Kosovo and the dark side of democracy

I think he would arguing that Woodrow Wilson’s “simple-minded defence of self-determination” lead to this, not the argument between Mill and Acton.

But I am bit surprized about his claim that European nation states are now more ethnically homogeneous than 150 years ago. Most of this ‘homogenization’ is linked to the collapse of the Austrian empire, and the Soviet one later on. Those events seem far too specific to generalize to a statement that Europe as a whole has moved to homogeneous states.

The same effect might well be explained more simply as a consequence of the invention of gunpowder. The use of force was no longer an ultra-skilled occupation requiring exclusive attention. It became possible to turn a bunch of illiterate farm workers into an army with a modest expenditure on guns and amunition.

In order to maintain control of a geographic location the state had to rely on more than just brute force. Nationalism provided a substitute.

States tended to expand to the point where they were able to maintain control. Maintaining control of a homogenous population is somewhat easier than maintaining control of a population with a distinct culture or language.

I take it from this that Pratap Bhanu Mehta profoundly regrets India’s secession from the multiethnic British Empire

Given the invocation of Jinnah, I think a more-fair reading would be that he regrets the preemptive secession from a hypothetical newly-independent-and-unified India. Given the violence associated with Partition and the later violence associated with the secession of Bangladesh, that’s not a crazy regret to have. On the other hand, the thing about the nationalization of nation-states is that it’s in part competitive, and being a large minority in someone else’s democratic nation-state is often unattractive– you’re never sure how nationalistic that nation-state is going to be.

Most of this ‘homogenization’ is linked to the collapse of the Austrian empire, and the Soviet one later on.— you forgot to mention the Ottoman; and the Czarist empire went through a round of collapse and contraction before the Soviet empire expanded and collapsed again. But the replacement of multiethnic empires with aspirationally-monoethnic democracies is just what was at stake, and those imperial cases covered a lot of real estate. A majority of now-extant European states are on land that one of those empires once controlled.

The reinforcing movement from the other side was German and Italian unification. Altogether, Europe now looks *much* more like “one democratic-state per nation, one nation per democratic state” than would have been imaginable a couple centuries ago. The final result is a Mehta says: A Europe of democratic nation-states.

Zamfir, I agree that makes more sense–it’s the ‘150 years later’ part that threw me off. Wilson would have had to adopt the principle of self-determination when he was less than 2 years old. I see now the view is that Mill and Wilson were both contributing figures in the supposed homogenization–it’s just sloppy writing on top of a dubious causal claim.

BTW, Wellman’s “A Theory of Secession” has soothing words, at about the same level of abstraction as Buchanan’s theory, for anyone afraid of the “disastrous doctrine” of self-determination.

#5, #8

Yes, my guess is that Mehta probably approves of his own, Indian nation’s secession from the British Empire, but not of Pakistan’s secession from India.

But if the independence of India led to the counter-secession of Pakistan, with all the communal massacres that this involved, the logic of Mehta’s position should be, that the secession of India from the British Empire – which began the process of independent nation-state formation that led to partition and communal massacre – was a mistake in the first place.

Furthermore, if Britain had simply refused to recognise the independence of India, would the international community have been justified in simply withholding recognition of Indian independence permanently ?

marko,

That’s an interesting point. It’s also quite relevant for Bangladesh, where India recognized the rebels as the legitimate government of Bangladesh and the Americans were strongly opposed, to the extent of putting two aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean to threaten India.

For me, Partition was a mistake because it relied on a created national identity that did not exist. It’s clear that there was never a desire on the part of West Pakistan to recognize East Pakistan as an equal in the government – East Pakistanis (that is to say Bangladeshis) were never recognized as full citizens. Of course, all national identities are constructed, but the creators of Pakistan deluded themselves into thinking they could make one even though most people rejected the idea.

What’s up with Switzerland, anyway?

When Germans were encouraged to leave Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland after WWI, Jews usually were counted as Germans. Dramatic irony there.

But how can you be xenophobic with four official languages? What’s their secret?

#14

Franck, that’s a very good point. Bangladesh’s secession from Pakistan was unilateral, and it was nevertheless supported by India. Furthermore, India unilaterally recognised Bangladesh’s independence, without Pakistan’s permission.

http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/1971/Dec06/index.html

Perhaps Mehta would like to comment on whether or not this was a ‘dangerous precedent’ ?

Samchevre (#11),

This highlights one of the real weak spots of democracy; there’s no coherent method for boundary-setting. (In other word, who gets to vote on what? Should school policy be set by the town, the state, the nation? How do you decide?)

