At this point, it would be interesting to proceed to a qualitative comparison between the cases of Kosovo and Vojvodina and the political attitudes of their Albanian and Hungarian populations, in the second half of the 1990s. With regard to Kosovo, comparative evidence from other cases of interethnic conflict demonstrates that hegemonic control is not always a successful instrument for managing ethnic differences. This instrument often marginalizes the moderate segments within the ethnic community in question, it simultaneously bolsters radicals and ultimately hinders prospects for peaceful accommodation in the future.124 Indeed, in Kosovo, the Serbian top-level policies resulted in
124 On the Northern Irish case, see Brendan O’ Duffy, ‘British and Irish Conflict Regulation:
From Sunningdale to Belfast. Part I: Tracing the Status of Contesting Sovereigns, 1968– 1974’, Nations and Nationalism 5, no. 4 (1999): 529–33.
the radicalization of the Albanian community, a development that saw the gradual outflanking of Ibrahim Rugova and his passive resistance policies by KLA.125 In Vojvodina, on the contrary, the policies of the Serbian nationalizing state were much subtler. Therefore, there was no serious chance that the large-scale radicalization of the Hungarian, or any other ethnic, community might be triggered ‘from above’.
On the other hand, a key difference between the political attitudes of the Vojvodinian Hungarians and the Kosovan Albanians was the continuous participation of the former in the state’s political arena and the boycott of all sorts of mainstream political activity (e.g. elections at all levels) by the latter. In Vojvodina, participation in the state’s political life was the case with all minority groups. The overwhelming success of the boycott in Kosovo was not merely an indication of successful mass mobilization by the ‘parallel’ elites; it also relied on a sociological factor. This factor was the prevalence of a highly collectivist social ethos among Kosovo’s Albanians. This, in combination with the persistence of a highly patriarchal as well as extended family ethos within the same community, might make the participation in the boycott appear (in accordance with a homocentric circles pattern) as the moral thing for an individual to do with respect to the family and the extended kin, the local community and the ethnic group as such.126 The combination of all aforementioned catalysts also accounted to a large extent for the
125 For further information on Ibrahim Rugova’s LDK, its passive resistance agenda and
the ‘parallel’ political organizations in Kosovo see Sqhelzen Maliqi, ‘The Albanian Movement in Kosova’, in Yugoslavia and After, 138–54; Janusz Bugajski, Ethnic Politics in Eastern Europe: A Guide to Nationality Policies, Organizations and Parties, New York: The Center for Strategic and International Studies (1994), 153–6. On the origins, the formation and the increasing popularity of KLA among the ethnic Albanian masses, see Tim Judah, ‘A History of the Kosovo Liberation Army’, in Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions, ed. William Joseph Buckley (Cambridge: Eerdmans Publishing, 2000), 108–15.
126 Similar patterns of grassroots political behaviour are encountered among the semi-
clannish Ghegs of Northern Albania. On certain occasions, a political candidate’s clan background can be of primary significance for his popular appeal. A typical example is the vast support channelled towards Sali Berisha, the leader of the Democratic Party of Albania, by the Northern Albanian electorate at the first Albanian multiparty elections (March–April 1991). Sali Berisha belongs to the powerful Gheg clan of the Berishas.
high degree of political homogeneity among the Kosovan Albanians127 and, following the community’s radicalization process, the unequivocal support channelled towards KLA.
In the Vojvodinian Hungarian case, on the contrary, neither a high degree of internal political homogeneity (especially since the mid- 1990s) nor any indications of ethnic radicalization were the case. In regard to the latter, no demands, even subtle, were ever raised by the Hungarian political elites in Vojvodina for the secession of the northern Bačka enclave from Serbia. Especially during the second half of the 1990s, the Vojvodinian Hungarian elites would always try to maintain a responsible and balanced stance with regard to ethnic issues pertaining not only to the micro-level of the province but the Serbian/Yugoslav macro-level as well.128
Finally, the most essential difference between Vojvodina and Kosovo was that, in the former case, the persistence of the trans- ethnic substratum of Vojvođanski identitet, as a mass phenomenon, effectively preserved the character of Vojvodina as a multiethnic space. This was definitely the factor that brought Vojvodina’s political elites together, regardless of the ethnic divisions. By contrast, in the case of Kosovo, a combination of ethnic segregation on the grassroots level and unbridgeable standpoints between the political actors involved (the Serbian state and the Albanian ‘parallel’ elites) resulted, first, in the extreme aggravation of the crisis and, following NATO’s intervention, the transformation of the southern province into a mono-ethnic and mono-cultural society.
128 In the eve of the NATO bombing, the VMSZ presidium issued a declaration in which it
was stressed that ‘the resolution of the Kosovo question can only be achieved by means of negotiations’. The party condemned the incoming air campaign against Serbia as unacceptable because ‘it would sink the country into even greater misery and endanger the lives of the entirety of its citizens, including the Hungarians of Vojvodina’. The party equally castigated ‘Slobodan Milošević’s decade-long domestic policy of defying the entire world’. On this issue, see the ‘Statement by the Presidium of the Alliance of Hungarians in Vojvodina Regarding the Situation in Kosovo’, 24 March 1999 (http:// www.hhrf.org/kosovo.htm).
127 Even though the ‘parallel’ political landscape in Kosovo comprised nearly eighteen
parties, Rugova’s LDK enjoyed the support of over 95 per cent of Kosovan Albanians throughout most of the 1990s.