PART II
CREATING NATION STATES AND NATIONAL ANTHEMS IN SOUTHEAST EUROPE5
National liberation ideologies: Towards the nation states in the Balkans
From the fifteenth until late nineteenth century the Balkan Peninsula (southeast Europe) was divided between two competing empires, the empire of the Catholic Habsburgs ruling from Vienna and the Islamic empire of the Ottomans ruling from Istanbul. Until the end of the eighteenth century the two empires fought frequent and devastating wars over the territory of the Balkans, primarily the regions of the present day Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia.
In the nineteenth century other empires became interested in the region. First, Napoleonic France briefly occupied parts of present-day Croatia and Slovenia and used the name of the pre-Slav inhabitants, Illyrians, as the name of the newly established province. Already in the eighteenth century the Russian Empire had started expanding at the expense of the Ottoman Asian possessions and in the nineteenth century it repeatedly went to war with the Ottomans while endeavouring to expand its control over the Balkan Peninsula. As a result, the Russian Romanov Empire became the principal adversary of the Ottomans and in its expansionary quest sought to present itself as the protector of the Christian populations of the Balkans living under the Islamic regime. The Habsburgs in the nineteenth century attempted to contain the Russian expansion into the Balkans and to avoid further conflict with the Ottomans. In this quest the Habsburgs were supported by Great Britain, which was at the time engaged in its own containment of Russian expansion in South Asia. The Habsburg Austria-Hungary became the main European ally of the Ottomans until late the nineteenth century when Germany took up this role.
In the aftermath of the French Revolution, new actors, partly independent of the competing empires and their territorial ambitions, started to emerge. These were actors native to the region and were primarily local notables and peasant masses. National ideologies, which flourished in the whole of Europe, became the primary instruments of mass mobilisation in the Balkans as well. In southeast Europe these were national liberation ideologies: they aimed at liberation from foreign rule, first from the rule of the Ottomans and, later, from the Habsburgs or their local representatives. These ideologies, constructed and later spread by the native intelligentsia, focused on the following three markers that differentiated the target populations from their rulers: language, religion and the myth of a lost national state. In the twenty-first century, these three markers are still used to differentiate groups and their nation states from each other.
A national liberation ideology sets quite clear historical goals for the language/religion group it targets: the recovery of the long-lost state and the achievement of its independence through the overthrow of foreign rulers. The foreign rulers are portrayed as having established and maintained their rule by force and thus the use of force against them is the only possible way to remove them. National liberation ideologies in the early nineteenth century were thus often ideologies of liberation by the force of arms.
In order to affect national liberation, national ideologies needed to establish who the individuals and groups requiring liberation were and what territories needed to be liberated. In comparison with the overall goal of national liberation through war, these were much more daunting tasks. The great majority of the target populations were small-holding or share-cropping peasants who were for the most part illiterate. Their basic unit was the extended family and their identity was village or region-based. How could the idea of a wider community, that is a nation, be inculcated among such peoples, in the absence of a universal education system and without print media in a language they could understand?
The language spoken at home and read and written in school was often sufficient to mark the ruled from the rulers. In the cases in which the lower rungs in the state administration use the same vernacular and where the contact with the state administration and its upper echelons was very rare, such as in the Ottoman provinces, religion and religious customs proved to be a key marker. It must be remembered that the Ottoman state was not only controlled by Muslims but was a state with an Islamic judicial and political system that treated non-Muslims as second class citizens.
Religion and language separately or jointly were, during the nineteenth century, sufficient to demarcate the ruled from the rulers but neither religion nor language could define the boundaries of emergent national groups and the territories over which they made claims. This showed the inherent limitations of Balkan national liberation ideologies as nation- and state-building instruments. By appealing to these two markers, language and religion, those seeking a new order were able to demarcate in a general way those whom they were aiming to liberate. However, in order to determine the identity of the people whom they wanted liberated, they had to appeal to other, much fuzzier notions.