This isn’t a weak point just for or even particularly for democracy; it’s a central fault point in every kind of politics. Unless you’re going for the totalitarian option (which not even Hobbes imagined could be pulled off), then you’re going to have to wrestle with peoplehood, with finding and founding boundaries. Democracy, or at least pretty much everything about democracy we moderns consider legitimate and worthwhile, had to begin from or at least develop at the same time as a distinct sense of belonging. Ethnic self-determination has a terrible track record, but I’m not sure any other style of “nationa imagining” (nice shout-out to Benedict Anderson, Jacob) necessarily has done better or at the cost of less blood.

I absolutely agree that in his debate with Acton and elsewhere, Mill let his inner 19th-century racist run free. But at least he was trying to come up with some basis for extending self-government to more people around the globe–and frankly, considering how he without a second thought slammed what might be called “unreasonable seccession movements” of his day (asking why the Bretons or the Scots could possibly prefer their own nation to that offered by the French and British nations), Mehta–at least in regards to this debate over Kosovo–ought to give him a little more benefit of the doubt.

Marko (#3, #12, #22): excellent observations, all–though I suppose that decolonization and the break-up of the “multiethnic British Empire” was a specific and distinct enough event to not be much of a precedent when it comes to discussing nationality and democracy.

Again this is largely a discussion of ideas about, not actions in Kosovo. But how was this specific situation handled, given the conflicts and relations, West and East, Russian and European, Albanian and Serb. Stability itself has a moral value. How much has cool reason prevailed in the minds of the well intentioned?
Not much at all.
Cool reason discussing the glories and dangers of democracy is not cool reason discussing the actions of the players.

If you want to move from liberalism to ethnic nationalism, why not jump directly to tribalism?

Well, let’s see. Right now, Serbia is attempting a partition of Kosovo that is purely ethnically based. Every place in Kosovo that is dominated by Serbs is attempting to assert its right to federate with Serbia. Serbia is making no attempt to claim parts of Kosovo that are dominated by Albanians. Ethnic Albanians that work in northern Mitrovica are being prevented from coming to work, and there have been attempts to ethnically cleanse northern Kosovo of what few Albanians remain there. There has been no official apology from the Serbian government for past official Serbian government acts that disenfranchised Albanians, or for state-sponsored death squads against Albanians. There was no attempt to provide polling places for Kosovo Albanians to vote in the recent Serbian elections, and there has been no attempt to create a Kosovo government that includes any Albanians.

As far as I can tell, the current Serbian government has made no attempt to include Kosovo Albanians in any aspect of its government. That suggests to me that they don’t view them as citizens with an equal claim on the government. And since they would make up 20% of the population of a Serbia that includes Kosovo, that is a serious failing.

I’ve read Mark Ames’ piece from 2000 on exile.ru where he says that Serbs can’t even enter KLA-controlled areas in Kosovo, let alone “provide polling places”. Maybe it’s different now, I don’t know.

The more the citizens / subjects / inhabitants identify with their state, the stronger the state is. The more homogeneous the population is, the more likely that this identification will be achieved.

But strong states are only sometimes a good thing. They’re better than civil war, and better than very weak do-nothing states who can’t provide even minimal state services, but with states stronger is not better.

Civilized, humane people with any degree of understanding of the world can be patriotic up to a point. America’s patriotism is a horrible blemish.

“Poor blemished America! How it must envy the purity of our pristine European nationalisms.”

We’re an empire of citizens not ethnicity. The relation among our constituent groups is our advantage (as more modern) over otherwise social democratic Europe.

The attempts by several commenters to suggest that Mr. Mehta is inconsistent in arguing against recognition of Kosovan independence, while (presumably) lauding Indian (or Bangladeshi) independence are not convincing. After all, a simple counter-argument to such views is that Mr. Mehta is not against secession per se.

Rather, he is very much against secessionist projects that are coupled to aspirations to build a (religiously or ethnically) homogeneous state from territories that are very heterogeneous. Neither the Indian (i.e., Nehru, Gandhi and rest of the Congress party), nor the Bangladeshi, independence movement (i.e., Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rehman’s party) had that character.

Regards,
Kumar

The more the citizens / subjects / inhabitants identify with their state, the stronger the state is. The more homogeneous the population is, the more likely that this identification will be achieved.

I don’t think so. There are few cases where the population identifies as strongly with their state as it does in the US, yet that population is the opposite of homogenous.

As evidenced by the happy irrelevance of ethnicity to US history.

There’s plenty to criticize in American history. But compared to other world historical examples, it’s made a decent showing of itself.

40/43
As regards ethnicity and the US: as opposed to most other countries, the record and the answer is a simple yes. We slaughtered the natives and some of us arrived as slaves but we are a nation of immigrants who refer to ourselves as such.
The European model since the fall of Rome has been tribalism. I’m surprised that someone who makes a living studying The Troubles would miss these basic facts. On both sides of my family I’m the descendent of refugees from persecution: Protestant and Jewish/Eastern and Western European.

