Dispatches from the Balkan War and Other Writings

by Finkielkraut, Alain; Rogers, Peter S.; Golsan, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780803220034
• ISBN10: 0803220030
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

Dispatches from the Balkan War and Other Writingsis a collection of essays on the Balkan crisis and on European reaction to it. In opposition to many powerful figures in France, Alain Finkielkraut has largely supported the Croatian struggles for sovereignty. He argues against an array of outmoded views of the Balkan region and its political and cultural conditionsconceptions that date back to earlier in the century and that have long bedeviled the region and the European powers' relation to it. The book takes up larger issues about European political and intellectual historyissues that are in urgent need of reexamination and revision in the post-Cold War world. A timely and passionate book, this volume will be of great interest to Finkielkraut's many admirers as well as to anyone interested in the ongoing Balkan crisis and modern European history.

Author Biography

Alain Finkielkraut is one of the most celebrated and controversial intellectuals in contemporary Europe. A staunch defender of liberal intellectual and political traditions, he is both a fiery polemicist and a skillful analyst of intellectual trends and histories. Peter S. Rogers is an associate professor of French at Loyola University New Orleans. He is the author of Proust: Speculative Scripture. Richard Golsan is a professor of French at Texas A&M University. He is the author or editor of several books, including Fascism’s Return (Nebraska 1997).

Table of Contents

Translators' Acknowledgments	p. ix
Note on Translation	p. x
Chronology of the War in the Former Yugoslavia	p. xi
Introduction: French Intellectuals and the War in the Former Yugoslavia	p. xvii
How Can One Be Croatian?: The Return of Ideology
Let's Not Congratulate Ourselves	p. 5
History's Poor Relatives	p. 13
"I Am the Member of an Ancient Tribe..."	p. 37
Indifferent Memory	p. 42
How Can One Be Croatian?: Journal of a Disaster
A Death Announcement 9 July 1991	p. 71
Words and War 4 October 1991	p. 78
The President Gives a History Lesson 12 December 1991	p. 80
"Ave Europa, Morituri Te Salutant" 10 December 1991	p. 83
A Dismissal of Charges 25 April 1992	p. 84
Sarajevo: Crimes against Humanity 10 May 1992	p. 85
Past-Present 27 May 1992	p. 87
Sarajevo Twenty Days after Francois Mitterrand 21 July 1992	p. 90
The Boat Is Full 31 July 1992	p. 92
Bastards and Victims 3 August 1992	p. 94
Insults and Abandonment 9 August 1992	p. 96
Let's Not Add War to War 18 August 1992	p. 98
The French Exception 1 September 1992	p. 101
What Is a Nation?--Second Episode September 1992	p. 105
"If This Is a Man..." 15 September 1992	p. 108
The Perfect Crime 15 October 1992	p. 111
Writings on the Balkan Conflict, 1993-96
Introduction to Part 3	p. 115
The Demands of the Day 16 December 1992	p. 18
Revisionism 15 January 1993	p. 120
The Peacemakers: The Dream of Peace without Intervention Ends Up Prolonging the War 3 February 1993	p. 121
Two Europes February 1993	p. 123
The Inadmissible Frontier 18 March 1993	p. 129
Bosnia-Herzegovina: Without Shame 21 May 1993	p. 131
The Injunction of Buchenwald 15 December 1993	p. 133
Vukovar, Sarajevo: Hitler's Posthumous Victory 1993	p. 139
The Crime of Being Born: Europe, Nations, War February 1994	p. 148
Intellectuals, Politics, and War 16 September 1994	p. 166
Will To Be Powerless 29 November 1994	p. 170
On the Uselessness of the Twentieth Century 15 December 1994	p. 173
Forgetting the World 15 April 1995	p. 179
The Kusturica Imposture 2 June 1995	p. 182
Don't Let the Image of the Dead Bury the Dead 16 June 1995	p. 185
The King with No Clothes 26 July 1995	p. 188
Of Men and Angels 20-21 August 1995	p. 192
Race in Opposition to the Nation 8 September 1995	p. 198
President Tudjman, Europe, and Bosnia-Herzegovina 5 October 1995	p. 204
The Politeness of Despair 14 September 1996	p. 207
Leaving the War: An Interview with Alain Finkielkraut September 1996	p. 210
Source Acknowledgments	p. 221
Index	p. 223
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

Let's Not Congratulate Ourselves

A man, in a large town, walks quickly. Nervous, worried, and glum, he doesn't notice anything or anyone: he simply walks along. Suddenly shouting voices get his attention. He raises his head and on the other side of the street he sees a group of people arguing. Intrigued, he crosses the street, approaches them, and listens. A little later, he grimaces and continues his walk, crying out to the quarreling people, "You're bothering me to death!" Verdrei mir nicht dem Kopf , says the Yiddish that has left us this profound story.

