Responses to Aleksa Djilas, ‘The Academic West and the Balkan Test’, JSEB, Vol. 9, No. 3, December 2007

In his lengthy and erudite review, first of Sabrina Ramet’s Thinking about Yugoslavia and then of my Balkans into Southeastern Europe, Aleksa Djilas calls attention to three of the major problems that still burden Balkan history. All are problems that help to preserve the region’s pejorative designation as Balkan even for the recent past. At the centre of South-eastern Europe’s pejorative recent past are of course the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. First, this recent violence has tempted some of ‘the academic West’, in Djilas’s phrase, into separating the warring sides on grounds of guilt or innocence, black or white, then reading the verdicts back into historical patterns of Balkan or unBalkan behaviour. Western scholars who have been attracted to such an unambiguous moral narrative typically exonerate, at least in the main, Croats and Slovenes or Bosnian Muslims with their Habsburg heritage while tracing back Serb guilt to Balkan roots. For the 1990s of course, the abuses of the Milošević regime left little room for reversing this moral narrative in Serbia’s favour or even, in the Bosnian case, room for accepting what I have called ‘the fallacy of false equivalence’, holding all three sides equally guilty for ‘the same dirty business’. Second, the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution have tempted regional scholars, particularly but not exclusively from Serbia and Greece, with another moral narrative, the primary responsibility of Western, primarily American intervention. They fall back on the dated paradigm of Great Power predominance in the affairs of the fledgling Balkan states of the 19th century, still defensible during and after the two world wars but otherwise debatable. American survival as the one present-day Great Power after the collapse of the Soviet Union has revived its attraction as a way of avoiding domestic responsibility. Third, these two moral narratives of the 1990s, each read back across the 20th century, challenge the region’s own younger scholars to take the lead back from ‘the academic West’ in re-examining the domestic history of the pre-1989 and pre-1945 periods. For Greece, re-examination of the three rounds of Civil War in the 1940s, with constructive contention between scholars criticizing first the anti-Communist and then the Communist sides, was already under way by the 1980s. Elsewhere, freedom from ethnic or international stereotyping is appearing in new scholarship from Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, and also Bulgaria and Romania. Working from primary sources to conclusions, rather than the reverse,