by Tony Judt
But in time the Communists in Czechoslovakia, as elsewhere, came to see the advantage of encouraging a moderate degree of national feeling. Reflecting a growing sentiment in Bratislava the reformers of 1968 (many of them of Slovak origin) proposed, as we have seen, a new federal constitution to comprise two distinct Czech and Slovak Republics; of all the significant innovations discussed or implemented in the Prague Spring this was the only one to survive the subsequent ‘normalization’. Having initially treated Catholic, rural Slovakia as hostile territory the Party authorities now came if anything to favor it (see Chapter 13).
Slovakia’s backwardness—or rather, the absence there of large concentrations of educated middle-class urbanites—now worked to its advantage. With fewer cars or televisions and worse communications than the more advanced western provinces, Slovaks appeared less vulnerable to foreign influence than Prague-based radicals and dissidents with their access to foreign media. Accordingly they suffered far less in the repression and purges of the seventies. Now it was Czechs who were on the receiving end of official disfavour.322
With this history in mind, the break up of Czechoslovakia after 1989 would appear, if not a foregone conclusion, then at the very least a logical outcome of decades of mutual ill-feeling: suppressed and exploited under Communism but not forgotten. But it was not thus. In the three years separating the end of Communism from the final split, every public opinion poll showed that some form of common Czecho-Slovak state was favored by a majority of Czechs and Slovaks. Nor was the political class deeply divided over the issue: in both Prague and Bratislava it was broadly agreed from the outset that the new Czechoslovakia would be a federation, with considerable autonomy for its separate parts. And the new President, Václav Havel, was a firm and very public believer in maintaining Czechs and Slovaks in the same country.
The initial unimportance of the ‘national’ question can be seen from the results of the first free elections, in June 1990. In Bohemia and Moravia Havel’s Civic Forum secured half of the vote, with most of the remainder divided between Communists and Christian Democrats. In Slovakia the picture was more complex: Civic Forum’s sister party Public Against Violence (PAV) emerged as the largest group, but a sizeable share of the vote was split between Christian Democrats, Communists, Hungarian Christian Democrats and Greens.21 But the newly re-emergent Slovak National Party scored just 13.9 percent in the elections to a Slovak National Council, 11 percent in the vote for delegates to the Federal Assembly (parliament). Less than one Slovak voter in seven opted for the only party which favored dividing the country into its separate ethnic constituencies.
But in the course of 1991 Civic Forum began to disintegrate. An alliance based upon a common foe (Communism) and a popular leader (Havel), it now had neither: Communism was gone and Havel was the President of the Republic, ostensibly above the political fray. Political differences between erstwhile colleagues now came to the fore, with doctrinal free-marketeers led by Finance Minister Václav Klaus (a self-described Thatcherite) increasingly influential. In April 1991, followingparliamentary approval of a broad law on the privatization of state-owned enterprises, Civic Forum split and Klaus’s (dominant) faction became the Civic Democratic Party.
Klaus was determined to drive the country rapidly forward towards ‘capitalism’. But whereas there was a real constituency in the Czech lands for such an objective this was not the case in Slovakia. Privatization, the free market and a reduced state sector held little appeal for most Slovaks, who depended far more than Czechs upon jobs in unprofitable, outdated state-owned factories, mines and mills—‘enterprises’ for whose products there was no longer a protected market and that were unlikely to attract foreign capital or private investors. In the eyes of certain business and political circles in Prague, Slovakia was a burdensome inheritance.
Meanwhile Public Against Violence also broke apart, for analogous reasons. Its most effective public figure was now Vladimír Mečiar, an ex-boxer who played a relatively minor role in the events of 1989 but had since proved far more adept than his colleagues at maneuvering through the shoals of democratic politics. Following the June election he had formed a government in the Slovak National Council, but his rebarbative personal style produced a split in his coalition and Mečiar was replaced by the Catholic politician Ján Carnogurský. Mečiar duly departed PAV, forming instead his own Movement for a Democratic Slovakia.
