And so it came that the high priests, scribes and pharisees assembled at a town they called Geneva and they held council there on how they could best abandon the nation of Bosnia. They were led by Thorwald and by David, Lord of the fantasy land of Owenia. And the Bosnian presidency saw that its hour had struck and spake: “My soul is sad unto death.” And they said unto the men assembled: “Truly, truly I say unto you, one of you here will betray me.” But they were wrong, for not one, but all of them would betray Bosnia. And behold! Britain whispered to David, Lord of Owenia, “Betray it and the Nobel peace prize will be yours.” Germany and the United States said: “What has it done, we can find no fault with it?” Britain and France however said: “It is better for a whole nation to die, than that we would all be dragged into a hellhole.” And they let it be bound and handed it over so that it should be crucified.
—Brendan Simms, “Bosnian Passion”
Until comparatively recently, the idea that one could learn from history was axiomatic. “Histories,” Francis Bacon once wrote “make men wise.” But the closer we get to the present the more skepticism takes over. From Hegel’s familiar, almost clichéd dictum, “The one thing one learns from history is that nobody ever learns anything from history,” it is but a short step to Alan Taylor’s pessimistic belief that all we learn from the mistakes of history is how to make new ones. In our day it is customary for historians to play safe, to insist that history may inform or edify us, but never provide us with lessons for the future. The intellectual credentials for this attitude are impressive. Jacob Burckhardt tells us that history makes us not clever for today, but wise forever. Sir Herbert Butterfield questioned whether historians were “any wiser than the rest of their contemporaries on political matters.” Indeed, Butterfield saw real danger in the manipulation of history to provide “patterns which we can immediately transpose into the context of contemporary politics.”1
And yet, if we scratch the surface, we find that the notion that history has much to teach us is a persistent one. In The Use of History, A. L. Rowse writes that “Though you may hardly say that there are historical laws of the regularity and exactness of the laws of physical science, there are generalizations possible, of something like a statistical character.” Rejecting the idea that “history never repeats itself,” he went on to say that “there is no one rhythm or plot in history but there are rhythms, plots, patterns, even repetitions. So that it is possible to make generalizations and to draw lessons.”2 Similar views can be found among professional historians. In The Practice of History the late Sir Geoffrey Elton writes, “Its lessons are not straightforward didactic precepts, either instructions for action (the search for parallels to a given situation) or a universal norm.” “Nevertheless,” he continues, “a sound acquaintance with the prehistory of a situation or problem does illumine them and does assist in making present decisions; and though history cannot prophesy, it can often make reasonable predictions.”3 Historians of international relations are particularly prone to drawing lessons from history. Norman Rich even subtitled his book about the Crimean wars A Cautionary Tale. Nor did he leave any doubt at whom his work was directed: to “the future leaders of the world—in other words, to students—in the hope that they and all others interested in international affairs will find this cautionary—as did the author.”4
In short, the case for and against the lessons of history is fairly finely balanced. Perhaps the last word among the authorities should be left to the great high priest of whiggery, G. M. Trevelyan. Trevelyan, who had a great deal more sense than he is often given credit for, once said, “History repeats itself and history never repeats itself are about equally true. The question in any given case, is which part of history is going to repeat itself.”5
This goes to the heart of the matter. What is important is not whether history is repeating itself in Europe today, but which part of history is doing so. Of course, one could still criticize my argument on the a priori basis that there are no lessons to be drawn from history. But if one accepts that historical analogies can be helpful, then the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. In that case the question must be, do the analogies convince? It is only after hearing out the comparisons that one will be able to judge whether this essay does more than convert the precious metal of historical understanding into the dross of political polemic.
• • •
But before going on to discuss the historical parallels to the Bosnian horrors, we should call to mind the various interpretations of the war and the facts on which they are based.
