On Youtube I just stumbled upon a video that debunks common Western and Balkan myths about ethnic tensions in the region. Sadly, it also peddles a few tropes commonly found in some strands of Serb nationalism. That merits a closer look at it.

The Balkans and its inhabitants are full of hatred, particularly towards those of the neighboring groups, and every generation or so this hatred leads to bloodshed. It has been like that since the beginning of time, or at least since recorded history.

Thus is the narrative about the Balkans in general, and about former Yugoslavia in particular.

It is shared by people who are devout anti-nationalists, which makes it even more dangerous.

Believing that your neighbor’s or your own blood has to be shed every 40 years or so, believing that war is inevitable because of the supposed backwardness of your kind, becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

It encourages the vilest of nationalists to openly propagate their hatred and to call on people to join them in their genocidal fantasies of ethnic purity. And it paralyzes people who just want to live in peace and have a better future for themselves and their children.

Furthermore, it discourages any meaningful mediation or intervention from outside. We all know what the Balkanians are like. They are blood thirsty barbarians. So why should we, Germans, Austrians, Swiss, or whoever else, even raise an eyebrow over the open glorification of war criminals or the fact that open nationalism is becoming ever more rampant in parts of the region?

As one of the very few channels on Youtube, Balkan Odyseey, formerly Serbian mapping, addresses this important issue in a video I just stumbled upon.

The video also rightly dispells the myths of various Balkan ethnicities having been located wherever they are living since ancient times. Common examples are modern day Albanians really being just ancient Illyrians, and modern day Macedonians just being the Macedonians of Alexander the Great – coming with all the territorial claims often associated with such ideas.

(See here for a more amusing example of innovative nationalist history.)

The most important contribution to a rational view on the region is the factually true statement that the people of the Balkans have been no more violent throughout their history than the rest of Europeans. En contraire, we can identify regions in Europe from whom a lot more violence has emanated in the past millenium or so, including a lot more bloodshed.

And rather rightly, the creator states that systematic inner-Balkan violence is a very recent phenomenon.

Why Many of Us Believe The Myth

It is only recency bias that makes it look different to most outside observers, and even to most casual observers in or from the region.

Anyone over 40 remembers the bloody break up of Yugoslavia and its ethnic violence, culminating in the genocide of Srebrenica, that left more than 100.000 people dead, hundreds of thousands dislocated and traumatized.

People with an above average interest in history may perhaps know about the Croat genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma in WW II and about the Četnik massacres primarily against Muslims in Easter Bosnia.

And we all remember that we were told: It has always been that way.

This makes Balkan Odyseey’s video a valuable contribution to discourse on the Balkans.

It must be taken with a wagonload of salt, however.

In the midst of all these factually correct, necessary and valuable points, the creator, a Bosnian Serb nationalist turned communist, sadly disperses a few points that are all too familiar to anyone who knows Serb nationalist apologetics.

Now mind, Balkan Odyseey’s creator does this from a pro-Yugoslav point of view, and honestly tries to combat nationalist narratives of any kind, and to foster a sense of togetherness and resistance against the capitalist exploitation of the region.

He just hasn’t quite gotten to the point he rightfully wants us to get himself.

Problematic Point No 1: Bosnia

Let’s take a look at the more problematic points of the video.

About the medieval Bosnian realm he for instance says that (it) „was ruled by Serbian and Croatian rulers“.

That coming right after the factually correct statement that any form of national labelling for realms in antiquity or medieval times is futile at best.

One could dismiss that as just sloppy – and maybe it was.

Sadly, stressing that medieval Bosnia was ruled by Serbians and Croatians is a trope one often hears from Croat and Serb nationalists. Their goal is to de-legitimize Bosnian history, and hence – according to their own logic – the idea that modern day Bosnia should be a sovereign and independent state or nation.

Bosnia, their narrative goes, was never really Bosnian at all, it was always Serbian or Croatian, and so it’s really just an illusion, or a product of the hated Ottoman conquest, which accordingly should have no place in the modern world.

I am explicitely not saying that Balkan Odyseey means to transport this message. His inaccurate labelling of medieval Bosnian rulers just gets the point across, nevertheless.

This makes it necessary to digress into medieval history in general and the complicated history of the Bosnian realm in particular.

To simplify things, the Bosnian realm as a sovereign entity emerged out of the Croatian banate as well as the orbit of the Byzantine Empire around the year 1180 under Ban Kulen. It did remain a vassal state of the Hungarian Kingdom for a while longer, but enjoyed a great deal of sovereignty.

To label Ban Kulen himself is problematic. For one, national identities played no role whatsoever with medieval rulers anywhere in Europe. We will stumble upon this point a bit later. For the other, the question here is when we assume the emergence of any sense of Bosnia as being an independent entity.

