Since the beginning of the NATO air attacks, almost every newspaper explains the war with historical overviews rooting to sometimes more than 3000-year-old ethnic differences. Web sites display lessons called "Kosovo for Beginners" and with a single mouse click timetables and RealVideo histories pop up from the interactive maps. [2] The news media very willingly took on board Clinton's advice to look op Kosovo on the map. On one of these sites, Jason Fields an Associated Press journalist writes that Americans do not only have a problem with where to find Kosovo, but they also have a problem understanding ethnic differences that are not based on different skin colours. Instead of questioning the existence of such clear ethnic differences, Fields starts to invent them. He says: "What has consumed the Balkans over the course of generations is the hatred of Serbs for Croats. Croats for Slovenes. Slovenes for Montenegrins. Montenegrins for Muslims. Muslims for Macedonians. Macedonians for Albanians. All these ethnic groups (who look identical to the outside observer) share one thing in common: the Balkan peninsula. Finding anything else in common is a challenge." [3] He goes on giving a history of the Balkans that leaves no option for the reader but to conclude that fighting each other is the essence of Balkan culture. According to President Clinton "under communist rule, such nations projected a picture of stability, but it was a false stability imposed by rulers whose answer to ethnic tensions was to suppress and deny them. When communist repression lifted, the tensions rose to the surface, to be resolved by cooperation or exploited by demagoguery." [4] This historical construction of Yugoslavia as an artificial state that surpressed the anti-democratic and barbaric nature of its citizens is not only an American invention. It is widely believed that after the break up of the communist regime the tensions within Yugoslavia were the outcome of a natural process. This natural process - or should we say disease - of a state falling apart into ethnic groups is usually referred to as Balkanization. It is conceived as a very dangerous disease highly infectious to other territories. In this particular case, it is catalysed by a person called Slobodan Milosevic who is pushed, as some reports seem to suggest, by his evil wife Mirjana Markovic.  

There is however, something profoundly wrong with the logic of those explanations. I want to argue that Balkanisation is an idea that has become a reality, and is certainly not the outcome of a natural process. The Balkans did not exist for a long time. Maybe we have almost forgotten, but after the Second World War there was an area called Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe was imagined as part of a more or less homogeneous space called the Eastern Block. Yugoslavia had a somewhat exceptional position, as it did not obey Russian orders. However, the ideal of the socialist workers state and its motto "brotherhood & unity" placed this state without any doubt in Eastern Europe. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern Europe distanced itself from a financially and politically broken Russia and approached Western Europe. Eastern Europe was renamed Central Europe in the official thesauri. However, Central Europe did not turn out to be a very strong concept. The shift towards the West - or in other words towards democracy and the ideal of the free market - was rewarded by a selection process for NATO membership and with speculations about EU-membership. Economic potency was the most important selection criterion. This meant that the winners were Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The third-rank states that were left over were no longer referred to in terms of Europeaness. They received the second-hand label of the Balkans. Subsequently, the hierarchical classification of Europe could be legitimised by referring to the turbulent history of the Balkans.  

Maria Todorova, author of the book Imagining the Balkans called this language game of hierarchical classification, Balkanism. [5] As opposed to the idea of Balkanisation that isolates the causes of war to the Yugoslav territories, Balkanism refers to the inter-relatedness of the war with Western values. From the perspective of Balkanism we can understand the ethnic divisions within Yugoslavia as a continuation of the hierarchical categorisation in terms of Europeaness.  

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, some people in the former Yugoslavia considered themselves more European than others. Croatia, for example, was proclaimed to be more European than Serbia. It was stated that the western border of Europe stopped just after Croatia, that means just before Serbia. This Western boundary was justified by reference to Catholicism. The West rewarded this attitude by recognition. However, Balkanism did not stop at the Croatian borders. The urban citizens in the north of Serbia also identified with European values and used to refer to their Austro-Hungarian past. They called the peasants, especially those of the south, "Balkan dwellers" and this was not meant to be a compliment. [6] Many Serbs may now state that the cradle of the Serbian civilisation stands in Kosovo. However, they did not go in big numbers to visit the area. [7] The story of Europeaness did not end in Serbia. The Albanian-Kosovars did not feel so ethnic-Albanian as one might expect from this naming. As the Albanian-Kosovars learned to know their fellow Albanians a bit better (after they became free to travel), they started to look down on them. "Kosovars often regard Albanian citizens as backward people who lack a modern education or knowledge of the wider world. People in Albania tend to view Kosovars as arrogant braggarts with questionable business ethics. Of course, this rivalry has now been put aside in the outpouring of traditional Albanian hospitality for the refugees." [8] 