Among these notions were the historical myths of medieval states that had been lost during the Ottoman or Habsburg military conquest or incorporation. These myths became the principal sources for separate national ideologies of Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslim), Macedonians and Bulgarians.6 Each group, through its ideology, appropriated a medieval state or a medieval dynasty as the origin of its nationhood or statehood and on the basis of such an appropriation made claims for the recovery of the putative territories of the medieval state. Not only were the boundaries of these states little known (if at all), but the very concept of a demarcated landline border was unknown in the Middle Ages. Not surprisingly then, the maps of ‘national’ territory to which the medieval states laid retrospective claim clashed with each other: for example, the short-lived empire of Stephan Uroš IV Dušan (1346–55), from a Serb dynasty, extended over the southeast European territory of the medieval states appropriated by Macedonian, Bulgarian, Bosniak and Montenegrin national ideologies.
The appeal to the idea of medieval statehood primarily had a nationally uplifting and mobilising role: its aim was to portray the target group as politically equal to its rulers (and later other potential competitors) in possessing the right to statehood and thus to lift the national self-esteem. However, given that the maps of ‘national territory’ of medieval states clashed with each other, the overt and covert claims to territory made in this way often resulted in conflict between the separate national ideologies and eventually between the newly established states. What started as an exercise in boosterism of national self-esteem ended in some cases in violent conflict among new nation states, as for example in the wars between Serbia and Bulgaria in 1885 and 1913.
However, not all national ideologies in southeast Europe appealed to myths of medieval states and not all sought independent statehood. An ideology that attempted to construct the national identity solely on the basis of a linguistic marker, that is a common language, was the Illyrianism of the poet Ljudevit Gaj in Zagreb, Croatia, growing from the 1830s. The aim of Illyrianism was to create a common cultural space for the speakers of one South Slavonic dialect – štokavian – which appeared to have speakers stretching from the present day Slovenia to Bulgaria, thus straddling the divide between the two empires and three major religions: Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam. This credo reappeared again in Zagreb in 1860s under a native label of Yugoslavism (‘jugo’ being the common word for ‘the south’). In the age of the major national unifications in Europe (the Italians in 1861 and Germans in 1871) this was the ideology of national unification of the South Slavs. The unification was at first planned to be carried out within a reformed and expanded Austria-Hungary but when that turned out to be unrealistic, within an independent state.
Yugoslavism, in its call for an independent state for the South Slavs, thus avoided any reference to the recovery of states or to the differences in religion. As it was aiming at a state common to several groups with distinct history and religion, as well as distinct literary traditions, it proved to be incompatible with the national ideologies and programmes aiming at separate national states for each of the distinct groups. However, since both the separate and unifying national ideologies aimed at national liberation from foreign rulers, this ultimate goal seems to have blurred their incompatibilities. Moreover, Yugoslavism aimed at a creation of a modern European parliamentary state and thus appealed to the same segment of population – the literate strata – to which separate national ideologies appealed. Yet separate national ideologies at times had a wider appeal, particularly among the illiterate peasantry because they used the historical traditions transmitted through religious ritual and oral poetry and story-telling.
By the end of 1918, the unifying Yugoslav ideology appeared to be winning: its program for a common independent state seems to have been embodied in the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The creation of the kingdom in 1918 was one of the results of World War I. Without the victory of the Entente forces (including the Serbian army and its volunteers from South Slav lands) over the Habsburg and other Central power forces in this war, the Yugoslav idea probably would not have been realised in any form. Nonetheless the creation of a common state appears to have once again created a sharp cleavage between the ruling and the ruled; those ruling were Serbs who had a relative majority in the kingdom and whose dynasty took over the role of the sovereign, and the ruled were all other nations and national groups. From 1918 onwards the separate national liberation ideologies, in particular those of the Croat, Macedonian and Montenegrin groups, gained a new target, the Serb-ruled kingdom. The aim of their liberation efforts was thus the dismantling of the new kingdom and the creation of independent nation states. The Axis occupation of the kingdom in April 1941 brought an illusory liberation to the Croats (in the form of the Axis-controlled state of Croatia) but to no other group.
