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“Nationalism and human rights in south-eastern Europe,
the territoriality and culture factors”
George Voskopoulos
Assistant Professor, University of Macedonia,
Department of International and European Studies, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Introduction
Human rights refer to fair treatment and equality in opportunities for minority groups. In a broad definition they are “ordinarily understood as the rights one has simply because one is a human being”[1] and they define qualitatively an individual’s life within a politically organized society. Human rights are “general moral rights, claimable by everyone and held against everyone, especially those who run social institutions”[2].
The issue refers primarily to states obligations vis-à-vis individuals as defined by the establishment of the Westphalian state system characterised long by non-intervention politics and national sovereignty[3]. For long, human rights had been subsumed under states rights and this deprived the efforts of the international community of legitimacy.
Human Rights have been a principal concern of the United Nations Charter which has long aimed at imposing an international human rights regime. On global level the UN Commission on Human Rights was established in 1946 while the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights attempted to enforce them on a regional level.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided a comprehensive system of guarantees in a conclusive way (civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights). Yet, the problem in a state centric system that enjoys substantial legitimacy was the efficiency of the monitoring process and enforcement power. The “Helsinki process” in 1973 became the prototype of human rights regime but lacked enforcement powers in a world dominated by state actors.
More than ever, human rights interest is based, inter allia, on a moral imperative. Violation of human right may cause an international intervention in the domestic affairs of a state that consistently violates human rights, as was the case with southeastern Europe in the 1990s. For instance, in the warring conflict in former Yugoslavia, where, the rival parties, motivated by nationalism[4], covert and overt irredentism, as well as populism, engaged in ethnic politics and nationalism and eventually created a security vacuum that became the most critical challenge to Europe’s ability to act collectively.
Nationalism is a concern “which relate either directly or indirectly to ethnicity”[5], however, inherent problems that relate to the structure and political culture of the region should be analyzed as inter-linked patterns of the same multidimensional problem. Under this spectrum human rights issues in the region cannot be scrutinized in isolation from nationalism and overt or covert expansionist trends, “Great Idea” attitudes and the conceptual link between human rights and territorial control. This is illustrated by the use of strategic minorities either as a form of putting pressure on host countries or a means to directly or indirectly challenge the territorial status.
The core of the problem
On a macro level of analysis the general aspect of the problem of respecting human rights lies in defining, protecting and monitoring human rights in a world system of sovereign states. Sovereignty and its Webberian legacy presupposes that only the state has the exclusive right to deal with its internal affairs as it has the sole prerogative and arbitrary right to use violence within its internationally recognised borders. For decades the state has had the sole and exclusive power to exert control over its national, territorial base and make legitimate use of force. To a cosmopolitan view, the core of the problem lies in the state’s privileges and exclusive rights as a unitary, sovereign actor acting in the absence of a supranational authority.
International human rights issues are by nature and structure problematic in a world structured around sovereign states. Yet, the ontological issue is whether the end of state sovereignty is a viable policy that will definitely eliminate human rights violations. If the state ceases to be sovereign who is going to be accountable for violations; who is going to provide legitimacy for intervention and under what circumstances will the international community engage in a just war as defined by St Augustine?
Eventually the problem lies in the structural elements of the international political system. A viable human rights regime is expected to overcome the structural forces of the world political system. In a state-centric world, human rights are the prerogative of sovereign states but at the same the international community has a moral imperative to intervene without annulling state sovereignty.
A second less scrutinized aspect of the problematic application of human rights may be found on their territorial dimension, that is the overt or covert connection between human rights respect and control over a defined territory, or a territory that has long been the apple of discord amongst local actors. In the case of south-eastern Europe this has been a powerful motive of suppression and “de-legitimisation” of human rights.
