Siyue Tang
Political Thought and Intellectual History
Michaelmas Term, 2024
Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs, 5(2), pp. 70-78

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14289034.

Introduction

Initiated by the Serbian offensive, the Yugoslav Wars have long been viewed as a quintessential case of post-Cold War ethnic warfare. Serbian nationalism has been widely considered the culprit of brutal ethnic cleansing characterising the war. However, substantial debate remains on how ethnic nationalism in Yugoslavia gained such power to incite violence. This article argues that a collective paranoia within the Serbian nationalist narrative incited the extreme ethnic violence in the Yugoslav Wars. It will demonstrate how Serbian nationalism drove the country’s offensive in the Yugoslav Wars by disseminating narratives of imminent genocide, securitising successionist movements, and engendering collective anxiety.

This article focuses on the construction of Serbian identity and its antagonism with outgroup ethnicities. It argues that the origins of the Yugoslav Wars can be located in the nonrational assessment of security threats within ethnic nationalist narratives. By analysing Serbian media and elite statements before and during the conflict, this article will demonstrate that Serbian nationalism was purposefully constructed around historical persecution and impending genocides. By generating rampant paranoia, Serbian nationalism distorted the securitisation process and unravelled Yugoslavia’s structural instabilities into total war.

Studies of ethnic violence have long been dominated by ‘primitivist’ and ‘civilisational’ theories of conflict as based upon ancient grievances or ethnic incompatibilities (Huntington, 1996). However, these explanations leave little room for an investigation into the active construction of modern nationalisms. Furthermore, such studies often struggle to integrate mature theoretical frameworks of structural instabilities, including state capacity, economic conflict, and security structure (McDoom, 2012). This article’s constructivist approach allows a closer examination of the active and intentional creation of nationalist narratives, the epochal reality of structural instabilities, and the nuances of ethnic identification itself.

The first section will attempt to conceptualise ethnic nationalism and ethnicity using a constructivist approach. This approach allows us to explore the organised creation of resentment, fear, and hostilities toward outgroup ethnicities in the ideology of ethnic nationalism. In the second section, the article will confront the older civilisational theories of ethnic nationalism and critique their assumptions about the rigidity of ethnic boundaries. The third section will closely examine the formation of Serbian nationalism and its active role in constructing the Serbian ethnic identity and ethnohistory. Focusing on the central motifs of historical persecution and impending genocides, the article will illustrate how ethnic nationalist narratives polarised social attitudes. Finally, the article will demonstrate how the prevailing narratives of impending genocide and ethnic solidarity led to an inflated perception of security risks and triggered the Yugoslav Wars. This article contributes to the integrative analysis of constructivist and structural realist theories, clarifying understandings of how collective emotions and ethnic identification could direct political responses, inflate security risks, and exploit structural instabilities.

Conceptualising Ethnic Nationalism

In its most literal form, ethnic nationalism is the doctrine that considers ethnicity as the most important criterion for group membership (Snyder, 1993). However, the concept is laden with ambiguities: ethnic allegiance is not naturally derived. Humans have always lived in a multitude of communities and thus possess simultaneously a variety of allegiances (Smith, 1993). This includes affiliation with families, religions, classes, gender groups, and ethnic and national communities. Such allegiances are typically invoked in a situational manner and rarely conflict. To truly command the ethnic group’s devotion, ethnic nationalism must evoke sufficient allegiance to override all other obligations, for example, one’s duty to the state, civic community, or family. Therefore, ethnic nationalism, and especially its excessively violent form in the Yugoslav Wars, should not be understood as a natural dynamic.

Following the constructivist tradition, this article defines ethnic nationalism as a purposefully created set of beliefs on ethnic history, identity, and political allegiance. The ethnic nationalist agenda should be assessed using Anderson’s (2006) framework on ‘imagined political community’. According to Anderson, a nation is imagined by the people who perceive themselves as a part of a shared community. Ethnic community, then, is created and sustained by the conscious construction of a political narrative on ethnic cultures, characters, and histories. Built from the myth of common ancestry, ethnic nationalism creates a specific narrative on the identity of the ethnic people and their enemies (Hassner, 1993). Contemporary political interests are implicit in this disseminated narrative, and the very creation of ethnic community is grounded in political motives (Fearon and Latin, 2003). As such, ethnic nationalism does not concern the awakening of ancient nations to self-consciousness and self-assertion. Instead, it attests to creating new social structures responding to contemporary challenges. In the words of Gellner (1964, p. 169), nationalism, including its ethnic variant, ‘invents nations where they do not exist’.