To add: The US relationship to the “troubles” in the middle east comes from two sources, the greed for oil and the fact that the US shares with Israel the status of safe haven for jewish refugees from your European hell. And ironically or not, one of the factors now mitigating that crisis is that we offer safe haven to Muslims as well, who assimilate precisely because they are welcome to.

So stuff it.

#46

“To the extend that Jalal’s argument is true, one cannot claim that the creation of Pakistan was the logical outcome of India’s independence.”

It may not have been the only logical outcome, but it was certainly the outcome that actually happened.

Zamfir @ 35: he fears the Indian subcontinent is so unstable that Kosovo is a dangerous precedent, is it not the unstability itself that is the major problem?

You are right, and the point generalizes. The problem is not with the principle of self-determination; it is with the assumption that it is an unqualified right held by all nations regardless of context.

There is no inherent value to either nation-states or to multi-ethnic states; the only relevant questions are about whether particular secessions would or would not lead to serious instability.

I usually like secession. I like seeing any place declare independence. But nationalism is dangerous. We don’t see as much of it in the United States, luckily–e pluribus unum.

Mr. Hoare:

The argument you attempted to run against Mr. Mehta–his alleged inconsistency in deploring Kosovan independence while lauding Indian independence–indeed depends crucially on whether the creation of Pakistan was a ‘logical’ consequence of Indian independence (from Britain). Only if nationalist projects that are liberal (i.e., not based on homogenizing a particular territory) consistently lead to the creation of illiberal nationalist projects can you convincingly argue that Mr. Mehta is inconsistent in his beliefs about the grounds for secession.

Mr. Mehta can surely argue that he views Indian independence with more than a tinge of regret: as one who believes in liberal nationalist projects, he lauds the creation of the Republic of India while ruing the illiberal choices of others (in reaction–literally–to the idea of the Indian republic).

Finally, it is your attempt to cast aspersions on those who you claim have an Indian-nationalist agenda which is not convincing: Is everyone who has misgivings about Kosovan independence an Indian-nationalist?

Certainly, the arguments I have proffered are made in good faith. If your argument makes better sense, surely they will prevail. More argument, less invective, please. Nobody is really fooled by dressing up the latter as the former.

Regards,
Kumar

You can’t really get a grip on Kosovo until you understand just how corrupt, oppressive, and fundamentally brutal Serb rule was in the 1990s.

The decade started with Serb cops firing into crowds of unarmed civilians, and finished with death squads and ethnic cleansing; in between you had the closing of Albanian schools, firing of roughly half the work force from state-owned jobs, explicitly apartheid system in which ethnic Serbs were vastly privileged over the Albanian minority, etc., etc.

You also can’t get it until you realize how much the Albanians hate the Serbs, and how much the Serbs hate and despise the Albanians. The Serbs want Kosovo, but they don’t want the Albanians; they never considered them to be citizens of Serbia, even when they formally were.

I could go on at length, but here’s a telling detail: Serbs have a derogatory term, _Shiptar_, for Albanians. “Shiptar” occupies almost exactly the same space as “nigger” in American English. And it’s the standard term in Serbia, just as “nigger” was in the South fifty years ago. I mean, it’s universal to the point where not using it immediately marks the speaker as either very formal or some sort of prissy liberal.

You’ll notice that of the various autonomy plans Serbia put forward for Kosovo last year, not one involved the Albanians having any representation in Serbia’s Parliament or government.

Doug M.

#57

vkrishna, my argument is really not with supporters of Indian independence, but with people who support the right to secede for their own nation while denying it to other nations, in a manner that is inconsistent.

“First, India did not secede from the British Empire. It was an unwilling colony of the British Empire gained through coercion, with no rights allowed to its citizens, who were taxed and looted unto death.”

Kosova, too, was an unwilling colony of Serbia gained through coercion; its Albanian citizens were at best second-class citizens and at worst were subject to genocidal treatment.

“This was therefore not a matter of secession, but the culmination of a long historical process of demands for individual rights and freedom.”

I’m not quite sure why the justified and democratic character of Indian independence (which I don’t deny) makes it any less a matter of secession. Secession, in cases such as India’s and Kosova’s, can indeed be the culmination of a long historical process of demands for individual rights and freedom.

“Early leaders of the independence struggle believed that they could agitate for and obtain equal treatment and constitutional rights for Indians, like the British citizens of the empire, but were disabused of such notions.”

I think most Kosova Albanians would say that it was made entirely clear to them, over many years, that they could never enjoy equal treatment and constitutional rights within either Yugoslavia or Serbia.

