Serbian or not quite Serbian?

Elizabeth Roberts
REALM OF THE BLACK MOUNTAIN
A history of Montenegro
521pp. Hurst & Company. £25.
978 1 85065 771 8
US: Cornell University Press. $37.50.
978 0 8014 4601 6

Have you got the details of the Eastern Question at your fingertips? Can you remember what exactly it was that brought Gladstone out of retirement to challenge evil with all the moral force at his command? Well, if you are a little rusty on all these issues – to some extent laid to rest at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 – Elizabeth Roberts will tell you about the Black Mountain that was near the heart of this bloody matter and about much else besides, in Realm of the Black Mountain, her scholarly, readable and well-written history of Montenegro.

A tune by Franz Lehár, whose “Pontevedris” in The Merry Widow are thinly disguised Montenegrins, first introduced Lady Roberts to that country: “I come by cruel fate from a little Balkan state” – cruel fate, perhaps, to be consumed by interest in such a small country with so little geography but all too much history. Yet her book offers, admittedly on a smaller canvas, as much insight into the problems of the Balkans as have works by Rebecca West, Misha Glenny, Noel Malcolm and Mark Mazower – whose book The Balkans (2000) is the best short introduction to the region.

Unfortunately, Western interest in the Balkans has been and remains rather more of a minority one than it should be, given the region’s importance in European history. We do not care to dwell too long on the region that – some used to think – brought us at Sarajevo the First World War. That lack of interest is one of the reasons why, in the 1990s, some found it so easy to look the other way, while over 200,000 men, women and children died in the wars that accompanied the dismemberment of Tito’s Yugoslavia. It was the lowest point in Europe’s post-war history, exposing the gap between our pretensions as Europeans and our ability to act decisively together. The most important question in those days was not what Europe would do – mostly wring its hands and issue communiqués – but what the United States would not do. After all, as the Secretary of State James Baker memorably remarked, Washington had no dog in this fight.

Elizabeth Roberts leads us skilfully along the highways and byways of Montenegro’s excessive amount of history. A tiny country, with a beautiful Adriatic coast (now discovered, alas, by Russian tourists) and a rocky, mountainous interior, it has suffered from its geographical position on some of the geopolitical as well as geological fault-lines of Europe. It has been in the Illyrian no-man’s-land between Venice and Byzantium, and on the frontier between the Muslim and Christian worlds, between Catholic and Orthodox Churches, between the decaying European empires of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. Others have poked about in the wreckage that these clashes have produced – Hohenzollerns, Romanovs and sanctimonious British liberals. For all this time, Montenegrins have tried to cling on to a sense of their own identity – Serbian or not perhaps quite Serbian, “a separate ethnic group”, as Roberts notes, “of mixed Slav-Albanian-Vlach origins”. It is the country from which Milovan Djilas and Slobodan Milosevic both sprang, representing in their ways the best and worst of the history of the land that became, in 2006, the first independent nation state of the twenty-first century.

Today’s population of less than 700,000 inherits a country with a bloody past, which I suppose goes for most of us. Yet even by Europe’s customary standards, Montenegro’s history is remarkably turbulent and brutal. You would have been well advised not to pick a fight with a Montenegrin. There were beheadings, poisonings and blindings as warlords, prince-bishops and kings struggled for power. One ruler had his brother nailed to a cross and sawn in half. Heads rolled and were used for football or sent gift-wrapped to Sultans. Converts to Islam were massacred. Women – and who would have chosen, as one ruler said, to be even a princess among wolves? – had cats sewn into their skirts which were then beaten with rods. Defeated foes had their noses and lips hacked off. “How can a soldier prove his heroism if he does not bring in noses?” a Montenegrin schoolteacher said to the writer and traveller M. E. Durham on the eve of the Balkan war which preceded the European conflagration of 1914–18. No wonder that the Carnegie Report on those regional wars recorded the use of terror against civilian populations, justified by nationalist ideologies, to drive people from their land.

This is a wretched tactic that continued into the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Moreover, Montenegrin behaviour did not seem to have improved very much. In 1991–2, Montenegrin irregulars joined the Serbian armed forces in the shelling of Dubrovnik, for which two prominent Montenegrins were sentenced at The Hague. Earlier this year, I stood in the main cemetery in Dubrovnik on the feast day of St Blaize (the city’s patron saint) and looked up through the cypress trees at the escarpment above us from which only fifteen years before shells had been lobbed down on the defenceless (now beautifully restored) city below. The deputy mayor, a local professor, showed me the graves of his young pupils who were murdered in this strategically pointless assault. There were rows and rows of youngsters, their photos on many of the headstones, aged eighteen, twenty, twenty-four.