From the autumn of 1991 into the summer of 1992 representatives from the Czech and Slovak administrations conducted lengthy negotiations, seeking an agreed basis for a decentralized, federal constitution—the preference of the clear majority of politicians and voters on both sides. But Mečiar, in order to establish a constituency for himself and his party, now took up the cause of Slovak nationalism—a subject in which he had not previously evinced great interest. Slovaks, he informed his audiences, were threatened by everything from Czech privatization plans to Hungarian separatism to the prospect of absorption into ‘Europe’. Their national existence (not to mention their livelihoods) was now at stake.
Buoyed by such rhetoric and his kitschy but charismatic public style, Mečiar led his new party to a clear victory at the Federal elections of June 1992 with nearly 40 percent of the vote in Slovakia. Meanwhile, in the Czech regions, Václav Klaus’s new Civic Democratic Party, in alliance with Christian Democrats, also emerged victorious. With Klaus now prime minister of the Czech region, both autonomous halves of the federal republic were in the hands of men who—for different but complementary reasons—would not be sorry to see the country fall apart. Only the Federal President himself now stood, in constitutional form and in his own person, for the ideal of a united, federal Czechoslovakia.
But Václav Havel was no longer as popular—and therefore as influential—as he had been less than two years before. In his very first official journey as President he had traveled not to Bratislava but to Germany—an understandable move in the light of longstanding Czech-German animosity and his country’s need to make friends in Western Europe, but a tactical misstep nonetheless from the point of view of Slovak sensibilities. And Havel was not always well served by his staff: in March 1991 his spokesman Michael Žantovský declared that Slovak politics were increasingly in the hands of ex-Communists and ‘people who recall the Slovak state as the golden period of the Slovak nation’.323
Žantovský’s assertion was not altogether mistaken, but in context it would prove more than a little self-fulfilling. Like other former Czech dissidents, Havel and his colleagues were not always inclined to think well of Slovaks. They rather looked upon them as parochial chauvinists: at best naively chasing the mirage of sovereignty, at worst nostalgic for the wartime puppet state. Ironically, Klaus did not share such liberal prejudices, nor did he care one way or the other about Slovakia’s past. Like Mečiar, he was a realist. The two men, now the most powerful politicians in their respective regions, spent the next few weeks ostensibly negotiating the terms of a state treaty for a federal Czechoslovakia.
Whether they ever could have achieved agreement is unlikely: Mečiar demanded currency-issuing and borrowing rights for a virtually sovereign Slovak republic; a moratorium on privatization; the restoration of Communist-era subsidies; and a raft of other measures - all of which were anathema to Klaus, doggedly pursuing his plan for a forced march to the unrestricted market. Indeed, their meetings in the course of June and July 1992 were not really negotiations at all: Klaus purported to be surprised and upset by Mečiar’s demands, but these were hardly a secret in view of Mečiar’s many speeches on the subject. In practice it was Klaus who was maneuvering the Slovak leader towards a break, rather than the other way around.
In consequence, even though the majority of Slovak deputies in the Slovak National Council and in the Federal Assembly would have been quite content to approve a state treaty affording each half of the country full autonomy and equal status in a federal state, they found themselves instead facing a fait accompli. With negotiations stalled, Klaus
in effect told his Slovak interlocutors: Since we appear to be unable to reach an agreement, we might as well abandon these fruitless efforts and go our separate ways. The Slovaks, faced with the apparent fulfillment of their own wishes, were trapped into assent—in many cases against their own better judgment.
