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Subject: Book Review: Meharg on Gagnon Jr., _The Myth of Ethnic War_

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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Genocide@h-net.msu.edu (December 2005)

V. P. Gagnon Jr. _The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s_.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xxii + 217 pp. Appendix, Index.
$35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8014-4264-8.

Reviewed for H-Genocide by Sarah Jan Meharg, Pearson Peacekeeping Centre and
the Department of Politics and Economics, Royal Military College of Canada

Identities are Contextual? Reconstructing the Identification Process of
Ethnic Groups in the Former Yugoslavia

There is no doubt that study of the Balkans has fallen off the map--that
scholars have moved on to other case studies and other regions. So why has
V. P. Gagnon Jr. written a book on the Balkan wars? This review aims to
answer that question and suggests that scholars of contemporary armed
conflicts read _The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s_
because it goes far beyond the study of Serbia and Croatia. The main purpose
of this text is to provide documentation that debunks Western political
theoristsı common myths about ethnic war. The earlier emergence of 'culture
wars,' where ethnic groups perpetrated aggressive marginalization through
political, ideological, religious, and economic means, ignited Western
imaginations in the 1990s; and this theme has stuck with us ever since. In
fact, the discourses of identity and conflict prevail as markers of the end
of the twentieth century. Gagnonıs book re-imagines these notions of
ethnicity, culture, and identity and how they inform our understanding of
genocidal warfare.

In _The Myth of Ethnic War_ Gagnon outlines an alternative narrative of
pre-war beliefs about ethnicity and identity as held by the wider Serbian
and Croatian civilian populations leading up to the Yugoslav Wars of the
1990s. It briefly reviews the Yugoslav political history from 1960-1989
(focusing on the League of Communists), and then, in detail, he discusses
the last years of the 1980s using statistical and opinion polling data. He
continues through the 1990s and the challenges of understanding the causes
of violence in the Balkans during a post-Cold War period. Gagnon then uses
this background as the basis for re-framing commonly held Western beliefs
about ethnic war.

As in other highly political arenas, there are a series of common
assumptions associated with these types of wars. According to normative
Western discourse, ethnic wars occur only in so-called primitive,
ethnicized, under-developed nations that are not yet evolved (or have not
yet graduated) to the ranks of civilized nation-states. These conflicts are
thought to be based upon ethnic divisions and are associated with the
homogenization of spaces and symbolic places--again a marker of the last
centuryıs post-Cold War territorial re-organization--and whose citizens
would stop at nothing to erase the signs and symbols of competing cultures.
Such culture wars gnawed away at positive identity narratives, and what
remained were the negative identity narratives manipulated by the
pathologies of nationalism. As a result, the discourse of identity became a
negative construct and impacted the ways in which violent conflict was
codified and comprehended by the West.

V. P. Gagnon suggests that the ways in which the West imagines ethnic
warfare assumes Western culture to be superior to those involved in the
contemporary armed conflicts. This then simplifies and falsely categorizes
the identities of those participating, either willingly or otherwise, in
wars that are "named" ethnic. Moreover, he blames those in the field of
political science for framing the wars in the former Yugoslavia as ethnic.
Further, he accuses political scientists of continuing to intentionally
overlook data that suggests these conflicts were something more than battles
over ethnic regionalism and bounded homogenous territories. He goes on to
illustrate that the pre-1990 ethnic spaces in the Balkans were
heterogeneous, textured with multiple languages, economies, social
behaviors, and forms of identification. These, though, have been left out of
the simplified arguments, which suggest that clear ethnic dividing lines
existed prior to the wars and that the conflicts were nothing more than
tribal territorialism.

The task that Gagnon set for himself is to deconstruct the dominant
political discourses of ethnic war using anthropological notions of identity
and ethnicity. In this way, he attempts to indemnify the people of Serbia
and Croatia who were under the purist political influence of pathological
national elites. If, as Gagnon suggests, anthropological studies consider
identity as a process of identification rather than an absolute, static
attribute, then the story of the Yugoslav wars can be re-examined. The new
evaluation considers the pathologies of nationalism rather than the common
assumption that Serbian and Croatian civilians subscribed to an agreed-upon
identity, culture, or homogenous nation and this then propelled them towards
violence.

Two case studies are employed to accomplish Gagnonıs goal, Serbia and
Croatia. Interestingly, Gagnon decided to use these two countries because of
the Westıs interpretation of their so-called pathological nationalism, their
seemingly paradigmatic ethnic conflicts. He traces the development of elite
strategies over time, the challenges to elite interests, the discourses of
threat, and the strategy of conflict. This demonstrates that the strategies
of conflict were aimed at political demobilization of the wider population
to preserve control over the structures of power.

