Guest guest Posted April 2, 1999 Report Share Posted April 2, 1999 The introduction is short this time because, this issue, you're getting two extracts from my 1996 book 'Healing the Hurts of Nations', and that's enough from me! It concerns Serbia and its psycho-history. Rather apposite at this point in time. While this material is now four years old, the details, but not the issues, have changed. The book is available for free download at http://www.isleofavalon.co.uk/healhurt.html . It is also serialised in digestible weekly chunks on email, and a new cycle of sendings starts early in May. To , email me, Palden, during April, at palden, writing ' HHN' in the subject line. Please tell anyone who might be interested. And it's free! With love Palden editor, AvalonArticulates ------------------ Two excerpts from Healing the Hurts of Nations by Palden Jenkins published online on the Glastonbury Archive http://www.isleofavalon.co.uk/archive.html 50. When nations fall ill: Serbia Here we are looking at an example of the national-psychological workings of national identity. The self-image Serbia adopted around 1990, under the leadership of the nationalist Slobodan Milosevic, prompting the breakup of the Yugoslav federation, proved to be very destructive. This was not just ordinary nationalism - there was serious national insecurity, with historic vengeance and deep power issues behind it. My purpose here is to identify points and trends in Serbia's history where the hurts giving rise to these feelings were laid down in national unconscious and semi-conscious memory. Yugoslavia was a cross-national federal state founded in the aftermath of WW1, on the downfall of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires - both of which bordered each other in what became Yugoslavia. Difficulties prevailed in the inter-war years, with democracy failing and a monarch taking power. After WW2 Yugoslavia was reconstructed by a Croatian, Josip Broz Tito, a leader in the nationalist resistance war against the occupying Nazis. Tito's idea had been to cement the multinational state of Yugoslavia in the internationalist spirit of the socialist ideal. The trouble was, the whole region had suffered long foreign domination, with no love for foreign powers. Tito eventually died in 1980, age 88. The nation moseyed along uncomfortably until the Soviet withdrawal from eastern Europe in the late 1980s. The global Cold War geometry dissolved. Then the trouble began. The field was open for any taker: Milosevic, a former senior state apparatchik, rang old bells by playing up Serbian nationalism, seeking to captivate a dormant Serb patriotic groundswell in an otherwise vacuous political atmosphere. Serbs were worried that their future might be dominated by Croats, or that Serb minorities in other regions would be abandoned to the whims of other ethnic groups. Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, himself talking up Croatian nationalist insecurities, portrayed Serbia as a threat to Croatia. Slavonia and Macedonia withdrew from Yugoslavia to avoid the brewing conflict and Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro quaked in understandable indecision and fear. Serbia lacked a separatist agenda of its own - it had been the dominant partner in the federation. At first it sought to preserve the federation. However, other Yugoslav states variously possessed a separatist agendas of their own: they wanted autonomy from Serb domination - though breaking up Yugoslavia was not initially on the agenda. Milosevic of Serbia raised the flag of expansionist nationalism - a Greater Serbia - levelling it first against the autonomous region of Kosovo. Kosovo, south of today's Serbia, had been the Serb heartland around the 11th century. In more recent centuries it had been populated by Albanian and Macedonian Muslims who, by 1989, formed 90% of the Kosovo population. However, the Serbs saw it as their historic right to hold on to Kosovo. The Serbs, up to the +900s, lived in a peripheral hill enclave spanning Kosovo and parts of eastern Bosnia. It was a hide-away. In medieval times Serbia gradually became a sizeable power, enlarging itself out of the fluctuating and underpopulated territories of neighbouring Hungary, Bulgaria and Byzantium. Serbia had not been a nation as such - more a confederacy of tribes sharing a common Russian origin and occupying a common home. Serbia, as a recognised state, was founded in the 1000s by Michael of Zeta. Papal recognition was, to Serbs, an important political distinction, helping them fend off Byzantine expansionism. But Serbia disintegrated into tribal areas again on Michael of Zeta's death, after being thrashed by the Byzantines in 1123. The hill-and-valley landscape of much of Yugoslavia is very amenable to such disintegrations. After a decline of Byzantine power around 1180, Serbia was re-forged as the statelet of Rascia under Stefan Nemanja, whose successor Stefan II reigned until 1228. However, this state, as was common across Europe at the time, was forged by the actions of a top-heavy nobility. Nobles formed the power-structures which forged states out of less-defined tribal areas - they often owed their positions to powerful overlords or