Against The Civilisational Paradigm

A prevalent perception asserts that ethnic nationalism is the result of ancient grievances and rigid civilisational fault lines. Huntington (1996) argues that the Balkans were destined for violent ethnic conflicts due to their historical position at the confluence of civilisations. Caught between the shifting borders of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, the Balkans were supposedly locked between the civilisational fault lines of Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, and Islamism. Historic rivalries between these civilisations fostered rigid ethnic communities and enduring hostilities. Echoing Huntington’s civilisational paradigm, Kaplan (1993) maintains that the defining divergence between Serbs and Croats could be located within the Catholicism-Orthodoxy rivalry, which was exacerbated in the Second World War. Thus, the wars in Yugoslavia can be understood as a continuum of historical conflicts that erupted since the communist government could no longer keep them under control.

Nevertheless, this conception is hardly applicable to studying the Yugoslav Wars. The view that violent nationalism was somehow ingrained in the Balkans demonstrates a historical ‘cherry picking’ by ignoring the fact that the former Yugoslavia was considered the most liberal communist regime and the first line of potential new members of the European Union (Kaldor, 1999). It also disregards the progress of ethnic emulsion and high intermarriage rates between Serbs and Croats in the decades before the war (Snyder, 1993): even the parties directly responsible for the brutal conflict did not seem to agree on a set of objective ethnic boundaries. Serbian nationalists proclaimed themselves the true defenders of Christianity and antagonised the Muslim minority, such as the Kosovo Albanians and Bosnian Muslims (Cigar, 1995). On the contrary, Croatian nationalists called both the Orthodox Serbs and the Muslims ‘threats’ to the truly ‘European’ Catholic Croats (Cohen, 2019). Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia, and the driver of Yugoslavia’s bloody breakup, maintained that Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Kosovo Albanians were not fundamentally different from the Serbs (Gagnon, 1994).

Finally, the civilisational theory fails to explain why violent waves of nationalism occurred after centuries of peaceful coexistence. This post hoc reasoning mischaracterises the nature of ethnic nationalism by conflating its political manifestation with its origin. The Serbian nationalist movement that triggered the Yugoslav Wars was an epochal invention created by the weakness of the Communist Yugoslav regime. Nationalist sentiments capitalised on structural instabilities, distorting political priorities, and conflating the rational assessment of security threats. Despite its apparent disguise in ethnic history, Serbian nationalism was a decidedly contemporary construction.

The Birth Of Serbian Nationalism

In ethnically divided societies, ethnic identification plays a crucial role in determining ethnic group relations, forming perceptions, and assessing threats. Serbian nationalism amassed massive influence over the population due to its narratives on the Serbian ethnic identity and its relationships with the other Yugoslav ethnic groups. In the case of Serbia, the claim to ethnic nationhood was legitimated by the social construction of a unique ethnic community with a supposedly superior character. Donald Horowitz (2001, p.185) terms this form of group identification as ‘ethnic entitlement’. ‘Ethnic entitlement’ concerns two facets: the contest for group worth and legitimacy in an ethnically diverse environment. It involves disseminating claims about the ethnic group’s collective character, history, and values to advance its political interests. The politics of ‘ethnic entitlement’ could have dual implications: an effort to dominate outgroup ethnicities, as well as to prevent being dominated by them. Lying at the heart of the ethnic conflict is this deep-rooted collective anxiety regarding group worth and legitimacy. According to Horowitz (2001, p.179), this form of collective anxiety ‘modifies perceptions, producing extreme reactions to modest threats’.