1. The first is the Serb view. It is that this is a war of self-defense for a Serbian people haunted by a fear of a repeat of the genocide suffered at the hands of the Croat puppet fascist state during World War II. On this reading the Serbian people are the victims of a long-thought-out Croat-German-Vatican-Muslim plot to destroy the old Yugoslavia and erect in its place either a Fourth Reich, a rerun of the genocidal Croat puppet fascist state, an Iranian-style Muslim theocracy, or some bizarre combination of all three.
2. The second view is the standard view of Western governments and more specifically, the view of the British government. This is that the conflict in Yugoslavia is essentially a civil war, though an unusually tragic and vicious one, for which all sides are more or less equally to blame. While there is general agreement that the Serbs have committed the most atrocities, there is also a broad consensus that the conflict involves no vital Western interest and thus does not justify the use of Western troops to check Serbian aggression.
3. The third view is one that I share. This view holds that, whatever opportunistic acts of Croat aggression may have taken place subsequently, the root cause of the war lies in a psychologically and logistically well prepared program of Serbian aggression.
• • •
In the face of the greatest European upheaval since 1945, involving an enormous displacement of population (at least 2.5 million at the latest tally), more than 100,000 deaths, most of them not battle casualties but in consequence of deliberate terror accompanying the practice of ethnic cleansing, mass rape, expulsion, concentration camps, and integral nationalism run riot, it is hardly surprising that commentators have resorted to historical analogy in an effort to find their bearings.
Predictably, the specter of the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and appeasement was frequently invoked. Lady Thatcher warned in December 1992 of the risk of a second holocaust. Mark Thompson speaks of the “final solution” of Bosnia-Herzegovina.6 The deportation of the Muslim population in railway boxcars led the American journalist Roy Gutman to speak of “Third Reich practices.” He compares the fate of Muslims to that of the Armenians and Milošević to Hitler. Citing George Santayana’s dictum that those who disregard the past are bound to repeat it, Gutman argued that the lesson of World War II is that there must never be genocide in Europe again.7 Elie Wiesel made the link between the two crimes clear when in an address at the opening of the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C., he rebuked Clinton for his inaction over Bosnia. The Labour M.P. Malcolm Wicks made the same point in April 1993 when he wrote, “Yesterday in Washington the Holocaust Memorial was opened. The timing could not have been more momentous. Will its opening challenge us to prevent a Bosnian holocaust, or mock our pretensions that we have learned this century’s most important lesson?”8 Perhaps the most plaintive of such calls was that of Brenda Katten, chairman of the Zionist Federation: “As Jews, we are quite horrified at what is going on: we lost a lot of our people in the 1930s because the gates were closed on us. What is sad, is that we don’t learn from history.”
This analysis was not shared by the majority of commentators, though their sense of historical analogy was no less acute. Instead, they argued that history showed that only nation-states “worked,” that Bosnia was unviable on this count and was thus doomed to fail. Others argued that history had shown intervention always made things worse; that it led to open-ended commitments, ended in Vietnam traumas, and achieved no purpose. Others still evinced a deep-seated abhorrence for all things Balkan, and adapted Bismarck’s bon mot to argue that the Balkan peoples were not worth the bones of a single British grenadier. Above all, these pundits rejected analogies with the Third Reich, Hitler, the Holocaust, and appeasement. “Comparisons with Hitler are intoxicating and should be avoided,” wrote Conor Cruise O’Brien. He went on to state, indisputably, that “It was by seeing Nasser as Hitler that Anthony Eden got Britain into Suez.”9 In the Sunday Telegraph Frank Johnson argued that history taught us to stay out of the Balkans.10 Allan Massie saw similar dangers in intervention.11 “Russia,” he wrote, “might abandon sanctions against Serbia and come to the defense of its traditional ally: shades of 1914.” Before his conversion to the cause of intervention, Andrew Marr in the Independent spoke of the pro-interventionists as “Mr. Gladstone’s inheritors,” referring to the Bulgarian agitation of 1876;12 more of this presently. One of those warning of a new Vietnam was the war photographer Don McCullin: “What most people seem to forget about Bosnia is rule one: read history. Certainly it’s got the makings of another Vietnam where you just tie up thousands of troops and lose in the end.”
