83.53 Ibid., p. 86.

The orientalism of Mojzes argument is all the more extraordinary given thepersonal reflections he offers at the beginning of his book. Mojzes recognizes themany contradictory narratives about the conflict, but argues that the interpret-ations vary according to the background of the author. Serbian authors tend towrite pro-Serbian narratives, Croatians pro-Croatian, Muslims pro-Muslim, and soforth.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 heoffers, we find he was born in Croatia to a religious but non-nationalist family, wasraised in Serbia, but considered himself a Yugoslav, admiring Titos socialist policiesof brotherhood and unity. Even more astonishingly, he then reject[s] the notion thatwe are determined by our pastnot in spite of being an historian but because I aman historian.55 It seems, in a somewhat contradictory manner, that what applies tohim does not apply to the Balkans (at least in his argument), and while the past isnot personally determinate, ethnicity nonetheless governs interpretations.

Personal authorizations for narratives on the conflict in former Yugoslavia are notuncommon. In The Yugoslav Drama, Mihailo Crnobrnja writes from the perspectiveof a Yugoslav ambassador to the EC who served during the conflict. Cast in fourpartsthe stage, the actors, the plot, and the final curtainCrnobrnjas account is astory of national awakening and the victory of aggressive nationalism.56 As such,and particularly in the case of the Bosnian conflictwhere it was a confrontationamong three ethnic communities within a state that has been internationallyrecognisedCrnobrnja argues it is not possible to understand the conflict as aninternational war. It might not have been civil in so far as it was ethnic, but it wasat the beginning no more than an internal confrontation of the people of onecountry.57

Whether that one country was Yugoslavia or Bosnia does not matter forCrnobrnja, because the issue was whether either could avoid the ugly virus ofaggressive nationalism.58 Once the former had unravelled, the latter was imperilled.The danger came not from any pseudo-naturalistic working out of history orhatredsfor all ethnic groups had lived together for centuries without warring witheach otherbut from the political ambitions of the representatives of thosegroups.59 Unlike Mojzes Yugoslavian Inferno, therefore, Crnobrnjas The YugoslavDrama pays attention to some of the key political developments within Bosnia in therun-up to large-scale fighting in April 1992.

Crnobrnjas invocation of those events, however, is not designed to discriminatebetween sides. While OBallances Civil War in Bosnia, Zameticas The YugoslavConflict, and Cohens Broken Bonds ignore these and other such events as a means ofdirecting responsibility for the ethnic conflict towards the (so-called) Muslims, andIzetbegovic in particular, Crnobrnja does not seek to redress the balance by utilizingthe events to reassign responsibility. This supports the contention that the events donot, in and by themselves, give rise to a particular interpretation. Rather, The

272 David Campbell

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 bymaking a particular judgment: that all ethnic groups played an equal part.60

This forced impartiality is central to Crnobrnjas argument, and figures in anumber of subsequent places. For example, after noting that it is difficult to establishwho gave the orders for ethnic cleansing operations, he declares that the entirechain of command, up to and including the principal leadersMilosevic, Tudjmanand Izetbegovicbears heavy responsibility for not putting an end to thesegruesome methods of cleansing and for not publicly denouncing them.61

When Crnobrnja departs from his strategy of treating all sides equally regardless,it is to redress what he sees as the bias of Western media which set out to reportonly on Serb brutality in the first place. Serb atrocities were more visible, Crnobrnjaargues, because although Croats and Muslims engaged in similar atrocities, Serbshad conquered a larger territory.62 That this greater conquest was the product of adisproportionate level of violence, rather than an unrelated outcome which simplyheightened visibility, seems not to have disturbed the author of The YugoslavDrama. Indeed, the Serbs right to an amount of territory well beyond theirproportion of the population (which was how it was usually calculated) is justifiedby Crnobrnja as flowing from the proportion of Bosnias rural territory on whichthey farmed.63

In coming to terms with the Bosnian conflict, a common attitude, when one facesthe limited options of civil war or international aggression, is to avoid a decisionand argue either that it is a combination of the two or that a focus on one to theexclusion of the other is a half-truth. Bogdan Denitchs Ethnic Nationalism evinces asimilar ambivalence. On the one hand, he talks of the second Yugoslavia (194591)being murdered rather than simply ending, and argues that the leaders of Serbiaand Croatia are tearing apart and partitioning Bosnia-Herzegovina, a sovereignmember of the United Nations.64 On the other hand, he speaks of a civil war.65

