Is Europe’s powder keg ready to burst again? Nationalistic Serbian Discourse

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Kosovo today: between ancient hatreds and possible reconciliation

To quote this document: Goda Šileikaitė, “Is Europe’s powder keg ready to burst again? Nationalistic Serbian Discourse”, Nouvelle Europe [en ligne], Wednesday 16 November 2011, http://www.nouvelle-europe.eu/node/1318, displayed on 17 May 2012

More than three years after the Kosovo declaration of independence, the dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo is still hardly moving out of the deadlock. The principles are tightly controlled on both sides, leading them to a no-win situation that neither Kosovo and Serbia, nor the principal mediator – the European Union – are satisfied with. We may then wonder to what extent nationalism is playing a role in today’s bilateral relations and whether it still retains the same features as earlier.

From nation to nationalism

"It is not dangerous to lose a battle. It is not even that dangerous to lose a state. Such losses can be made up. It is dangerous, however, when one begins to distort the truth, warp principles, corrupt ideals, and poison traditions. Then the spirit suffers, craziness overcomes it, and self-destructiveness crushes it",-wrote the unknown Serbian nationalist after WWII. Where should we draw the red line between the creation of the nation states that preserve national interests and the extremes that arise after they confront one another? How should we describe the nation? According to Julie Mertus, it is not obligatory that a nation should be emphasized within a state; what is essential is the language, the culture and the history. Language and culture are things that are hard to deny, whereas history is determined to overcome the triple structure of facts, myths and experience. Hannah Arendt goes further explaining that it is very complicated, even practically impossible to distinguish ficticious historical scenarios from reality, so each nation perceives its own truth.

The specific distortion of truth leads to political or social propaganda when it serves to stimulate the false historical consciousness based on the exclusive idea that one nation has outstanding features in comparison with the other. Such discourse is based on the attribution of the negative features to only one group; in other words such discourse criminalizes one group, while it victimizes the other. This is the origin of the radical nationalistic escalations which were very distinct and intense during the so-called "Slobodan Milošević’s era" in Former Yugoslavia. This period of nationalism is very popular among scholars who focus on the former Yugoslavia and produce the vast majority of the research.

Explaining nationalism further, Eric Hobsbawm points out rightly that it is not an ideology, but rather an idea in various forms which empowers not only to create a state, but also to maintain it, raise for the fight against other states and strengthen the existing regime. Ernest Gellner elaborates by saying that nationalism might become a very strong tool in the hands of a prudent leader having a dictatorial nature in himself and pursuing to create an ethnically "clean" nation. This is the type of thinking that Milošević was following in the late eighties and nineties while suddenly springing out to the very top in Yugoslavian politics. Under Tito, all ethnic interests and probable nationalistic practices were seriously suppressed so there is no surprise that after his death, the spring bounced back. What did that mean for Yugoslavia? It means that all the ethnic hatreds which were successfully under pressure while Tito in power, were condemned to spread as the worst nightmare in Europe'shistory during the Milošević's reign.

He quickly managed to consolidate the Serbs by manipulating their recent discontent that was caused by the Albanians prioritised well-being under the rule of Tito.

But what about today?

Vladimir Putin, former (and most probably next) President of Russia, underlined during his presidency that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major disaster for the Russian nation by praising the great achievements and the power that the Soviet Union was holding tightly. This basically means that V. Putin was legitimizing the crimes conducted against the small nations during WWII and after it, during the "sovietization" programme. How should Serbian nationalism be treated today? From one point of view, the Serbs are still being blamed for "Miloševićian" politics, but from another point of view, the separation between the former political practices and those today is clearly drawn., Indeed, it implies that there was not a single person praising the politics during the Milošević era.