How Political Leaders Make Use of Nationalism

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

Though there are many contending theories about nationalism, they all fall into two very broad theoretical schools of thought.

Those that come under the rubric of perennialism or priemordialisms, assert that ethnicity is the bedrock of nationalism. These scholars contend that nations are ancient, natural phenomena, and since these go far back into history, nationalism is something innate to human collectivities.

The other camp, comprising academics variously known as constructivists, instrumentalists or modernists, believe nationalism is socially constructed, usually by self-serving elites, who rally the masses around nationalism for their own political purposes. 

These “imagined communities” only arose in the recent historical past, argue the modernists, as rulers built modern states. The growth of literacy and various technology- enhanced communications enabled them to weld the populations under their control into patriotic citizens.

Of course these categories are not watertight, and in reality every form of nationalism combines elements of both.

Take the case of Serbia’s long-time leader Slobodan Milosevic. In the 1980s, as Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, he, like many Communist apparatchiks, reinvented himself as a nationalist.

He rallied the Serbian Orthodox population to confront those that, in his mind, threatened it, particularly the Roman Catholic Croatians and the Muslim Bosniaks and Kosovar Albanians.

Yugoslavia, an artificial construct, was, as a saying went, “one country with two alphabets, three religions, four languages, five nationalities, and six republics.”  

It soon descended into a series of civil wars. Conflict started in the former republic of Slovenia in 1991, spreading to Croatia later that year and then Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992; in that deeply divided republic, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs all battled for control. 

By 1998 the province of Kosovo, too, decided to throw off Serbian rule. Although by then Orthodox Christian ethnic Serbs were a minority in the province, with Muslim ethnic Albanians comprising the vast majority of the population, most Serbs considered Kosovo the birthplace of their nation and were determined to keep it.

In order to hold on to Kosovo, Milosevic would now stir up nationalist passions by invoking the memory of one of the Serbian people’s great tragedies: the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds, which had taken place 600 years earlier, in 1389.

Some 12,000 to 30,000 troops of the Serbian Principality under Prince Lazar Hrebeljanovic faced an estimated 27,000 to 40,000 troops of the invading Ottoman Turkish army under the personal command of Murad I, the reigning sultan.

It resulted in the defeat of the Serbian army; the Ottomans continued their conquest of the entire Balkan region, while it cost the Serbs their political freedom. 

Serbs would now chafe under Ottoman rule and would not re-emerge as a sovereign nation until the mid-19^th century. 

Memories of the heroic last stand by Prince Lazar and his knights sustained the Serbian popular imagination during those five centuries.

In 1988, a coffin purporting to contain Lazar’s mummified remains was taken on a triumphal tour around Serbia by Milosevic and displayed in front of large gatherings of wailing mourners.

A year later, Milosevic marked the anniversary of the battle at Gazimestan, the monument located near the battle site. This “sacred ground” served Milosevic with a “usable past.”

Galvanized by his rhetoric, some in the crowd, estimated at between half a million and two million people, called Milosevic “Little Lazar,” while others chanted “Europe, don’t you remember that we defended you!” 

This referred to a key element of the Kosovo myth, that Serbia sacrificed itself in defending Christian Europe against the encroaching Muslim Turks.

But in 1999, following the NATO-backed Kosovo Liberation Army’s campaign against the Serbs, Milosevic lost the province, which is now an independent state, though Serbia refuses to acknowledge its sovereign status. 

Milosevic was himself indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for his role in ethnically cleansing Kosovo during the 1999 war; he died in 2006 while the trial was in progress.

So was Milosevic a primordialist or an instrumentalist? Clearly a combination of both.

Meanwhile, Kosovo remains a troubled land. In the northern part of the country, where ethnic Serbs predominate, they want to be a part of Serbia.

“First we were forced to live under the Turks,” remarked a Serbian Orthodox monk. “Now it is under the Albanians and the Americans.”

He was hopeful that the Serbs would restore their medieval dominion over Kosovo. The Balkans remain a ground of contention where the past is never dead.