In Yugoslavia Balkanism has been translated into ethnic divisions. Those ethnic divisions have been affirmed in the Western peace proposals. Although Western politicians never stop stating how much they regret the partition of Yugoslavia, they nevertheless defend their contribution to the divisions along ethnic lines as the only realistic option. Not only Milosevic and Tudjman classified the people in groups and numbers with great precision. Diplomats like Owen and Holbrooke did not hesitate to carve out the boundaries of ethnic groups and their territory with great precision as well. None of the peace proposals for Bosnia contained options for people who did not want to identify as Muslim, Serb or Croat. According to the Dayton agreement Muslims and Croats are only alowed to vote for candidates of their own entity. [9] This means an acknowledgement of ethnicity as destiny. The media affirm this apartheid politics by displaying the maps and percentages of Muslims, Serbs, Croats and ethnic Albanians as if these categories are just neutral facts. [10] As if the categorisation of people were simple facts of life that had nothing to do with politics. The logic of Milosevic is based on the same principle. The main difference between the Western politics and Milosvic's policies is that Milosevic pushes Balkanism towards its logic conclusion, that is: genocide.  

The European politics of division and exclusion have undermined a positive identification of the Yugoslavs and in particular of the Serbs with the West. The NATO air attacks, however unavoidable they might be now, widen the gap between the West and Serbia by the way the aims are formulated. The Pentagon speaks of "punishing" and "degrading" Serbia and its army. President Clinton says it is Milosevic who should "pay the price". These words seem to be designed to avoid the discussion about a real commitment to the people in Kosovo. A commitment that could lead to sending in ground troops. The lack of support for the refugees from Kosovo seems to proof that Operation Allied Force is more about Nato's "credibility" and Milosevic "paying the price" than about a genuine concern about the people of Kosovo or Serbia. [11] 

Indicating some serious problems of the Western involvement in the Yugoslav war, and Nato's current bombing campaign in particular, is not, however, the same as an immediate call to stop the bombing. Many left-wing critics simplify the intervention as a US capitalist-hegemonic project that should be opposed. Immanuel Wallerstein, for example, recently played down the genocide in Yugoslavia as a low-level civil war into which the US and other powers intruded themselves as mediators. [12] Suddenly many left-wing intellectuals find themselves in one line with the far-right in their passionate defence of state boundaries and sovereignty. Like the Dutch UN commander Karremans who witnessed in Srebrenica the slaughter of 7000 Muslims by the Serbs, Wallerstein still dares to say that he does not want to make any difference between the "good guys" and the "bad guys". [13] Wallerstein simply says that he does not want to do the arithmetic to figure out who has done more atrocities than the other has. [14] He also gives two reasons why the US is intervening. The first is that it is an attempt to save NATO in order to keep up military expenditure and the second is to control Europe via the organisation of NATO. The fact alone that Wallerstein with his arguments against intervention places himself on the side of people like Thatcher, Le Pen, Bossi, Heider, the Republican isolationists is at least a sign that this hegemonic-capitalist project of the West is not as unambiguous as he imagines. They all basically argue that the Yugoslavs should clear up their own mess.  

Meanwhile, the Kosovars are acknowledged as victims but do not seem to have a real voice. In the first days of the war, thousands of people had already fled the area. Nevertheless it was stated again and again on the news that - although we feared the worst - we could not know what was going on, as there were no longer any "objective" monitors to verify the accounts. Without the presence of the assumed objective Western view, Kosovo has become a kind of black box with input and output. Both the advocates and the opponents of the intervention have created an image of "poor and defenceless people" who are not seen as members of our community, and thus not worth to die for. [15] Maybe, finally, at this particular junction of history, we should focus on the question of how we could intervene on behalf of these people more effectively, instead of reaching out to old clichés. 

