The Blue Monkey Review

The central theme of Misha Glenny’s history of the region is that the “Great Powers” have generally been the source of conflict in the Balkans, and that national identity has arisen both as a defense against Great Power hegemony and as an instrument of that hegemony. The Austrian emperor claimed a role as “defender” of Slavic Catholics in Croatia and kept taking more territory on the Dalmatian coast; the Russian tsar could establish “special” relationships with Bulgars, Serbs, even Montenegrins, depending on who best served plans for Russia’s growing power. And the Turkish empire? As the “sick man of Europe” declined in health the other empires tried to take as much as they could and the mixture of peasants, merchants, and bandits who actually lived here improvised states and formed alliances with the power that seemed least exploitive. The process continued into the 20th century as Nazi, western, and Soviet claims on the region shifted and hardened.

More recently, however, the loyalties that emerged from almost two centuries of self-formation have become instruments for homegrown elites. In the 1990s Croatian and Serbian leaders wrapped themselves and their expansionist goals in the cloak of national identity. As in the American Civil War, neighbors, even family members, found themselves on opposing sides in a struggle of conflicting ideologies that they. I cannot do justice to the stories from that period, but the hatreds that broke out then still have power to shape lives now. The hardships of war and economic breakdown have left some Serbians and Montenegrins nostalgic for Yugoslavia, for Tito, even for Communism.

Many people here recognize that their leaders have taken advantage of them. My students all take for granted that the government here, at all levels, is corrupt. They vaguely recognize that the identity issue has become a useful symbol for political power. Blue Monkey readers will remember Momir’s comment a few weeks ago, that the referendum on Montenegrin independence only distracted people from economic issues. My own students agreed when I shared that idea with them. Still, for the ordinary unemployed guy taking his morning walk on the corso, the referendum issue probably appeals to pride of place. Ads supporting independence have now begun to appear, claiming that only an independent Montenegro can be Montenegro.

Like many complicated issues, this one lends itself to simple explanations. In discussing conflicting loyalties in the Balkans with my students, many of them quickly agreed that internecine conflict somehow defined this region and their culture. When I gave them the quote that begins this posting, a murmur of agreement ran through the class. The problem is that they don’t hate other Balkan people. I’m sure that resentments run deep in this region, but younger people here don’t take them for granted. National identity has other meanings than simple exclusion.

Yet what does it mean to be Serbian or Croatian, let alone Montenegrin? I’ve tackled that question with my students both directly, in discussing national identity, and indirectly in discussing race. Race makes for an interesting intellectual problem here, since it remains largely theoretical. Every one of my 160 students is white. I’d be surprised if most of them have even seen anyone of African descent. “We learn in school that there are four races,” Alexander told me a few weeks ago. “White, black, red, and yellow.” “What about the Roma?” I ask. “Are they a separate race?” “Of course.” “Well, are they white, black, red, or yellow?” “Well, that is what we learn in school. But in reality....” And so it went. Most took comfort in the notion that color (some kind of color) defined race, but we left unresolved the issue of whether the Roma were Montenegrin.

In fact, the issue of what it means to be Montenegrin proved intractable. Alexander claimed some kind of generalized Slavic kinship. “Can I be Montenegrin?” I asked. “If I live here? Learn the language?” Some said yes, some no. I had students who accepted a liberal definition of national identity as citizenship. “If they are born here and live here, then they are Montenegrin.” Others laid out characteristics that were far more exclusive, including bloodline and religion. The issues of religion and language emerge repeatedly in discussing Montenegrin identity, and these same issues appear throughout the region.

“We had a religious war in an atheist country,” said Jasmine, an artist in Belgrade. During the 1990s Serbian Orthodox soldiers shelled Catholic Dubrovnik. Catholic Croatian soldiers shelled the Moslem section of Mostar, in Bosnia. When Yugoslavia fell apart, the pieces it fell into generally had distinct religious majorities. Religion came up repeatedly in my classroom discussions as a marker of national identity or even of race.