Denitchs essay, which is concerned with the rise and use of ethnic nationalism inYugoslavia as a basis for considering the general relationship between nationalismand democracy, contains other equivocations. While he favours a focus on thepolitical manipulation of ethnicity and nationalism, and thus seeks to avoid thedeterminism of a Balkan character or history which runs counter to such anargument, Denitch nonetheless gestures towards the latter position by talking of aRip Van Winkle [which] staggered back to life in 1989 and has had a desperatelydifficult time in trying to catch up with the long lost years. He argues that it is as ifall the predemocratic political movements, folkish sentiments, populist prejudices,and vaguely religious nationalist identities had been preserved in amber during thelong years of Communist power in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.66

Denitchs concern is less with the political history of the Yugoslav conflict and itsBosnian manifestation, and more with the thematic consequences pertaining toethnicity, nationalism, multiculturalism, and democracy it suggests. His main objectof concern, therefore, is the way in which the political construction of the demos has

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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.

been limited to claims about the supremacy of the ethnos. This exclusivistcategorization is a problem because, although he is suspicious of essentialist talkabout mentalities, he sees ethnicity as being something ascribed (you are born withit or you are not) rather than acquired, like citizenship.67

Denitch introduces one interpretation of the conflict not found elsewhere. Heargues that the war and its promotion of nationalism as collective identity can beseen as a response to the collapse of the old universalisms associated withCommunist rule. In the face of this red meat of the organic, authenticHeideggerian national community the cool, legal and rational democraticuniversalism has been insufficiently powerful.68 As such, the conflict has been apostmodern, disintegrative war of particularisms against both the reality andimagery of an orderly if repressive modern society.69 This has been made possible,Denitch argues, by a retreat from rationalism which has enabled both a paranoidpolitical culture and the emergence of irregular Yugoslav paramilitaries who sharecultural links with German skinheads and French racists. This post-rational,postmodern condition has been fostered by a consumer culture which devalues andreplaces boring cool valueslike tolerance and democracywith hot valueslike ethnic identity and possessive individualism.70

Understanding the Yugoslav conflicts as instances of civil and/or ethnic wardoes not necessarily result in responsibility being shared equally by all parties to thefighting. Sabrina Petra Ramets Balkan Babel, which figures the struggle in thatmanner, is a good example of the way in which this common interpretive focus canproduce different accounts of the historical field. Although, as a revised collection ofpreviously published essays, this book does not have the narrative coherence andpurpose of a more integrated text, the introduction nonetheless leaves the readerwith little doubt as to its pre-eminent concern. While noting it is not the only sourceof instability, Ramet declares that since 1918, there has been a constant tensionbetween Serbs and non-Serbs in this polyglot country, as Serbs have repeatedly triedto Serbianize and/or dominate the non-Serbs, and non-Serbs have doggedly foughtsuch domination. This struggle between Serbs and non-Serbs lies at the heart of theinstability for which Yugoslavia was famous.71

This struggle, however, is not located simply in the political domain, and Rametsgreatest contribution is in drawing attention to the other sites in which it is located.As she notes in the conclusion, this book has argued that political dynamics arereflected in, and even adumbrated by, changes in the cultural sphere and that thereligious sphere underpins and legitimizes actions and decisions taken in the politicalsphere. The political, cultural and religious spheres do not exist apart from eachother; they are, rather, organic parts of a religio-politico-cultural system in whichactivity in one part has intentions, reflections, and consequences in other parts.72

274 David Campbell

67 Ibid., pp. 136, 141.68 Ibid., p. 128.69 Ibid., p. 72.70 Ibid., p. 73. In this link between the condition of global cultures and the conflict in the Balkans,

Denitch shares affinities with Stjepan G. Mestrovic, The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence ofPostmodernism and Postcommunism (London, 1994). Mestrovics book is difficult to fathom, given itsconfused conceptual apparatus, but it does contain provocative insights into the role played by theWests fear of balkanization in conditioning a response to the war.

71 Ramet, Balkan Babel, p. 1.72 Ibid., p. 320.

Ramets understanding of the civil or domestic domain is thus inherently morecomplex than narratives which restrict themselves to an institutional politicalregister. Her detailed concern with gender relations, cultural products such as musicand literature, the media, and religious practices (which includes the important pointthat Yugoslav society was progressively secularized, to such an extent that levels ofbelief were well below those reported in the United States) demonstrates thecomplexity of social and political life in former Yugoslavia, so often overlooked byother narratives operating within a civil frame. In the end, of course, none of thisdiminishes the imputation of Serbian responsibility her work clearly carries.