1. The Guardian, 10 April 1999
2. See for example: ABC news: A Beginner's Guide to the Balkans: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/balkans_content/ See also the web site of the Serbian government, History: http://www.gov.yu/kosovo/history.html and the website of the Kosvovar Liberation Army: Albanian History Chronology of Events: http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/Track/4165/historia.html
3. Fields, Jason, Historical Perspective: Yugoslavia, a Legacy of Ethnic Hatred, Web site Associated Press, 19 February 1999, http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?PACKAGEID=flashpointyugo
4. Clinton, William, Why the Allies Must Fight On, Sunday London Times, 18 April 1999
5. Maria N. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, 1997. The information I used for my article is based on Todorova's lecture: "Hierarchies of Eastern Europe: East Central Europe Versus the Balkans" in Imagining the Balkans Reader, Evening debate in the Balie, Amsterdam, 13 January 1999, pp 1-5
6. Mattijs van de Port, "It Takes a Serb to Know a Serb: Uncovering the Roots of Obstinate Otherness in Serbia", in Imagining the Balkans Reader, Evening debate in the Balie, 13 January 1999, p. C: "I had become acquainted with Novi Sad, the capital of the northern Voyvodina region, as a town that praised itself on being the cradle of a European Serbia. The Novosadjani never grew tired of pointing out the Austro-Hungarian past of their community, it's geographic location in the in the Pannonian plains, the Habsburg façades of their homes, the many germanisms in their dialect. They ranged themselves behind the banner of civilization and kultura, that peculiar central European blend of courtesy, good taste and a well developed sense for etiquette and decorum; and they were ever ready to blow up the contrast between themselves and their countrymen further south whom they labeled, with barefaced contempt, 'Balkan dwellers'. Living on what they perceived to be the very border between Europe and the Balkans the people of Novi Sad sought to locate themselves firmly at 'our' side of the line."
7. Moore, Patrick, Questions and Answers on Kosova, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Balkan Report, Vol. 3, No. 13, 7 April 1999
8. Moore, Patrick, Ibid.
9. David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Vilolence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p.225
10. See e.g. the UN Ethnic Map of the Balkans on: http://www.stratfor.com/crisis/kosovo/maps.htm
11. See Leon Wieseltier, "Force without force", in: The New Republic: A Journal of Politics and the Arts, April 26 - May 3, 1999 Issue
12. Immanuel Wallerstein, "Bombs Away!", JUSTWATCH-L Digest - 30 Apr 1999 to 1 May 1999 (#1999-127), see http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/archives/justwatch-l.html
13. It is also a bit too easily forgotten that the systematic deportation of the Albanian Kosovars by the Yugoslav army was already a large-scale operation before the NATO intervention had begun. See e.g. BosNet Document : "20,000 Displaced in Kosova in Last Week" of 7 March 1999, Bosnet-digest, Vol. 6, No. 1151, http://www.kentlaw.edu/cgi-bin/ldn_news/-h+law.listserv.bosnet+2104, The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says at least 20,000 people have been forced to flee their homes at least temporarily since the Yugoslav army began conducting "winter exercises" in Kosovo in late February" and "UNHCR estimates that some 5000 people remain displaced in the area near the border with FYR Macedonia. Another 1500 have recently crossed into FYR Macedonia, according to UNHCR's office in Skopje."
14. Of course, Wallerstein says, the Yugoslavs have done "atrocious" things, in Kosovo as in Bosnia. But "their opponents, the Kosovo Liberation Army in this case, and the Croatians and Bosnians in the previous war, have also been guilty of atrocities. And I for one am not going to do the arithmetic to figure out who has done more atrocities than the other. Civil wars bring out the worst in peoples, and the Balkan wars of the last five years are not unusual in that respect."
15. See Rhys Williams, "The Propaganda War: Official Media Machine Hits no Resistance", in The Independent, 29 March 1999