“So the issue of secession does not enter here, and since Mr. Mehta’s arguments concern democracies, this example is not valid on those grounds either.”

Serbia was never a genuine democracy until 2000, by which time its rule over Kosova had already ended. Even after that, its attempt to reassert its rule over Kosova meant denying citizenship rights to the Albanian majority.

Thus, in the referendum over a new Serbian constitution held in 2006 – for the deliberate purpose of reasserting the Serbian claim to Kosova – Serbia’s government banned Kosova Albanians from voting in the referendum while allowing Kosova Serbs to do so.

“Secondly, Pakistan did not secede from India. The state of Pakistan was formed on August 14, 1947, one day before the Indian state was constituted on August 15, 1947. Your framing of this event is consequently wrong and misleading.”

I disagree. India did not suddenly come into being on 15 August 1947. There was British India before that. Whether you define the carving out of Pakistan from the former British India as an act of secession, partition, independence, etc., is a matter of semantics.

“The facts were simple, there was a genocide in East Pakistan (many of the victims were religious minorities), and a consequent refugee influx from East Pakistan into India of > 10 million people. This was the main motivation for India’s military intervention.”

Very similar circumstances surrounded NATO’s intervention in Kosova in 1999. Indeed; I think India’s intervention in East Pakistan / Bangladesh, and NATO’s intervention in Kosova, were both entirely justified to prevent genocide.

“Kashmir’s (it should be Jammu and Kashmir) secession has never been popularly mandated. Additionally, allowing such a secession would be a direct attack on the secular, multiethnic foundations of the Indian state, because it would be an acknowledgement that an multiethnic state like India is unstable and the two nation theory (based on religion) is valid.”

This is really a whole debate in its own right. But I suspect that many Indian commentators really have Kashmir in mind when they argue against Kosova’s independence.

“Maybe I misunderstand what you’re saying here, in which case I apologize. But if this is what it sounds like, why should Albanians as such have some special representation in the Parliament?”

You’re misunderstanding. The autonomy plans all had this in common: Kosovar Albanians would be able to vote only in Kosovo.

IOW, there would be no Albanian representatives in the Parliament in Belgrade. Albanians would have no say in running the country of which they were nominally part. We’re not talking about quotas here. The Serbs’ position was, no representation whatsoever for two million people — almost a quarter of the country’s population.

There were formal justifications for this, of course — brief googling will give you more than you want — but the plain fact is, a Parliament with 25% Albanians is a revolting notion to most Serbs, and was a complete political non-starter.

If you’re American, about the only way to grasp this is to think about the South in the days of Jim Crow, when White Supremacy was law and overt expressions of racism were not just respectable but admirable. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’ll help you get your mind around it. Serbs see Albanians as violent, dirty and dangerous; they don’t want to live near them, and they’re creeped out by the idea of Albanians in positions of power or respect. Albanians see Serbs as The Man. The current political scene in Belgrade is rather like that period 40-50 years ago when white Southern politicians were racing to “out-nigger” each other.

Doug M. (not Claudia)

Are you talking about this (wiki):

International negotiations began in 2006 to determine the final status of Kosovo, as envisaged under UN Security Council Resolution 1244. The UN-backed talks, lead by UN Special Envoy Martti Ahtisaari, began in February 2006. Whilst progress was made on technical matters, both parties remained diametrically opposed on the question of status itself.[37]

In February 2007, Ahtisaari delivered a draft status settlement proposal to leaders in Belgrade and Pristina, the basis for a draft UN Security Council Resolution which proposes ‘supervised independence’ for the province. A draft resolution, backed by the United States, the United Kingdom and other European members of the Security Council, was presented and rewritten four times to try to accommodate Russian concerns that such a resolution would undermine the principle of state sovereignty.[38]

I’d like to learn more about it (maybe you have a good link), but I don’t understand how something produced by the UN-run-and-sponsored negotiations can indicate evil intents of the Serbian government. Seems to me there must be more to it.

marko, this belief that india “seceded” from the british empire is ahistorical and really weird.

(1) the british empire was not really the sort of national unit which one could really talk about “seceding” from. like other components of the empire, the raj was formally a british dependency, not an integral part of britain. at independence, about half of the raj consisted of “princely states” (states which the british ruled by way of a treaty arrangement with an indian prince).

(2) secession is by definition unilateral (that is, without the consent of the relevant national unit), whereas india became independent with british approval.

also, re your #49, why can’t each of these cases just be judged on their merits? given the differences between each case, isn’t flexibility warranted, rather than something to be attacked?

#64

“like other components of the empire, the raj was formally a british dependency, not an integral part of britain.”