The victor of World War II in Yugoslavia, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, re-constructed the state on the model of the USSR, creating six federal units and two sub-federal units, each federal unit with the full trappings of statehood. This federal state was presented as the ultimate national liberation of all the nations and ‘nationalities’ (national minorities). Each recognised national group – Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Macedonians and Slovenes – and the two largest ‘nationalities’ – Hungarians and Albanians – were each to have a single homeland of their own in the form of a republic or a sub-federal unit, that is a province.
From the point of view of separate national ideologies this was, of course, not an ultimate aim, rather at most it was a good starting point. The new units in the federation could indeed provide the ground for the creation of independent nation states. And in June 1991 first two federal units in the SFRY, Croatia and Slovenia, were transformed into nation states by the act of ‘disassociation’ (secession) from the federation. From 1991 until 2008 further five new states were created, one from each of the remaining federal units and one from the sub-federal unit of Kosovo. Separate national programmes originating in the nineteenth century thus came to fruition in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century on the basis of the territorial division imposed by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1945 as a division into federal and sub-federal units. The communist federal blueprint was imposed in 1945 by the force of arms of its National Liberation Army and the Partisan Detachments. All the new nation states created from 1991 to 2008, except Montenegro and Macedonia, were also created by force of arms.
National liberation struggles and wars
The national liberation of southeast Europe started with the First Serbian Uprising of 1804. The Serb peasants of the Beograd pashaluk, under their local leaders, rebelled against the renegade Ottoman officers who took control of the Beograd province from the Ottoman government. The rebels received Russian support. However, the Russian–Ottoman peace agreement of 1813 led to their defeat and huge civilian losses. In 1815, the Second Serbian Uprising had no Russian support and the rebel leader was able to negotiate a de facto autonomy under his rule in the Beograd province. In 1830, Serbia was formally granted autonomy. As we shall see later, this was an indirect effect of the first European military intervention in a Balkan war of national liberation, that is the Greek war of independence (1821–8).
The Greek national liberation, unlike that of the Serbs, was planned by a pan-Greek national organisation, Filiki Etaria, and based on the large Greek diaspora community. The programme envisaged a general uprising of the Balkan Christians but the initial rebellion in present-day Romania, again supported by Russia, was easily crushed. The Greek rebels in central Greece received both financial help and volunteers from western Europe, in particular Great Britain, where they were seen as continuing the freedom-loving tradition of the Ancient Greeks. They were initially successful against weak Ottoman forces but, as fighting broke out among the rebels and the Ottomans landed large military forces from Egypt, the rebellion soon found itself in grave danger. At this point Russia, Great Britain and France offered to mediate an armistice. When the Ottoman government refused, these states acting in a joint naval action at Navarino in Greece in 1827 sunk the Ottoman fleet. After long negotiations, in 1830 the three powers decided to create an independent Kingdom of Greece with a foreign monarch. The kingdom was created by a treaty, signed in London, in 1830, between the three powers and the Ottoman government. The latter was thus forced by military action by European powers to cede territory for the creation of the new nation state. In previous agreements, the Convention of Ackerman of 1826 and the Treaty of Adrianople of 1829, the Ottoman government had agreed to the autonomy of Greece as well as of Serbia (Jelavich 1983 vol 1, 240–1). The limited autonomy that the three powers gained for Serbia, in negotiating the end of the Greek war, was further extended and confirmed by an order (firman) from the Ottoman emperor in 1830. Serbia thus gained extensive autonomy under a native prince in the same year that Greece got independence under a foreign monarch.