Nationalism has been a powerful dual motive for both majorities and minorities and their respective aims vis-à-vis territories. Also, it has become a powerful, emancipating political force. As underpinned, “nationalism…conceals within itself extreme opposites and contradictions. It can mean emancipation and it can mean oppression…nationalism, it seems, is a repository of dangers as well as opportunities. It has so many different forms and “national” variations in space and time that is often argued whether they can all be accommodated under one roof”.[6]
Although nationalism was the decisive force in the process of building nation-states and securing territorial bases in south-eastern Europe, at a later stage it became a source of conflict and a means of suppressing otherness. It is within this dysfunctional framework that nationalism became at times incompatible with the application of a human rights regime.
Under the impact of clashing nationalisms[7] local states have most often defined human rights issues through practices that qualitatively relate to irredentism and secession supported by “shared historical experience and physical contiguity”[8].
The above links the issue of human rights to economic scarcity, “a total lack of wealth”[9] and underdevelopment, defining and crucial elements of the economic and social realities and microcosm of south-eastern Europe. Although this paremetre should be looked into at face value, it adds first to the distorting images formulated by host countries and second the motivational criteria that conceptually and politically define the international behaviour of mother countries.
This particular state of deprivation does not help the protection of human rights because inter-communal or inter-ethnic competition for scarce resources along with proximity[10] might lead to warring conflict and violence. In these cases the conflict is bound to turn into a zero-sum game, in which one part’s gains is the other part’s losses. The results of these policies and attitudes have been more than obvious in the region and have long tarred relations among local actors. A side-effect of similar views has been the inability to structurally and operationally establish democratic multi-ethnic societies in which otherness is not viewed as an actual or potential threat.
The minority problem in the Balkans
Today’s geographical borders of the Balkan subordinate system resulted from the long warring conflicts among Balkan actors either against the Ottoman Empire or among one another in the two 1912-13 Balkan Wars, a fact that makes historical suspiciousness an integral part of the ethnic incompatibilities among Balkan peoples and the distorting lenses through which intra-Balkan relations have been approached[11]. The results of such traumatic conflicts are still in the memories of the Balkan peoples, as not too many decades have passed since today’s territorial map was established.
Historically the conflictual setting was created by the fact that several ethnic groups, with different and at times contending religious, ideological and political loyalties were found living together (in a way an unsuccessful ethnic, cultural, religious and political cohabitation) without all of them or any of them desiring so. When they broke loose from their common Ottoman tie, they engaged in a quest for territorial setting, advancement and expansion. This involved the use of extreme uncontrollable force that appeared appalling to out-of-the system actors[12]. This was the first phase of what might be called early Post-Ottoman Balkan history, which inaugurated with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
Ever since, southeast Europe has been in a state of continuous changes, a structural deficiency evident during the Balkan Wars, the Yugoslav crisis in the 1990s and the 1999 Kosovo crisis. The aforementioned cases constitute evolutionary stages of the move of the Balkan tectonic plates that have caused the lengthy parcelisation of the Balkan Peninsula and have added to the negative cultural notions formulated by a number of Western analysts.
As a result of the ethnological settlement in the Balkan Peninsula after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, it has been suggested that “most Balkan problems centre around the same feature-minorities”[13]. Territorial settlement in the Balkan subordinate system is not only relatively recent, but also fluid, as, the use of strategic minorities for expansionist reasons is a typical characteristic of the region, whose diachronic feature is its “transitional character”[14] and its territorial unrest.
The unstable character of the Balkan Peninsula is deteriorated by the perplexed ethnological map of the Balkans, as minorities have been used by mother countries as a means of putting pressure to host-countries. As a general rule, derived from Balkan historical reality and experience, ethnic minorities have long been associated with irredentist policies and/or secessionist movements. As noted, “the populations of the world are not distributed on clear-cut national territories and there are always minorities whose presence in the national state is difficult and potentially disruptive”[15]. It is this very perception or misperception that sets the conflictual ground and the lose-win approach of issues related to the territorial aspect of human rights.
