Blood and Belonging Read online

  Praise for Blood and Belonging

  “ A concise, intelligent eyewitness critique of a half-dozen of the more virulent post–Cold War patriotisms extant.”

  —Stan Persky, The Globe and Mail

  “This is an immensely impressive meditation on nationalism in the post–Cold War era. In moving prose that is both powerful and subtle, Ignatieff introduces readers to the intellectual origins of modern nationalism as well as the often brutal results … A remarkable work.”

  —Library Journal

  “A compelling mix of interviews, history, vivid impressions and sharp reportage.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A wise and sensitive book … Ignatieff has admirably used a cosmopolitan sensibility to find what is recognizable and human in what, to him and to many of us, seems most strange.”

  —New York Newsday

  “Uncannily contemporary … in ambition, the book pre-empts the evening news to establish, and then analyze, a context for events and changes by no means complete. To combine reporting, political philosophy, complex personal sentiment and prophesy is an almost Sisyphean task.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “A very anecdotal and essayistic ramble through a landscape of horror, grief and fanaticism … vivid and deeply felt … absorbing.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “Michael Ignatieff brings heart and generosity [to] tragedy.”

  —Toronto Star

  “ None of us should ignore this book. Its message is too important, too disturbing.”

  —Times Educational Supplement (London)

  “Ignatieff takes an intellectual’s safari … In this beautifully conducted, unsettling tour, Ignatieff’s personal recreations teach almost as much about nationalism’s roots as the scenes of people and places he paints. The real value of Blood and Belonging to Canadians … is not the answers it offers, but rather the questions it makes us ask.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “Anyone who looks with horror and disbelief at the ethnic hatred tearing apart so many countries today will be riveted … An extraordinary accomplishment.”

  —The Vancouver Sun

  “[A] beautifully written elegy for civilization.”

  —The Ottawa Sun

  “Michael Ignatieff is a richly talented writer and reporter. One of his greatest gifts is an eye for the heartbreaking detail that makes the seeming madness of recent news stories comprehensible in human terms.”

  —Robert McNeil, The McNeil/Lehrer News Hour

  “Ignatieff … is a reporter with a keen eye and a poetic sensibility. His subject matter is grim; his prose, passionate and evocative, bringing alive scenes that readers will be glad not to have witnessed in person … Vivid and readable, it provides unforgettable impressions of societies that are going in the wrong direction on the highway to brotherhood and unity.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Explores the heart of the most virulent nationalist conflicts around the world … A valuable, thought-provoking book.”

  —Calgary Herald

  PENGUIN CANADA

  BLOOD AND BELONGING

  MICHAEL IGNATIEFF is a distinguished author of both fiction and non-fiction. His novel Scar Tissue was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while The Russian Album, a family memoir, won the Governor General’s Award and the Heinemann Prize from Britain’s Royal Society of Literature. His work on ethnic nationalism in the 1990s resulted in a television series and the book Blood and Belonging, which won the Lionel Gelber Prize. Until August 2005, he was Carr Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

  ALSO BY MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

  NON-FICTION

  A Just Measure of Pain:

  Penitentiaries in the Industrial Revolution, 1780–1850

  Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (co-edited with Istvan Hont)

  The Needs of Strangers

  The Russian Album

  The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience

  Isaiah Berlin: A Life

  Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond

  The Rights Revolution

  Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry

  Empire Lite:

  Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan

  The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror

  FICTION

  Asya

  Scar Tissue

  Charlie Johnson in the Flames

  BLOOD

  AND

  BELONGING

  Journeys into the New Nationalism

  Michael Ignatieff

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1993

  Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1994

  Published in this edition, 2006

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Michael Ignatieff, 1993

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  ISBN-10: 0-14-305468-6

  ISBN-13: 978-0-14-305468-9

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Last Refuge

  SIX JOURNEYS

  1 CROATIA AND SERBIA

  2 GERMANY

  3 UKRAINE

  4 QUEBEC

  5 KURDISTAN

  6 NORTHERN IRELAND

  FURTHER READING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  INTROD
UCTION

  THE LAST REFUGE

  WARLORDS

  The UN checkpoint was a sandbagged Portakabin manned by two Canadian infantrymen guarding a road barrier between the Croat- and Serb-held sections of Pakrac, in central Croatia. The road to the checkpoint wound its way between pulverized bungalows, upended cars in the ditches, waist-high grass in abandoned gardens. Just visible in the grass, as we approached the checkpoint, were two teenage Croatian spotters with their binoculars trained on the Serbian side.