The Greek war of independence displayed a pattern of interaction of native rebellion and outside intervention that persisted into the twenty-first century. Thus native rebellion against rulers who are considered foreign often starts with little or no support from the outside powers, which prefer a status quo. However, once the rebel forces are in danger of losing the war, the outside powers, sometimes under the pressure of public opinion, intervene with their military forces in support of the rebels. This intervention is often presented as a way of securing peace. The intervening powers then establish independent states or recognise the independence of the new states and provide them with military and financial support.
Violent conflicts with the Ottoman forces in Serbia and Montenegro did not, however, trigger outside military interventions. Unlike Serbia, Montenegro never had an Ottoman governor or administrator effectively in control over its core mountainous territory. The Ottoman government claimed sovereignty over the region and extracted tribute throughout the eighteenth century. The mountainous and impoverished country, divided into tribes and clans, in the absence of the direct Ottoman rule, came to be ruled by its Orthodox bishop-princes from the monastery of Cetinje and the main source of revenue for the fledgling state were subsidies from the Russian court. The principal policy of the bishop-princes (who later divested themselves of ecclesiastic office) was the expansion of their territory into the adjoining Ottoman-ruled regions. In this they had support at first of the Russian Empire and later other European states. Like the Greeks in the early nineteenth century, the Montenegrins were, in the second part of the nineteenth century, presented in the Romantic imagination of the Europeans as fighters for freedom:
O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,
Great Tsernogora! never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.
(Lord Tennyson, ‘Montenegro’ 1877).7
However, unlike the native rebellions in Serbia and Montenegro, the native rebellion in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1875 resulted in a military intervention and its occupation by the Habsburg Austria-Hungary. As the Greeks had in 1821, the Bosnian Christian rebels in 1875 received aid and volunteers, primarily from Montenegro, Serbia and Russia. An uprising broke out in Bulgaria as well, which was suppressed with great brutality and much loss of civilian lives. Outraged public opinion in the European states, in particular in Great Britain (‘The Bulgarian horrors’) called for an intervention against the Ottomans. The intervention came swiftly in 1877 when Russia invaded Ottoman territories, advancing quickly towards the Ottoman capital in Istanbul/Constantinople. The Russian peace settlement with the Ottomans that followed envisaged the creation of a large Bulgarian state that would be under Russian protection. This was unacceptable to Great Britain and Austria-Hungary and thus at the Congress of Berlin, in 1878 the European powers, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, Germany, France and Russia, with no participation from the Balkan governments or national movements, divided the Balkans. Bulgaria was greatly reduced in size and split into two autonomous but not fully independent entities, Bosnia and Herzegovina was handed over to Austria-Hungary to administer and occupy (as well as a strip of the territory separating Serbia and Montenegro), Cyprus was ceded to Great Britain while the Ottoman Empire retained control over the territories in the present-day Thrace, Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania. In addition to gaining new territories, ceded by the Ottomans again, the de facto states, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania, were recognised as independent states.
The Congress of Berlin may be regarded as an attempt by the European powers to contain the national liberation movements in the Balkans. One set of foreign rulers, the Ottomans, were replaced by another, the Habsburgs and the British. The replacements were expected to be more efficient in controlling the local Christian populations than the Ottomans. The military occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary was, as expected, resisted by the local Muslim forces and this led to an exodus of the Muslim population to the Ottoman-held territories. At the Congress the European powers exercised once again their power to divide and allocate territories of the militarily defeated state, this time the Ottoman Empire, and to create independent states, autonomous entities and de facto protectorates (such as Bosnia and Herzegovina).
As expected, the Ottoman authorities faced national liberation movements and armed rebellion of native populations in the territories they had been left with. In 1903 they faced a large rebellion (the Ilinden insurrection) by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO) and in 1910 a rebellion by an equivalent Albanian organisation. The Macedonian rebellion led to the proclamation of the Kruševo republic but was soon crushed. Although the Albanian revolt was crushed quickly as well, the Albanians rose in revolt again in 1912 and took Skopje (Uskup), the present-day capital of Macedonia.
