As we try to understand the world in which we live, we sometimes focus exclusively on short-term phenomena or on the actualities. That, however, is a mistake, for in order to deal with current affairs we must understand the long-term phenomena as well; history and historical memory is one of the long-term factors, along with others, for example, geography. Indeed, my argument in what follows will be that historical memory is a powerful motive force for human action, and one that has a dialectic relationship with political realities, since it is influenced-or even created- by political realities, and in turn influences their shape. To a large extent, historical memory is constructed; and in our days, there is considerable debate about its construction, as one may easily ascertain by looking at the recent debates regarding the Second World War, or various monuments of commemoration, or indeed regarding the recommended history curriculum for high schools. Historical memory, in other words, is being constructed daily; in the Balkans, entire regions are engaged in the construction of a memory which often has very little connection with historical reality.
Historical memory is lodged in institutions and symbols, one influencing the other in a dialectic process. The prime example of the process in western Europe is the case of Charlemagne: a powerful symbol of European unity in the Middle Ages, he became the symbol of French and German nationalist aspirations in the modern period, and thus a figure that embodied disunity. The heartland of the Carolingian Empire, however, is also the core of the European Union, in part, I think, because of a common heritage, common culture and common institutions that go back to a real and an imagined Charlemagne.
In the Balkans, there is a close equivalent to the powerful Carolingian symbol. That is the battle of Kosovo, fought by the forces of Serbia and Bosnia against the advancing Ottoman Turks on June 15 (28 by the new calendar), 1389. It was a battle of major significance, for it marked an important stage in the subjugation of the Balkans to the Ottomans. And it bore within it the elements of legend, for a Serb (Milosh Obilich) killed the Ottoman sultan, an action which led to the execution of the Serbian Prince Lazar and his son. While immediate contemporaries were not clear as to who had won the battle, the subsequent events, i.e. the fall of these areas to the Turks, fed historical memory, so that the battle was construed as a Christian defeat, yes, but one of such heroism that it had within it the seeds and promise of future revival. Defeat that turns into victory is a common motif in the construction of historical memory1.
The martyrdom of Lazar (for it was soon seen as such), and the heroism of Obilich, as well as the epic-legendary sacrifice of many warriors, and the motif of treachery appear to have been turned into epic song soon thereafter. The first firm mention of such songs appears around 1530 in Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia. The message is that Kosovo marks the end of the medieval empire; but it also carries the spirit of future rebirth, symbolized by the legendary reunification of Lazar's severed head with his body. The songs stress the internal conflict among the Christian Slavs in a cautionary vein, attributing the defeat partly to such hostilities, and cautioning against them. In the mid-19th century, the songs were rediscovered in Bosnia and Montenegro, where men and women still sang long ballads from memory.
Thus we have here a very strong historical memory, which was given force in the early 19th century, at the time of the Serbian movement of independence and liberation from the Ottoman Turks, in 1804-15, and during the various historical stages which the area underwent: the revival of the Serbian state, the Balkan wars in which one of the most important aims was the liberation of Kosovo, thus confirming the new state, and after the 1960's. The memory of the battle of Kosovo was further given force by both state and intellectuals in the course of the 19th century: in 1889, Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia celebrated Vidovdan (June 15/28) as a national day. It was on Vidovdan, 1914, that Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary made the mistake of going to Sarajevo, and was killed by a Serb nationalist student, an event which sparked the First World War. On Vidovdan, 1921, King Alexander swore an oath of allegiance to the new constitution of Yugoslavia; and it was that day that Stalin clumsily chose, in 1948, to announce his opposition to Tito after Tito had refused to attend the Cominform, thus strengthening Yugoslavia's independence from the Communist block. 2 On the six hundredth anniversary of the battle, the Serbs carried out actions regarding the Serbian province of Kosovo which eventually led to a change in the U.S. policy toward Yugoslavia.3
The lessons to be drawn from the battle of Kosovo and its subsequent symbolic presence in the history of the South Slavs are, in my view, the following. This is a historical event which lies at the heart of Serbian national identity, and a symbol of terrific power, which cannot be disregarded. It follows that any idea of tampering with the region of Kosovo will be resisted strongly, for such symbols have are more powerful than current configurations. On the subject of Kosovo, Robert Lee Wolff, a wise and learned scholar, wrote : "towards [the battle of 1389] they feel somewhat the same way as Americans might feel about Valley Forge". 4 This is also a part of the world where honor even unto martyrdom is entrenched; and the corollary is, to put it bluntly, that outside force is not easily accepted, and certainly not for long. Secondly, and more optimistically, one may observe that the legend of Kosovo is not only a Serbian legend but a more generally south Slav legend. Thirdly, and even more optimistically, the legend, although full of blood in the way of all epic poetry, has its focus on spiritual victory and spiritual survival, on the message of unity among those who had composed the medieval Empire, that is, much of pre-division Yugoslavia. Thus, despite what western observers believe, the South Slav peoples have symbols and memories of unity.