Gagnon offers more attention to Croatia than Serbia, and draws upon primary
source materials that, as he puts it, have not been tapped by the West.
Without these materials Western theorists were led to simplify the Yugoslav
wars as the "bad Serbs" against "good Croats." One such source is the
Yugoslav polling data from the late 1980s. This statistical and opinion
polling data offers researchers an alternative narrative devised from
quantitative and qualitative sources.

Using these previously unknown materials, Gagnon proceeds to offer insight
into the ethnic wars of the 1900s, proposing that nationalistic elites
required some strategy to undermine the voice of its political opponents and
the heterogeneous publics of both Serbia and Croatia. Gagnon offers the
notion of _demobilization_ as the powerful tool used to suppress opponent
voices.[1] He understands demobilization to be the corollary of mobilizing
the voice of a people and supporting their role as powerful agents in an
inclusive society; as such, demobilization becomes the intentional silencing
of a peopleıs voice, the undermining of their role as social agents, and
their increased marginalization and exclusion from the public realm.
Gagnonıs demobilization is part of the process that can lead to genocide. In
fact, he describes in part the notion of _identicide_--the intentional
destruction of material and psychic elements with which a group
identifies--and the destruction of which, according to Gagnon, is the
precursor to genocide. In Serbia and Croatia, the strategy of violence and
demobilization became necessary because ethnic identities were not the
powerful motivating forces that elites anticipated. In these two countries
the regimes managed to perpetrate a strategy of violence to demobilize the
people, and according to Gagnon, silence their voices and the voices of the
challenging elites. It was also used to marginalize the people as well as
the issues they used to oppose the status quo; portraying them and their
concerns as outside the realm of legitimate political discourse (p. xviii).

Alternative frameworks for understanding contemporary armed warfare are
always a welcome addition to the literature on genocide. Gagnon provides us
with an alternative understanding of ethnic wars. He suggests that
significant demobilization strategies, perpetrated by political elites
against the wider populations, were required in order for the post-Cold War
territorial, ethnic, cultural, and social reorganization to occur at a
grassroots level. He illustrates that civilians were reticent to support the
disruption of their own multi-ethnic communities and thus allowed the elites
to manipulate their reorganization. Simply put, he shows the argument that
these wars were purely ethnic in nature and violent in context to be
inadequately supported.

Despite efforts to study and understand violent conflicts and their
long-lasting impacts upon ethnicity, culture, and identity, there remains a
dearth of multidisciplinary thinking that continues to result in the
oversimplification of violent conflict within contemporary discourses.
Moreover, the simple, blanket terms of _ethnicity_, _culture_, and
_identity_ tend to cause misinterpretations of social systems when coupled
with theories of violent conflict. The political motivations, social
manipulations, and pathological underpinnings of nationalism have led to
deep and lasting impacts upon civilian populations, not only in Serbia and
Croatia, but far beyond these bounded territories. Western scholars and
policy writers have inadvertently perpetuated the myths of ethnic warfare,
and as Gagnon suggests, may even be complicit in its continued
misinterpretation.

This book is successful in two respects. The first is that Gagnon has
introduced a series of non-Western statistical data to the West. It is
important that further analysis of this data be continued by other scholars.
The second is that anthropologists and cultural geographers examine
ethnicity, culture, and identity in ways that political scientists do not,
and Gagnon has successfully contributed to linkages between these
disciplines. Gagnon is not the first to do this, but his multidisciplinary
study strengthens our opportunities for understanding.

Note

[1]. Gagnon uses the term _demobilization_ within a political studies
discourse. There are other common uses of the term; the most popular
connects it with the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR)
process of military ex-combatants in post-conflict communities. This
programming involves many actors, including the international community,
which is deeply entrenched in the success of such programs. The DDR process
actively demobilizes soldiers and is the decommissioning of former
combatants, in fact, removing their military rank and membership and
formally releasing them from a military group. There is no overlap between
Gagnonıs term and the common practice of military demobilization.



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--
Amy C. Hudnall
LECTURER
History Dept., Whitener Hall, Appalachian State University,
Boone, NC 28608
828-262-6025; hudnallac@appstate.edu

RESEARCH ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Institute of Rural Health, Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID
208-282-4681;  hudnamy@isu.edu

H-GENOCIDE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR, H-NET




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