In addition to the armed rebellions, by 1912 the Ottomans faced a military alliance of their former dependencies, now independent states: Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece. In 1912 the alliance went to war with the Ottoman Empire and quickly conquered most of the remaining Ottoman territories in the Balkans. The European powers, in particular, the Habsburg Austria-Hungary, opposed the Balkan states' military action but did not even threaten to use military force to end it. Under pressure from the European powers in June 1913 the belligerents signed a treaty dividing the conquered territory among the Balkan states. The Bulgarian government, dissatisfied with the division, attacked Serbia and Greece in the hope of conquering a large part of the present-day Macedonia. Bulgaria was quickly defeated and the consequent Treaty of Bucharest (August 1913) left to the Ottomans the land in Thrace around Istanbul/Constantinople and created yet another independent state, Albania. Although the European powers did not intervene militarily in this round of national liberation, they nevertheless exercised the power to create an independent state, Albania, out of the territories of the defeated Ottomans, in spite of the protests from the newly established states of Serbia, Montenegro and Greece.
The Balkan wars thus completed the national liberation from the Ottoman Empire. This national liberation was achieved mostly by war although there was also military and diplomatic intervention by the European states. However, this was not the end of the national liberation wars. In 1913, the German-speaking Habsburgs still ruled over the Slav-speaking populations Bosnia and Herzegovina (annexed in 1908 to Austria-Hungary), as well as the present-day Croatia and Slovenia. Macedonians – Slav speaking inhabitants of the present-day Republic of Macedonia – came under the rule of Serb and Greek states. Albanian-populated areas of the present-day Kosovo came under the rule of the Serbs. The populations of these areas were to be liberated from their foreign rulers in World Wars I and II and in a series of wars from 1991 to 1999.
In 1914, the Habsburg government had good reasons to fear that Serbia, which in 1913 doubled its size by military conquest, intended to overthrow Austro-Hungarian rule of Bosnia and Herzegovina by supporting national liberation organisations in the country. Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia in August 1914 can thus be regarded as a somewhat desperate attempt to pre-empt or contain national liberation of that disputed territory. However, by 1914 this kind of military action, particularly when not directed against the Ottoman Empire, had found scant support among other European states. Russia, in particular, held that its influence in the region was seriously undermined by the Habsburg action against Serbia. In addition, the Austro-Hungarian attack on Serbia led to the expansion of Serbia's national liberation goals. In December 1914, with World War I in full swing, the Serbian government proclaimed for the first time, as its war aim, the liberation of its ‘brethren’ Croats and Slovenes from the Habsburg rule. As result of the Entente's defeat of Austria-Hungary and its allies, this war aim was eventually attained. The state of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which seceded from the dissolving Austria-Hungary in October 1918, in December 1918 united with Serbia and Montenegro into a new South Slav Kingdom ruled by the Serbian king. A variety of political parties and groups from non-Serbian territories opposed the unification and the Macedonian IMRO, Montengrin Greens, various Albanian groups in Kosovo as well as a Croatian regiment of the Habsburg army took up arms against the new kingdom. The opponents of the unification believed in 1918 that they were given a set of new foreign rulers, the Serbs, from whom they would also need liberating.
The Communist Party of Yugoslavia and its controller, the Soviet-based Communist International (Comintern), from 1936 onwards promoted a national liberation ideology that combined ideas of the liberation of the ‘subjugated’ nations with that of the ‘oppressed’ peasant and working classes. All of those were to be liberated from the Serbian bourgeoisie and allied oppressors. Among all the groups fighting for national liberation, only the Communists fought for the liberation of all the national groups, even the national minorities (excluding Germans). The other national liberationists promoted the liberation of one group only, the one from which they drew most support and were often hostile and murderous towards other competing groups. The Communist liberation ideology thus became an instrument for the mass mobilisation of the peasantry from various national groups for resistance against the Axis occupation of the kingdom in 1941. The victory of the Communist-led Partisan forces in 1945 was only in part due to their wider appeal. A key element in the Communist victory was the Allies' military and logistic support. From 1943, their forces were equipped by the British and their headquarters protected by the Allied fleet and air force, and in 1944–5 the Soviet Red Army, in a wide sweep from the southern Ukraine, liberated the northern part of Yugoslavia.