While ethnic nationalism is rooted in the simple pursuit of group worth and legitimacy, its creation is often convoluted. Rarely is it singlehandedly created by the political elites themselves. Although political elites play an integral role in manipulating and disseminating nationalist discourse, the birth of ethnic nationalism involves the sustained and arduous efforts of writers, politicians, and regular people. Its creation depends on a stratum of writers committed to developing ethnic-centric philosophies and ethnohistories from folklores, mediaeval histories, and religious narratives (Gellner, 1964). This denotes a conscious translation of ‘low’ oral cultures with diverse origins and lessons into an internally consistent ‘high’ literary culture ready for political dissemination. The specific set of ethnohistorical memories is then used as collective moral inspiration for the ethnic group. In the case of the Balkans, the Yugoslav Communist Party unknowingly exacerbated this process by censoring published ethnic histories. As such, documenting ethnic history relied on the telling and retelling of events in oral history. Historical bloodshed could become magnified, distorted, and manipulated, contributing to a grotesque version of actual historical accounts that perpetuated paranoia and tension. Thus, contemporary political struggles became anchored in the histories and injustices of the distant past (Mertus, 1999).

Serbian nationalism was built on the narratives of historical suffering and national rebirth. In this stream of nationalist rhetoric, one of the most important stories was the myth of Kosovo, built on the 1389 Battle of Kosovo between Serbian and Ottoman forces. According to the myth, the Serbian Prince Lazar Hrebeljanovic led the army to face the invading Ottoman army. The night before the battle, God offered him a choice between an earthly kingdom and a heavenly one. In Serbian legend, Prince Lazar chose the heavenly kingdom; the Serbs were defeated in battle and subjected to five centuries of Ottoman rule (Kaplan, 1993). While historical scholars debate the true victor of the conflict given the ambiguities of the historical details, Serbian nationalists asserted that their nation had undeniably lost (Macdonald, 2003). By choosing to die as a martyr, Prince Lazar installed Serbia into the kingdom of heaven, supposedly elevating the Serbs to the status of a ‘chosen people’ by giving Serbia a messianic role in defending Christianity against Islam (Macdonald, 2003, p.255). For the Serbian nationalists, the defeat of Kosovo attested to this divine heroism of the Serbs. Motifs of Serbia as the successor of Byzantium and the Serbs as a chosen people dominated the nationalist rhetoric before and during the Yugoslav Wars (Anzulovic, 1999, p.102). Vojislav Seselj, a prominent Serbian nationalist leader and the founder of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), called Kosovo ‘the heart of Serbia’ and made the Kosovo myth a recurring theme in public statements during the Yugoslav Wars (Cigar, 1995, p.73). However, Serbian nationalism was simultaneously gripped by anxiety. Even though the national legend promised power and status to the ‘heavenly’ Serbia, it bore the painful lesson of historical oppression (Anzulovic, 1999, p.100). An integral notion of Serbian nationalism was that its people were threatened by the genocidal intent of their ethnic enemies – both old and new. During the Second World War, the Serbs’ resistance against Axis forces in the Balkans faced the brunt of Ustashe’s brutality in the form of terrorist raids and the killing of nearly 500,000 Serbs (Yeomans, 2013, p. 18). The Metropolitan Bishop of Montenegro, Amfilohije Radovic, preached to his Serb congregation, ‘Our destiny is to carry the cross on this blazing divide between different worlds.’ Nonetheless, the Serbian people were still under threat as ‘an insane wind tries ceaselessly to extinguish this sacred lamp’ (Cigar, 1995, p.74). This ‘insane wind’ was to be understood as the history of genocide and oppression committed both by the fascist Croatian regime and the Ottoman Empire. Dobrica Ćosić (1994, p.58), the first President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1993, said that Serbs ‘have always been the victims of foreign conquerors.’ Under this narrative, the Serbs must diligently guard themselves against the corrupting influence of Muslims and Croats. Narratives of impending genocide instilled a deep-rooted collective anxiety alongside a strong sense of ethnic identity. By legitimating Serbia’s claim to power and propagating paranoia towards outgroup ethnicities, Serbian nationalism laid the foundation for violence.