Ramets account of the Bosnian conflict begins with a reversal of the argumentthat interethnic conflict in the republic was persistent. Employing a historicalgeneralization common to those who wish to challenge Serb policy withoutdisturbing the parameters of their analysis, Ramet argues that Muslims, Serbs andCroats had lived in peace for most of the 500 years they cohabited in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The intercommual violence that accompanied World War II was animportant deviation from this pattern, but even then the situation was complicated.Shattering this peace required, therefore, the sowing of seeds of hatred, for whichthe Serbian Orthodox Church certainly deserves credit. Arguing that a sense ofBosnianness began to unravel in the latter half of the 1980s, Ramet points to theopening events of the chronology to shift responsibility for the fracture fromIzetbegovic to the Bosnian Serbs.73

Whereas narratives such as Cohens and OBallances downplay or ignore Serbianinitiatives to establish autonomy so as to make their reaction appear defensive,Ramets concern with those events achieves the reverse and casts the BosnianGovernment and the republic as subject to pressure and seeking recognition forsecurity. To underscore who was pursuing ethnic exclusivism, Ramet points out thatafter sovereignty was granted by the international community, the UN and ECmediators, along with the Western media, began to treat the Bosnian government asif it represented only Muslims, even though, as of 12 February 1993, the Bosniancabinet still included six Serbs and five Croats, alongside nine Muslims.74 Suchreminders were necessary, Ramet argues, because the inability or unwillingness todistinguish between the parties means everything is relativized to the point whereeveryone becomes equally guilty. In consequence, the only rational response seems,to relativists, to be total indifference or studied evenhandedness.75

Relativist hesitations of the kind opposed by Ramet are not to be found in thosenarratives which view the Bosnian conflict as an instance of international aggres-sion. Christopher Bennetts Yugoslavias Bloody Collapse opens with a story wherebythe author relates his experience of being mugged on the London Underground toBosnia and Croatias fate after 1991: they, too, have been assaulted by a powerfuland deranged assailant, wielding not only a knife but also an array of sophisticatedweaponry.76 The identity of the international assailant is not much in doubt. But incase it was, Bennett makes it clear in his chapter on Bosnia. Noting that the electionsof 1990 produced a coalition government, he writes that had the fate of Bosnia-

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73 Ibid., p. 243.74 Ibid., p. 248.75 Ibid., p. 259.76 Bennett, Yugoslavias Bloody Collapse, p. vii.

Hercegovina been left to Bosnians there was still a chance that they could have cometo an understanding among themselves. But it was not left to Bosnia and conflictwas imported from outside, principally from Serbia.77

To establish that this is the case, Bennett refers to all the initiatives undertaken byBosnian Serbs to undermine the sovereignty of the new republic, noting that theyreplicated strategies already used to good effect in the war against Croatia.78 A goodnumber of these same events are discussed in Crnobrnjas The Yugoslav Drama. Butthere they function as part of an argument which attributes responsibility to threeconstituent groups equally. In contrast, Bennett reads these events as local evidenceof the overall plan for a Greater Serbia: the Yugoslav wars were not theconsequence of an unfortunate series of events and misunderstandings, but of acalculated attempt to forge a Greater Serbia out of Yugoslavia.79 Moreover, hehighlights the significance of discussing these events in this manner: though Serbapologists consider the recognition of Bosnia-Hercegovina the spark which ignitedthe conflict, this explanation ignores the order of events. The war had already begunbefore the international community recognised Bosnia-Hercegovina; the events werenot the other way around.80

Whereas OBallances narrative placed Izetbegovic at the critical centre, forBennett 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 asingle man, Slobodan Milosevic.81 That militant Serbs set out in a blitzkrieg-styleoperation to exterminate the non-Serb population as well as any Serbs who refusedto go along with the Greater Serbian vision of the republics future meant thatMilosevic could, in an invocation of the politically resonant and culturally powerfulWorld War II script, only be compared to Hitler, and the international communitysresponse could only be compared to Europes in the 1930s.82