  The UN had just waved us through into Serb-held territory when fifteen armed Serbian paramilitaries surrounded our van. They had been drinking at a wedding in their village. The drunkest one, with dead eyes and glassy, sweat-beaded skin, forced the van door open and clambered in. “We watching you,” he said, making binocular gestures with his hands. “You talk to Ustashe,” and he pointed back at the Croatians hiding in the grass. Then he took the pistol out of his belt. “You fucking spies,” he said. He ordered the driver out at gunpoint, took the wheel, and began revving the engine. “Why can’t I shoot this?” groaned the cameraman in the seat behind. “Because he’ll shoot you,” someone in the back of the van muttered.

  The Serb put the van into gear and it was moving off when one of the UN soldiers yanked open the door, grabbed the keys, and shut off the ignition. “We’ll do this my way,” the UN soldier said, breathing heavily, half puffing, half cajoling the Serb out of the driver’s seat. Another young Serb in combat gear pushed his way into the van and shook his head. “I am police. You are under arrest. Follow me.”

  This was the moment, in my journeys in search of the new nationalism, in which I began to understand what the new world order actually looks like: paramilitaries, drunk on plum brandy and ethnic paranoia, trading shots with each other across a wasteland; a checkpoint between them, placed there by something loftily called “the international community” but actually manned by just two anxious adolescents; and a film crew wondering, for a second or two, whether they were going to get out alive.

  The writ of the “international community” ran no farther than 150 meters either side of the UN checkpoint. Beyond that there was gun law. The paramilitaries took us to the police station in the village, where the chief spent an hour establishing to his satisfaction that because our translator’s grandfather had been born on the Croatian island of Krk, he must be a Croatian spy. But then a telephone call arrived, instructing the chief to release us. No one would say who had given the orders. It appeared to have been the local Serb warlord. This was my first encounter with a warlord’s power, but it was not to be my last.

  I am a child of the Cold War. I was born in the year of the Berlin Airlift of 1947 and my first political memory of any consequence is of being very afraid, for one day, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Looking back now, I can see that I lived through the last imperial age, the last time when the nation-states of the world were clearly allocated to two opposing spheres of influence, the last time when terror produced peace. Now terror seems only to produce more terror.

  If the twenty-first century has already begun, as some people say it has, then it began in 1989. When the Berlin Wall came down, when Václav Havel stood on the balcony in Prague’s Wenceslas Square and crowds cheered the collapse of the Communist regimes across Europe, I thought, like many people, that we were about to witness a new era of liberal democracy. My generation had almost reconciled itself to growing old in the fearful paralysis of the Cold War. Suddenly a new order of free nations began to take shape— from the Baltic republics to the Black Sea, from Tallinn to Berlin, from Prague to Budapest, Belgrade, and Bucharest: In August 1991, when Muscovites defended the Russian Parliament against the tanks, we believed that the civic courage which had brought down the last twentieth-century empire might even be strong enough to sustain Russia’s transition to democracy We even thought, for a while, that the democratic current in the East might sweep through our own exhausted oligarchies in the West.

  We soon found out how wrong we were. For what has succeeded the last age of empire is a new age of violence. The key narrative of the new world order is the disintegration of nation-states into ethnic civil war; the key architects of that order are warlords; and the key language for our age is ethnic nationalism.

  With blithe lightness of mind, we assumed that the world was moving irrevocably beyond nationalism, beyond tribalism, beyond the provincial confines of the identities inscribed in our passports, toward a global market culture that was to be our new home. In retrospect, we were whistling in the dark. The repressed has returned, and its name is nationalism.

  CIVIC AND ETHNIC NATIONALISM

  As a political doctrine, nationalism is the belief that the world’s peoples are divided into nations, and that each of these nations has the right of self-determination, either as self-governing units within existing nation-states or as nation-states of their own.