The liberations in Yugoslavia in World Wars I and II were thus the result of the military victories of extra-regional powers (the Entente and the Allies respectively) to which the native liberating forces were allied. Success in liberation in the Balkans thus crucially depended on military engagement of the states outside the Balkans.
The Yugoslav Communists, in keeping with their ‘equal nations’ liberation ideology, endeavoured to construct a political system in which no single nation dominated (or ‘oppressed’) the others. Not only were the five (later six) constituent nations and the two largest national minorities each given a ‘homeland’ and state-like institutions (including tertiary education in their language and their Academy of Sciences) but they tried to ensure that the constituent nations/nationalities were all represented in the highest party and government bodies. The Yugoslav president-for-life Tito was presented as leader of all citizens, not of any nation in particular. Both the Yugoslav Communist elites and some US and European scholars believed that in this way the national question in the Yugoslav space was resolved once and for ever.
They were wrong. In the late 1960s the communist elites in each republic and province started to build their powerbase within their ‘own’ national group. In the early 1970s, the ‘national question’, in the form of the distribution of income and political power among the republics and provinces, re-emerged as the central question of Yugoslav politics. Separate national ideologies, confined at first to the dissident circles, re-emerged on the political scene in various forms in the 1970s and 1980s. As before, these ideologies aimed at an independent state for the target nation, be that the Croat, Slovene or Serb nation. The Albanian ideology was, understandably, initially irredentist and aimed at the unification of Albanians into a common state incorporating Kosovo and the Albanian-populated part of western Macedonia with Albania.
In the early 1980s, the death of the president-for-life Tito, a severe economic crisis (partly due to huge foreign debt) and a popular revolt of Kosovo Albanians, demanding the establishment of their own federal unit (republic), severely undermined the legitimacy of Communist Party rule in Yugoslavia and its effective control over the country. With the end of Cold War and increasing withdrawal of the USSR from Eastern Europe from 1985 onwards, an alternative to the Communist-ruled Yugoslavia became a possible political scenario. From 1986, when the Serbian Academy of Sciences Memorandum was leaked to the Communist media, a public discussion of an alternative – the dissolution of the federation into independent nation states – became possible for the first time since 1945.
Any attempt to establish independent nation states in Yugoslavia faced interrelated structural and ideological problems. Since their creation in the nineteenth century, ideologies of nation states in the Balkans had competed over the same territory. Two or more of them would claim the same territory, either on the grounds of historical myths (medieval states) or on the ethnonational belonging of its population (or sometimes both). In particular, the Albanian and Serb ideologies competed over the territory of Kosova (Kosovo and Metohija in the Serb nomenclature). Croat and Serb ideologies competed over territory of Serb-populated lands of Croatia and over Herzegovina in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslim) and Serb and Croat ideologies competed over various parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina and over the whole of the federal unit which Bosniak ideologues claimed to indivisible. Albanian irredentist ideology competed with the Macedonian over the Albanian-populated areas of western Macedonia. Further, in Bulgarian national ideology, Macedonians were considered to Bulgarians who by historical accident became detached from Bulgaria. The Greek government, following an ideological template, objected to the use of the terms ‘Macedonia’ and ‘Macedonian’ claiming these terms referred exclusively to the northern province of Greece.
