The academic West and the Balkan test

Abstract

Sabrina P. Ramet, a professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, has written a book which is most impressive in its scope. Thinking About Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates About the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo is a discussion of more than 130 books, mostly in English but also in the languages of former Yugoslavia and a few inGermanand Italian, all listed at the beginning. It is divided into 13 chapterswith titles that aremeant to attract the attention not only of scholars but of all interested in former Yugoslavia, such as ‘Who’s to Blame, and for What? Rival Accounts of the War’ or ‘Milošević’s Place in History’ or ‘Debates about Intervention’. Thequestion that instantlyand inevitably springs tomind is, of course,whether Sabrina Ramet has really read all these books or is Thinking About Yugoslavia just a spectacular example of that dark academic craft of reviewing a book after only leafing through it or reading other reviews? (Perhaps in the not too distant future wemayhaveaNewYorkorLondonReview of Reviews of Books?)Whetheror not one believes that Ramet has read 40,000 pages or 16 million words (my rough calculations), her knowledge is considerable. Yet hers is not a book that can be recommended. Its bane is not to be found in ignorance but, alas, in the author’s profound bias, which causes her to evade difficulties and conceal complexities. Professor Michael Mann, America’s leading historical sociologist, published in 2005 The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, which soon won