Moderates must rise to the challenges of populist nationalism

Perfection was not the enemy of good under Marshal Tito, ruler of Yugoslavia from after the Second World War until his death in 1980. I cannot launch a defence of Communism, and of course his dictatorial suppression of the distinct identities, ethnicities and religions in the country should not, on the face of it, be remembered positively, but there is little doubt that it cemented ethnic harmony.

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The power vacuum created by the death of one man was filled, in theory, by eight - one from each of the federations of Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Serbia, and, to minimise the power of the Serbs, one each from the Serbian autonomous regions of Vojvodina and Kosovo. But the decentralisation of power and the elevation of nationalism, inevitably, came hand in hand. The Serbs’ nationalist thirst for a Greater Serbia grew, as did their "othering" of those who they believe wronged them, going back hundreds of years to the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Simultaneously, though, the lure of the West for the Croats and Slovenes, with their EU borders, was a strong, opposing force. The rest is history, and Yugoslavia was at war for a full decade; essentially all of the 1990s.

Except in Bosnia, where the rest is not history, and where the past remains omnipresent. So often at the epicentre of geopolitical history, a decade after its Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs lived and loved together, often not even knowing who was what, Sarajevo found itself subject to a four-year siege. Serbs went from dining with Bosniaks to shelling them, dropping a daily average of 300 Yugoslav army bombs onto the city from its surrounding hills.

We know those hills, us in the West. We watched skiing and bobsleigh and Torvil & Dean in the Winter Olympics. But then we stopped watching. Our eyes were closed when the Serbs put their Bosniak neighbours into concentration camps in the north west at the start of the war in 1992. In Prijedor, men were starved, beaten, tortured and killed. Women were cleaners by day - mopping blood and, in some instances, pieces of brain from the torture rooms, ready for the next skeletal victim - and playthings by night, raped repeatedly by the camp guards, then often killed along with their children. On the doorstep of the EU, what was never supposed to happen again, was happening again.

Bosniaks thought we had opened our eyes again when we sent the UN to Srebrenica and neighbouring towns near the Serbian border, but the Blue Helmets turned the other way in arguably the greatest failure we have ever seen from the international community. In the space of a week in July 1995, over 8,000 men and boys were dead, slaughtered at the direction of Ratko Mladic.

I met a woman, much the same age as my mother, whose sons were much the same age as my brothers and me. Her husband and eldest son were killed at the start of the Bosnian War, and her other two sons and grandson were murdered in the genocide. Stoic and brave beyond reason, she told us her story. She said her sanity is all she has left. But her eyes told the story of a woman utterly broken by an unspeakable failure of humanity. Her only remaining wish, she said, is that we talk about what happened in an effort to avoid it repeating itself, in Bosnia or anywhere else in the world.

There is no perfection in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina. An excruciatingly complicated governing structure, with 13 Prime Ministers, three Presidents (one for the Croats, one for the Bosniaks and one for the Serbs) and two Federations (including Republika Srpska, the successor to Radovan Karadzic’s proto-state), just about holds this wounded country together. The wounds are raw. Perpetrators and survivors walk amongst each other. In Serbia and Republika Srpska, genocide denial and glorification goes to the very top and continues now, today.

Ethnic and religious divisions are hardly unique to the Balkans. So how do we avoid countries climbing that ladder, from difference, to hostility, to war, to genocide?

Andy Maciver at a poignant reminder of the horror in Srebrenica (Image: Andy Maciver) East and west, liberal and autocratic countries around the world are in a perfect storm, building since the financial crisis and exacerbated by Covid, immigration, wokery and, to some degree, by climate change. Populist nationalism is on the ascendancy. Russia, of course, and those aligned to it such as Belarus. Russia-flirters like Serbia, Azerbaijan and Hungary. The massive and unpredictable Turkey.

Closer to home and for different reasons, nationalism is gripping the Finns, Swedes, Swiss and Italians which all have parties in, or supporting, government. In France and Germany such parties threaten to discombobulate the mainstream and shift the common ground.

This week, Donald Trump destroyed any lingering concept of a common ground as those of us who opine on politics wish to define it. The common ground now is the disenchanted, disempowered, working-but-broke people, turning to populist nationalists who tell them that this is the fault of people who don’t look or sound or think like them.

We can simultaneously be wary of hysterical exaggeration, but also conscious of the domino effect of climbing that ladder.

Diversity and "othering" are not the same. Diversity is positive and liberating. However hundreds of millions of otherwise decent, regular people are lost and looking for answers. If moderates are unable to provide those answers, they will find them somewhere else. Telling them they are stupid or racist is not proving to be a winning strategy.

These countries gripped by populist nationalism are not the same as Bosnia. But neither was Bosnia.

Andy Maciver is Founding Director of Message Matters, and co-host of the Holyrood Sources podcast