We Hungarians entered NATO on March 12. Less than two weeks later, as NATO members, we provided free air lanes for military planes to Yugoslavia, and now we must identify ourselves with a war against a neighboring country. To make my position clear: I was in favor of Hungary joining NATO, and I'm glad NATO will protect us against external enemies, though as far as I know, no one intended to attack my country.

Two years ago, hundreds of thousands demonstrated against Milosevic in Belgrade's Republic Square, demanding lawful, pluralist democracy. I was invited to speak to the students and was surrounded by intelligent, enthusiastic faces and clever slogans on billboards. Today, in this same square, perhaps the same people are demonstrating against NATO aggression.

The West's actions in Yugoslavia reflect not merely the arrogance of power but a fundamental misunderstanding of the Balkans. European union is certainly the child of enlightenment, but experience indicates that an anti-integrative, or even disintegrative, romanticism must appear in opposition to such a tendency.

If we look to the Balkans, we see this romanticism in operation as the ideology of the homogeneous nation-state. Following the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet domination in 1989, armed struggle on the basis of nationality or ethnicity did not take place in the zone between Poland and Bulgaria, at least partly because the democratic movements chose to follow the path of nonviolent self-liberation.

In Yugoslavia, the member states considered themselves homogeneous nations, though clearly they were not. This process resulted in the violent severing of many real bonds, but Western public opinion held that far off in the Balkans the establishment of new borders (and the torments that resulted from them) was a station in the development of democracy. Clearly, the partition of Belgium in consequence of the Flemish-Walloon conflict would be something to avoid, yet the West was glad to see Yugoslavia cut into parts.

The West considered the former Yugoslavia an artificial creation, despite twenty-one nationalities having lived there together over many years without ethnic civil war and despite Yugoslavia having been able to protect its sovereignty against the Soviet Union without outside help, as it had resisted Hitler's Germany. The West forgot about the 1 million war dead, the executions on both sides and the memories of that as a cultural legacy. It forgot that the collapse of a federal state with its restraining framework would make ethnicity the chief principle of orientation for individuals. On land where the population is mixed, however, the principle turns neighbors who have lived together in peace into enemies.

• PAGE
• 1
• 2
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.