While the nationalist movements relied on the support of many true believers, the President of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, exploited Serbian nationalism opportunistically (Nakarada, 1994). After taking power in December 1987, Milosevic convinced the Serbian people that it was time for Serbia to be reborn as a powerful nation (Macdonald, 2003). There is little indication that Milosevic believed in Serbia’s divine character himself, but his strong nationalist rhetoric mobilised an increasingly agitated population. His promise to end the persecution of Serbs in Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina simultaneously made him a national hero to Serbia and exacerbated ethnic antagonism within Yugoslavia. Perceived historical oppression justified this ethnic conflict as a necessary struggle for the Serbian people against the belligerent Croats and Muslims. Following this narrative, the ethnic outgroups oppressing the divine and pure Serbian people must be defeated at all costs (Kaplan, 1993). Expulsion, or even extermination, of other ethnic groups would be permissible and even encouraged; ethnic cleansing is not far down the line. When the right structural opportunities present themselves, this attitudinal polarisation was primed to justify extraordinary measures to defend the constructed ethnic identity.

Exploiting Structural Instabilities

Ethnic nationalism directed the course of the Yugoslav Wars by aggravating the securitisation process. The Copenhagen School, which coined the securitisation theory, argues that the creation of security threats depends on the specific ways they are framed, not only their objective condition (Buzan et al., 1998). Security threats command extraordinary political responses and provide justification to bypass conventional checks and balances. The securitisation process allows non-military subjects, such as economic instability, political structure, or ethnic composition, to be elevated into security threats demanding exceptional countermeasures. Thus, ethnic nationalism could incite violence not only by disseminating paranoia in civic society but also by overriding the rational assessment of security threats. The prevalent motifs of impending genocides and historical oppressions constituted a securitisation process that framed the very existence of other ethnicities as a threat to the Serbian nation: Muslims and Croats received the most suspicion. Using narratives about the suppression of the Ottoman Empire and the fascist Croatian regime during the Second World War, Serbian nationalism framed these ethnic groups as an existential threat to Serbian nationhood.

By the 1980s, Yugoslavia’s structural instability had become fertile soil for polarising ethnic sentiments. Following the death of Tito, the political authority of the Yugoslav Communist regime came under scrutiny since the central government lacked a strong leader to unify central policies and suppress nationalist discontent. Under the 1974 constitution, decentralisation reforms devolved power to Yugoslavia’s six republics and two autonomous provinces, each dominated by one ethnic community (Ramet, 1984). The League of Communists grew fragmented as each autonomous province or republic held its communist party alongside the federation, and political organisations increasingly revolved along ethnic lines (Jovic, 2009). Republics were allowed to avoid the Tito-era doctrine of ethnic unity as national narratives became essential to political debates and a profitable arena for political interests. The weakness of the central administration was exacerbated by Yugoslavia’s complex political identity. The authority of the Yugoslav Communist regime was derived both from the partisan resistance during the Second World War and its economic position as a bridge between the Communist and the Western world. The fading memories of the Second World War and economic stagnation had already started challenging the sanctity of the central authority (Hassner, 1993).

The dissolution of a strong political and ideological authority encouraged competition between republics. In the late 1970s and 1980s, mounting economic strains opened a new frontier for tension: the rapid economic growth stimulated by defence-oriented heavy industrialisation in the post-war period had already subsided, the failure of economic restructuring was conflated with massive foreign debt from Western European financial institutions and the global recession of the 1980s, and, by 1979, Yugoslavia had accumulated a debt of 20 billion US dollars and was forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Kaldor, 1999, pp. 38-39). An IMF recovery plan was agreed upon in 1982 with the conditions of economic liberalisation and austerity (Silber and Little, 1997). This directly resulted in the defunding of public sector employment, shrinking social welfare, and intensified resource competition between republics. Throughout the decade, unemployment hovered at an average of 14 per cent, hyperinflation hit 2,500 per cent by the end of 1989, and the federation lost control over creating money for the republics (Kaldor, 1999, p. 39).