Indeed, and Kosova was an Autonomous Province and a constituent member of the Yugoslav Federation, not an integral part of Serbia.

“secession is by definition unilateral (that is, without the consent of the relevant national unit), whereas india became independent with british approval.”

Well, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard ‘secession’ defined as something that has to be unilateral. According to the online Dictionary.com, ‘to secede’ means:

“to withdraw formally from an alliance, federation, or association, as from a political union, a religious organization, etc.”

Indeed, Dictionary.com, on the same page, gives the example of the break-up of the Soviet Union, when the republics broke away consensually:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/secede

According to Marrian-Webster, ‘to secede’ means

“to withdraw from an organization (as a religious communion or political party or federation)”

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/secede

Nothing there about unilateralism.

Anyway, at what point did Britain accept India’s independence ? Was the Indian nationalist movement ‘secessionist’ before that point ? I was under the impression that Gandhi and Congress had to wage a sustained political campaign involving civil disobedience to get the British out.

If we’re going to start restricting the definition of ‘secession’, then I think one could make a very powerful case that Kosova didn’t really ‘secede’ from Serbia either…

“all the blame on one side of the conflict”

No, blame accrues to the Albanians as well. It’s a complicated story.

“…the backing of the US and other Western powers meant that the Kosovo Albanians were under no pressure to negotiate a solution that fell short of independence…”

There’s some truth to that. On the other hand, the Kosovars got that backing in large part by behaving themselves and signing on to the Ahtisaari Plan. That’s why countries like Sweden, Japan and Peru are recognizing Kosovo’s independence — they like that the Kosovars are following the UN’s original plan, even if the UN itself is paralyzed because of Russia’s veto.

International support for Serbia, OTOH, is largely from (1) countries that are traditionally sympathetic to Serbia (Russia, Greece), (2) countries that have fractious minority regions of their own (Spain, Cyprus, Indonesia, India, Bolivia, Sri Lanka…), and (3) countries who are buying the whole “imperialist plot” theme and opposing independence as a machination of the West(Venezuela, Cuba). Nobody is seriously saying, we support Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo because /that’s going to work out so well/.

I note in passing that, at least in the US, there’s an interesting meeting of the far left and far right — Noam Chomsky and Redstate agree that Kosovar independence is bad.

Anyway. Had the Serbs approached negotiations in good faith, they’d have a much stronger position today. They didn’t. They refused to participate in discussions for the Ahtisaari Plan, relying on the Russian veto to kill it. Then, when forced into FTF discussions with the Albanians, they made it very clear that all they were interested in was legal title over Kosovo and protecting the remaining Serbs there — they wanted nothing to do with their Albanian “citizens”. It’s really hard to see how that was ever going to end well.

Doug M.

By this logic slaves are in “an alliance, federation, or association” or “a political union” with their masters. At some point the hairsplitting becomes absurd. We’ve reached that point.

Kosovo has been through long periods as part of Serbia and its central to Serbian history. It’s old native ground. But it’s not now. The relation of Kosovo to Serbia is closer to the state of Virginia where the whites have moved out, Latinos have reached at 80% of the population and the Congress has refused to seat the states representatives. And of course Latino’s as indio blood were here first. Sorry, but that has little relation to the struggle for independence of the Philippines. The Modern British “Empire” of Scotland and Wales or the Hatfields and McCoys fighting over fishing holes, is not the conquest of West Africa.

#70

“Kosovo has been through long periods as part of Serbia and its central to Serbian history.”

Kosova has formally been part of modern Serbia only since 1945. It has been under Serbian rule since 1912. India was under British rule for much longer.

If you’re going to go back to the Middle Ages to justify Serbia’s possession of Kosova, then you might as well call for southern Spain to be given back to the Arabs.

“The relation of Kosovo to Serbia is closer to the state of Virginia where the whites have moved out, Latinos have reached at 80% of the population and the Congress has refused to seat the states representatives.”

Completely untrue. Virginia is an integral part of the US. Kosova was not an integral part of the Republic of Serbia.

A better parallel would be to compare Kosova’s relationship to Serbia with Puerto Rico’s relationship to the US (though even that does not do justice to the extent to which Kosova had an independent status in the Yugoslav Federation separate from Serbia).

Marko, you’re oversimplifying. Kosovo was conquered by Serbia in 1912, and integrated into the Serb-dominated Kingdom of Yugoslavia thereafter. Then under Tito, Kosovo was /firmly/ part of Serbia for the first generation after WWII — they didn’t start to wiggle out until the late 1960s, and didn’t gain “independent status in the Yugoslav Federation” until after the new Constitution in 1974.

The legality of the various constitutional changes… well, the Serbs could fairly claim that 1973 was imposed on them by a government that wasn’t representative. Other hand, the Serb “recovery” of Kosovo in 1989-90 was done by means that were pretty blatantly illegal.