Other more imaginative parallels can be drawn. If Timothy Garton Ash spoke of the period 1989–90 as a rerun of 1848, another “springtime of the nations,” the years 1991–93 can be compared to 1849–50 with the unsettling discovery of incompatibility of liberal revolutionary national aims in Transylvania, Posnania, and elsewhere. Another persuasive parallel might be with the immediate aftermath of World War I. The posthegemonic chaos of the years 1918–23, in which the smaller European and Near Eastern states struggled for the Habsburg, tsarist, and Ottoman inheritances, bears a close resemblance to the struggle for the Soviet succession we are witnessing today. Once again we have turmoil in Moscow, breakaway movements on the former Soviet periphery and in the Balkans. We have a host of new countries with recondite currencies. We have, once again, worrying signs of an American withdrawal from Europe, a hint of neo-isolationism even. Disturbing though these signs may be, the essential message of such a comparison is a comforting one. Because though there was much unpleasantness in the years 1918–23, things eventually sorted themselves out. Then as now the lesson seems to be not to get involved, for the two most spectacular interventions after World War I, the expeditions to Russia and the Chanak crisis, were notorious failures. So perhaps it should hardly surprise us to find the Greek-Turkish population exchanges of the 1920s, which involved millions of people and enormous human suffering, being touted in UN circles as a model for Bosnia.
But numerous though the possible historical parallels may be, it is the Balkan crisis of 1876–78 and the events of the 1930s to which commentators and politicians return again and again.
• • •
In 1875 the peasants of Bosnia rose against their Ottoman rulers. Against the hopes and expectations of the British government the Turks were unable to put the insurrection down quickly. During the following year, the revolt spread to Bulgaria. If the struggle in Bosnia had shown scant regard for humanity, the Bulgarian insurrection soon degenerated into massacre, as Turkish irregulars, the so-called bashibazouks, were loosed on the largely defenseless Christian population. This provoked an outcry in Britain where a vociferous section of the public, led by the prime minister, William Gladstone, began to demand intervention, or at least an end to the traditional pro-Turkish and anti-Russian policy of Disraeli’s Conservative administration. The parallels with the present day are compelling. It is more or less the same geographic area that is at issue, although the roles of victim and perpetrator in the public mind have been neatly reversed. If in 1876 it was the hapless Orthodox peasantry being raped and massacred by bestial Turkish soldiery, today it is the Muslim civilians who were at the mercy of crazed Serbian Chetniks. The reaction of the British government and the Foreign Office is also similar.13 In 1876 they urged the Turks to stamp out the revolt quickly and their misgivings about Turkish policy stemmed not from the casualties involved but from the length of time the Ottomans were taking to get to grips with the insurrection. Today such feelings are more subterranean but they are nonetheless widespread in government circles. As for the Foreign Office, the scarcely concealed desire that the Serbs should “get on with it” in Bosnia is attested by many leaks and the general thrust of British policy.14 There is another striking parallel, namely, the efforts of the British government to establish some kind of moral equivalence between victim and perpetrator. In 1876 the undersecretary at the Foreign Office, Bourke, spoke of the insurrection as being “fomented by foreigners (i.e. the Russians)” and “how sanguinary were the intentions and acts of the insurgent Christians.” The Daily Telegraph spoke of the “wholesale massacre of Moslems whenever found, and they did not fail to ill-treat both women and children.. . . They point to their bleeding little ones—did they remember humanity when they fell upon the Turk? Their villages are in flames, and they protest, yet they cheerfully set Ottoman hamlets in a blaze.” Much in the same way the Foreign Office and the British government have wasted no opportunity today in drawing attention to the fact that there are no innocent parties in the Yugoslav conflict.15 At the popular level this argument was an effective one, for nobody likes to be accused of gullibility or failing to understand what is, in another classic Foreign Office phrase, a “very complex situation.” In the media this view found expression in headlines such as “No Nice Guys Left [in Bosnia] as Patience Runs Out” or “They Are All Baddies at Odds in Bosnia.”16
But perhaps the most arresting similarity between the two phenomena lies in the extraordinary public debate generated by the massacres and the response of the British government to such pressures. If the Bulgarian agitation was, in Richard Shannon’s words, “by far the greatest and most illuminating revelation of the moral susceptibility of the High Victorian public conscience,” then the Bosnian agitation of 1992–93 is the nearest equivalent in modern times, the closest our jaded and compassion-fatigued age will ever get to the moral fervor of Gladstonian liberalism.