I shall now turn to some other forms of Balkan historical memory, embodied in institutions, where there are indeed significant differences from the West.
The areas south of the Danube, including Greece, had for centuries formed part of two large Empires, one Christian, the Byzantine Empire (330-1453), the other Muslim, the Ottoman Empire. While different in many respects, they both were large states, governed from the center-Constantinople, Istanbul-, and consisted of very many peoples of different languages and customs-ethnicities-and, especially after the Ottoman conquest, different religions. Both these states underwent historical processes of integration and disintegration. During the last 250 years of the Byzantine Empire, the centralized state declined, and a number of successor states were formed. The process of disaggregation was counterbalanced by various efforts at re-integration. These were sometimes political. For instance, in the 1340's, Stephen Dushan, King of Serbia, created a large state which included much of modern Yugoslavia and modern Greece. It lasted for a short time, and was traditional in concept, since Dushan's real ambition seems to have been to supplant the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. There were also successor states with a strong regional basis-some in Greece, some in Serbia, some in Bulgaria, which were less traditional in outlook. There are, here, the beginnings of an ethnic or national consciousness, primarily among the Greek-speakers, but also among some south-Slav speakers, the Serbs, the Bulgarians, which could ultimately have developed into the creation of regional states.
There was, simultaneously, a real system of economic integration, based on international commerce, whose motor power was Italian. But economic integration in that period was not powerful enough to truly counterbalance political fragmentation. There was, therefore, instability, resulting in the Ottoman conquest which reconstituted a powerful multi-ethnic state over large areas, and brought a certain economic unity as well. It is important to note that both the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire adopted policies which on the whole left the populations alone as long as they did not rebel and did not stop paying taxes. True, under the Ottomans there were some large-scale conversions to Islam, which were to influence subsequent history: the upper class of Bosnia converted after the 16th century, so that, in modern times, around 30% or 40% of the population is Muslim; similarly in Albania, resulting in approximately 70% of Muslims in the population.5 In other areas, however, the mass of the population retained its original religion. For administrative purposes, the Ottomans divided the subject populations not according to ethnicity but according to religion. What this combination of historical circumstances means is that the ethnic characteristics of the various demographic elements persisted, but were not complemented by the slow formation of state and nation that we have in western Europe of the early modern period. The peoples of the Balkans were used to living together and had institutions of cooperation at the local level which bespeak an interesting attitude.
The historical memory all of this has left, embodied both in institutions and in symbols, constitutes a complex story. Let me simply say that historically the population shared allegiances, that is, to multiple allegiances, to state, religion, village, family; in terms of institutions, there is indeed a strain of integration and cooperation as well as the one of antagonism which western observers stress. Thus, for example, during the 18th century, there was once again economic integration. This is the period of the victorious Balkan merchant studied by Trajan Stoianovich: Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians gave unity to the economic space, organizing agricultural and manufacturing activity in the course of carrying out a very active trade with central Europe. And the church acted as a very strong centripetal force of the Orthodox communities. Common memories, common customs, common foods, common geographic images are shared by the peoples of the Balkans. When Greeks, Serbs, Albanians, Bulgarians, Turks from certain areas, Rumanians get together today, it takes them only a little time to find common roots; some came originally from the same area, but were dispersed in various refugee movements or movements of population exchange; some speak the other's language; some have studied at the same universities in one or another of the Balkan cities. But they can also discover or rediscover old antagonisms.