Describing him as Croatian would probably be not entirely wrong. As would calling him Bosnian. Either would just be entirely meaningless.

For his successors as Bans (which roughly translates as viceroy) the labels Croat or Croatian would be even more problematic. We should assume that a dynasty becomes native – or whatever label we want to use – after a few generations.

This goes even more so for the ruler who gave the medieval Bosnian realm full sovereignty. Tvrtko I Kotromanić, Ban of Bosnia from the 1350’s on, successfully established the Kingdom of Bosnia in 1377. He thus became the first King of Bosnia.

Now, note the use of words here. King of Bosnia, not Bosnian King. More about that in a bit.

He also was King of Serbia in a Personal Union. His family had intermarried with the royal dynasty of Serbia, the Nemanjids, and with Croatian aristocracy.

His full title in local language was: „Kralj Srbljem, Bosni, Primorju, Hlmsci Zemli, Zapadnim Stranam, Dolnim Krajem, Usori, Soli, Podrinju i k tomu“ Contemporary Latin translations of this title sometimes differ in details, but run in the same vein.

The Kotromanić dynasty was undoubtedly from Bosnia, hence we could apply the term Bosnian to Tvrtko and his successors, most of whom were called Stjepan, Stevan or Stefan, incidentally. It would just be a rather meaningless point as a look just across the border, into Bosnia’s former souzerain should make apparent.

Tvrtko I Kotromanić‘ contemporary counterpart on the throne of Hungary and Croatia was King Sigismund.

Sigismund was a member of the Luxemburg dynasty, then a powerful family and faction within the Holy Roman Empire, and was born in modern day Frankonia. He probably would have thought of himself as German in a way, if he thought of himself in national terms at all.

In his lifetime, Sigismund as a ruler was Elector of Brandenburg, King of Hungary and Croatia, King of Germany and the Romans, King of Bohemia, and Holy Roman Emperor.

To call him a German king of Hungary would not be entirely inaccurate, it would just not have made any sense to him or his subjects.

Or think of the ruling dynasty of the United Kingdom. They are not widely perceived as a German family, nor as a Norman or a French dynasty.

Calling Tvrtko I Kotromanić Bosnian King would be somewhat accurate but entirely meaningless. Calling him Serbian King would be outright misleading. This is an important point as there is currently a controversy going on about him, sparked by a well intended but terribly botched Bosnian nation building project and the predictable reaction to it by Bosnian Serb nationalists.

I will cover this for Balkan Stories later this year.

Problematic Point No 2: Omissions

Another problematic point is how Balkan Odysee approaches WW II.

The overall description of the main factions is dead on. We could pick over details here, but let’s leave that to another time.

The devil here lies in the detail. Balkan Odyseey describes the Ustaša genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma thusly: „This was the first time in history that Balkan neighbors turned against each other in such a fashion“.

This leaves out quite a few nasty details in the 70 or so years preceding the Ustaša genocide.

As Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania gradually emerged as independent countries in the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century, following uprisings against Ottoman rule, they implemented heavily anti-Muslim policies.

While these policies shifted and changed over time, they at times included what would today be described as ethnic cleansing. Overall, hundreds of thousands of Muslims fled these countries within roughly half a century.

By far most of the victims were fellow Slavs or Romanians whose families had at one point and time converted to Islam.

Following the First Balkan War, the Kingdom of Serbia encouraged ethnic Albanians in the newly acquired province of Kosovo in no uncertain terms to seek a better life in the Ottoman Empire. It was this policy’s expressed goal to serbify Kosovo, which at that time already had an Albanian majority population.

These policies culminated in the great „Population Exchange“ after WW I and the transformation of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire into the Turkish Republic. In 1923, Turkey and Greece respectively de facto deported a total of 1.6 million people deemed alien into the other respective country.

Greek Muslims and Muslim Albanians in Greece were forced to go to Turkey, Greek Orthodox Christians in newly founded Turkey were forced to move to Greece.

Similar programs were initiated or at least contemplated between Serbia and Turkey and Bulgaria and Turkey.

This was religious and ethnic violence on a scale hitherto unprecedented.

Mind, at this time the international community considered this perfectly acceptable. And this was by no means specific to the Balkans.

In the consolidation wars in Eastern Europe immediately following WW I, several newly independent countries in Eastern Europe tried to expand their territories at each other’s expense and at times did not shy away from ethnic cleansing. Poland is the most prominent and most often overlooked example.

This is not due to a Slavic or Eastern European soul, whatever that may be.

Countries further West just had had a lot more time to consolidate their nationhoods as they slowly emerged in late medieval or early modern times. For the most, they did not have to ressort to such measures but achieved cultural and at times supposed ethnic homogenity by less violent means – such as education programs that produced unified and standardized languages, eliminating older regional languages, dialects and cultures.