The economic challenge decimated the less developed regions, such as Serbia and Kosovo. In contrast, the wealthier, more service-focused republics, such as Croatia and Slovenia, were spared from the brunt of the recession. In Serbia, narratives of a ‘thieving’ Croatia gained popularity (Nakarada, 1994). The 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts claimed that Slovenia and Croatia had stolen Serbia’s economic potential (Macdonald, 2003). It asserted that the wealthy republics had taken advantage of the system, forcing Serbia to support undeveloped regions and sell its natural resources at subsidised prices. Furthermore, it argued that Serbia’s poverty was engineered by the ‘Croat’ Tito and the ‘Slovene’ Kardelj, who aimed to annihilate the Serbian culture and ethnicity. The reality of massive foreign debts, structural economic failures, and the dysfunctional central authority were conveniently ignored in the Memorandum. Instead, the economic issue was framed as a coordinated attack on the Serbian community. The popularity of this conspiracy theory denotes an aggressive collective anxiety where, deep in the economic stagnation, Serbian nationalists envisioned themselves besieged by their ethnic enemies.

The power vacuum also encouraged the development of secessionism and aggravated ethnic antagonism. Barry Posen (1993) suggests that weakening the central Yugoslav government created an emerging anarchy within the federation and impelled republics to manage their own security. Following the structural realist theory, the republics’ inability to distinguish between defensive and offensive security measures would foster mutual suspicion. This would result in a downward spiral of antagonism and military escalation until one group takes pre-emptive military action to neutralise the threat. However, the basic realist theory cannot answer why Serbia was the first country to attack. Having direct control over the most well-organised and heavily armed military force in the region, the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), and an unrivalled stock of tanks, artillery, and aircraft, Serbia would have been the most secure republic even in the dissolving Yugoslavia (Cohen, 2019). If the political deliberations had been entirely rational, Serbia should have had no reason to launch a pre-emptive attack for defensive reasons.

A better explanation for this question follows our constructivist analysis of Serbian nationalism. The Serbian agitation towards successionist movements did not necessarily arise from a rational assessment of the political landscape. Instead, it could be inspired by the profound group anxiety created by the specific construction of Serbian ethnohistory and ethnic identity. Following Horowitz’s (2001) argument, the securitisation of successionist sentiments arose from a collective paranoia against the perceived ethnic rivals. The dissemination of an ethnohistory that connected ancient injustices with contemporary conflicts confounded the security assessment, and the issue was no longer measured in a rational assessment of relative strengths. Instead, struggles, fights, and quarrels became the most recent exponents of ancient bloodshed as histories of persecution, imagined or real, became entwined with the contemporary conflict. Amid these recurring narratives of impending genocide, ethnic paranoia could swiftly disseminate in the Serbian population.

This collective paranoia especially affected the Serb diaspora living in Croatian and Muslim-majority republics. In the Serbian nationalist rhetoric, Croatia’s independent movement was equated to the ‘Nazi resurrection’ (Macdonald, 2003, p.201). Despite the fact that Franjo Tudjman, the president of Croatia and the leader of the Croatia successionist movement, fought against the Nazi Ustashe regime during the Second World War, his democratic government was called ‘pro-German nazi-fascism’ by Serbian nationalist writers (Mesic, 2004, p. 46). Dobrica Ćosić stated in a published collection of wartime essays that ‘This [Croatian] state is governed by a totalitarian and chauvinistic regime…This provoked a Serbian insurrection in Croatia, those who justly fear a new program of extermination, the same as the one during the Second World War to which they fell victim’ (Ćosić, 1994, p. 58-59). Drawing from their historical victimisation, Serbian nationalist writers had no difficulty likening Tudjman to Hitler, or believing that Croatia’s independence was the beginning of genocide (Mesic, 2004). The deep-seated distrust of the republic government and civic institutions overrode the rational assessment of political reality. Under these narratives, there was little surprise when the Serbian offensive was seen as a reaction to genocidal intents (Kaplan, 1993).