Unsurprisingly, there is also a sense of déjà vu about the anti-interventionist camp. If in 1876 Disraeli and others pointed to the British interest in upholding Turkish power in Europe against the Russians, today Hurd, Hogg, and Rifkind justify their passivity in terms of the absence of any vital British interest in the stability of the Balkans.17 There is the same defiance, almost willful cynicism in the face of the outrage of what they regard as the chattering classes, the strictures of facile utopians ignorant of the realities of power politics. Nor is this all. There is also the same strange specter of alliances cutting right across the whole party-political and cultural spectrum. In 1876, for example, strong support for the Bulgarian agitation came from Gladstone and many Liberals, from the Welsh, Anglo-Catholics (Puseyites), anti-Ultramontane Catholics (pro-Newmanites, anti-Manning and Wisemanites), from nonconformist ministers, and from a selection of newspapers and journals, including the Methodist, the Church Review, and the Daily News. Opposition to the agitation came from the Daily Telegraph, the Conservative Party, low church evangelicals in the Church of England (except Lord Shaftesbury), the pope and the English Roman Catholic church, Ireland, the Jewish community, and the poet Swinburne. Today, support for intervention in Bosnia has been expressed by Lord Callaghan, Michael Foot, and Lady Thatcher, writers such as Malcolm Bradbury, trade union grandees such as Bill Morris (general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Britain’s biggest union), the trenchant anti-Marxist and political guru Edward Heath, and also Bruce Kent (vice president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), the Reverend Ian Paisley, Dennis Skinner, Tony Benn, Max Hastings, and Alan Clark. Then as now interventionist rhetoric has been seen as merely a vehicle for a political comeback. Thus Disraeli accused Gladstone, who had come out of retirement to lead the Bulgarian agitation, of “taking advantage of such sublime sentiments” and applying them “for the furtherance of their sinister ends.” The Times spoke of Gladstone’s “rhetorical inebriation.”
Much the same has been said of Margaret Thatcher’s sensational interview in April 1993, when she accused the British government of “complicity in genocide.” It was then that Malcolm Rifkind dismissed her charges as “emotional nonsense.” Finally, perhaps the Bosnian question will follow the nine days’ wonder of the Bulgarian agitation into oblivion. Doubtless the British government takes comfort from the fact that the agitation fizzled out after the failure of the Straits conference of 1877 and was utterly negated by the surge of popular anti-Russian and pro-Turkish jingoism that followed the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78.
But only perhaps. What if the Balkan crisis of today is more than just a flash in the pan? What if there is a clear Western and thus British national interest to be defended in the former Yugoslavia?18
• • •
Of course, there are obvious ways in which the current situation does not resemble the 1930s. First of all, Milošević is no Hitler. Though he may possess a fairly highly developed murderous instinct, it pales in comparison to the sheer scale of Hitler’s crimes. Second, Serbia does not possess even a fraction of the strength, cohesion, and talent that made the Germans such a formidable threat to European peace in the 1930s and 1940s. Similarly, the horrors inflicted on the Muslim and Croat peoples of the former Yugoslavia cannot be equated with the planned and industrialized destruction of a whole people we call the Holocaust. Horrific though it is, “ethnic cleansing” is not strictly speaking “genocide” in the sense we mean when referring to the Third Reich, Cambodia, or Stalin’s Russia. And yet the lack of an indisputable equivalence with the 1930s and 1940s should not surprise us. For if the parallel were that obvious, this paper would be redundant, for in that case we should be doing nothing else in Western Europe than discussing the Serbian threat night and day. In short, I am not saying that the drive for a Greater Serbia corresponds exactly to Nazi expansionism. What I am saying is that the Balkan massacres are, if not of genocidal dimensions, then easily the nearest thing to genocide in Europe we have witnessed since World War II. Similarly, the political culture and behavior of present-day Serbia are, if not the pure Nazism of Hitler’s Germany, then at least the most frightening example of expansionism and integral nationalism run riot that we have seen for fifty years. Perhaps even more significant, the response of the West to this phenomenon bears more than a passing resemblance to the policy of appeasement adopted in the face of the German threat.