Perhaps those of whom so much heroism has been expected have found it difficult to countenance moderation. The courage has never been in doubt. It inspired a pretty awful poem by Tennyson – in his “Charge of the Light Brigade” mode – “O smallest among peoples! Rough rock-throne Of Freedom! / Warriors beating back the swarm / Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years . . . ”. In the Partisan struggles against the German and Italian occupiers in the Second World War, Montenegrins – Djilas prominent among them – played more than their proportionate part in that heroic fight against the odds. More than a third of the Partisans’ generals came from Montenegro. Djilas – Tito’s leading dissident critic – is the nearest person in Robert’s book to a real hero. Should we now add to his the name of Milo Djukanovic, the guileful Prime Minister and President who manoeuvred Montenegro through the shoals of Serbian and European politics to the achievement of Independence? I first met Djukanovic in early 2000. He was cleverly distancing Montenegro from Milosevic’s Serbia, avoiding an all-out challenge, mindful of the dangers of perhaps having to fight the Serbian army with Montenegrin police. I flew into Dubrovnik and was taken by car to cross the nearby border of the Serbian-Montenegrin state, where customs and immigration officials were still formally loyal to Belgrade. We flew up from the coast, in a helicopter which Djukanovic had sent to collect us, to Podgorica, the country’s rather grim capital. Once a Muslim fortress, it was heavily bombed by the Germans in the Second World War and rebuilt with all the aesthetic sympathy of Socialist planners in the 1950s and 60s.

Djukanovic is an impressive man. A prime minister before he was thirty, he is tall, good-looking, charming and no more trustworthy than you would expect of a survivor of the break-up of Yugoslavia. I met him fairly regularly in the next few years, listening to his patient efforts to prove himself a modernizing, pro-European, straight-as-a-die leader. His long replies to the often rather petulant questions that I was obliged by European policy to ask him were mellifluously translated by his beautiful interpreter. After the fall of Milosevic, interest in supporting him turned into trying to stop him doing what he was evidently intent on doing, that is, securing Montenegro’s escape from Serbia’s embrace. Europe’s official position was to prevent this at almost any cost, mostly because of the alleged knock-on effect in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

We twisted ourselves into knots trying to make this policy work, trying to design customs agreements with Serbia-Montenegro that took account of the fact that the two economies were totally dissimilar and that the federal trade minister – a Montenegrin – spent his time at international conferences sounding out other countries about allowing Montenegro to join the World Trade Organization on its own. The smarter politicians in Belgrade did not believe in the policy of holding Serbia and Montenegro together either, nor really did the Americans, though they let us in Europe play the hand. Djukanovic steadily came to the conclusion that our heart was not in the struggle. We said to him things we did not believe, and he replied with answers that neither he nor we thought were true. The end result was inevitable. So Montenegro is now on its own, its only heavy industry, such as it is, in the back pocket of the Russians (for the bauxite mining concessions, Roberts suggests) and the rest of the economy struggling to find a way to be entrepreneurial without smuggling petrol from Albania, or cigarettes and people to Italy. There used to be Italian preliminary indictments requesting Mr Djukanovic’s arrest, but maybe these have been diplomatically pigeonholed.

There are surely two lessons to draw from this story of medieval ferocity that has lasted almost to the present day. First, we should have learned by now about the dangers of identity politics, a point admirably made by Amartya Sen in Identity and Violence: The illusion of destiny (reviewed in the TLS, August 11 2006). So much horror has resulted, in Europe and elsewhere, from the notion that we are the inheritors and custodians of pure-blooded loyalties, and that the defining sentiment in our lives should not be the best way of acting as individuals but how we should behave as members of a clan. We need, invariably, to make up much of the history that sustains this idea. It absolves us from individual responsibility. This is what unleashed all that terror on the Balkans in the 1990s, and what underpins Samuel Huntington’s claims that our future will be torn apart by clashing civilizations. So it will if, for example, we forget our sense of civic idealism, seeing inevitable future struggles as being played out between Christians and Muslims, not prevented by individual citizens who remember their humanism.

Second, the most successful foreign policy pursued by the European Union has been enlargement. It has helped to stabilize our continent while authoritarian regimes have fallen, the Russian empire has crumbled, and democracy and markets have struggled into life. It is remarkable that the fall of the Berlin Wall did not lead to bloodshed in Central and Eastern Europe. The exception was the only part of the formerly Communist world that had most distanced itself politically from Moscow. The death of Tito, the survival of his fissiparous constitution, ethnic hatreds between Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim communities, and the destructive genius of Milosevic, tipped the Balkans back into vicious warfare.

For years, Europe had no policy on all this. When eventually one began to emerge – for example, the Carrington Plan in 1991 – it was scuppered by the EU’s squabbles and irresolution. After too much bloodshed, a new policy offered West Balkan countries membership of the EU. Nationalists could bury feral xenophobia without losing their sense of patriotism. Slovenia is already a member, and Croatia is well on the way to joining the twenty-seven. Others, I hope, will follow, if Europe does not lose its nerve.

That is true elsewhere too: it is true, for example, of Turkey, Ukraine and Moldova. Of course, enlargement should not continue indefinitely across the globe. But it should not end before we have taken in Europe’s neighbours who share our values, and Turkey, whose European ambitions and credentials we accepted years ago. To turn our backs on Turkey now would risk turning a policy that has created stability into one that accomplishes exactly the opposite. And for what reason? Because we still believe in the ethnic, religious, identity politics that pitted Ottoman Muslims against Orthodox Serbs and Montenegrins? Because we still believe, in the words of J. A. R. Marriott’s introduction to his The Eastern Question, that “the primary and most essential factor in the problem is the presence, embedded in the living flesh of Europe of an alien substance . . . the Ottoman Turkey”? If we continue to listen to voices like Sir John Marriott’s, then the often terrible story that Elizabeth Roberts tells so well is not yet over.
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Chris Patten was the last Commander in Chief and British Governor of Hong Kong. His book Not Quite the Diplomat: Home truths about world affairs was published in 2005.