As to the morality of the various governments… well, the Yugoslav authorities treated the Albanians badly until 1974. Then the Albanians turned around and put a certain amount of pressure on the Kosovo Serbs. (How much and what kind are still disputed.) Then Slobo took over, sowing the wind with an explicit policy of “a Serb foot grinding Albanian faces, forever”. I tend to see Serb rule in the 1990s as being so catastrophically bad and morally bereft as to overshadow what came before and after, but there are plenty of people who disagree.

abb1, I haven’t said a thing about the decolonization of India. But if you want to talk about Kosovo, it’s not hard to learn more — there’s no shortage of material out there.

Doug M.

#74

“Marko, you’re oversimplifying. Kosovo was conquered by Serbia in 1912, and integrated into the Serb-dominated Kingdom of Yugoslavia thereafter. Then under Tito, Kosovo was /firmly/ part of Serbia for the first generation after WWII —they didn’t start to wiggle out until the late 1960s, and didn’t gain “independent status in the Yugoslav Federation” until after the new Constitution in 1974.”

No Doug, I’m not oversimplifying. Kosovo was a constituent element in the Yugoslav Federal system in its own right from the very start, before it joined Serbia. Kosovo formally joined the Republic of Serbia in 1945, formally through the decision of its own, Kosovar assembly, as an autonomous oblast. It did so only with the authorisation of the Yugoslav centre, and the Yugoslav constitution at all times thereafter guaranteed its distinct status.

If by “firmly part of Serbia for the first generation after WWII” you mean “firmly under Serbian control”, then yes, that’s true. But Kosovo’s independent status in the Yugoslav Federation under the 1974 Constitution was built upon its earlier status as an autonomous oblast and constituent element of the Yugoslav state.

I’m sorry but I didn’t recognize that any of you have a knowledge of a History of Serbs and Albanians at Balkan. Albanians coll team selfs Ilirians and they sees that thy live at Kosovo 2000 years. Iliri is a tribe who lived at a mountains on west part of Kosovo, near to Albania border today, and on the Adriatic coast. When Romans came on Balkan thy absorbed them. After Romans Empire breakdown at 6th century comes Slovens tribes at Balkan and made first Serbs country between 610-641 a.c. under jurisdiction of Byzantine. Area who thy have under control was today Macedonia, Kosovo until mountains, Monte Negro and part of Herzegovina. In 9th century thy start be Christians and start organized schools and churches and central church was in today Pec. All that time Ilires tribe is in a mountain area and near to the coast, today Albania coast.
After Turks invasion in 1389 when was killed 50000 Serbs and 200000 Turks sultan Bayazit bring the worst tribe in Otoman Empire at a Serbs holy land Kosovo, Arnautes. They are a professionals executors in Otomans army. Thy forced Serbs population to left Kosovo. Twice Serbs escape from Kosovo because of a terror – 1690 and 1737. Ilirians cooperated with Turks so because of that today population at Kosovo think that there are Iliri. Serbs liberated part of Serbia in long process from 1804 until 1867. After throwing out of Turks from major part of Balkan in I Balkan War 1912 Kosovo is Serbian again. After 1945 and communists victory because of more than 1000 churches and monasteries after Tito confrontation with Stalin and Enver Hodza 1948 thy let more than 100000 Albanians until 1952 to cross a border and colonize Kosovo. After 1952 Albanian border was good protected from Albanian part with mine fields etc. People who come from Albania never have citizenship of Yugoslavia until 1974. They are refuges until 1974 with 5-10 children and after 1974 they didn’t have a clear status. Etc., etc. …

Never mind …

From what I have read Kosovo was 50% Serbian up until about WWII when the majority were driven out. So they claim of Serbia to Kosovo as a province seems fairly strong.

Maybe Serbia has not transcended ethnic nationalism yet, at this particular moment. And it may very well be that the secession was inevitable, I’m just saying that it’s not a good thing. And, conceptually, it’s not a solution, because, inside any ethnic group there are always sub-groups, villages, clans that tend to split it into smaller and smaller units. You can’t create a state with border guards and embassies for every family, so clearly this logic is not sound. People just have to make an effort to get along, and make arrangements that will facilitate it, like a reasonable degree of autonomy.

#79 — Dammit, no. Kosovo has been majority Albanian since at least WWI, and probably back into the 19th century. There are Yugoslav censuses going back to 1921.

Doug M.

We4ll, there seems to be people who disagree with that:

Before World War II Serbs constituted a slight majority of the Kosovo population (Avramov, supra). In addition to the murder and expulsion of Serbs, the relative ethnic population balance was further skewed by the entrance of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from Albania proper during the war. Relying on Italian records from the time, Smilja Avramov estimates that 150,000 to 200,000 Albanians moved into Kosovo between 1941 and 1943.

