Posted on Friday 16 May 2003 to Story So Far

How the Balkans got balkanized

Written in 1993 at the height of the conflict in Bosnia, this paper by E. A. Hammel nicely summarises the demographic history of the Balkans and how it became so, well, really really complicated.

Demography and the Origins of the Yugoslav Civil War

What did this migrational process do to ethnic identification and its cultural symbols? The three primary elements of ethnic identification in the Balkans are kinship, language, and religion. They are not neatly related. Ethnic identification is summarized in labels, such as Serb, Croat, Muslim -- these especially in the context of the Civil War. Kinship is reckoned shallowly and rather bilaterally among most Muslims, deeply and more patrilineally among Orthdox, and something in between among Catholics. It was not difficult to record genealogies 14 generations deep in upland Serbia and Montenegro as recently as the 1960s but hard to do so more than 3 generations deep among Bosnian Muslims. Thus, the efficacy of kinship in defining ethnic groups varies. Especially among the Orthodox, consciousness of kinship ties to populations in areas of origin is strong.

Language is a tricky criterion. The Slavic speakers are sharply distinct from Albanians, Hungarians, Germans, Turks, Greeks and others. However, a large proportion of the local population in any area through which a major linguistic boundary runs are bilingual. Among the Slavic speakers, linguistic differentiation is gradual, in a dialect continuum from northwest to southeast; the Slavic languages have differentiated less than the Germanic or Romance languages, and mutual intelligibility is quite high. Only minute attention to dialect detail makes ethnic symbolization possible. This dialect continuum has been segmented by internationally imposed political boundaries and the centralizing efforts of core states, and the intellectuals of such states have sometimes been busy erecting linguisting boundaries to serve nationalist interests. In general, the linguistic divisions are based on the particular word we gloss as the interrogative pronoun, "what?" (sto, ca, kaj), and the rendering of the unstable "jat'" vowel of Late Common Slavic as "i", "ije" or "je", or "e". Even these isoglosses are not neatly distributed. Without going into detail, I note that the northwest shift of Slavs fleeing the Turks drove a wedge of Montenegrin and Herzegovinian dialect up through Bosnia into Croatia-Slavonia, separating speakers who had once formed a band running across Bosnia and Slavonia from the Adriatic to the Drava.

Religion is the most public and the most commonly invoked criterion of ethnicity. The religious history of the region is complicated. The Slavs were Christianized in the 10th Century by the efforts of the SS Cyril and Methodius, Macedonian monks who developed two alphabets for the translation of the Scripture into what we now know as Old Church Slavonic, a dialect very close to Old Common Slavic. They began their work with the central Slavs in Moravia, where German monks had failed before them. The essentially protestant nature of their linguistic efforts was a thorn in the side of Rome and a symbol of the emerging schism in the Church, which was formalized within little more than a century. The original alphabet, the Glagolithic, persisted in Dalmatia and Bosnia where it came to have a regional symbolic quality, replaced by Latinic in the Catholic church and by Cyrillic, the second of the two alphabets, in the Orthodox. In Dalmatia Glagolithic was used in the Protestant Reformation. The quality of political separatism evinced in the Reformation was manifested more exotically in the Bogumil heresy in Bosnia from about the 11th to the 15th Centuries. Bogumilism, a dualistic Manichean Christianity, originated in Bulgaria in the 10th Century in an Orthodox context and spread throughout the Balkans, and may have been ancestral (or at least fraternal) to the Albigensian heresy in France and the Paterene heresy in Italy as well. It was extirpated in mediaeval Serbia by Emperor Stefan Dusan who vacillated between Rome and Byzantium, finally accepting the latter, but flourished in Bosnia where it provided a neutral ground between the two contending churches that symbolized the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. It is claimed to have been popular first among the peasantry and then adopted by the Bosnian nobility. With the arrival of the Turks, all of the Bogumils seem to have converted to Islam, led perhaps by the nobility who were able to preserve their feudal privileges by becoming vassals of the Sultan. Islam, like Bogumilism, afforded a refuge from both contending Christian empires.[7]

These three dimensions of ethnicity: kinship, language, and religion, crosscut. Cvijic notes Catholic populations whose ancestry lies in Orthodox areas and who maintain kinship ties with families who are Orthodox. There are Catholic Serbs in Dubrovnik who celebrate that distinctively Orthodox feast of the household saint called the slava. The Catholic inhabitants of Konavlje south of Dubrovnik refer to the Orthodox as od stare ruke (of the old hand), suggesting their own prior membership in the faith.[8] There were at one time some Protestant Slavs, principally in Slovenia, to some extent in Dalmatia, but most of all in Slavonia under the Turks where there was no interference from Catholic bishops, but the Counter-Reformation erased them from the local religious map. There are Albanians of all three faiths: Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim. Hungarians and Germans in the region are either Catholic or Protestant. Religion thus does not define ethnicity across major language divisions; no Catholic Croat claims common ethnicity with a Catholic Hungarian. On the other hand religion divides language communities into endogamous subsets, some of which are taken as identifiable ethnic groups. For example, Catholic and Muslim Albanians recognize that they are Albanians, but of different faiths. On the other hand, Catholic and Orthodox Slavs do not recognize common ethnicity; no Croat peasant claims co-ethnicity with Serb peasants, and neither with Muslim Slavs, even if they speak virtually identical dialects.[9]

Out of this kaleidoscope emerge the politically relevant ethnic groups that we see opposed in the Balkans today and quintessentially in Bosnia and Herzegovina. While the elements of kinship, language, and religion are the symbolic characteristics of ethnic membership, they fail to define the ethnic groups in any consistent or historical way. Croats, Serbs, and Muslim Slavs in Bosnia speak dialects that are only narrowly distinguishable. The dialect of the Bosnian Serbs is closer to that of most of the Croats of the region than it is to the Serbian of the core of Serbia. Similarly, the dialect of most Bosnian Croats is closer to that of the Serbs of the region than it is to that of the Croats of northern Dalmatia or the core of Croatia. The symbol that they use to differentiate themselves is religion, but religion fails in that task outside the region (for example with the Catholic Serbs of Dubrovnik).

These contending ethnic groups are clusters of symbols that are the detritus of imperial history and that are currently mobilized by political organizers to make impermeable boundaries where such boundaries did not exist before. It is not a new process. Under the Austrians, the Slavs of the Military Border were originally thought of all as Vlachs, whether Catholic or Orthodox; only later under their most Catholic majesties was there pressure to make the boundary of religion at least as wide as that of the State. Exactly that homogenizing instinct to achieve a congruence of political borders and symbolic qualities led Franjo Tudjman[10] and the Croatian Democratic Party to strip the krajina Serbs of their cultural distinctiveness and privileges, granted to them by the Communist Party as a way to prevent the rise of mini-nation states. The attempt to limit symbolic expression had the same result it did under Maria Theresa and Joseph II -- armed rebellion. This ethnic cleansing of a resident population is now met by ethnic cleansing of territories through the mechanisms of terror and expulsion as Serbia seeks to extend its boundaries to match the old Ottoman ones in Bosnia. Serbia is not above the first strategy, either, as it limits the use of Albanian in official and educational discourse, bent on completion of the slavicization of Illyrians that resulted in much of Montenegro. [more]