The Abyssinian war that began in 1935 has a strangely familiar air about it. As in the case of Bosnia, it was argued that Abyssinia should never have been admitted to the League of Nations in the first place. When the crisis blew, a British government review swiftly established that there were insufficient British interests at stake to justify resistance to Italian aggression; Britain, in particular Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind, take exactly the same line on Bosnia today. Then as now, comparatively few people in authority seemed to make the point that it was collective security, not the individual country, that was ultimately at issue.
As for the Spanish Civil War, the scope for comparison with contemporary events is practically unlimited. Franco’s rebellion broke out in July 1936. Within a month France and Britain had imposed an arms embargo on both sides, much in the same way as the United Nations did in Yugoslavia at the end of 1991. In both cases the West treated the recognized and democratically elected government of an embattled state on an equal footing with the rebels. In both cases the effects were far from evenhanded, for in the Spanish instance Italian and German weapons were supplied to the rebels in an abundance that the Soviet Union did not match for the government side, while in Yugoslavia the embargo directly favored the Serbs who, having planned the war well in advance, had already helped themselves to most of the old federal armory. And in both cases the British and French governments have celebrated their policy as the height of responsibility. There are further similarities. For example, in April 1993, when Western governments still put on a pretense of concern for the Bosnian Muslims, a common argument advanced against a lifting of the arms embargo was that it would enable the Russians to supply the Serbs, as if they had not enough arms already. This was very redolent of the logic of Arthur Greenwood, deputy leader of the Labour Party in the 1930s, who said that for every weapon sent to Spain, the Germans and Italians would send fifty to the insurgents. He rather overlooked the fact that the Axis countries were already sending as much as they could. In 1936 the deputy speaker of the Spanish parliament made an impassioned appeal to the Labour Party conference to allow Spanish democrats to defend themselves; surely this was not too much to ask? In the same way, the Bosnian prime minister Haris Silajdžić became a familiar and forlorn figure on Western television, arguing that if the west was unwilling to defend the Bosnians against aggression and massacre they should at least allow them the opportunity of defending themselves.
Moving forward a couple of years to the Sudeten crisis of 1938, the parallels between the roles of Konrad Henlein and Radovan Karadžić as the respective leaders of a nationalist irredenta are obvious, although one may credit the latter with a much greater autonomy from his puppet master. Once again the British government was quick to state that there were no British interests at stake. In the words of the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, Alec Cadogen “(the foreign policy) committee is unanimous that Czechoslovakia is not worth the bones of a single British grenadier. And they are quite right too.” After the Czechs were abandoned to their fate it was not long before the customary vilification of the victim followed. According to Sir Thomas Inskip, minister for the coordination of defense, Czechoslovakia “was an unstable unit in Central Europe,” and he “could see no reason why we should take any steps to maintain such a unit in being.” The chancellor of the exchequer, Sir John Simon, pronounced that “Czechoslovakia was a modern invention, a very artificial creation with no real roots in the past.” All this is highly redolent of the anti-Bosnian rhetoric of Western statesmen today: Bosnia has no historical justification (never mind its medieval statehood), is not a nation-state and thus not viable (never mind the Swiss example), should never have been recognized, and so on. It may be that these critics had a point, but only in the same way they would have had a point about Czechoslovakia in 1938. After all, the national composition of the Czech state in 1938 was as follows: approximately six million Czechs, three million Germans, two million Slovaks, and well over half a million Hungarians. This is not so very different from the ethnic breakdown in prewar Bosnia: with just over 40 percent Muslims, 39 percent Serbs and about 18 percent Croats. If it is right to abandon the Bosnian state today on the ground of its “unviability,” it was certainly the height of realism for Chamberlain to throw the Czechs to the wolves in 1938.