monarchs in reward for loyalty or services rendered. This power of the nobility proved to be questionable, inasmuch as the fortunes of European states became dictated by the fortunes and ambitions of nobles, by their henchmen and by power-intrigues at royal courts. Many nobles were foreign to the places they dominated. Political developments were conducted over the heads of most people. For ordinary people the benefits of statehood were mixed. Statehood meant taxes, impositions, loss of local power and breakdown of secure social relationships and commonweal. Such is the story of most European states. Medieval disenfranchisement in Europe became a source of great internally-generated social pain - pain which has fed many conflicts ever since. In Serbia there was an historic medieval battle of interests between western-oriented (Catholic) and eastern-oriented (Orthodox) nobles and magnates. Most ordinary people were pagan and locally-aligned. Alignment to the Catholic or Orthodox orbits endowed a state with higher-level political legitimacy and security - the church brought literacy, law courts, appeal mechanisms, constitutional legitimacy and economic as well as religious advantages. The Catholic-Orthodox schism was a forerunner to later West-East divisions - the divide between western liberal and eastern autocratic nations in the 1700s-1800s or the Iron Curtain of 1945-90. And many of these Euro-divides affected Serbia. The Serbian Orthodox church was established in 1219 by St Sava, in reaction to the Pope's recognition of the western-oriented king Stefan II of Serbia in 1217. Popular adoption of Orthodoxy was partially a protest against the monarchy's alignment to Catholicism. Thereafter, religion and denomination became a touchy issue to Serbs. This was a critical time in the weaving of Serbia's future. Surrounded by powerful, manoeuvring neighbours, Serbs developed an instinctual aversion to dominant foreign powers. The tribal confederacy of old transitioned into a feudal state with a controlling nobility, and peasants slowly became serfs serving growing estates. A money economy and trading cities grew - with the customary immigration of German, Jewish and other businessfolk and artisans who spread themselves across Europe at the time. This infrastructural development represented a breakthrough for Serbs. Nationhood was being forged, giving an element of autonomous security. Psychologically, this is a bit like a nation's initiation into adulthood. This brought with it identity-issues which had not existed in the preceding tribal order. Tribes tend to exist for themselves, with their customs, mythologies and lineages. But nations demand new identities, mythologies and regalia which give increased definition to what the nation *is not* (in relation to surrounding nations). This is an erection of protective walls and borders, a creation of armies and armed aristocracies. However, such a development also involved an uncomfortable importation of foreign influences and a betrayal of older tribal allegiances and structures, much to the loss of the ordinary people. Nobles, educated outside ordinary local social circles, cared little for the social integrity of their fiefdoms. To them, society was a resource for levying feudal dues, raising fighting men and building objects of power. In Serbia's case, pressures from neighbours and bigger powers gave the nation an underlying inferiority complex - a 'little me who gets beaten up by big brother' feeling. The parents cared only when it was advantageous to them. Serb leaders strove to turn this feeling into a sense of strident independence, even ethnic superiority. However, this was, in a sense, a ruse to enhance the ruling nobles' power, not necessarily a move to benefit the ordinary people. Yet the ordinary people accepted it. So there was a hidden sense of national self-betrayal or denial behind this. This was a vital ingredient in the formative development of the nation, now psychologically like an 18 year-old. Trade drew Serbs north towards the Danube - Belgrade, today's capital, was then but a Danube-side border township. Trade also drew Serbs south into Montenegro, Macedonia and much of mainland Greece, eventually expanding Serb influence and territories over much of the Balkans. Hence modern-day jitteriness amongst Greeks, Macedonians and Albanians over Serb expansionism - they have seen it before. Serbs themselves were unconsciously struggling to prove their power and worth - they were doing to other people what they themselves had suffered at others' hands. They were getting their own back on the world. During a humiliating interlude in the 1290s, when the Mongols swept through Kosovo, king Stefan Urosh II was forced to make Serbia a vassal-state to the Mongol Khan. This punctured Serb esteem. The Mongol incursion into Europe was short-lived, and by 1330, Serbia dominated the Balkans again, and Stefan Dushan (Urosh IV) was crowned 'Tsar of the Serbs and Greeks' in Skopje (now capital of today's Macedonia). Serbia became well-established as a regional power. Dushan codified the laws by emulating Byzantine standards. He even had designs on the Byzantine throne, though he died while advancing on Byzantium. Serbia