The Balkans: A Short History (23 page)

The shift toward a “humanitarian” concept of pain and punishment—bound up with changing ideas of the human personality—was a very gradual one, stretching across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Then relatively suddenly, between 1820 and 1860, the number of capital crimes was sharply reduced in Western Europe, older forms of punishment such as the rack, burning and decapitation were abandoned, while the modern prison evolved and replaced the public space as the main locus of state executions. “The spectacle, and even the very idea of pain,” wrote John Stuart Mill in 1836, “is kept more and more out of sight by those classes who enjoy in their fulness the benefits of civilization.” Thanks to “a perfection of mechanical arrangements impracticable in any but a high state of civilization,” the infliction of pain can be handed over to “the judge, the soldier, the surgeon, the butcher and the executioner.” And Mill continued: “It is in avoiding the presence not only of actual pain but of whatever suggests offensive or disagreeable ideas that a great part of refinement consists.”
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A few years later, such sentiments animated a British traveler, Sir James Gardner Wilkinson, who tried to intervene in the border wars between the Ottoman rulers of Bosnia-Hercegovina and their Montenegrin neighbors. Upset by both sides’ habit of decapitating enemies and displaying their heads in public, he wrote to the bishop-prince of Montenegro, the Vladika Petar, arguing that a custom “so shocking to humanity” actually prolonged hostilities by exciting the desire for revenge. He tried to explain “the difference between the sentiments engendered by a civilized war, and a war in which such a usage is adopted.” It was only in 1820, we might note, that the heads of the Cato Street conspirators had been publicly displayed to the crowd in London.
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The reduction in public executions in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, Scandinavia and Germany reflected not just the emergence of new “civilized feelings” and new industrial equipment, but also the authorities’ fears of disorderly crowds and their excitable passions. Rural peasant societies like those of southeastern Europe inhabited a different moral, mechanical and political universe. The Ottoman authorities were not worried about the riotous mob and they went in for exemplary public punishment; but for their part they regarded the European use of bodies for surgical experiment and dissection as sacrilegious and immoral. The Vladika Petar Njegos, who had recently felt obliged to avenge the Turkish killing of his own relatives in the usual fashion, courteously rejected Wilkinson’s proposal as unworkable.
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“We may be poor but we have honor,” an elderly Montenegrin woman told an interviewer recently, summing up the close relationship between peasant hardship and the code of honor. Western attitudes asserted the value of individual self-control; others were more concerned about preserving the family honor. Peasant communities had regulated life both officially and informally in terms of collective responsibility and sanctions since Byzantine times, if not earlier. Punishment, even by the state, long reflected the popular view that families were responsible for the misdeeds of their individual members. Peasants in nineteenth-century Serbia, for instance, proposed stamping out growing crime by exiling both the criminal and his family to special penal regions. Antibrigandage laws often deported or levied fines not only on the brigand but on his relatives too.
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Modernizing politicians were, however, drawn to the new norms of violence—individualized, private and impersonal rather than collective, familial and public. Building a modern state—in the Balkans as elsewhere—meant wresting violence, punishment and local lawmaking out of the hands of all unauthorized agents and centralizing them in the hands of civil servants. For them, in the words of a Greek journalist of the 1920s, the state had “a duty to show it stands above everyone and everything.” Regular armies replaced self-armed groups; judicial and penal bureaucracies emerged in place of village courts and customary sanction; the brigands were hunted down. In Montenegro, where tribal law had been all-powerful, Vladika Petar II’s successor, Prince Danilo Petrovic, imposed a new law code in 1851—less than a decade after Wilkinson’s first intervention—and discouraged decapitation. He also outlawed the practice of blood feuding, which threatened to make it impossible to weld the country’s tribes into a cohesive whole.
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The conquest of the new values was neither instantaneous nor complete. Wartime massacres unleashed by the Croatian Ustache against Jews and Serbs, especially at the Jasenovac death camp, or by the Romanian Iron Guard in their pogroms of 1940–1941 represented a fusion of older and newer mentalities and technologies. In 1947, during the Greek civil war, an outraged London
Daily Mirror
published a front-page photograph of armed royalists on horseback parading the heads of Greek rebels. “Heads Are Cheap” was the title of the article, which highlighted the “cruelties and atrocities” committed by regular police and army units. In fact, ministerial orders had previously been issued forbidding the display of decapitated heads and recommending the use of photographs instead to identify dead guerrillas. Behind the scenes, British officials deplored the use of the term “atrocity.” They pointed out that “the exhibition of corpses of criminals was not confined to Greece and even in normal times was practiced in order to convince the frightened populace that a well-known murderer was dead.” In poorly policed societies, decapitation proved the victim was dead and asserted the courage of his killer or the power of the state. Transporting entire bodies was burdensome and cameras were expensive—as American bounty hunters also knew. And far from heads being cheap, these ones were valuable, since prices had been fixed for them.
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Was there really, then, a special propensity to cruelty that lingered on in the Balkans into modern times? Perhaps it all depends on what one means by cruelty. One could, after all, tell a very different story. There were no Balkan analogues to the racial violence displayed by lynch mobs in the United States between 1880 and 1920 or to the class violence that labor protests elicited there and elsewhere. Western Europe had its own myths of revolutionary violence—from Sorel onward—whose impact was far greater there than in the continent’s southeastern corner, yet these were commonly regarded as heroic rather than barbaric. Political violence between 1930 and 1960, from the Left and the Right, was no greater in the Balkans than elsewhere, whether we are comparing postwar Bulgarian and Soviet prisons, or Greek and Spanish camps after their respective civil wars.