If there is one event that anchors a narrative of Serb nationalisms responsibilityand Milosevics complicity, it is his statement to Kosovo Serbs in April 1987. It setsthe scene for Silber and Little in The Death of Yugoslavia, an account which sharesthe premise of Bennetts Yugoslavias Bloody Collapse, albeit phrased more mildly.One of the central themes of our book, the authors write, is that under Milosevicsstewardship, the Serbs were, from the beginning of Yugoslavias disintegration, thekey secessionists. This is not to say that Milosevic was uniquely malign or solelyguilty. The foot soldiers of Yugoslavias march to war were legion and were drawnfrom all nationalities in the country.83

The great virtue of The Death of Yugoslavia is its rich reportage of the complexityof the Yugoslav conflicts. To support their central contention, Silber and Little areable to deploy from their copious interviews indigenous political voices to maketheir points. Thus we hear Ivan Stambolic , the Serbian President ousted by

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77 Ibid, pp. 1823.78 Ibid., p. 183.79 Ibid., p. 238.80 Ibid., pp. 1878.81 Ibid., p. 247.82 Ibid., pp. 2434, 245.83 Silber and Little, Death of Yugoslavia, p. 26. This phrasing marked a change from the first edition,

which declared more boldly that if our book has a single core thesis, its this: that under Milosevicsstewardship, the Serbs were, from the beginning of Yugoslavias disintegration, the key secessionists.Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (London, 1995), p. xxiv.

Milosevic, declare that Milosevics populist methods were the red rag to the bull ofother nationalisms. When the biggest nation begins to wave flags, the smaller nationswere obviously afraid.84 Although the Serb leadership is centre stage, their Croatiancounterparts are not exonerated in the same way Bennett dismisses Tudjman as nomore than a scapegoat for the countrys disintegration. The telling case of JosipReihl-Kir, the moderate Croat police chief in Slavonia, is testament to this. Kir wasunable to prevent an April 1991 military raid organized by Gojko Susak designed toprovoke conflict around Borovo Selo, a Serb village near Vukovar. Nonetheless,because of this and other efforts at moderation, he was assassinated by his politicalcompatriots. As Silber and Little conclude, it is a striking commentary on thedirection in which Croatia was moving during those crucial weeks leading to theoutbreak of full-scale war, that Kirs moderation, his conciliatory approaches to theSerbs, had cost him his life, while Susaks activities, stoking tension and provokingconflict, were to win him one of the most prominent places in Tudjmansgovernment [as Defence Minister] .85

The Death of Yugoslavia also contains important points which question thosecivil war narratives, like Cohens, which emphasize credible Serb fears as a rationalefor their actions. Although the insensitivities of the Croatian authorities in relationto the Krajina Serbs are well documented by Silber and Little, they nonethelesspoint out that Lord Carringtons 1991 peace plan contained important initiativeswhich could have accommodated the interests of Serb communities in Croatia andBosnia. In a similar vein, Silber and Little offer an account of Izetbegovics religiousconvictions and political aspirations markedly different from OBallances orZameticas. According to Silber and Little, Izetbegovics Islamic Declaration was awork of scholarship, not politics, intended to promote philosophical discourseamong Muslims. In it, he excluded the use of violence in the creation of a Muslimstate, 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 itis 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 thoseevents are still read in terms of the narratives central plot of the Serbs being theprimary secessionists. But it does mean that it is superior to less complete andobviously more partial narratives, such as OBallances, and the contrasting butequally particular account of Bennett.

Susan Woodwards Balkan Tragedy is even more comprehensive than Silber andLittles account. Although it shares with The Death of Yugoslavia a concern for theinternational context and dimension of the conflict, the understanding of theinternational employed by Woodwards narrative is somewhat different. Woodwardsinitial concern is to differentiate Balkan Tragedy both from arguments that focus onthe conflict as a war of aggression committed by one state (Serbia) against another(Bosnia)the interpretation which Woodward identifies with the US Governmentand from accounts which stress that the Yugoslav and Bosnian conflicts constituteda civil war based on the revival of ethnic conflict after the fall of communisma

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84 Silber and Little, Death of Yugoslavia, revised edn, p. 47.85 Ibid., p. 144.86 Ibid., pp. 2089.

view more common in Europe and Canada, Woodward notes.87 Instead, BalkanTragedy aims to demonstrate the manner in which the Yugoslav conflict isinseparable from international change and interdependence, such that it is notsomething confined to the Balkans but is part of a more widespread phenomenonof political disintegration.88 As a result, Woodward writes that the story recordedand analysed in this book begins a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall, whenthe economic austerity and reforms required by a foreign debt crisis triggered a slidetowards political disintegration.89