These are connected with the timing and the force of nationalist movements and nation building, all of which came in the 19th and, for Albania, the early 20th century, and all of which emerged from rebellions against the Ottoman Empire, that is, wars of independence. That Balkan nationalism came late, that is to say when it was already a powerful ideology in western Europe, meant that it was based on western ideas, often ill adapted to this area of highly mixed populations. Furthermore, while in much of western Europe the process of nation-building and state-building had gone on for centuries (and marked by almost endemic wars, since the 14th century and through the 19th, some exceedingly brutal and bloody), here everything was telescoped, and nation-states began to be formed while nations were being defined. In this process, history and the construction of historical memory played an important part. The 19th century was seminal for the construction of identity all over western Europe as well, which rediscovered its medieval past and sought its roots in it. Like western Europeans, the peoples of the Balkans turned to their folk poems, to their historical past to help give identities to the states they were building. But here history was perhaps even more important as a connecting tissue. And history is long and contradictory, capable of giving rise to different territorial claims. The Greeks could look to the classical past and the Byzantine past, as they sought to unite to the then small Greek kingdom various areas with a Greek-speaking population or with a historic Greek past; they remembered too that Constantinople had been ruled by mostly Greek-speaking emperors for a thousand years, and part of the political spectrum was moved by the idea of recovering it. The Serbs remembered the Empire of Stephen Dushan, and sought to integrate the south Slavs, including the area broadly called Macedonia, which was under Ottoman rule until 1912. The Bulgarians dreamt of recreating the empire of Czars Symeon and/or Samuel, which unfortunately covered much the same area the Greeks and the Serbs had historic claims on, including Macedonia. The Treaty of San Stefano embodied these dreams for a brief moment, before being superseded by the Treaty of Berlin (both in 1878). Some of these conflicting claims were worked out between 1912 and 1922.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when most of the Balkan states had gained independence, at least for part of their territories, the conflicting claims were primarily focused on Macedonia, a large geographic area, the largest still under Ottoman domination. Its population was very mixed, consisting of Orthodox Greek and Slavic speakers, and Muslims as well as Albanians, Rumanians, Jews in the cities, and others; hence the term "macédoine" for a mixed fruit salad. The "Macedonian Question," which loomed large in the affairs of the Balkans in the late 19th and early 20th century, was fought both on the ground and on paper. in the absence of national allegiance on the part of the population, there were battles of schools and maps: the first to influence the population and shape, change or reinforce its allegiances, the second to persuade the great powers of the justice of Ottoman, Greek, Serbian or Bulgarian claims.
Thus, as the Balkan states emerged out of their wars of independence, one strain in their self-identification and in their relationship to each other was marked by historical memories and claims which were built in antithetical ways, on a substratum of diverse ethnicities.
Does all this mean that conflicting historical claims and memories cannot be unraveled? I think it does not.
And I think it is very important here to differentiate among the remnants of these processes in the intervening seventy years, that is, after 1922. During this time, especially through the 1920's, a number of things happened, which influence affairs today and change historical memory. There was, of course, the resolution of the wars, which ultimately brought to an end the Ottoman Empire, and distributed its remaining territories among the various successor states, including Turkey itself, which holds a small area in the Balkans. There were, secondly, processes of assimilation, through the schools, and integration in national life. There were exchanges of population which were extremely painful, and which took place all through the early part of the 20th century, sometimes under the supervision of the League of Nations and sometimes not: this process left Greece, for example, with a basically homogeneous population in Macedonia, especially after World War II, but with a substantial Muslim minority in Thrace. It left Turkey with a Greek minority which was considerable to start with, but which was inexorably reduced to a small number. This has reshaped the effects of historical memory in Greece: while after 1922 the dream of recovering Istanbul died, and irredentism had little basis on which to develop, any perceived threat to the frontiers created with so much blood and bolstered by international guarantees is taken very seriously indeed.
The case of Yugoslavia is different, for here we have, or rather had, an effort to create a federative state and a federation of ethnicities. Yugoslavia was created in 1918, with the voluntary adherence of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Hercegovina. This was not a creation of Communist regimes, as is sometimes thought today, but a free adherence, at a time when Wilsonian principles ruled. The Serbs, too, once united into Yugoslavia, abandoned dreams of Stephen Dushan. Expansionist policies, into Greece and Bulgaria, were revived in the Yugoslav province of Macedonia in 1944, when its communist government laid claim to the ancient geographic area of Macedonia, claims incorporated in the constitution of that province. Internally, Yugoslavia was in the position of having a number of ethnicities with different religions and different recent histories, and also facing different foreign powers ready to help with secessionist movements. And yet the state of Yugoslavia, for all its problems, was the most interesting experiment in federation of peoples, rather than in states with compact and pure populations, given that in some parts of the Balkans compact and pure populations are not in evidence, and can only be created with enormous pain, as we see today.