Beyond politics, too, Balkan states have not been inclined to kill or incarcerate more of their citizens than other countries. Compared with the 11 million criminal suspects and 2 million prisoners in the United States and the huge prison population of Russia, contemporary southeastern Europe looks rather humane. In the United States 554 per 100,000 were behind bars in 1994; the corresponding rates were 195 in Romania, 63 in Macedonia and 16 in Greece. None of the Balkan prisoners faced the prospect of judicial execution, whereas the United States used the electric chair or lethal injection upon dozens of prisoners a year. And if it is hard to argue that Balkan states now are more cruel than others, it is equally hard to make the same charge of their societies: crime rates are not above European norms, least of all for violent crimes. Alcohol does not induce the number of assaults it does in Protestant Europe, nor does racial hatred.
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On the lookout for evidence of Balkan bloodthirstiness, however, Western observers have often mistaken the myths spun by nineteenth-century romantic nationalists for eternal truths. Across Europe, from Ireland to Poland, poetic visionaries dreamed of resurrection, sacrifice and blood spilled for the sake of the nation’s future. To take but the best-known Balkan exemplar of this genre,
The Mountain Wreath’
s glorification of the supposed extermination of Muslims in Montenegro a century and a half earlier was the product of the Vladika Petar Njegos’s poetic imagination, not of historical fact: it lauded as heroic atrocity the much less bloody real story of the gradual departure of Muslims from Montenegrin land over more than a century. The rise of the Kosovo legend during the twentieth century was similarly misleading—an indication of modern not medieval prejudices. In both cases, the emergence of Balkan epics of bloodshed and national unity was not fortuitous; they emerged at points in the nineteenth century when the nation-building process was coming under particular strain. This, not the primeval past, was the origin of their ethnically polarized sentiments.
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Moreover, as was evident first in the Gulf War, the West has increasingly come to see war itself as a spectacle. NATO’s intervention in Kosovo and Serbia utilized an impersonal and distant technology in order to reassure a Western public that a military campaign could now be waged with a minimum of casualties or bloodshed on either side. In this way, perhaps, war itself is being depersonalized, much as social violence had been earlier. Writing off Balkan violence as primeval and unmodern has become one way for the West to keep the desired distance from it. Yet, in fact, ethnic cleansing is not a specifically Balkan phenomenon. It took place through much of central and eastern Europe during and immediately after Hitler’s war: more than fifty forced population movements took place in the 1940s, involving the death and transplantation of millions of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and many others. The roots of the ferocity of this latest cleansing lie not in Balkan mentalities but in the nature of a civil war waged with the technological resources of the modern era. Unlike national wars, civil wars do not unify society (in the way, for instance, the Second World War helped unify British society). On the contrary, they exacerbate latent tensions and differences, and are fought out amid a total breakdown of social and governmental institutions.
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How might the Balkans look if the sign of violence was lifted for a moment? It is true that serious threats to peace still exist in southeastern Europe, perhaps more serious than elsewhere: Turkish–Greek relations, embittered in particular by Cyprus, will take more than an earthquake to improve, while NATO bombing of Kosovo has solved one problem (Serbian persecution of the Kosovar Albanians) only to create others (Albanian persecution of Serbs, as well as the new relationship between Albania, Macedonia, Serbia and Kosovo itself). Just as the nation-building process is more recent and compressed in the Balkans, so ethnic nationalism remains stronger and civic traditions more fragile than elsewhere. Nevertheless, while Yugoslavia in the 1990s descended into war for its own reasons, other countries in the region have followed a more peaceful path. Occasional Greek references to “Northern Epirus” (i.e., southern Albania), Bulgarian dreams of “Macedonia,” Romanian nostalgia for Bessarabia and Moldova are today faint and meaningless echoes of issues that provoked wars and invasions a century ago: politics there has ceased to gravitate around expansionism and national glory. Only perhaps some Albanian nationalists have yet to abandon the dreams given up by their neighbors.