by now had overstepped its true capacities. The dynasty fell apart around 1360, leading to disarray and hardship. The self-respect of the nation now severely collapsed: Serbia had failed in its time of greatness. This strengthened its growing victim-and-master complex. The field was open to the expanding Ottoman Turks, who had recently begun invading the Balkans and surrounding Constantinople, the opulent, declining capital of Byzantium. The Ottomans advanced northwards, with an eye to penetrating to the heart of Europe. They had designs European power, and eventually hijacked Byzantium. In 1389 came the fatal battle of Kosovo ('the Field of Blackbirds'), when the Serb and Balkan nobility was crushed by the Turks. This was a devastating blow for all Serbs: first they had overstretched themselves, then they had collapsed, and next they were overrun by a completely alien force. Disaster. Many Serbs moved north from Kosovo to what is today's Serbia, and Turk-friendly Albanians trickled into Kosovo. In this experience the seeds of future catastrophe were sown: the idea arose in the Serb unconscious that all Muslims were a threat and deserved vengeance. Serbs weren't fuming for blood, but the idea was there - a dormant pain in the national spleen. Serbia became an Ottoman vassal state and its own national impetus was lost. Its self-esteem was entirely deflated. The Ottomans controlled the Balkans. There was an heroic fight-back by the Hungarian hero Janos Hunyadi and fellow Christians, yet the Turks prevailed after the battle of Varna in 1444. Serbia was, by 1459, completely absorbed into the Ottoman sphere. It no longer felt fully 'European'. It was different, on its own, unloved by anyone. The Ottoman threat on Europe contributed to the rise of the Habsburg empire of Austria-Hungary. The Habsburgs blocked the Turks and protected Europe. Interestingly, the Habsburgs and Ottomans fell at the same time, in WW1, centuries later. Both empires lasted 450 years, mirroring one another as rival Christian and Muslim states - across Yugoslavia. Under occupation, indigenous Serbian culture was held together by underground Orthodox cultural resistance. There was considerable conversion to Islam also, especially south and south-west of Serbia, particularly for the business and cultural advantages it gave. The Ottomans did not force conversion. But Ottoman civilisation did have its vibrant, exciting and profitable side, and joining the Turkish order was a better option than marginalisation. Serbia thus survived the centuries under the Ottoman order. But the Serb spirit felt threatened by the Ottoman cultural tide. Serbs were connected now with Syrians, Egyptians, Turks, Tartars and Armenians, through Istanbul. This cultural dilution led to a later rise of dogged nationalism. Serbia passed later under Austrian domination, which was insensitive and incompetent. Yugoslav states were always pawns in someone else's game. 53. Shadowy viral epidemics When Milosevic played the Serbian nationalist card in the late 1980s his adversarial agitation fell on a caucus of receptive Serb ears. Meanwhile, apathy and disorientation on the part of the moderate Serb majority, who were at the time more interested in business than politics, allowed nationalist extremism to grow. Pro-Milosevic Serb nationalists embodied and reawoke the historic hurt the Serbs had accumulated over the centuries. This hurt was felt particularly toward Croats who, under Franjo Tudjman, had their own nationalist and anti-Serb feelings. Things became paranoiac. Serb nationalist feeling was deep-rooted. The pain which drove it lurked in the form of unremembered, unconscious guilt and regret, arising way back at the time of the Serbian collapse in the mid-1300s. This kind of national-psychological complex is an historical shadow haunting many nations. It is rooted in profound collective regret derived from the forced submission of ordinary people to aristocratic power-seekers, who themselves came to betray their nations. Such feelings of intrinsic regret are not consciously experienced - they lurk as a bitter, heart-hardened, underlying sentiments, unidentified until events activate something. National self-betrayal is hard for a people to acknowledge - instead, betrayal is projected and blamed on foreigners, minorities, symbols or perceived threats. After this medieval disintegration of Serbian national integrity took place, many mishaps later befell the Serbs. Deep unconscious memory of this activated a militant tendency amongst the Serbian people in the late 1980s, skilfully whipped up by 'Slobo': After failing to assert Serb dominance over the Yugoslav federation, Milosevic planned to expand Serbia, break up the Yugoslav union, invade and 'cleanse' the lands he thought belonged to 'Greater Serbia'. The potential grew for Serb-induced horrors in Kosovo, Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia, even in Albania, and for additional frictions with Hungarians within Serbia's northern borders. It is unjust and partisan to accuse Serbs of baseless aggression toward their neighbours - even though there was no sensible justification for their ruinous aggression and ethnic cleansing. More compassionately: a mountain