  As a cultural ideal, nationalism is the claim that while men and women have many identities, it is the nation that provides them with their primary form of belonging.

  As a moral ideal, nationalism is an ethic of heroic sacrifice, justifying the use of violence in the defense of one’s nation against enemies, internal or external.

  These claims—political, moral, and cultural—underwrite each other. The moral claim that nations are entitled to be defended by force or violence depends on the cultural claim that the needs they satisfy for security and belonging are uniquely important. The political idea that all peoples should struggle for nationhood depends on the cultural claim that only nations can satisfy these needs. The cultural idea in turn underwrites the political claim that these needs cannot be satisfied without self-determination.

  Each one of these claims is contestable and none is intuitively obvious. Many of the world’s tribal peoples and ethnic minorities do not think of themselves as nations; many do not seek or require a state of their own. It is not obvious, furthermore, why national identity should be a more important element of personal identity than any other; nor is it obvious why defense of the nation justifies the use of violence.

  But for the moment, what matters is that nationalism is centrally concerned to define the conditions under which force or violence is justified, in a people’s defense, when their right of self-determination is threatened or denied. Self-determination here may mean either democratic self-rule or the exercise of cultural autonomy, depending on whether the national group in question believes it can achieve its goals within the framework of an existing state or seeks a state of its own.

  All forms of nationalism vest political sovereignty in “the people”—indeed, the word “nation” is often a synonym for “the people”—but not all nationalist movements create democratic regimes, because not all nationalisms include all of the people in their definition of who constitutes the nation.

  One type, civic nationalism, maintains that the nation should be composed of all those—regardless of race, color, creed, gender, language, or ethnicity—who subscribe to the nation’s political creed. This nationalism is called civic because it envisages the nation as a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values. This nationalism is necessarily democratic, since it vests sovereignty in all of the people. Some elements of this ideal were first achieved in Great Britain. By the mid-eighteenth century, Britain was already a nation-state composed of four nations—the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh, and the English—united by a civic rather than an ethnic definition of belonging, i.e., by shared attachment to certain institutions: the Crown, Parliament, and the rule of law. But it was not until the French and American revolutions, and the creation of the French and American republics, that civic nationalism set out to conquer the world.

  Such an ideal was made easier to realize in practice because the societies of the Enlightenment were ethnically homogeneous or behaved as if they were. Those who did not belong to the enfranchised political class of white,
propertied males—workers, women, black slaves, aboriginal peoples— found themselves excluded from citizenship and thus from the nation. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these groups fought for civic inclusion. As a result of their struggle, most Western nation-states now define their nationhood in terms of common citizenship and not by common ethnicity. One prominent exception is Germany.

  Napoleon’s invasion and occupation of the German principalities in 1806 unleashed a wave of German patriotic anger and Romantic polemic against the French ideal of the nation-state. The German Romantics argued that it was not the state that created the nation, as the Enlightenment believed, but the nation, its people, that created the state. What gave unity to the nation, what made it a home, a place of passionate attachment, was not the cold contrivance of shared rights but the people’s preexisting ethnic characteristics: their language, religion, customs, and traditions. The nation as Volk had begun its long and troubling career in European thought. All the peoples of nineteenth-century Europe under imperial subjection—the Poles and Baltic peoples under the Russian yoke, the Serbs under Turkish rule, the Croats under the Habsburgs—looked to the German ideal of ethnic nationalism when articulating their right to self-determination. When Germany achieved unification in 1871 and rose to world-power status, Germany’s achievement was a demonstration of the success of ethnic nationalism to all the “captive nations” of imperial Europe.

  Of these two types of nationalism, the civic has a greater claim to sociological realism. Most societies are not mono-ethnic; and even when they are, common ethnicity does not of itself obliterate division, because ethnicity is only one of the many claims on an individual’s loyalty. According to the civic nationalist creed, what holds a society together is not common roots but law. By subscribing to a set of democratic procedures and values, individuals can reconcile their right to shape their own lives with their need to belong to a community. This in turn assumes that national belonging can be a form of rational attachment.