Tackling the virus of nationalism. By SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
Slavenka Drakulić
has spent much of her career reflecting on what happened in Yugoslavia in the
1990's - and how difficult it is to combat the ‘nationalist virus’ - in books
like Balkan Express (1993), As If I Am Not There (1999) and They Would Not
Hurt a Fly (2004). In the light of developments in Spain, she spoke to Spanish
online newspaper El Confidencial about the potential dangers in the Catalan
crisis.
Ángel Villarino
(interviewer for El
Confidencial): In
1984, Yugoslavia seemed to be one of the best countries to live in Eastern
Europe. Living standards were similar or even better than in Spain. Sarajevo
hosted the Winter Olympics and, at least from the outside, it looked like the
country was doing relatively well. Serbs, Croats, Slovenes lived together and ‘ethnic
tension’ was something that only happened in soccer stadiums. Nobody predicted
then what was to happen just a few years later. The combination of economic
crisis and nationalism has a destructive power that can take effect very fast.
How was this made possible? Did anyone see it coming in Yugoslavia?
Slavenka Drakulić: Nobody saw it, nobody believed it
possible. But the truth is that
it did not happen very fast. Conflicts and wars do not, as a rule, happen
overnight, even if it looks like that from the outside. It is enough, for
example, to see how it happened in Germany, for example by reading Viktor
Klemperer’s book I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years,
1933-1941. There he describes a series of small steps in the discrimination
against Jews, in turning them into Others. It took years and years, and it
began by forbidding them to use public transport, buy flowers or visit a
barber, then forcing them to wear a yellow star, then… the Holocaust.
In ex-Yugoslavia it
took at least five years to whip up nationalist propaganda, homogenize people
into national groups and prepare for violent conflict. It actually started with
Slobodan Milošević climbing to power in Serbia and with apartheid in Kosovo in
the eighties. In that sense, one could say that the rise of Croatian
nationalism was a response to its Serbian counterpart, especially after the
Serbian minority in Croatia proclaimed its autonomy. After that, Milošević,
with the Yugoslav People’s Army, felt he could attack Croatia.
How was it at the very
beginning? How did the situation start to become critical?
The media were crucial
in this process of creating the enemy. My colleagues – journalists and writers,
intellectuals and academics – were willing participants in the nationalist
propaganda; they were either true believers or opportunists. You have to know
that, learning from history, you must first identify the enemy. This is what
nationalist propaganda is all about. It is easier if there is an historical
enemy, if there were earlier conflicts that you can built on – like WWII in the
case of Serbs and Croats. With the help of elements of history (‘ancient
enemies’) plus myths and half-truths, you can create an explosive emotional
mixture. Ideology, it seems, can overcome economic interest and reason. We all
underestimate the power of emotions. At the bottom of these emotions is fear,
fear that ‘the enemy’ would, in this case, take your territory. If the
nationalist propaganda manages to create fear in people, then the main step
towards the conflict is taken, the main obstacle overcome.
After the first
bloodshed, the conflict becomes real. The smell of blood is the trigger for the
real confrontation. But even that is not real war, because at the beginning the
victims are few, so they are still individuals: we know their names. My
definition of war is that it starts when there are so many victims that we no
longer know their names. War starts when victims become anonymous.
My impression is
that when a conflict breaks out, middle-ground positions – those of the
peacemakers – are the first to be silenced. It’s exactly what is going on in
Spain. Did this happen in Yugoslavia?
It is what war does to
an individual: it forces you to take sides. By then it is already too late for
peacemakers. Peacemakers are usually silenced before a conflict begins, and
indeed that is usually an omen of approaching problems. What I find interesting
is that in Yugoslavia there was not enough opposition to the looming conflict.
I think there were at least two reasons for that. One was the very nature of
the non-democratic, authoritarian society we lived in, which prevented the
development of a civil society. Yugoslavia was a country without developed
political alternatives like in other countries – Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia. The other was the fact that my generation, born in the late
forties and early fifties, should have done the job. But we were spoiled and
satisfied with crumbs like the freedom to travel abroad, a better standard of
living, etc. My generation was the last to believe in socialism. We, as opposed
to our peers in the Soviet bloc countries I just mentioned, did not feel enough
repression to create a democratic political alternative or leaders like Lech
Wałęsa, Adam Michnik or Václav Havel. The point is this:
when nationalism appeared on the political scene, there was no real
alternative.
In ex-Yugoslavia
most families had relatives in other countries. They were so mixed and still
they turned against each other. What triggered that? How did people suffer from
this?
Yugoslavia was a
federal country, a mixture of nations...read more:
see also