of stored up frustration emerged in a subgroup of Serb society and gained control - at the same time as Thatcherism gripped Britain. Serbia went mad. The Serb bombardment of Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Tusla, Bihac and Srebrenica, and the extensive use of sniper-murder well overstretched accepted rules of war and sensibility. In the early 1990s, Europeans and Americans felt insufficient sympathy for Orthodox Serbs or for Muslims to wade in. They dithered on the edges, fiddling, mouthing diplomatic noises. This harked back to deep memories of the medieval religious schisms between Constantinople and Rome: Catholics (West Europeans) sided with Croatia and Orthodoxy (East Europeans) sided with Serbia. And no one sided for the Muslims. And everyone forgot inter-ethnic peoples. Foreign powers failed to act sufficiently and in time. Madness broke out. Modern Yugoslavs, especially Bosnians - many of whom had lost or forgotten their ethnic alignments - were unready to assert inter-ethnic tolerance in insecure times, in the face of divisive nationalist invective. Bosnians, uncertain and vulnerable, declared independence, with grudging support from Europe. Serbia, politically touchy, took this as a threat. Bosnian Serbs angled for independence from Muslim-majority Bosnia. After its war with Croatia in 1990-91, Serbia turned on Bosnia. Disaster ensued. A disaster which will leave scars for generations to come. The 1990s Yugoslav wars embodied an acting-out of innately medieval rivalries between the Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim spheres - rivalries which have gone on for 500-1,500 years. These antipathies, like a recurring emotional virus, found a weak zone in 1990s Yugoslavia. Disoriented, Yugoslavia was immunologically weak, unready to 'hold the circle' of inter-ethnic harmony. This harmony had been strong in Bosnia: Sarajevo, throughout history, was Europe's sole city where Jews had not gathered in a ghetto. But the accumulated pain of former times, reinforced by horrors which fell on Serbs in the 19th and 20th Centuries (which we don't have space to cover here), had the strongest power in the Serbian national psyche in the 1990s. As with many outbreaks of militant behaviour, a noisy 20% of the population coercively drowned out the rest. Tito had been a benevolent despot. Things had been tolerable under him, though free thought and association were restricted. After his death, this was uncorked in the 1980s. Loud nationalist incantations prevailed before moderating influences could gain sway. Yugoslavia split asunder along deep emotional cracks and went into over-reactivity. Everyone started defending their patch, looking askance at their neighbours. The contents of the national unconscious spilled over, invoking hero-worship, war, rape, slaughter, horror and revenge. At times like these, the shadowy, horrific side of the collective unconscious rears its head, aided in this case by a mountain of armaments left over from Cold War times. Both Alexander I, king of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, and Tito in post-war times, omitted to recognise the resilience of minority nationalist feeling. The Nazis had driven over it entirely - though the Serb and Croat partisans charged their price. After the war, Tito covered nationalism with socialist internationalist ethics - yet in foreign policy he staved off both the Soviet Union and the West. This lasted until the 1980s. Then came a vacuum. It took Milosevic, Tudjman and their henchmen to activate the virus of nationalism, to reawaken old buried sentiments. Once the virus had taken hold, and once people resorted to arms, the fever was on the rampage, and whole populations were sitting ducks. Diplomatic medicine was already too late to apply, and the doctors - UN, NATO, EU and Russia - were unwilling to operate surgically. They wanted no blood on their own hands, no body-bags on TV. The 1990s Bosnian war has been an example of what can happen when old historical feelings are not acknowledged and resolved properly. Yugoslavia could have become a relatively prosperous and successful post-Soviet state. Or at least it could have divided diplomatically, as did Czechia and Slovakia in 1992. Gradual transition and moderation in Yugoslavia failed: extremes and extremists took over. This kind of pattern, if allowed to replicate, can become a scourge of the future. It is already a pattern of the insecure 1990s. It is a virus at risk of going epidemic, anywhere, unless counteracted by a strange mixture of positive internationalist values and respect of national and minority values. Many countries are vulnerable by dint of their histories - India, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Belgium, Guatemala, Lebanon, Indonesia, South Africa, Canada, even Spain. As was Yugoslavia. This viral inter-ethnic world issue needs tackling at its roots. Copyright, Palden Jenkins, 1996. -- flute http://www.create.org/healingarts/reiki.htm http://www.create.org/bbs - For Updates on REIKI HB 367 "The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures." R. Tagore Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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