2012 January 25 « Greater Surbiton

Ian Traynor should know better

Commenting on Sunday’s referendum victory in Croatia in favour of joining the EU, the veteran Guardian journalist Ian Traynor, a man with a long experience of covering former-Yugoslav affairs, has this to say:

Croatia has voted to join the EU by a sweeping majority, delivering a greater than expected yes vote in a referendum watched nervously in Brussels for fear of a backlash… The endorsement means that Croatia, barring any last-minute hiccups, will become the EU’s 28th member country in July next year, symbolising its break with the Balkans and former Yugoslavia and anchoring it strongly in the European mainstream as well as Nato.

How exactly does Traynor think that Croatia’s entry into the EU will ‘symbolise its break with the Balkans and former Yugoslavia’ ? Three Balkan states (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania) and one former-Yugoslav state (Slovenia) are already members of the EU, and the others are seeking to join. The likelihood is that most, if not all, will eventually succeed, and that EU membership will therefore unite Croatia firmly will the rest of the former Yugoslavia and the wider Balkans. Far from ‘symbolising its break with the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia’, Croatia’s entry into the EU will reaffirm its close relations and common destiny with them.

Traynor’s lazy sentence hints at a perceived dichotomy between ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’, whereby the former represents things like law, democracy, progress and human rights and the latter represents things like primitivism, nationalism, authoritarianism and looking backwards. Joining ‘Europe’ would therefore mean abandoning the ‘Balkan’ world of primitivism, nationalism, authoritarianism and looking backwards. Traynor’s sentence hints that the nationalism and wars in the former Yugoslavia of the 1990s were a product of the region’s ‘Balkanness’; of traits inherent to it as a Balkan rather than a European region. In reality, Western and Central Europe have had, if anything, worse records of extreme nationalism, imperialism and genocide than have the Balkans.

Ian Traynor should know better.

Wednesday, 25 January 2012 Posted by Marko Attila Hoare | Balkans, Croatia, European Union, Former Yugoslavia, Marko Attila Hoare | Ian Traynor, Marko Attila Hoare | Leave a Comment

About

A blog devoted to political commentary and analysis with a particular – but far from exclusive – focus on South East Europe. I come from a traditional left-wing background, but believe that the recent failure of most of the left to oppose fascism, genocide and tyranny in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in the Middle East and elsewhere, has definitely discredited left-wing politics in its traditional form. This blog will therefore, among other things, be discussing what a new progressive politics might mean in the twenty-first century.

Born in 1972, I have been studying the history of the former Yugoslavia since 1993, and am intimately acquainted with, and emotionally attached to, the lands and peoples of Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia. In the summer of 1995, I acted as translator for the aid convoy to the Bosnian town of Tuzla, organised by Workers Aid, a movement of solidarity in support of the Bosnian people. In 1998-2001 I lived and worked in Belgrade, Serbia, and was resident there during the Kosovo War of 1999. As a journalist, I covered the fall of Milosevic in 2000. I worked as a Research Officer for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001, and participated in the drafting of the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic. I was a member of the Faculty of History of the University of Cambridge from 2001-2006, and am currently a Reader at Kingston University, London. I am Section Director for the European Neighbourhood of the Henry Jackson Society, a Cambridge-based think-tank that promotes democratic geopolitics. I live in Surbiton in the UK.

I am the author of three books, The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London, Saqi, 2007), Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943 (London, Oxford University Press, 2006) and How Bosnia Armed (London, Saqi, 2004). I am currently working on a history of modern Serbia.

I have been variously accused of being a neoconservative, Trotskyite and Croat nationalist and a supporter of Islamism and Western imperialism. Depending on how you define these terms, some or all of this may be accurate.

Marko Attila Hoare

markohoare AT hotmail DOT com