    The same bad humor, the same impatience, the same exasperation have characterized the reaction of the French media to what we have agreed to call the Yugoslav crisis. They noticed people arguing, approached them, and listened with mike and camera in hand. And then they shouted, "You're bothering me to death!" They found that this manner of discussion came from mental retardation. The Balkan specificity of the conflict has been underscored with a kind of enraged contempt and undifferentiated disgust for all involved. Forget about finding out who attacked or was attacked in what has been called and today is still condescendingly referred to as "interethnic" confrontation. The antagonists have never had a right to the political distinctions that hold for the rest of Europe. These people are all the same, they are all animals. Just like the "Negroes" in colonial discourse, the Slovenes, Croatians, and Serbs are all the same. They are the interchangeable representatives of the same bestiality.

    This is not the first time the small nations of Central Europe have been dealt such treatment. In 1938, the contempt of the civilized toward the savage played a role in the abandonment of Czechoslovakia that was at least as important as was political cynicism or fear. As Emmanuel Terray has quite justly recalled, and in a timely fashion, the spirit of Munich was not only cowardly but arrogant. In response to or rather echoing Goering, who had referred to Prague's leaders as if they were "dwarfs or ridiculous Pygmies about whose origin we know nothing and who let themselves trouble a people of great culture," Chamberlain declared to the House of Commons, though in a much more refined style, "How horrible, how fantastic, how incredible that we should be reduced to digging trenches and putting on gas masks because of a quarrel in a distant land that has come about between people about whom we know nothing." And the journalist Stéphane Lauzanne reflected a widespread feeling among the French elite that France should not have "to carry with outstretched arms this or that unknown amalgam of diverse races in the Balkans."

    For some time the "Balkans" had been a synonym for "Africa," and we placed Bohemia there with the same geographical casualness as we do with Slovenia today.

    Out of order, you may object. It's a false analogy. For journalism's anger against Yugoslavia is not racist but, on the contrary, imbued with and even drunk on antiracist feelings. We're reproaching the belligerent not for being other but for crying out, "Death to the others!" and for reproducing on a small scale the types of behavior that Europe, learning lessons from Hitlerism, had decided once and for all to outlaw on its territory; it is not to be Pygmies, but it is to belong to Le Pen's Front National and, Ustachis here, Chetniks there, chauvinists everywhere, to immure themselves in this communitarian adherence at the very time when we have the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the free movement of persons and goods in Europe.

    And in order to emphasize the contrast with Munich where Goering held sway, the writer Peter Handke has just given, with the rejection of the national claims which are today set forth in Yugoslavia, the triple guarantee of his Slovene origin, his status as a cosmopolitan artist, and last but not least , his German bad conscience.

    But what does Peter Handke say in this "Conte du neuvième pays" (Tale of the ninth country), which today serves as a reference to the French Verdrei mir nich dem Kopf in regard to Yugoslavia? He begins in these terms: "All sorts of reasons have been evoked for the declaration of a separate regular State called the `Republic of Slovenia.' But for me to be able to differentiate them in my mind, I must first be able to see them: the substantive `reason' cannot, in any case, for me anyway, have any value except in relation to the verb `to see.' And I see no reason, none whatsoever -- not even Greater Serbia's famous Panzer communism -- to create the State of Slovenia; nothing but an accomplished fact. In the same way, I see no reasons to advance for the creation of the Croatian State."

    It would probably be frivolous to place before Peter Handke's eyes the outcome of a referendum by the people themselves concerning their self-determination. True democracy, in effect, combines the principle of the people's sovereignty and the idea expressed by Péguy in an issue of the series Cahiers de la Quinzaine, rifled none other than De la raison (On reason), that "the people are not the sovereign of reason."

    One person may thus be right against everyone else. The problem is that Handke's "reason" is exclusively made up of subjective impressions and estheticizing nostalgia: "For me Slovenia has always belonged," he writes, "to Great Yugoslavia." The Yugoslavian part of Slovene history, however, only begins in 1918, but what does that matter! The "for me" here takes care of any proof, the "I" of genius is reason unto itself and disqualifies as mere whims or guises of egoism the very reasons Slovenes and Croatians give for their declarations of independence.

    The Slovenes and Croatians did not, however, act lightly or capriciously, as Handke would have it. And contrary to the allegations or insinuations of the French journalistic leadership, neither have they taken history in the wrong direction, by choosing the nation -- that is to say, partition -- as opposed to federation -- that is to say, unity -- at a time when the law of the peoples' solidarity is imposed upon the European conscience and allows the national to bloom into the supranational. They have seen Serbia answer the claims of the Albanians from Kosovo (who make up between 80 and 90 percent of the province's population) with the installation of a colonial regime: dissolution of the Parliament; Serbization of the police to allow for a more efficacious repression; the establishment of a government under orders from Belgrade; the temporary interdiction of Albanians in secondary education; dismissal of all professors refusing to abide by this decision; etc. They have seen the increasing stranglehold of the local Serb power upon diplomacy, the army, finance, and the federation's political police. In short, they have noted the (re)constitution of a Serboslavia instead of and in place of the Yugoslavia that Tito had subjugated to his iron rule and which he took with him to the grave. And after asking in an atmosphere of indifference and even of general hostility for a confederation of sovereign states (the very thing that is being set up with everyone's approval in the former USSR), the Slovenes and Croatians concluded that democracy was possible only within a national framework and, for the nation, only outside of Yugoslavia.