The Czech parallel also helps us understand one of the more distressing aspects of the Bosnian War, namely, the conflict between the Bosnian government and Croat separatists. For after Czechoslovakia had been abandoned by the West in 1938, both the Poles and Hungarians stepped in to claim their share of the carcass in Teschen and southern Slovakia, respectively. Predictably, the failure of the West to uphold international law triggered a frantic scramble for territory at the expense of the victim; it would, however, be absurd to claim that the opportunist behavior of the Poles and Hungarians put them on par with the original aggressor, Nazi Germany. The opportunist behavior of the Croats in Bosnia should be seen in the same light. This conflict was eagerly seized on by the British government as evidence of the moral equivalence of “all sides” and the inherent “complexity” of the situation. Yet the Croat-government split, which in Bosnia was effectively a Croat-Muslim split, was substantially a response to the Western policy of nonintervention against the original Serb aggression. If there was to be no salvation from the West, the Croats argued, then why not grab what was left of Bosnia, before the Serbs took everything? This conduct was immoral, shortsighted, and—as it turned out—suicidal, but to argue that it makes for a moral equivalence with the original Serb aggression is to accept the logic of the appeasers.
But the parallels do not end there. We find the same schizophrenia over the role of the League of Nations, or in our case, the United Nations. Then as now Western governments made the international body responsible for the implementation of collective security. This meant effectively—and the aggressors of the 1930s and of today were not slow to figure this out for themselves—that collective security was being upheld by nobody. When Britain and France said the invasion of Abyssinia was a matter for the League of Nations, this was a green light for further aggression. In the same way, when the West abdicated responsibility for Bosnia to the European Community and then to the United Nations they issued an open invitation to the Serbs to press their advantage. But there are yet more parallels. There is the same stress on retrenchment and the need for financial stability. Once again there is no stomach for the additional financial burden resulting from a rigorous defense against aggression. Another similarity lies in the strange alliance of pacifist fundamentalists and conservative timeservers created by fear of military involvement. In the 1930s the appeasers were men such as Chamberlain and Baldwin, but also Labour grandees such as the strongly pacifist Ponsonby and Lansbury. Today, it is men of such diverse views as Malcolm Rifkind and Tony Benn who have set their faces against Balkan involvement. Likewise, in the 1930s such political opposites as Churchill and Bevin preached the gospel of resistance, much in the same way as Margaret Thatcher, Paddy Ashdown, and Michael Foot call for intervention today.
We hear the same risible rhetoric to cover up our own inadequacy. Just after the Munich agreement Chamberlain wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury that he was sure that “some day the Czechs will see that what we did was to save them for a happier future.” How familiar this must sound to the Bosnians who were told that the arms embargo and Western neutrality were “in their own best interests.” To intervene or to supply arms, ran and still runs the British government’s argument, would simply be to “prolong the agony.” The sheer nonsense and insolence of this argument are obvious. After all, what if the British government had been refused aid against the Nazis in 1940 on the grounds that it might prolong our agony?
There is one last parallel. In November 1937 Hitler’s adjutant Friedrich Hossbach drew up a document that set out the Führer’s intention to wage aggressive war against his neighbors. In September 1986 the Serbian Academy of Sciences in Belgrade formulated a memorandum that provided the blueprint for Serbian expansionism. Of course, unlike the Hossbach protocol it was not an official government document, still less was it a detailed politico-military plan with a timetable attached. But we may assume that such timetables and plans were devised in due course, for the Greater Serbia envisaged in the memorandum was henceforth singlemindedly pursued by Milošević. In fact the authors demanded the creation of a new and vastly expanded Serbian republic out of the ruins of the old Yugoslavia. This was to include Serb settlements in Croatia, much of Bosnia, the whole of Kosovo, and Vojvodina. This phase in the creation of Greater Serbia has almost been completed. It remains to be seen whether Milošević or his successors will now call it a day, or whether they will be emboldened to carry the war into Macedonia and beyond.