During the Cold War, a social and economic revolution transformed the Balkans. The all-important shift to an urban, industrial—and now postindustrial—society brought fundamental changes to the nature of daily life and new challenges to domestic political elites. The ending of the Cold War has allowed the Balkans to participate in a different Europe, whose values are inscribed in its dominant cross-national institutions: the European Union, NATO and the CSCE (now the OSCE), for example. And it has transformed them geopolitically too, since they now find themselves at the center of a greatly expanded market that takes in the Black Sea, the former Soviet Union and central Asia, offering possibilities for business across a vaster area than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman empire. In other words, the problems and perspectives for southeastern Europe today are not those of the past, but dilemmas familiar in one form or another to most European countries: how to reconcile older patterns of welfare provision with the competitive pressures of global capitalism; how to provide affordable energy while safeguarding the natural environment from pollution; how to prevent the total decline of rural ways of life, and to build the prosperous economies that alone will reduce the attractions of organized crime and allow democracy to flourish. Perhaps understanding the region’s history can still clear the ground for an appreciation of the possibilities that lie ahead.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: NAMES

1. Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science,
cited in M. Todorova,
Imagining
the Balkans
(New York, 1997), p. 19.

2. Warrington W. Smyth,
A Year with the Turks
(New York, 1854), p. 169.

3.
Earl of Albemarle
[George Keppel],
Narrative of a Journey Across the
Balcan
(London, 1831); M. von Tietz,
St. Petersburgh, Constantinople
and Napoli di Romania in 1833 and 1834
(New York, 1836), p. 91; Lt.-Gen. A. Jochmus, “Notes on a Journey into the Balkan, or Mount Haemus in 1847,”
Journal of the Royal Geographical Society
24 (1854), pp. 36–86; E. Ollier,
Cassell’s Illustrated History of the Russo-Turkish War
(London, n.d.), vol. 2, p. 15.

4. P. Vidal de la Blache and L. Gallois, Geographie Universelle (Paris, 1934), vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 395–96; J. Pinkerton,
Modern Geography: A
Description of the Empires, Kingdoms, States and Colonies, with the Oceans,
Seas and Isles in All Parts of the World
(London, 1802), vol. 1, p. 461; Jochmus, “Notes,” p. 64. The earliest indigenous account is probably D. Filippides and G. Konstantas’s 1791
Geografia neoteriki;
see the edition edited by A. Koumarianou (Athens, 1988).