The Albanians were allies with the Nazis in WWII. Maybe shqiptar doen’t mean “n*gger”. Maybe it means Nazi to the Serbs.

The SS high Command planed to create a mountain division of 10.000 men. The Higher SS and Police Command in Albania, in conduction with the Albanian National Committee, listed 11.398 possible recruits for the Waffen SS mountain division. Most of these recruits were “kossovars”, shqiptar Ghegs from Kosovo Metohija in Serbia. The Shqiptar Tosks were found mainly in southern Albania. Most of the Shqiptar collaborators with the nazi forces were theNazi forces were the so-called Kossovars, ethnic Shqiptars from the Kosmet of Serbia. The Nazi German-sponsored Albanian gendarmes, special police and para-military units were made up by Kossovars. The Kossovars were under the direct control of the Albanian Interior Minister Xhafer Deva.

#17 seems aggressively ignorant. The answer to your question can be found in too many places to count. It really is incumbent upon one to try to become educated, isn’t it?

#85: maybe it means Nazi, but then again, it’s easy enough to discover that it doesn’t. Inconveniently, I suppose.

More generally: It could be impossible to know what the ethnic composition of Kosovo was (but I doubt it); the fact that you have to gravitate to the compromised nationalist extreme among Serbs (historians or ethnographers) to find the argument that Kosovo was majority Serbian before WW2 (or thus WW1) suggests that it was majority Albanian. That’s not science, of course.

“Fadil Hoxha (Serbo-Croat: Fadil Hodža) (Đakovica, March 15, 1916 – April 23, 2001 in PriÅ¡tina) was a Yugoslav (Kosovo Albanian) politician.
He returned to Kosovo in 1941, where he worked as a teacher. In the same year he abandoned his post to become one of the founders of the communist partisan movement in Kosovo. Within a short time Hoxha rose in partisan ranks to become commander, leading battalions which had in their ranks primarily Kosovo Albanians and a number of Serbs who fought against Fascism and Nazism and the Italian and later German occupation of Kosovo.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fadil_Hoxha
He was defeated after 1980 by the mindless nationalist hatred of both sides.

Anybody can go on the internet and see that only there is ample evidence that the Albanians supported the Nazis and commited genocide and ethnic cleansing agianst the Jews and Serbians. This is backed up by many Jewish websites as well.

#90: yes, I do. I’m not on the fringe here (and I don’t need to be a seer), those who say Kosovo was settled by Serbs till 1945 are. They can prove their point. Mine is not contentious.

#92: and? Wikipedia is a battle zone between the sides on these issues, and proves nothing.

“90: yes, I do. I’m not on the fringe here (and I don’t need to be a seer), those who say Kosovo was settled by Serbs till 1945 are. They can prove their point. Mine is not contentious”

If you are not concerned with facts, then do explain what your agenda is. Are you some sort of paid propagandist?

I propose a new logical fallacy. It’s called Nick’s fallacy. Here’s how it works. I assert that I am not on the fringe. Therefore I am right no proof needed. That’s a neat trick isn’t it?

I am concerned with facts. You have none for your position that Kosovo was majority Serbian in 1945. I just propose not to waste my time proving the obvious. I’m not playing a debate game with you. What to you is a logical fallacy is to me an acceptance of the obvious. If you’ve got something reasonable that demonstrates that Kosovo was majority Serbian in 1945, do tell. (And I don’t think I like you either!)

Historical analogies are not really necessary, even to order our thoughts in this case. There’s nothing terribly complicated about Kosovo’s history vis-a-vis Serbia.

Are you talking about Smilja Avramov? That helps. Wow.

Here is another link:

http://www.iacenter.org/bosnia/bkgndyug.htm

Nick is offering all kinds of novel argumentations here. The argumetation by sneer, the argumentation by omniscience, the argumentation by shrug. And he claims to be a scholar!

By 1961 the Serbs still comprised one third of the Kosovo population:

During these decades of postwar political changes, the population of Kosovo was also changing in important ways. In 1961 Serbs still made up about one-third of the province, but by 1971 they comprised only one-fourth. By 1989 Serbs made up about 9% of Kosovo’s population. Serbs tended to blame this population shift on Albanian efforts, abetted by Communist party policy, to drive them out. Most outside observers assert that while relations between the groups were often less than civil, most Serbs left Kosovo, which was the poorest part of the former Yugoslavia, in search of better jobs and educational opportunities. The Albanian community there also had a birth rate much higher than the Serbs’.