Woodward notes that insofar as the Yugoslav conflict has been understood as aninstance of a more general phenomenon, this has been done in terms of ethnicconflict, whether internally generated or externally sourced.90 Woodward has nodoubt 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 attentionfrom the immediate causes, Woodward wants to articulate real origins andfundamental issues of the conflict. For Balkan Tragedy these are to be found at theintersection of domestic upheavals brought on by transformations in the Europeanand international orders. This involves the collapse of states, the problematicmeaning of national self-determination in relation to human rights and borders, andthe process of incorporating (or excluding) former socialist states into the West.91

More specifically, Woodward maintains the real origin of the Yugoslav conflict liesin the politics of transforming a socialist society to a market economy anddemocracy and the way in which that meant for Yugoslavia the disintegration ofgovernmental authority and the breakdown of political and civil order whichresulted in the collapse of the Yugoslav state.92

The argument in Balkan Tragedy rests on an economic logic allegedly common tothe dynamic of disintegration evident in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, the SovietUnion, and Czechoslovakia in 198991.93 Nationalist politics is said to have emergedin those areas closer to and more integrated with Western markets, and to have beenpushed by politicians in those wealthier regions who had support from Westernsources for their reforms. However, once this drive overflowed into areas less able tocope with the austerity measures required by liberalization strategies, adversepolitical consequences associated with personal insecurities and social anomieemerged.94

Whether such a causal mechanism can comprehensively account for the numerousdevelopments examined in the study is a matter of judgment. After all, if economicdeprivation is what fuels nationalist politics, why (as the argument claims) doesnationalist politics emerge in the first instance in regions of relative affluence?Moreover, a reliance on an economic logic of this kind diminishes the insightfulanalysis Woodward offers with respect, for example, to the way the politics of

278 David Campbell

87 Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 7. Despite this move, some have read Woodwards account as deeplysympathetic to Serbian nationalism. See Attila Hoare, An Ideological Ally for Belgrade, BosniaReport, 15 (1996), pp. 1011.

88 Ibid., p. 3.89 Ibid., p. 4.90 Ibid., p. 14.91 Ibid., p. 13.92 Ibid., pp. 15, 378.93 Ibid., pp. 34950.94 Ibid., p. 35.

national self-determination governed both indigenous and international strategies(see chapters seven and nine). There can be no doubt, though, that Balkan Tragedyis right to correct the lack of attention to the regional and global political economyoffered in other accounts, with chapter three being a detailed account of theconditions which preceded and embraced the conflict. Similarly, the thoroughconsideration of the prewar bases of stability in Yugoslav society in chapter twoputs paid to the clich that it was either the iron hand of Tito or the firm lid ofCommunism that suppressed tensions. Woodwards analysis demonstrates that thecountry was not held together by Titos charisma, political dictatorship, orrepression of national sentiments but by a complex balancing act at the inter-national level and an extensive system of rights and overlapping sovereignties.95

However, given Balkan Tragedys fundamental concern with the economic logicapparent in the dynamic of disintegration, its account of the Bosnian conflict is,despite attention to many of the same events as The Death of Yugoslavia, somewhatdifferent from Silber and Littles narrative. Although Woodward also deals withevents that encompass autonomist moves in her narrative, they function not asthreats to one side or another, but rather as manifestations of the politics ofnational self-determination enabled by the larger context of disintegration andtransformation. This is most obvious in the sustained attention that Balkan Tragedyalone pays to the establishment of Croatian enclaves within Bosnia. As a result ofthis different treatment, Woodward concludes, in contrast to the emphasis in Silberand Littles core thesis, that the Serbian leadership in Belgrade was only one of theparticipants aiming to create national states in a territory that was nationally mixedand contested. Nor were the Serbs as unified as their slogan proclaimed.96

Pursuing a different objectivity

The question how one goes about making a judgment as to which narrative of theBosnian War is better raises the thorniest of historiographys issues. While it is notdifficult to argue that one should give greater credence to those accounts which aremore comprehensive, or more self-reflexive about their own presuppositions andtheir impact on the representation of particular events, in the end the above reviewdemonstrates that the basic point of Whites argument holds. Events in a chronologydo 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 benarrated in different ways (or overlooked entirely), often to support contradictoryconclusions. The consequence of that, uncomfortable though it may be, is that arecourse to the historical record will not by itself resolve the issue of which is betteror worse.