On July 17th 1992 the Slovak National Council accordingly voted to adopt a new flag, a new constitution and a new name: the Slovak Republic. A week later Klaus and Mečiar, the latter still a trifle dazed by his own ‘success’, agreed to divide their country with effect from January 1st 1993. On that day Czechoslovakia disappeared and its two republics re-emerged as separate states, with Klaus and Mečiar as their respective Prime Ministers. Václav Havel, whose efforts to bind the country together had been increasingly forlorn—and altogether ignored in the final months—ceased to be President of Czechoslovakia and was reincarnated as President of the foreshortened Czech Republic.324
Whether divorce was good for the two partners remained unclear for some time—neither the Czech Republic nor Slovakia flourished in the initial post-Communist decade. Klaus’s ‘shock therapy’ and Mečiar’s national-Communism both failed, albeit in different ways. But although Slovaks came to regret their dalliance with Vladimír Mečiar, and Klaus’s star waned in Prague, nostalgia for Czechoslovakia was never much in evidence. The Czechoslovak divorce was a manipulated process in which the Czech Right brought about what it claimed not to seek while Slovak Populists achieved rather more than they had intended; not many people were overjoyed at the result, but nor was there lasting regret. As in the break up of the Soviet Union, the power of the state and the political machinery it had spawned were not threatened: merely duplicated.
The division of Czechoslovakia was a product of chance and circumstances. It was also the work of men. With other people in control—with different outcomes at the elections of 1990 and 1992—the story would not have been the same. Contagion played a small part as well: the example of the Soviet Union—and events unfolding in the Balkans—made a schism between the two ‘national republics’ of one small central European state seem less absurd or impermissible than it might otherwise have appeared. Had a federal state treaty been agreed upon by 1992—had Czechoslovakia endured for a few years longer—it is highly unlikely that anyone in Prague or Bratislava would have seen much point in pursuing their quarrels, with the prospect of admission to the European Union absorbing their attention and the bloody massacres in nearby Bosnia concentrating their minds.
XXI
The Reckoning
‘If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned
silly thing in the Balkans’.
Otto von Bismarck
‘It seems as if these feuding peasants could hardly wait for the invasion of
their country so they could hunt down and kill one another’.
Milovan Djilas, Wartime (1977)
‘We’ve got no dog in this fight’.
James Baker, US Secretary of State (June 1991)
‘The worst thing about Communism is what comes after’.
Adam Michnik
‘Truth is always concrete.’
G. W. Hegel
The peaceful fragmentation of Czechoslovakia contrasts dramatically with the catastrophe that befell Yugoslavia in the same years. Between 1991 and 1999 hundreds of thousands of Bosnians, Croats, Serbs and Albanians were killed, raped or tortured by their fellow citizens; millions more were forced out of their homes and into exile. Struggling to account for massacres and civil war on a scale not seen since 1945—in a country long regarded by Western radicals as something of a model socialist society—foreign commentators have typically proposed two contrasting explanations.
One view, widely circulated in Western media and taken up in the public statements of European and American statesmen, presents the Balkans as a hopeless case, a cauldron of mysterious squabbles and ancient hatreds. Yugoslavia was ‘doomed’. It consisted, in the words of a much-cited bon mot, of six republics, five nations, four languages, three religions and two alphabets, all held together by a single party. What happened after 1989 was simple: the lid having been removed, the cauldron exploded.
According to this account, ‘age-old’ conflicts—in what the Marquis de Salaberry had described in 1791 as ‘the unpolished extremities’ of Europe—bubbled over much as they had done in centuries past. Murderous animosities, fuelled by memories of injustice and vengeance, took over a whole nation. In the words of the US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, speaking in September 1992: ‘Until the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it’.
In a contrasting interpretation, some historians and foreign observers asserted that—on the contrary—the Balkan tragedy was largely the fault of outsiders. Thanks to outside intervention and imperial ambition, the territory of former Yugoslavia had over the course of the past two centuries been occupied, divided and exploited to the advantage of others—Turkey, Britain, France, Russia, Austria, Italy and Germany. If there was bad blood between the peoples of the region it should be traced to imperial manipulation rather than to ethnic hostility. It was the irresponsible interference of foreign powers, so the argument runs, that exacerbated local difficulties: had the German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for example, not insisted in 1991 on ‘prematurely’ recognizing the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, the Bosnians might never have followed suit, Belgrade would not have invaded, and a decade of disaster could have been averted.