    No autocentrism in this gesture. These small nations do not take themselves as ends in themselves. Their objective is not to be rid of all foreign influence. What animates them is not a refusal to live any longer in a plurinational space but instead the desire that Handke hates so much, and yet that is so legitimate: the desire to belong to Central Europe, and the desire, in leaving Yugoslavia, simply to join Europe immediately. We accuse them of being turned in on themselves, when they succumb to the call of the sea. What, in effect, is the construction of Europe for Croatia and Slovenia, if not precisely the end of "Balkanization" -- that is, finally the realizable possibility of being integrated as free nations into a communitarian unit, instead of being pawns in the hands of imperialist rivals?

    From India to the United States, certainly nothing is worse than the splintering of societies into piecemeal communities or hostile and closed tribes. But a little attention, memory, and a little wracking of one's brain would be enough to understand that the Yugoslav problem is not comprehensible in those terms. By reducing the conflict to a phenomenon of allergy or mutual exclusion and by turning each person into the "other" of one's enemy instead of trying to understand the motives, forms, and "political" stakes of this enmity, the media generously betrayed their mission to inform and instead walked hand in hand with our diplomacy's aloofness. The antiracism of the first gave a kind of moral cloak to the will of the second not to tamper with the borders set up by the Treaty of Versailles to counter German influence, and to save the Soviet empire, by avoiding any bad example from Yugoslavia.

    With heart and aloofness mixed, the status quo ante was defended, as though it were a question of a federal system defined by the transfer of national competencies to common institutions rather than of a hegemonic system characterized by one nation's predominance. We have called the military invasion a "civil war" and let "Serbia lead, with the decisive help of a supposedly `federal' army, a cruel operation of pure and simple conquest at Croatia's expense": a grand premiere in a Europe where institutions have rested since 1945 on "the repudiation of war as an instrument of national expansion."

    French thought never ceases to congratulate itself on being cured of communism, reconciled with democracy, uncompromising on the rights of man, and free of ideologies that not long ago still simplified reality in the most outrageous fashion. This is not a reason, however, to be proud. There is nothing here for currying favor. Never has Zola's remark been more apt: "Let's not congratulate ourselves." Though communism is dead, it has nevertheless handed on to its detractors a hate for any complexity as well as the rejection of a pluralistic world.

    In 1848, Paris was the home for the Springtime of Peoples. Those who dreamed of replacing a dynastic Europe with the United States of Europe looked to France, the second homeland of all patriots, and the headquarters of a revolution that wanted to combine freedom within with freedom without, civil and political rights with national independence.

    Today Paris no longer has this influence. Whether it invokes economic constraints, individualism's irresistible progress, or the pain of a recent past, the thought that unfolds there no longer has room for the nation. And when it is a question of condemning the putsch of the Kremlin Apparatchiks, personalities as unquestionable as Jacques Attali, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Pierre Joxe, minister of defense, and Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, state their solidarity with the "Soviet people," that is to say the homogeneous entity, the historical community of a new type, Russianized and normalized, which has been broken up in the name of freedom, in Vilnius and in Yerevan as it has been -- or such is the hope -- in Leningrad or Moscow.

    But of course we were not born yesterday. We know, as Istvan Bibo has written, that "following a cataclysm or an illusion," the nation's cause may be separated from that of freedom. We know that the national community's reappropriation of a country is not necessarily always accompanied by freedom of the individual. Vigilance is therefore necessary. Numerous rounds of territorial litigation, finding scapegoats to blame for shortages, the persecution of minorities, the fascist retraining and xenophobic bidding on the part of administrators of the old party eager to remain or to return to power, blaming the Jews for the 1917 Revolution and its consequences, the rehabilitation of national figures who collaborated in the Nazi "crusade" against Bolshevism, "the convulsionary fear of seeing freedom threaten the nation's cause": all these scenarios are possible and some are already being carried out.

    But if it is true that nations, beyond their cultural, historical, and climatic differences, should be subjected to the same democratic rules, democracy, for its part, needs a body, a land, a particular city so as to be something more than the power to go to a different television channel or to choose between several brands of deodorant. And to those who -- in our age of a single Market, economic concentration, world music, and culinary cosmopolitanism -- dismiss as anachronistic or barbarian the aspirations of the small European nations to exist on the world stage as subjects with full rights, there is no better nor more just answer than these lines from Vues sur l'Europe (Views on Europe), the book André Suarès wrote to denounce the Nazi danger during the dark days of the 1930s: "I proclaim the greatness of small nations. They alone are on the scale of man. Large empires are only on the scale of the species. Small nations created the city, morality, and the individual. Large empires have not even conceived their necessary law or dignity. The empires have quantity; quality marks the small nations.... Humanity's destiny is bound up with these divine small societies. Man holds strongly onto God; and God has created a man and not crowds. Variety characterizes this creative hand. Nature itself is not pleased with mass production. A world faithful to the Creator's thought tends toward harmony and not unison. A single note, arrived at by the destruction and ruin of all the others, makes the musical genius shudder."

Copyright © 1999 University of Nebraska. All rights reserved.