CEREMONIA DE PRESENTACIÓN DE LAS CARTAS CREDENCIALES

42 I.Bernik B.Molnar ‘Ethism, Nationalism and State-Building:The case o f Slovenia’ Paper presented at the Congress o f the International Political Association, Seoul, August 1997 p.3

vis-a-vis the state, which can take the form o f politics o f irreconcilable ends, but more often involves a struggle to maximise the influence and conditions for one’s own national group. Throughout the following discussion nationalizing and homogenizing policies o f the new nation-state (i.e. new constitution, language laws, state education, citizenship laws, immigration policies, the provision for minorities, land reforms etc.), are seen also in the light o f ethnic politics, for invariably they entail the promotion o f interests by one ethnic group, which has acquired nationhood - the dominant nationality.

When the focus o f identity becomes ethnic identity and when the definition of group interests becomes dominated by ethnic affiliation, invariably it leads to an exaggerated preference o f one group over another, often to the point o f belittling (or even hostility) o f others. The policies o f the state or minority inspired by such a

preference o f one group over another lead to ethnic politics, a precondition of which is ethnic nationalism. The distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism informs many theories of nationalism and the question o f its compatibility with democracy, and will be discussed at length in the second chapter. Here it is sufficient to say that this binary classification rests on the assumption that ethnic nationalism poses a considerable

challenge to democracy by its inherently collectivist, thus illiberal, definition of the nation as a community o f descent. Civic nationalism then is antithetical in character, inclined towards an inclusive definition o f the nation as a community o f equal citizens .

Obviously such a strict distinction does not reflect the complexities of nationalism and its historical and political processes nor does it mean that ethnic or civic nationalisms are unchanging in their character as if written in stone. In the nineteenth century when some nations (e.g. Slovaks, Croats, Czechs, Slovenes, Serbs) tried to liberate themselves from the autocratic empires, the overwhelming group identity was the ethnic identity, but nationalism which drove that revolutionary struggle did not carry the same negative notion of oppression that we now associate with ethnic nationalism.

The difference is that what we are now witnessing in ECE is the establishment of political pluralism, but accompanied by an upsurge of ethnically based politics, which leads to unrest among majorities and minorities, whilst civic identities are dissolving into ethnic ones, often to the detriment o f the democratisation process. It is not denied that

43 For the review o f literature about civic/ethnic distinction see D.Brown ‘Are there Good and Bad Nationalisms?’ Nations and Nationalism 5:2 April 1999 p.p.281-302. A lso J.Schwarzmantel Socialism

ethnicity might have a legitimate role to play in defining identity and contributing to the formation of communities, but when it comes to the establishment o f democratic rules and political mechanisms in order to ensure the equality o f all citizens before the law, ethnicity offers little contribution. Furthermore, the crucial difference from the past is that the contemporary international environment has high expectations o f new states and their democratic credentials, including their policies with respect to minorities.

1.3. SALIENCE OF NATIONALISM IN POSTCOMMUNISM

1.3.1. Historical Legacy

It is a truism to say that the present and the future are determined by the past. However, when it comes to postcommunist societies the past encompasses at least three different pasts exercising a different influence on the present: the pre-communist past, which could be that o f an independent state, a federation or a multinational kingdom; the communist period which varied in the intensity of the regimes; and the very immediate past o f the extrication from the communist regime, followed in many cases by the dissolution o f the existing states. The task o f the following section then is to draw out a number o f factors that derive from those various national pasts and that can be generalised, and also to show how and to what extent they have shaped the role of nationalism and identity based politics in the region.

In the answer to the first question the pages to follow concentrate on five factors, considered here as contributory to the salience o f nationalism in postcommunism:

historical animosities, communist nationality policies and ideology, the elite competition and the issue o f minorities in new democracies. These are not mutually exclusive, on the contrary they are compatible and emphasise the causal influence o f the past, remote and very recent, on the transition from communism to democracy in ECE region.

1.3.2. From ‘ancient hatred’ to Contemporary Nationalism

The most common explanation o f the rise of nationalism in ECE countries became

and the Idea o f the Nation Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf 1991 and L.Greenfeld Nationalism: Five roads to M odernity Cambridge, Harvard University Press 1992 p .7-11

the story o f ‘ancient hatreds’44, long suppressed by communist party rule, which were released by the collapse o f the Soviet empire and the end o f communism and given free rein.

There are many reasons why the ‘ancient hatred’ view43 should be contested as a wholesale assessment o f the rise o f nationalism in ECE countries. Let us take the

Yugoslav conflict first. Contrary to the popular and often even scholarly claim the Serb- Croat dispute is not ’ancient’ - Serbs and Croats had not fought until the beginning o f the twentieth century46, which hardly even at the beginning o f this new century justifies the term ’ancient’. We do not need more indication than the words o f the late Croatian President Franjo Tudjman:

“Just as in the earlier centuries the ideas of Croato-Serbian national unity and Yugoslavianism grew from common interests in the face of foreign threats... so too did this century’s Croato-Serbian conflicts emerge because of different conceptions of Yugoslavianism ...”47.

Secondly, such views are too reminiscent o f Cold War rhetoric, when the whole region was treated as a monolith, always slightly suspect and backward, which having first fallen under the aberration o f communism, is now returning to its backward attitudes. That is equally untrue. The historical animosity between Slovaks and Hungarians never resulted in violence, the expectations of wide-spread violence in Russia were not realised, the traditionally difficult relationship between Turks and Bulgarians in Bulgaria actually improved after 1989 and Poles and Lithuanians have also avoided conflicts despite historical animosities.

Thirdly, even if it were true that the region is a victim o f history, the historical fact ignored by this view is that the local and regional differences always escalated at moments o f vast systemic breakdowns. The end o f Communism affected society in many

44 K.Verdery ‘Nationalism and National Sentiments in Post-Socialist Romania’ in Slavic Review 52:2 Summer 1993 pp.179-203 p.179; J.Snyder ‘Nationalism and the Crisis o f the Post-Soviet State’ in

Survival 35:1 Spring 1993 p.p.5-27 p.5; I.Banac ‘The Fearful Asymetry o f War: The Causes and

Consequences o f Yugoslavia’s D em ise’ in Daedalus 121 Spring 1992 p .pl41-173 p. 142; S.Holmes ‘Cultural Legacies or State Collapse’ in M.Mandelbaum Postcommunism p.28

45 also often referred to as ‘deep-freezer’ thesis, hatreds defrosted by the end o f communism, the pressure cooker etc.all invoking the same image - that o f potential suppressed violence waiting to happen.

46 J.Snyder ‘Nationalism and the Crisis o f the Post-Soviet State’, I.Banac ‘The Fearful Asymetry of War’. There are a plethora o f books on history o f ex- Yugoslavia. See L.J.Cohen Broken Bonds Westview Press 1993, but particularly Ch.Bennett Yugoslavia’s Bloody C ollapse Causes, Course and

Consequences London, Hurst&Company 1995, for a detailed and dispassionate account o f the war and

M.Glenny The Balkans 1804-1999 London, Granta Books 1999 for the history o f the Balkan