Whatever one thinks of these two readings of Balkan history, it is striking to note that despite their apparent incompatibility they have one important feature in common. Both diminish or ignore the role of the Yugoslavs themselves, dismissed as victims either of fate or the manipulations and mistakes of others. To be sure, there was a lot of history buried in the mountains of the former Yugoslavia, and many bad memories too. And outsiders did indeed contribute crucially to the country’s tragedy, though mostly through irresponsible acquiescence in local crimes. But the break up of Yugoslavia—resembling in this respect the dismantling of other former Communist states—was the work of men, not fate. And the overwhelming responsibility for Yugoslavia’s tragedy lay not in Bonn or any other foreign capital, but with the politicians in Belgrade.
When Josip Broz Tito died in 1980, at the age of 87, the Yugoslavia he had reassembled in 1945 had a real existence. Its constituent republics were separate units within a federal state whose presidency comprised representatives from all six republics, as well as two autonomous regions (the Vojvodina and Kosovo) within Serbia. The different regions had very different pasts. Slovenia and Croatia in the north were primarily Catholic and had once been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as too, albeit for a shorter time, had Bosnia. The southern part of the country (Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia) was for centuries under Ottoman Turkish rule, which accounts for the large number of Muslims in addition to the predominantly Orthodox Serbs.
But these historical differences—though genuine enough and exacerbated by the experience of World War Two—had been attenuated in subsequent decades. Economic change brought hitherto isolated rural populations into sometimes uneasy contact in towns like Vukovar or Mostar; but the same changes also accelerated integration across old social and ethnic boundaries.
Yugoslavia 1945-91
Thus although the Communist myth of fraternal unity required turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to wartime memories and divisions—the history textbooks of Tito’s Yugoslavia were prudently unforthcoming about the bloody civil wars that had marked the country’s common past—the benefits of such official silences were real. The rising post-war generation was encouraged to think of itself as ‘Yugoslav’, rather than ‘Croat’ or ‘Macedonian’; and many—especially the young, the better educated and the burgeoning number of city-dwellers—had adopted the habit.325 Younger intellectuals in Ljubljana or Zagreb were no longer much interested in
the heroic or troubled past of their ethnic forebears. By 1981 in cosmopolitan Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, 20 percent of the population described themselves as ‘Yugoslavs’.
Bosnia had always been the most ethnically variegated region of Yugoslavia and was thus perhaps not typical. But the whole country was an interwoven tapestry of overlapping minorities. The 580,000 Serbs living in Croatia in 1991 were some 12 percent of the population of that republic. Bosnia in the same year was 44 percent Muslim, 31 percent Serb and 17 percent Croat. Even tiny Montenegro was a mix of Montenegrins, Serbs, Muslims, Albanians and Croats—not to speak of those who opted to describe themselves to census-takers as ‘Yugoslavs’. Residents of ethnically mixed regions often had little sense of their friends’ or neighbors’ nationality or religion. ‘Inter-marriage’ was increasingly common.
Indeed the ‘ethnic’ fault-lines within Yugoslavia were never very well defined. The linguistic distinctions can serve as a representative illustration. Albanians and Slovenes speak distinct languages. Macedonians speak Macedonian (i.e. Bulgarian, with minor variations). But the differences between the ‘Serb’ and ‘Croat’ forms of ‘Serbo-Croatian’ as spoken by the overwhelming majority of the population were, and are, small indeed. Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet and Croats (and Bosnians) the Latin alphabet; but beyond some literary and scholarly terms, occasional spelling variations and a different pronunciation of the letter ‘e’ (‘ye’ in the ‘Iékavian’ or Croat form, ‘e’ in the ‘Ekavian’ or Serb variant) the two ‘languages’ are identical. Moreover, Montenegrins write in Cyrillic (like Serbs) but pronounce in the ‘Iékavian’ manner, like Croats and Bosnians—as do the Serb residents of Bosnia. Only the historical inhabitants of Serbia proper use the ‘Ekavian’ variant—and when Bosnian Serb nationalist leaders sought after 1992 to impose official ‘Serbian’ (i.e. ‘Ekavian’) pronunciation on their fellow Bosnian Serbs in the zone they had carved out of Bosnia, they encountered overwhelming resistance.