Describing the Ustaša genocide of WW II as the first event of mass ethnic violence on the Balkans could be dismissed as somewhat sloppy or oversimplifying. And it would be alright if we see it in the context that indeed there had been no ethnic violence on a grand scale on the Balkans prior to the second half of the 19th century.

Problematic Point No 3: Jasenovac

What makes it problematic is that Balkan Odyseey describes the Ustaša concentration camp of Jasenovac with the exaggerations all too familiar from Serb nationalists.

Referencing Serbian sources, the creator claims that up to 700.000 people were killed in the Croat extermination camp that was arguably the cruellest installation of its kind ever.

The overwhelming international scholarly consensus among historians puts the total number of victims of the Ustaša genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma in Croatia, Bosnia and parts of Serbia as between 300- and roughly 700.000. The Holocaust Memorial Center in Yad Vashem estimates that the number of victims of this genocide was about half a million people.

The vast majority of these victims were ethnic Serbs. Their number usually ranges between 300 and 600.000.

The Ustaše and their henchmen killed only a relatively small fraction of their victims in their extermination camp system. By far most were slaughtered in the countryside, often close to or even in the villages where they lived.

International teams of historians have estimated the number of victims of Jasenovac to be somewhere between 80- and 100.000. The Memorial Site of Jasenovac has identified 83.145 people killed in the camp.

Croat and Serb nationalists have manipulated the numbers of the Ustaša genocide repeatedly over the past decades. Croat neofascists often claim that just a few hundred people died in Jasenovac, and that the Ustaše killed maybe a few thousand people in total. The aim is to deny that any genocide ever happened.

Serb nationalists traditionally seek to maximize the number of victims, so as to elevate Serb victimhood. This is often used to justify or excuse war crimes and genocide committed by Serb nationalists in the 1990’s, or to at least downplay them by comparison.

That Balkan Odyseey uncritically relied solely on – unnamed – Serbian sources and did not provide any further context is highly problematic to say the least. Why he did that, is subject to speculation.

Considering some other smaller details my guess is that his laudable political conversion from Serb nationalist to communist hasn’t been followed up by enough independent research. He repeats some of the narratives he has grown up with.

I could probably tell more if I watched all the videos on the channel – which I haven’t done, to be honest.

Problematic Point No 4: Conspiracy Theory

Overall, this video falls into a peculiar but strong strand of Serb nationalism: A decisively pro Yugoslav stance that envisions both the history of Yugoslavia and the possible future of the region as being necessarily with a dominant cultural and political role of Serbia and the Serb people.

It doesn’t invent history out of whole cloth but exaggerates the role of Serbia and Serbs – which was undoubtedly a leading one – in the emancipation of Southern Slavic regions, and sometimes also the sacrifices Serbia and Serbs made in order for Yugoslavia as a home for all Southern Slavs to be possible,

Compared to other nationalisms in the region – be they Croat, Bosnjak, Serb or Albanian – it is benigne. It does not call for ethnic cleansing or forceful religious conversions and the like. It does, however, assign smaller groups subordinate roles and as such is hardly suited to overcome the very narrative Balkan Odyseey rightfully and laudably rails against.

Also, it can help to obscure historical developments.

This becomes apparent in the last minutes of the video where the breakup of Yugoslavia is presented as having been manufactured by the West in general and the CIA in particular.

The breakup of Yugoslavia was by no means inevitable. However, it was the result of several developments, national as well as international.

Nationally, the Yugoslav constitution of 1974 and how workers‘ self administration was implemented encouraged and fostered nationalist egotism. This allowed nationalist currents to grow even within Yugoslavia’s communist party system.

Internationally, the capitalist restauration in most of the Warsaw Pact and the fall of the Berlin Wall had discredited socialism in the eyes of millions of people in currently or formerly socialist countries – even within political leaderships.

Add to that that German and Austrian conservatives had smelled blood and encouraged Croat and Slovenian nationalists and neofascists to make a move. They were old allies, after all.

Not to forget that Ustaša and Četnik communities that had fled Yugoslavia in and after WW II to Canada, the USA, Australia and Germany managed to raise millions of dollars for newly emerging nationalist and neofascist parties in (the Yugoslav Republics of) Serbia and most of all in Croatia.

Without their money, there would not have been a Franjo Tuđman or his clericonationalist HDZ and probably no Croatian independence.

So, the violent breakup of Yugoslavia is owed to many factors, and is certainly not just a product of US machinations.

Peddling such conspiracy theories doesn’t help anyone. Not even those who argue against US imperialism on a rational basis.

I think that this video is worth watching for several reasons. It does dispell one of the most harmful myths about the Balkans. And it is a very good example of how emancipatory and progressive points of view can be blended with nationalist narratives. So there is much to learn.

If I judge it by its title, it sadly is just a glass half full, however.