Can’t argue with the link in 109, the quote from which doesn’t support your argument. The other links are from encyclopedia style websites; one is overt Serbian propaganda. I don’t see numbers in them in any case. Smilja Avramov acted as an arm of Serbian state propaganda in the 1980s/1990s. Her ties with the Milosevic regime were degrading (for her) and call into doubt all of her work, some of which sadly suffers that general fate in spite of its value. Stating the obvious, though, seems to be necessary: statistics cited by or generated by anything that smacks of an official Serbian govt. source, or the Serbian orthodox church, or most of Serbian intellectual and cultural elite must be doubted on its face. You should start now.

So what, for goodness sake, supports your argument? One third to 9 in 28 years, yet there is no possibilty it went from 50 to one third in the years from before the war to 1961, when, as even you cannot dispute the Serbians were ethnically cleansed and suffered genocide from the Albanians alied with the Nazis. And still you offer nothing in return. You are a crackpot.

Ok, then post the link to this so called census data. Or is this something only you are privy to?

115: No. I’m tired. Of you and of this.

Educate yourself! Of course I’m not lying. Why would I lie? Just accept what I offer you, which is not revelation but a simple series of facts. Move on.

Yet in 1961 all of a sudden there is again a thirty percent Serbian population in Kosovo!

Well, what do you know, nick is a liar. Or is tyhere some other census?

maybe you guys should get a chat program or something.

As for your typical sneering nonsense about the losses it is all over the internet. It is diffuicult to pin down, yet you have no trouble pontificating about it.

“difficult to pin down” was just another way of saying we should take care when considering wartime numbers, who offers them, and why they might be out of whack with other numbers. As were the Wikipedia numbers. The fact that “it is all over the internet” should really give you pause, you know. Look at yourself. You’re falling for all the simpleton tricks.

Which is the lie, crackpot. The census or the loses?

132 was an answer to 130. 128 was an answer to 131. You also need to learn to read, oh simpleton.

You’re funny.

I think you have lost sight of the original issue. Don’t let my problematic personality get in the way of you accepting the obvious, which is that Serbs were not the majority in Kosovo before World War II. Probably not after, oh, the mid-sixteenth century, Mr. Crnojevic notwithstanding.

“Probably not after, oh, the mid-sixteenth century, Mr. Crnojevic notwithstanding.”

So now we have the argumentation from probability. Not evidence, or facts. Nick is a fount of novel idiocies.

#98

“The relation of Kosovo to Serbia is closer to Virginia and the US than to India and the Raj. That was my point. It holds.”

No, it doesn’t:

1) The population of Virginia is predominantly American. The population of Kosova is not predominantly Serbian. Kosova is ethnically distinct from Serbia; Virginia is not ethnically distinct from the US.

2) Kosova was conquered forcibly by Serbia in 1912, against the wishes of the ethnic-Albanian majority. Virginia entered the US voluntarily.

3) Virginia is an integral part of the US. Kosova was not an integral part of Serbia.

The Virginia-Kosova parallel would only work if Native Americans still constituted a majority in Virginia today, and had continuously sought self-rule since they were conquered by the US.

Alternatively, if Serbia had succeeded in wiping out the Kosova Albanians the way the white Virginians had wiped out their Native Americans, then the two cases would perhaps be analogous.

Now you’ve done it. Marko Hoare is way smarter than I am, and that’s a fact. And your numbers do not bear on his argument. And you did not post a link saying Kosovo was 69% Serb in 1929.

Wow, that got silly.

— “Blog”: you can just google “1921 Yugoslav census”. There are multiple links to it online.

The 1921 Yugoslav census listed 439,010 inhabitants in the province, of which 75% were Muslim (329,502) and 66% spoke Albanian as a native language (288,907). The two figures are different because not all Muslims were Albanian (some were Bosniaks and Turks) and not all Albanians were Muslim (a few were Catholic), but still: it’s pretty clear who was in the majority.

The 1931 census painted a similar picture, although the number of Albanian native speakers had dropped to about 62% because of the Yugoslav government’s efforts to move Serb settlers in and encourage Albanians to emigrate (to Turkey, oddly enough, not Albania).

As for Albanians moving in after WWII, there’s very little evidence for this. Albanians in the Balkans have been one of the more settled populations, not prone to large-scale migrations unless driven out. Why “hundreds of thousands” would cross the rather high mountains between Albania and Kosovo in a few years after WWII has never been explained.

But I’m getting an “immune to facts” vibe from you, “blog”, so this will probably be my last contribution here.

Doug M.

Moreover over 1.2 million Serbians were killed during WWII. Are you saying that none of these came from Kososvo? Since that is where the Albanian Nazis were headquartered, a good percentage must have come from Kosovo.