Admittedly, the Tudjman regime did remove Serbs from key public positions as a part of the Croatianisation program (West, 2012). The Tudjman government also mirrored the political ambition of Serbian nationalists, calling for the establishment of an ethnically homogenous Catholic state to protect Croats from the numerically dominant Serbs who were Eastern and Orthodox (Cohen, 2019). These policies no doubt agitated the Serb diaspora and fuelled neo-fascist accusations. However, secessionist sentiments among minority ethnicities who could not challenge Serbia’s security were also framed as a threat to the Serbian nation. Such was the case for the Kosovo Albanians, whose demand for autonomy stemmed from prolonged economic and political marginalisation. After the region was revoked of its autonomy and brought under direct Serbian control in 1989, ethnic Albanians were systematically removed from public and governmental positions. This act was done partially to allocate economic resources to the Kosovo Serb minority and partially to remove Albanian influence in the region. Aside from the mass dismissals, Albanians also faced systematic discrimination, harassment, and heavy taxation by the Serb-dominated government (Silber and Little, 1997). Despite this, Kosovo Serb civilians still perceived Albanians as ‘rapists’, ‘murderers’, and a persistent ‘Islamic’ threat to the Serbs (Kaplan, 1993, p.33). Mertus (1999) suggests that this perception was caused by Serbian nationalist narratives that framed the Kosovo Albanians as the descendants of the Ottoman Muslims. The Albanian movement for autonomy was suspected of Islamic revival. The contemporary ethnic dynamics were thus conjoined with the painful defeat in the Battle of Kosovo. The constructed ethnohistory of martyrdom instilled a deep sense of insecurity and fear. As such, the very existence of ethnic Albanians was securitised as a threat to the Serb ethnicity, no matter their objective strength.

The fear of domination was exacerbated by Yugoslavia’s offense-dominant political geography. The Serb population was scattered across Yugoslavia in ‘island’ diasporas, making them physically vulnerable to local aggression. By 1991, stories of mass atrocities committed by the Croatian fascists gripped the Croatian Serb community in anxiety. Alleged reports of ‘hair-raising savagery’ against Serbs in the Vukovar hospital and atrocities committed in Poljane, Marino, Kip, and many more villages scattered across Croatia were compiled (Marinovic, 1993). While the truth of the testimonial was debatable, it succeeded in disseminating a prevailing sense of fear and anxiety in the Serb diaspora. The recurring theme that the Croatian neo-Nazis have dominated the government, the police, the hospitals, and the civil space substantiated the claims of an impending genocide (Macdonald, 2003). The perceived urgency of the situation was confounded by the practical difficulty in orchestrating a swift rescue. Despite the overwhelming firepower of the Serbian military, it was unlikely to secure the entire Serbian population should local ethnic purging erupt. The independence of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Kosovo would then create a realistic threat against Serbia’s ability to rescue the besieged diaspora. The perception of Serb communities ‘marooned’ in Croatian and Muslim territory likely heightened the urgency of military movement. Ultimately, Serbia’s aggravated response to the perceived security threat could be explained by the narrative of an impending genocide, the fear of domination by ancient rivals, and the construction of an ethnohistory that intertwined assessments of the present with injustices of the past.

Conclusion

Using an integrated framework of constructivism and structural realism, this article has demonstrated how Serbian nationalism derived its power by inciting collective paranoia in the ethnic group. By conceptualising ethnic nationalism as an imagined political community, this article develops a more nuanced understanding of Serbian nationalism’s causal role in galvanising group paranoia and unravelling Yugoslavia’s structural instabilities. This article contributes to understanding how collective emotions and group identification generated by ethnic nationalism can direct responses to security threats and instigate ethnic warfare. By constructing an ethnohistory that connected Serbia’s historical wars with contemporary conflicts, ethnic nationalism captured the imagination of the Serbian community with narratives of an imminent genocide. This resulted in rampant collective fear towards outgroup ethnicities. Ethnic nationalist sentiments exploited the political power vacuum and economic recession to inflate the threat of ethnic oppression. The prevalence of fear distorted the rational security assessment, leading to the securitisation of secessionist movements and even the existence of other ethnic communities. Ultimately, Serbia’s offensive in the Yugoslav Wars was the direct result of Serbian nationalism’s ideology of fear.

Siyue Tang

© The Author(s) 2024. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.