Which is not to argue that objectivity is totally pass. What we need to thinkthrough is an understanding of objectivity that is far removed from the logic ofpositivism. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche sets forth a spirited defence of a

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95 Ibid., p. 45.96 Ibid., p. 334.

different objectivity which might address that concern. He outlines an approach toknowledge that can embrace the necessity of perspectivism without submitting tothe oft-feared consequences of abandoning objectivisms illusion:

precisely because we seek knowledge, let us not be ungrateful to such resolute reversals ofaccustomed perspectives and valuations with which the spirit has . . . raged against itself forso long: to see differently in this way for once, to want to see differently, is no small disciplineand preparation of the intellect for its future objectivitythe latter understood not ascontemplation without interest (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability tocontrol ones Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a varietyof perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge. Henceforth, my dearphilosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited apure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject; let us guard against the snares of suchcontradictory concepts as pure reason, absolute spirituality, knowledge in itself : thesealways demand that we should think of an eye turned in no particular direction, in which theactive and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, aresupposed to be lacking: these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There isonly a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing; and the more affects we allow to speakabout one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the morecomplete will our concept of this thing, our objectivity be. But to eliminate the willaltogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of thiswhat wouldthat mean but to castrate the intellect?97

The narratives on Bosnia which this essay has examined, even if they think ofthemselves as being objectivist enterprises, manifest the unavoidable perspectivism ofpolitical representations. But for all their differences, they are united in materializingan ethnically ordered Bosnia to the detriment of understandings which might havebeen more politicizing.98 This is evident in the constant citation of the 1991 censusstatistics for Yugoslavia that predominate in the narratives.99 These numbers writeBosnia as 44% Muslim, 31% Serb, 17% Croat, 6% Yugoslav, with a smallremainder. The effect is to establish these markers of identity above all others associally salient, and assume that they obscure no other complexities. The result isthat ethnic divisions are posited as the community fault-lines around which politicsin Bosnia has revolved and will inevitably revolve. Such a conclusion effectivelyattributes 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 inYugoslavia would contest large elements of this picture, one cannot deny that themobilization of ethnicitya category about which a good many anthropologists(but sadly few political scientists or International Relations scholars) have grave

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97 Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (NewYork, 1989), p. 119.

98 This is pivotal to the widely held and structured way of seeing Bosnia. For a discussion of a way ofseeing which disturbs the geopolitical eye, see Gearid . Thuathail (Gerard Toal), An Anti-geopolitical Eye: Maggie OKane in Bosnia, 199293, Gender, Place and Culture, 3 (1996), pp.17185.

99 See Bennett, Yugoslavias Bloody Collapse, p. 180; Cohen, Broken Bonds, pp. 139, 241; Crnobrnja,Yugoslav Drama, p. 22; Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism, pp. 289; Mojzes, Yugoslavian Inferno, p. 33;OBallance, Civil War in Bosnia, p. vii; Ramet, Balkan Babel, pp. 1, 186, 244; Silber and Little, Deathof Yugoslavia, p. 231; Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, pp. 325; Zametica, Yugoslav Conflict, p. 36.

doubtshas been pivotal to the Bosnian War.100 But there is some distance betweenthe latter point and the unquestioning acceptance of the political effects of such arepresentation that most narratives are seemingly happy with. More work in thisregard is clearly needed; new perspectives cognizant of the politics of representationand responsibility are urgently required.

In the end it is perhaps beyond the capacity of any single narrative to provide thebest account. Nietzsches remonstration that objectivity is best served by thepluralization of perspectives, with an attentiveness to the politics of theirproduction, is a timely reminder that only through the clash of competing narrativesare we likely to assemble justifiable knowledge. Continual contestation, rather thanthe aspirations of synthesis and totality, should be the aim of inquiry.

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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 ofthat year made the significant categorical switch to Muslims in the ethnic sense. This transformationof the census then culminated in 1971 with the category Muslim being a distinct and equalnationality. Anthony Borden, The Bosnians: A War on Identity (London, 1993), pp. 45. Silber andLittle, Death of Yugoslavia, p. 229, argue the nationalization of Muslim is not complete until the1974 constitution. For reflections on the problematic character of Bosnian/Muslim in contemporarydiscourse, see Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, pp. 298302; and Norman Fairclough, Mainly Muslim:Discourse and Barbarism in Bosnia, Discourse and Society, 5 (1994), pp. 4312. The best singleaccount of the complexities of Muslim identities in Bosnia can be found in Tone Bringasethnography, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way (Princeton, NJ, 1995).