In the late 1980s, these ideologies were used to mobilise target groups for regime- and state-change. In particular, Serb populations in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina were mobilised in support of a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia or, failing this, in a Serb-dominated state consisting of Serb-populated areas. The Serb national ideology and mobilisation presented a major threat to the political elites, both Communist and anti-Communist, in Slovenia. It raised the danger of a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia similar to that of the pre-1941 kingdom (Slovenia had no Serb or any other significant minority population). In contrast, to the elites and populations of Croatia and of Bosnia and Herzegovina the Serb mobilisation presented a more immediate territorial threat. It was a threat of partition of these two federal units into Serb and non-Serb parts and a loss of large segments of territory. Once the Slovene and Croat assemblies declared independence in June (reiterated in October) 1991, the Bosniak and Bosnian Croat deputies in Bosnia and Herzegovina assembly followed suit. Following the Slovene model, the Kosovo Albanian elites aimed, at least initially, at the creation of an independent Kosovo, not at the unification with Albania.
The independence of Slovenia was opposed by the Yugoslav federal government, which led to a brief war in June 1991. The independence of Croatia was at first contested by the Serb political parties in Croatia that wanted to remain with Serbia. This led to a protracted armed conflict in which the remnants of the Yugoslav People's Army (the federal forces) invaded Croatia in 1991 and fought with the Croatian Serb military for the expansion of the Serb statelet, the Serb Republic of Krajina that seceded from Croatia.8 The independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina was also contested by the principal Serb party, which seceded from Bosnia and Herzegovina and, inheriting the heavy weapons and officers from the federal forces, fought from 1992 until 1995 against the allied Bosnian Croat and Bosniak forces in an attempt to expand and hold the territory it had conquered. In 1998, the Kosovo Albanians staged a mass armed rebellion against Serb rule, initially liberating large areas in western Kosovo. However, they proved unable to take any urban centres. The Serb military finally withdrew from Kosovo in May 1999 after 78 days of NATO air bombing of Serbia. Of all the seven states' secessions, only those of Macedonia in 1991 and of Montenegro in 2006, did not lead to armed conflict.
The EU member states' policies and the UN and NATO military interventions in the 1991–9 period showed some striking similarities to their interventions and their role in the creation of nation states in the nineteenth century. These powers militarily intervened only when the groups they were supporting in the first place were in danger of losing the war(s) and they established or recognised the boundaries of the new nation states regardless of their ethnonational composition and without regard to the preferences of various non-majority groups. Thus in the period 1991–2008 NATO and EU member states chose which independent states they would recognise regardless of the preferences of various national groups. As in 1877–8, 1912, in 1995 and 1999 this lead to the mass exodus of various national groups from the new entities. Finally, at the Berlin Congress in 1878 and at the Paris conference in 1995 (ending the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina), the same set of great powers, France, Great Britain, Germany and Russia plus the United States (in Paris), established a foreign administration (in effect a protectorate) in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Obviously there are also many significant differences between the great power involvement in the state creation in the nineteenth century and in the 1991–2008 period. The most obvious difference9 is found in Russia's role in the creation of new states. In 1995, four years after the dissolution of the USSR, its successor state, the Russian Federation, had no interest in creating or keeping client-states in the region nor did it have the power to do so. As a result, the United States and its European allies incorporated almost all the new states in their own structures – NATO and the EU – and thus made them militarily and politically much more dependent on the Western powers than ever before. Most of the new states are now members of NATO or have applied to become so and in effect can no longer undertake unilateral military action as the Balkan states did in 1912–13 against the Ottomans and against each other. All the new states are now either members (Croatia and Slovenia) or have applied to become members of the EU. This severely constrains their capacity for unilateral political action. Partly as a result of this incorporation of the new states into NATO and the EU, the great powers are now both more committed to, and more capable of, preventing any further conflict in the region than their equivalents were in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
In that sense, in the early twenty-first century, the United States and its European allies, through their international organisations, have a greater capacity to control political and economic developments in the region (and thus any future national liberation) than outside powers had previously. This is only one of the paradoxes of national liberation and the creation of nation states. National liberation in recent times therefore did not necessarily lead to a significant empowering of national subjects so liberated. Nevertheless a state-of-its-own has always been an alluring prize for those groups that consider themselves to be state-deserving nations.