It came up most recently in an informal discussion that I had with two of my students, Dragan and Neda. I had explained some elements of American youth culture in the 1920s, and talked about dating in general terms. I asked something rather general about dating in Montenegro today, and Neda unexpectedly said, “Sometimes there are national issues.” That surprised me, though she quickly made me understand that dating across the ethnic barrier is difficult or worse. She had a relationship with “a Croatian boy” that her parents found unsuitable. .She had to give it up. “They say they only want what is best for us, but I wonder.”

“But if he lives in your town and he speaks your language, what makes him Croatian?”

“His parents are Croatian. And they are Catholic while we are Orthodox.” Just that simple.

Dragan had a similar experience which was an even clearer example of the religious divide. He had become acquainted with a girl who was beautiful, he said. “I fell in love with her.” And he believed that she liked him, too. But when they talked and he told her his name, “I could see how she reacted because it was not a Moslem name.” And her parents would not allow her to spend time with boys who are not Moslem. [Dragan and Neda both live on the coast, an area with a much larger share of Croatian and Moselm Montenegrins than other areas.]

Boundaries marked by place of worship can hardly surprise us. Even in the U.S. inter-faith marriage faces some problems, though a religious identity would be distinct from national identity for us. Language, though, is a different story. We have our own problems with that in the U.S. But the issue is whether we admit that we are a bilingual national state or continue to irrationally deny it. We don’t argue over whether English is really the language we speak. (Oops—forgot the whole Ebonics controversy. But I think everyone else forgot that, too.)

When Yugoslavia existed, the official language was Serbo-Croatian. This made the claim that the regional dialects could all be grouped under a single term. In fact, the languages of the region, from Bulgaria to Slovenia all share many features, and linguistically are grouped under the rubric of “South Slavic.”

The real issue, though, is the language(s) spoken in Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Serbia. In my Blue Monkey postings I have consistently referred to Serbian as the language that I was trying to learn and the one I have used to ask for directions, buy cappuccino, and reveal points of my personal biography to strangers. And I’ve used that same language in all of the countries mentioned above. Yet, at the moment, all of those places claim to have their own language. “Govorite li hrvatski? (“Do you speak Croatian?”) the woman asked who helped me find my hotel in Dubrovnik. I made the same wild claim that I would have made if the question had referred to Serbian: “Malo,” I said. (“A little.”)

“Every country has the right to its own language,” one of my students told me. So, the United States, the most powerful nation (at the moment) on Earth, how does it get left out? He saw my point but it didn’t seem to undermine his position. Other of my students, though, just as freely asserted that Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin were all “the same language.”

I’d agree with the second viewpoint. The differences between Croatian and Serbian, for instance, are so few and non-dramatic that you would need to know one of the languages very well to quickly spot the differences. I bought a local teen magazine in preparation for my talk on youth culture, and managed to understand the gist of several of the articles. It finally occurred to me to note that it was printed in Croatia. It suddenly made sense why the magazine had used the unfamiliar term spoj for date rather than sastanak, the usual term here.

So, some vocabulary changes from one region to the next. Also, there are differences in pronunciation that have now been turned into differences of spelling. Mainly, Montenegrins and Croatians add a lot of “y” sounds that Serbians don’t use. [The alphabet here is completely phonetic, with the Latin symbol “j” representing the “y” sound.] Wednesday in Belgrade is Sreda but Srijeda in Nikšić.

Language distinctions also crop up here in choice of alphabet. In Croatia they only use the Latin alphabet. In the Republika Srbska section of Bosnia, only the Cyrillic shows up on road signs. But once you cross into Bosnian Bosnia, the Latin alphabet completely replaces the Cyrillic. In Montenegro and Serbia, both alphabets are used, though much more Cyrillic in Belgrade than in Montenegro. All these differences, though, don’t amount to a different language. Taken together, they are far less than the difference between the language spoken in Pittsburgh and the one spoken in Charleston.

Right now commonalities and relationships don’t seem to count for as much as distinction and exclusion. Montenegrins are eager to join the E.U. because of the expected economic benefits. They want to belong in Europe. So do Croatians and Serbians. But they don’t want to belong to one another.