• • •
In the last analysis, of course, any objections to such comparisons will probably be political, not historical. If one does not share my belief that Serbian expansionism is a threat to the security of Europe as a whole, then one can hardly be expected to be persuaded by my historical analogies. Yet if I am in danger of turning into a kind of modern-day Churchillian Don Quixote, charging at the windmills of supposed threats to peace, might my critics not be in peril of slipping into the complacency and misjudgments of the 1930s? This is the lesson of history I see being ignored so fatally in our own time. Because in disputing whether there is British interest at stake in the Balkans today we are effectively disputing which part of history, to recall Trevelyan’s formulation, is repeating itself. Are we back in 1876–78 or in 1938? The question is the more dramatic because in 1938 Chamberlain’s “peace with honour” were the same words that Disraeli had brought back in triumph from the Congress of Berlin and to which he added his own immortal and infamous gloss, “I believe it is peace for our time.” One could not help being reminded of this in May 1993 when, after obtaining the entirely worthless signatures of Karadžić and Milošević to a Bosnian peace accord, David Owen announced that “now is the time to talk of peace,” just days before his hopes were trashed by the Bosnian Serb parliament. Similarly, one could not help but have an eerie feeling about the choice of words Warren Christopher, the new American secretary of state, used to describe the Bosnian crisis in early summer 1993. It was, he said, “a humanitarian crisis a long way from home, in the middle of another continent.” Ever since Neville Chamberlain spoke of German aggression against Czechoslovakia as “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing,” one never thought to hear such a formulation from the lips of a Western politician again.
This piece started life as a paper presented to various audiences in Britain and the former Yugoslavia. I am particularly grateful to Dražen Katunarić for enabling me to address the Croatian Writers’ Festival in Zagreb in December 1994. I also thank Anita Bunyan, Stjepan Meštrović, Michael Foot, Jill Craigie, and Alain Finkielkraut for their useful comments. Needless to say, they are not responsible for any shortcomings this piece might have. For reasons of space, notes have been kept to a minimum.
1. Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations (London: Macmillan, 1951), 161, 173.
2. A. L. Rowse, The Use of History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1946), 17, 20.
3. G. R. Elton, The Practice of History (London: Methuen, 1967), 7.
4. Norman Rich, Why the Crimean War? A Cautionary Tale (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), xix.
5. G. M. Trevelyan, “Stray Thoughts on History (1948),” in An Autobiography and Other Essays (London: Longmans, 1949), 84.
6. Mark Thompson, A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 314.
7. Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide: The 1993 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Dispatches on the “Ethnic Cleansing” of Bosnia. (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 178.
8. Independent, April 24, 1993.
9. Independent, February 2, 1993.
10. Sunday Telegraph, February 14, 1993.
11. Sunday Telegraph, November 12, 1992.
12. Independent, December 2, 1993.
13. See Richard Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876 (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1975), passim.
14. See the critique by Mark Almond, Europe’s Backyard War: The War in the Balkans (London: Heinemann, 1994), 321.
15. See insightful comments in Thompson, op. cit., 326.
16. Victoria Clark and Michael Ignatieff, Observer, January 31, 1993.
17. See some of the evidence marshaled by Almond, op. cit., 307, et passim.
18. I have attempted to make the case for a strong British interest in Conservative BOW Group paper P610 “The Case for Intervention” (May 1993); M706 “The Last Chance” (July 1993); P725 “Why the Americans Are Right” (October 1994); M739 “The National Interest” [with Alexander Nicoll]; and in a number of newspaper articles.