Un-Happy Birthday, Republika Srpska

January 9, 2017 Leave a comment

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Mailmen for Republika Srpska. Source: Srdjan Puhalo, twitter.

Last December, I gave an interview to Der Standard on the dangerous positions of far-right candidate Norbert Hofer in the Balkans, including his support for Serbian claims to Kosovo and his endorsement of the nationalist positions of Milorad Dodik. In response, not Hofer, but the representation of the Republika Srpska to Austria complained to the newspaper and criticised Adelheid Wölfl and not me, although it interview reflect mine and her views.

The comments of the RS representation seem an appropriate subject to respond to on the 25th anniversiary of the establishment Republika Srpska today. The celebration itself is a provocation, after it has been declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina and an illegal referendum was held in the RS to reject the court decision. The celebration itself was designed to provoke with special police units parading with machine guns (and also the postal services of the RS).

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The arguments put forth by the RS office in Vienna are part of the general effort of Milorad Dodik and his party to whitewash the RS of its responsibility and to continue with the construct a quasi-state begun by Radovan Karadzic and his party. Recently, Serb historian Čedomir Antić published a History of the Republika Srpska, which was praised by RS leadership as part of the answer to the campaign against the RS. Of course without irony, the book covers the history of the RS, going back centuries, a classic exercise in retroactive nation- and state-building. The fact that around 45% of the population living on the territory of the future RS in 1991 were not Serbs is conveniently ignored.

So the RS office objected to me calling violent establishment of the RS a cause of the war, pointing out that the RS was established before the war began. However, the RS might have been declared by a Serb politicians on 9 January 1992, but it was established through ethnic cleansing and the expulsion of non-Serbs after April 1992, and this has been documented in great detail in numerous books and judgements of the ICTY.

Next, the Vienna office objected to me characterizing the rule of Dodik as using authoritarian means and talking for years about secession. As for authoritarian means,his   party has also over the years been publishing lists of enemies of the RS (see also here, here and here). These lists don’t only include names of foreign diplomats, but also Bosnian and Herzegovina NGOs, media and individuals. Such list-making of enemies and equating criticism of the party with attacks on the entities, can only be considered authoritarian practices. Furthermore, the state of the media and press freedom has been extensively noted and criticized by international organizations and NGOs (here, here and here).

Ironically, the office also objected I suggested that Dodik has been talking about secession for years, and that as a result the comment suggests that ‘he should not be taken seriously, which is damaging his reputation.’ Of course, it is ironic that main objection is that he just talks about secession not the project itself, which is of course in breach of the Dayton Agreement and UN Security Council Resolutions. Dodik and his party have been talking about independence and secession since 2006 (including a  resolution in the parliament in 2008 in response to the Kosovo declaration of independence). Klix.ba counted 30 times Dodik threatened a referendum over the years. For claims to independence, here,  see for also for 2008, 2012, 2013, 2015.

Now, of course, I cannot judge whether he really intends to pursue these threats and after more than 10 years of arguing that the RS should decide on independence and that is has the right (which it does not). Recent signs suggest that he more willing to take a chance and pursue this policy, even if it might be a hollow threat, as James Ker-Lindsay, as argued.

Finally, the RS office criticized my characterization of Milorad Dodik as nationalist. Instead, they noted that his politics are social-democratic and calling him a nationalist is damaging his reputation. Of course, they fail to mention that his party, the SNSD was expelled from the Socialist International in 2012. At the same time, the party been fostering ties to nationalist  and far-right parties, including not only the Austrian FPÖ, but also Front National which sent a delegation to “celebrations” of the RS. Dodik has personally welcomed individuals who have been sentenced for war crimes by the ICTY and been a witness of the defense of Radovan Karadžić. None of this is particularly socialdemocratic.

Why bother, the claims made by the RS office in Vienna are silly and unsurprisingly don’t withstand scrutiny? However, there are commentators who either lazily or for other reasons imitate such claims, see the argument of Timothey Less in Foreign Affairs (for an effective critique by Eric Gordy see here). Furthermore, there is a paradox in the claims by the RS leadership  , echoing what its creators in the 1990s, Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, and others claimed, namely that they were not nationalists, while at the same time pursuing exactly nationalist, exclusionary policies.