New states and their old national songs
Acquiring a nation state of one's own has always had an important symbolic role. By gaining a nation state, the state-owning-nation is admitted, as a notionally equal member, to the club of nations, some of which appear much older and some of which are indeed more powerful than the newly admitted ones. Having a state anthem is a necessary prerequisite for exercising the duties and rituals of an independent state, in particular in engaging in mutual visitations of state dignitaries and ritual recognition of sporting achievements of the nation at international competitions. A state anthem is thus necessary for any state to perform its prescribed role in the inter-state arena.
State anthems also express a national self-understanding. They tell us what their singers think of themselves as a collectivity. Although the states created in the latest round of national liberation are mostly new, the anthems they have chosen date mostly from the nineteenth century. In this sense, the anthems of the new states do not acknowledge, let alone celebrate, the novelty of the national/state entity to which they are dedicated. These anthems make claims to authority based on past rights and past glories. They claim that these nations are much older than their newly established states and that, correspondingly, they have been long deserving of statehood.
Moreover, none of the new states anthems refer to current origins or to the struggle/war through which their states were recently created. This is in sharp contrast to the anthems of neighbouring Balkan states: the Greek ‘Hymn to Liberty’ originated in the Greek national liberation war of 1821–8, the Bulgarian ‘Dear motherland’ from the 1885 Serbian–Bulgarian war and the Albanian ‘Hymn to the Flag’ from the period of the mass Albanian rebellion against the Ottoman rule of 1912. These were originally all marching or fighting songs, although the Bulgarian anthem in its current version had the fighting stanzas removed. This made it a self-congratulatory song about the motherland.
In fact, of the seven new states created after 1991, only one – Macedonia – has chosen a song originating in and referring to an earlier national liberation struggle, the Communist-led liberation 1941–5 from the Axis (Italian and Bulgarian) occupation. Macedonia's choice of this anthem did not stem from a desire to glorify or highlight the national liberation struggle. Rather the selection of this anthem resulted from the absence of an older alternative: there appear to be no distinctly Macedonian (as opposed to Bulgarian) national poems or songs from the nineteenth century that would be suitable.
Out of seven, four Balkan nations chose nineteenth-century songs. Three states, Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro, selected nineteenth-century songs that belong or are close to the ‘budilica’ genre – that is the ‘national awakening’ song. These songs originate in the early stages of national ideology construction: at the time when poets and other cultural entrepreneurs are attempting to make their listeners aware of their own national identity and to stir in them the required pride in national qualities, possessions and achievements. These three songs were not written as future national, let alone state, anthems: the Croat and Slovene authors of the poems written in 1835 and 1844 respectively did not envisage the independence of their homelands. The first two stanzas of Montenegro's current anthem originate from a festive folk song (possibly used in a patriotic musical as well) that was also sung during the time when Montenegro was an independent state and had a different official state anthem (see Chapter 6). One state, Serbia, is currently using its original nineteenth century royal anthem (with a minor modification) based on the model of the British ‘God Save the King’.
Two states – Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo – currently have state anthems without lyrics. These anthems were chosen by public competition and their authors are still alive. Both states have been created or reconstructed as international protectorates, introduced following NATO military intervention. In addition, in both countries there are minorities – primarily Serb minorities – that still do not want to belong to the state in question. In a sense, these are not single nation states or at least not conceived as such. And this is one putative reason why their anthems have no words to be sung: there is no single nation to participate in the necessary unison singing would involve.
The choice of nineteenth-century poems and songs thus suggests that, at least in the view of those making the choices, the states that were created in the 1990s were lengthy in their genesis. However, it is also clear that these nineteenth-century poems are still the best expressions of the state-yearning and state-upholding emotions of the respective nations and their members today, although this view of their capacity to express the best of such emotions has been, as we shall see, at least in some cases, contested. This book explores the reasons why each of these anthems has been chosen and how, in particular circumstances, each anthem projects images and ideas of nationhood and national identity.