During the Cold War the ideological and strategic polarization of the international system overlaid a number of aspects related to human rights and led its territorial aspect to a dormant mode. This would not have been realized without the ability of Communist leaders to overlay “bourgeois principles” such as nationalism[16] and national identity. Yet, the onset of the post-bipolar era re-activated the issue and, in the case of south-eastern Europe, linked it to the right of self-determination and territorial changes dictated either by structural needs or clashing nationalisms.
The 1990s Yugoslav crisis and its side-effects illustrated that in the post-Cold War era minority rights were given priority over the axiom of inviolability of borders. This is particularly the case in the Balkan zone of turmoil[17], where, diachronically, expansionism by means of war, threat of war or the use of strategic minorities had been the norm of interstate relations and a regularity of state international behaviour. Balkan states, ethnically related to minorities residing in neighbouring states, appeared to be willing to put pressure on its neighbours on the grounds of culturally, socially or politically suppressing ethnic minorities within their territorial base, whether these claims were justified or not.
In her work Imagining the Balkans, M. Todorova has suggested that the Balkans are “an externalization from within”, meaning the intentional and purposeful ostracism of what is conventionally understood as the “dark side of Europe”, “Europe’s backyard” or the “enemy from within”. At the same time Balkan nationalisms have been suppressed or “legitimized” whenever this has served an intrusive power’s purpose[18], a policy that has turned the Balkans into a cost-effective battleground for big power practices[19]. In a way, it might be that particular “western nationalism”[20] that set the aphoristic norm of evaluating Balkan politics and enhanced the backward tendencies of the local peoples.
To make things worse, the territorial balkanization[21] of the region, namely the formulated fragmentation trends have added mythical notions to the geographical aspect of local security issues (Gray Collin, 1996), while proximity[22] provided the necessary condition and fertile operational ground for waging a war. The mingling of territorial and cultural elements all along Balkan history have in essence provided the facilitating means for the expression of an extreme behaviour on the part of the belligerents involved in inter-state, inter-ethnic or inter-communal conflicts.
The aforementioned geographical and cultural factors cannot be analyzed in isolation and should be looked into as inter-connected elements of a specific conflictual setting. Pointing to only one of these factors may result in a cultural framework of analysis, particularly if cultural elements are magnified and not judged at face value. This might be the case if S. Huntington’s views are adopted as a cultural orthodoxy. The long warring conditions in the Balkans should be analyzed through multiple and overlapping level of analyses, namely geography, political culture and structural deficiencies as well as the inability of local and intrusive actors to envisage a regional human rights regime without border changes.
As noted, “during the twentieth century, the right to a homeland recurrently emerged as a human rights issue in international affairs”.[23] The statement sets the issue within the spectrum of security for the host country (national security) but also the urgent need to protect various and at times incompatible forms of otherness. Southeastern Europe may provide an example of the territorial aspect of the human rights issue and the non-constructive conceptual model of approaching it.
A certain political milieu in southeastern Europe attempted to deal with the problem through forceful assimilation and ethnic cleansing. This was wrongly viewed as a solution to eliminate threats to territorial integrity, a non-negotiable national interest that had to be defended by all means. In a way nationalists in mother countries and their maximalistic, revisionist aims provided “justification” to an extremist domestic milieu of host countries that considered minorities and the application of human rights an actual, not simply potential, threat to national security and territorial integrity.
In the evolutionary process of the escalating conflict a powerful weapon to legitimize claims of a minority over a defined territory was the use of history by extremists and those who defined “greatness’ in terms of territorial expansion. As plausibly underpinned, “a powerful weapon for nationalists is the use of history to show the past control of a territory by a state to which the modern nation can claim affinity”[24]. This very fact illustrated that history or conflicting national histories as narratives played a legitimization role of implied or overtly articulated irredentist claims. As a result, the existence of a minority, irrespective of its size, enhanced overt or covert demands for territorial changes that meant to “accommodate” historical accuracy, continuity and allow the realization of long established national goals.