One can draw certain conclusions which are perhaps relevant to this area where historical memory is so important. One thing that is certain is that outsiders to this area disregard its history at their peril, but they also can manipulate it at their peril. Another certainty is that historical memory is created and can be used both positively and negatively; one therefore must gauge the importance of aspects of it. Some are deeply entrenched and as real as material factors. To return to the battle of Kosovo, that historical memory is of such profound importance that it has to be taken seriously. Historical memory has been an essential ingredient and a powerful one in the construction of the post-imperial state systems in the Balkans, as in modern western Europe. In other instances, there have been and still are blatant misrepresentations and misuses of history, whose intent and effect are deleterious; such things take us back to dangerous routes instead of forward. The historian also observes that the Balkans are, currently, in a phase of fission; but the answer cannot lie in the disaggregation of the Balkans into a series of tiny states, for history is such that these would simply reproduce the problems of larger ones , without having their viability. Surely the answer lies in aggregation, of one kind or the other. After all, as I have already indicated, the area has long experience with the concept of multiple allegiances, which the European Union is partly based on.
The Balkans today are faced with historic choices, and my final point is that the history of the area has many faces and complexities, and the only long-term solution is surely to pursue the positive and constructive lessons. Too often uninformed observers focus on "traditional" enmities, existing "from time immemorial," which may in fact be rather recent, and not forces of nature. One may, instead, look at the factors which suggest cautious optimism: the fact that the area has functioned in the past and can now function as an economic system-not isolated, to be sure, but with connections to other systems. The fact that, here as elsewhere, prosperity plays a role in preserving peace, and prosperity is not impossible to achieve. The fact that in the history of the peoples of the Balkans there is much effort toward cooperation, and many efforts toward federative systems which, whether loose or less loose, should be pursued. The fact that historical memory can be channeled: and here is where education plays an important role. I remember that when I was a child in Greece there was a thaw in Greco-Turkish relations, and the history books were somewhat rewritten, to insist less on the negative aspects. Similar efforts have continued with Turkey through UNESCO's Balkan National Committees (in the 1980's) and between the Greeks and the Bulgarians more recently. 6 Schools that used to foster hostility in the past can foster cooperation in the present.
The optimistic view is not fashionable at the moment, and for good reason. The process of fission is proceeding, with initial encouragement from western Europe, and without much concern, in the international fora, either about the viability of small new states or about the dangers in creating nationalist and irredentist states and uprooted populations, and this at a time when integration is pursued in the rest of Europe. However, there are some signs that may warrant some optimism. Interestingly enough, economic institutions are at this very moment acting as trans-national forces of integration. Greek businessmen are active in the new markets of the Balkans, where the drachma is a strong international currency. In February 1995 there was, in Thessaloniki, a Conference of the Balkan Chamber of Commerce, organized by the Greek-American Chamber of Commerce and the Association of Industries of Northern Greece, in which there was discussion of a number of mechanisms for economic cooperation, from infrastructural to political ones. The vision and even the reality of cooperation, at least at the economic level, is there, and should be fostered. To a historian, there is the fascination of watching the reconstruction of economic cohesion which was also there in the past, with one difference: that in our world economic cohesion is a much more powerful force than it had been in the past.
If this optimistic perspective seems an impossibility, it might be instructive for us to remember that last year, on the 14th of July, there were German troops marching in Paris, participating in the celebrations of Bastille day. Who would have thought it, fifty years ago?
Angeliki E. Laiou is Professor of Byzantine Studies at Harvard University and Direcotr of Dumbarton Oaks .
Notes:
1 See W. S. Vucinich, T. E. Emmert,edd., Kosovo; Legacy of a Medieval Battle, Minneapolis, 1991, 103. What follows, on the battle itself, and on the memory it has bequeathed, is greatly indebted to this volume. On the Balkans in the late Middle Ages, see also John V. A. Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, Ann Arbor, 1994.
2 On the modern period, see R. L. Wolff, The Balkans in our Times, Cambridge, Mass., 1956.
3 Very useful for current policies and events is The Southeast European Year Book 1992, Athens, the Hellenic Foundation for Defense and Foreign Policy, 1993, especially the article by P. Simic, "Civil War in Former Yugoslavia: From Local Conflict to European Crisis," pp. 93-136.
4 Wolff, op.cit., 148.
5 Wolff, op.cit., 16ff.
6 E. Kofos, The Vision of "Greater Macedonia", Remarks on FYROM's new school textbooks , Thessaloniki, 1994, 5-7.