Yugoslavia at breakpoint.

Yugoslavia at Breakpoint 

Ljubljana

I was asleep when Slovenia declared independence, but even if I had been awake I don't think I would have noticed. The declaration had been brought forward by several hours, and was made just in time to appear in the next morning's Slovenian newspapers. And if I had not bought a paper, I still would not have known that this was the first morning in the history of independent Slovenia. There were no flag-wavers in the streets of Ljubljana, not even any crowds of excited gossipers at the newsstands. A proud blue emblem was displayed in every shop window; but when you got closer you could see that the words on it were not "Republika Slovenija" but "American Express."

That evening, there was an official celebration in the square in front of the parliament building. There were speeches, songs, brass-band music, and fireworks; but the atmosphere was relaxed and somehow unpolitical. As the crowd began to disperse and the brass band packed up its instruments, the giant screens round the square began playing a pop video, of a rock group called The Cult. Someone in the crowd was waving an American Confederate flag. It seemed more like an invitation to Disneyland than a call to arms. Earlier in the evening, two Yugoslav air-force jets had swooped over the city in low, loud, arrogant circles. "They are playing childish games," said a Slovenian businessman I was interviewing. "Just ignore them and they will go away."

Why did it all seem so unreal? Partly because the Slovenian government itself had done curiously little to make a clean break with the rest of Yugoslavia. When Slovene officers took over the customs posts at the borders that day, they continued to collect the Yugoslav federal customs. At the first press conference that morning, the minister of information, Jelko Kacin, explained that although the border crossings by road and rail would be manned by Slovenians, the federal army would continue to patrol the "green zone," the strip of land, three miles deep, behind the border in open country. High-altitude air-traffic control would also remain with the federal authorities. And as for Slovenian money, the long-expected new unit of currency, the lipa, simply failed to appear. A government spokesman explained that Slovenia would continue to use the Yugoslav dinar, adding rather feebly that when Norway separated from Sweden it took several years to establish a currency of its own. It was hard to tell what the reason was for all these half measures: perhaps incompetence in the case of the currency, and on other matters a genuine willingness to negotiate. Although Slovenia had, as later events showed, made some preparations for war, she was not trying hard to start one.

When news broke of the tank maneuvers round Ljubljana the following morning, the atmosphere changed, but only a little. A few buses and heavy trucks were parked near government buildings, and some improbably young-looking territorials with machine-guns stood at street corners; otherwise, life went on as normal. Even when the defense minister, Janez Jansa, turned up at a press conference in combat fatigues with a shiny leather holster on his hip, it seemed hard to believe that this 33-year-old ex-reporter was now directing something like a small-scale war. One American journalist asked him if he could read the casualty figures more slowly, "you know, like General Schwarzkopf"; the press conference rocked with laughter. Only the threat of air raids on Ljubljana itself changed the mood dramatically.

The sheer normality, to Western eyes, of life in Slovenia and Croatia makes it more difficult for us to understand what is happening there. We are used to seeing Third World peasants with machine-guns, and are familiar with the idea of the grey, oppressed masses of Communist states rising against their masters. But people like us, manning anti-aircraft guns on the tops of buildings where the groundfloor shop windows are full of American Express stickers: as Judge Brack says at the end of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, "Good God, people don't do such things!" So, oddly enough, their claim to be fighting in defense of liberal, Western values strikes us as almost unreal precisely because they look so liberalized and Westernized already. Would we prefer it, then, if they were marching in massed formations, dressed in quaint national costumes and singing ancient hymns?

Old-fashioned atavistic nationalism has not disappeared from Slovenia or Croatia (especially not from Croatia), though it no longer dresses up in peasant costumes. But it has become intertwined with a desire to identify with the West which is almost internationalist in its implications. Ask any Croat politician why Croatia needs to be independent, and he will start talking about the great historical dividing-line which runs between Croatia and Serbia: Western culture, Catholic Christianity, and (to use a favorite Croat adjective) "civilizational" values on the one side, and Ottomanized society, the Orthodox Church, despotism, and Communism on the other. As a piece of historical analysis this is grotesquely over-simple, and there is something morally repugnant about the way it dooms all liberal, Western-looking, anti-Communist Serbs to a historically predetermined failure. But as a device to unite Croatia's two strands of nationalism--ethnic anti-Serbian hostility, and the desire for a modern, Western economy and society--it is highly successful.

As the death toll rises, the older form of nationalism, with its hatreds, its historical certainties, and its ethnic absolutes, is likely to predominate, because it carries the greater emotional charge. There is a common view in the West that these ancient animosities have been the real problem all along, and that any talk by Croat and Slovene politicians about democracy and market economies has been just a smokescreen. The implication of this line of thinking is that things were better under Communism, because at least the Communist system kept nationalism under control: Yugoslavia's present crisis, therefore, is an inevitable consequence of the removal of Communism.

This argument is deeply unconvincing. It would be far truer to say that it is the failure to remove Communism completely from Yugoslavia that has caused the present crisis. With its comparative openness and freedom of travel to the West, Yugoslavia could and should have been the first country in Eastern Europe to dismantle Communism. When mass demonstrations in Montenegro (which is ethnically Serbian) and the Vojvodina (which is ruled by Serbia) forced the local Party bosses out of office in 1988, many of the demonstrators thought they were bringing about far-reaching reforms of the corrupt Communist system. But instead their concerns were hijacked by one faction in the Serbian Communist Party, led by Slobodan Milosevic (now the Serbian president), who realized that Communism was losing its legitimacy and turned to Serbian nationalism as a way of preserving and extending his power. It is this lopsided survival of the Communist political tradition, with its artificial stimulation of Serbian nationalism for its own internal purposes, that has set the present series of nationalist conflicts in motion.

In the realm of pure theory, one can still talk about how to construct a modern, peaceful, democratic federal Yugoslavia. In practice it is too late. Too many things would need to be changed now to make that possible. The present federal system has been shown up as ineffectual, manipulated or bypassed by the old power structures of the Serbian political establishment (which has undermined the federal economic reforms of the last two years) and the army (which now seems out of control). It is possible to be anti-Communist without being anti-federal, or anti-federal without being anti-Serb; but after the events of the last few days, the vast majority of Croats and Slovenes are implacably anti all three.

They continue, however, to be pro-Western, bewildered though they are by the attempts of Western governments to lecture them on the benefits of remaining in a federation which they now find abhorrent. The idea that forcing these two countries back into a federal political system would actually increase the "stability" of the area belongs to the realm of superstition, not to rational politics. The only way to recover anything resembling stability now is for the West to recognize Croatia and Slovenia as quickly as possible, and to encourage them to complete on generous terms the unfinished negotiations over their exit from Yugoslavia. The European Community and the United States still have an enormous moral authority over the Slovenes and Croats, who desperately wish to think of themselves as fully Western. But if we continue to reject their claims to independence, we shall only weaken the Westward-looking aspect of their nationalism, thereby helping to turn them into the very kind of resentful, vendetta-obsessed isolationists that Western policy-makers should most fear. Mr. Malcolm is political correspondent for the London Spectator.