‘Ethnic Unmixing’ and the Quest for Stability in the Balkans

Abstract

International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship, New York. The author would like to thank Phil Triadafilopoulos and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Parts of this article were presented at a conference on ethnic minorities, Humboldt University, Berlin, June 2001. These difficulties [of peacemaking] are made more acute by the fact that the things we have to think about are so unreal to us. We are feeding on maps, talking of populations as if they were abstract lumps, and turning our minds to a scale unheard of in history. To how many of us does the word Slovak convey the picture of fathers and mothers and children, of human beings with habits and personalities as intimate as our own? Even to highly cultivated people the word Slovak probably calls up the association of 'light pink patches with diagonal shading' somewhere in bewildering Austria-Hungary. Walter Lippmann(1)TWO CONTRADICTORY TRENDS have dominated the political history of twentieth century Europe: the absolute evil of mass extermination and faith in the correctibility of human conduct. The killing of 1914-18 was followed by a settlement that mixed revenge with a utopian belief in the perfectibility of social interaction and offered institutions designed on that basis. The unprecedented, engineered annihilation of entire peoples in the 1940s prompted the proscription of behaviour that even under conditions of industrial mass warfare seemed an outrage against mankind.These crimes against humanity occasioned the regulation and codification of norms whose validity was held to be universal and did not depend upon specific social, cultural, or political settings. The affirmation of universal human rights, the proscription of wholesale slaughter, the right to self-determination of peoples, and the de-legitimization of war as an instrument of policy were the principles enshrined in the post-war settlements of 1918 and 1945 and in the institutional arrangements set up to preserve them; they seemed finally to triumph with the end of the communist domination of eastern Europe in 1989.Yet the twentieth century ended in massacre and expulsion once again. In a fitting conclusion to the post-1945 vision of human rights and its failure to secure enforcement, the horrors of the wars of Yugoslav succession occurred in full view of a 'powerless' Europe. The question, however, remains: is the human rights revolution - and the triumph of associated values, institutions, and policies - only an illusion?The clash between violent particularism and humanistic universalism with all its contradictions has been especially pronounced in the Balkans. The region has served as an arena for broader pressures and processes, most prominently the ascendancy of nationalism as a guiding principle of moral, social, and political organization. But nationalism ran up against a stubborn persistence of linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity, and the Balkans became the primary battleground between diversity and the modernizing forces of homogenization.In Europe more generally, the period leading up to the First World War was characterized by a project that matched nationalizing states to peoples and territories.(2) Frequently, peoples were caught between unbending nationalism and territorial realities: as the weakest link in the chain, they bore the brunt of the staggering cost accrued in this secular project. Where no march among state, population, and territory existed, it had to be created and enforced; where assimilation proved impossible, the result was expulsion or massacre. These were the options offered by the iron law of political development: 'minorities within nation-states must sooner or later be either assimilated or liquidated.'(3)This article examines the shifting response by the great powers to this process of state formation, a process whose specific forms are by no means predetermined. …