Milorad Dodik and his leadership continue to dismantle  Bosnia. For all their claims to the contrary, they also dismantle the RS. It is only recognized in Dayton as part of Bosnia, without Bosnia, there is no RS. Downplaying war crimes, glorifying its perpetrators, suggesting that the RS can only exist  a weak or nonexistent Bosnia suggests the RS is not a salvageable political project, created through ethnic cleansing and mass murder and justified through its denial.

Here is the full text of RS office in Vienna discussed in this post

 

 

 

 

Filed under Bosnia, Uncategorized Tagged with ,

Death in Venice. European Style

January 6, 2017 1 Comment

There is no better place to reflect on the malaise of Europe than in one of its grandest cities, one of the continents largest  in the late Middle Ages. It’s decline has been lasting for centuries and few places have declined quite as picturesque as Venice. Today the historical Venice has fewer inhabitants than after the catastrophic plague of 1629/31, when a third of its population was killed and the epidemic contributed to the decline of the city.

Only around 55,000 people live in the historic city, some 20,000 more in the islands surrounding it. One has to go back nearly a millennium to find similar low numbers. More people visit the city every day (and half don’t spend the night) than the city has inhabitants.

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Nighthawks of Venice

Venice has been reduced from one of the great trading and political powers of Europe to a sight that visited along a narrowly confined path, a ‘highway’ linking the main sights, without context, selling ‘Italian goods’–made in China–along the way.

Activists and scholars have long criticized the mass tourism, the large cruise ships that flood the cities like iron skyscrapers.  But what is the connection to Europe? Venice is just a stop on the Europe in 14-days itinerary for tourists from the US to China.

Just over 100 years ago, the fictional Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous writer, visited Venice:  “He did not anticipate anything else, for the city had always received him with splendor. But the sky and the sea remained cloudy and leaden, at times a fog-like drizzle fell, and slowly he accepted that he would, reaching it by water, discover a vastly different Venice from that which he had approached over land.” Aschenbach is expressing his premonition of his own demise and the discovery of decay and decline in Venice beyond  splendor obvious to the visitors’ eyes.

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Death in Venice? Closed for the Season.

Some 105 years after the publication of Death in Venice, the Hotel Excelsior still stands on the Lido in which Thomas Mann had Aschenbach stay. Closed for the season. Who wants to stay at the Lido as the sand of the beaches is covered in icy frost?

The Death in Venice was not just the story of an aging writer and his confronting death and decay, it is mirror image of a continent on the eve of its first World War, about tear itself apart. The luxury and the decline of a former grand city were the perfect backdrop for the splendor at twilight of Europe at its time.

Europe’s splendor (or squalor) at twilight could not find a better city, even if a century has passed. Venice’s decline was lasted for four centuries sot that one more is of little consequence. There presumably less splendor and more trash in today’s Venice, but even that is unsure.

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Held together by red (and white) tape

Venice appears to be a role model for the rest of Europe: A commercial power that once dominated the world through is skillful trade and politics reduced to a site visited by thousands of selfie-stick wielding tourists with no knowledge of place or meaning of lions, domes and canals.

Europe, just like Venice in particular, has been replicated in the casinos of Las Vegas and in Chinese faux-European cities as a sanitized museum/amusement park.  The counter-project to the reduction of Europe to a tourism site has been the European Union over the past half century.Replacing the self-destruction of the continent not with sanitized picturesque sites, but with a shared project that give the continent more than Kodak moment sites.

The continued crises of the EU risk reducing Europe to the trajectory of Venice: Decline, reduction to a site, sanitized, commodified and–ironically–detached from its past (both its glory and its dark sides).

I have argued during the debates around the centenary of World War One, that 1914 should be seen as the zero-hour of Europe, not 1945. It was the moment that the old post-Napoleonic order destroyed itself, resulting in the two world wars and rise of both fascism and communism. Aschenbach anticipated in Venice the end of the old order. What would come to replace was far from clear to Thomas Mann or other astute observers of the crisis.

Over the past two decades, we have come to consider 1989, the end of the Cold War as the other big turning point, the end to the short 20th century that began in 1914, as Eric Hobsbawm argued. Maybe, Hobsbawm was premature. The turning point of 1989 creates a narrative were the post-1989 period is shaped by the absence of ideological confrontation and the victory of liberal democracy. Today, as liberal democracy is under pressure in the United States and the peace project of European integration is in crisis, the question emerges, was really 1989 the end of the 20th century, or will future histories argue that the 20th century was not so short and lasted until 2016? It is too early to tell and we are not only observing history, but also writing it.

Filed under European Union