The Star of Anxiety

All interesting writers work at least as much out of temperament as out of what they have seen or imagined. This is true of journalists as much as of novelists. Think of V.S. Naipaul’s dyspepsia when confronted by Islam or the way Larry McMurtry’s admirable nonfiction slips almost automatically into the elegiac mode. Misha Glenny writes under the star of anxiety. In the preface to his first book, “The Rebirth of History,” which chronicled the emergence of Eastern and Central Europe from Soviet domination, Glenny wrote “[M]y motivation for writing this book was quite simple--I was worried about Eastern Europe.” And in the afterword to the revised edition of his searing second book, “The Fall of Yugoslavia,” such was his despair that he declared, “I hate Europe, but there is nowhere else to go.”

These books were written while Glenny was principally occupied first as the BBC’s Vienna correspondent and then its reporter in the early years of the wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. And Glenny’s occasional journalism, above all in The New York Review of Books, was even more alarmist. He consistently warned that NATO strikes against the Serbs in Bosnia would lead to a wider war in the Balkans. He also expressed the fear that Macedonia was on the verge of collapse.

In this, as in other dire predictions, he was proved wrong again and again. But his tropism toward the most pessimistic possible interpretation both of what outsiders could do and to what extent the Serbs could be resisted without unleashing consequences that for Glenny were far greater than the status quo, be it the siege of Sarajevo in 1993 or the self-proclaimed Serb “republic” in the Serb areas of Croatia in 1995, has unjustly blinded his critics to his many virtues as a writer and as a feeling intellect.

He was wrongly accused of being an apologist for the Serbs, a blinkered “Yugonostalgic.” But it was his despair that increasingly got the better of him. He began to haunt the corridors of power, above all in Washington and in the United Nations operation in the Balkans, hoping to influence the course of events. Gen. Sir Michael Rose, the British commander of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Bosnia in 1994, credits Glenny with guiding him through the intricacies of Yugoslav politics and Balkan history. And Glenny was close to Robert Frasure, the American diplomat who served as Richard Holbrooke’s deputy, and died when his armored car went off a cliff on the way into Sarajevo in early 1995.

Since then, Glenny has left the BBC, largely withdrawing both from covering and joining in the polemics over post-Dayton former Yugoslavia and the Kosovo crisis. He did this because he was engaged in the ambitious enterprise of trying to write an encompassing history of the Balkans from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of the Kosovo war in 1999. With entire books devoted to each of the countries of the region--recent examples include Noel Malcolm’s brilliant history of Bosnia and Miranda Vickers’ history of Albania--Glenny’s enterprise seemed unpromising. But while it is not likely to be considered the authoritative work on the subject, and some of its assertions and perspectives are, depending on your point of view, either controversial or tendentious, it is still a very considerable achievement.

Glenny’s subtitle--”Nationalism, War and the Great Powers”--telegraphs his thesis. For him, the reason things have gone so wrong in the Balkans over the last two centuries has little to do with ethnic nationalism, let alone some genetic or cultural barbarousness--the “ancient ethnic hatreds” argument we heard so much of from Western pundits and politicians during the Bosnian War. Rather, Glenny tends to blame the great European powers and the United States for either provoking or aggravating conflicts that otherwise might have remained more limited.

“Before 1999,” he writes, “the great powers had intervened three times in the Balkans. The first was at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 when European diplomats agreed to replace Ottoman power by building a competing system of alliances. . . . The second began with the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia in the summer of 1914 and culminated in 1923 with the Treaty of Lausanne and the Great Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey. . . . The third started with Italy’s unprovoked attack on Greece in 1940 and ended with the consolidation of unrepresentative pro-Soviet regimes in Bulgaria and Romania and a pro-Western administration in Greece.”

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For Glenny, these interventions were what condemned the Balkans to economic backwardness. He brilliantly contrasts the Western sense, expressed in everything from the speeches of politicians to the coverage of journalists, that Western actions in the Balkans have usually been altruistic and reluctant, with the reality of the damage to the various Balkan polities and inter-ethnic relations wreaked by these actions. His conclusion that the NATO action in Kosovo should be judged in the light of these previous interventions is far more debatable. The Balkans may, as Glenny insists, have been the theater of “120 years of [Western] miscalculation and indifference.” But it is by no means clear that the belated effort to undo Slobodan Milosevic’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo--an event that Glenny treats with offensively euphemistic language, speaking of Milosevic’s “directing” the Kosovars across various borders after the beginning of NATO bombing--was in any sense simply another bit of Western blundering.

Glenny is at his best when describing events in Greece or Bulgaria (Albania is barely treated in the book, which is curious in light of the Kosovo crisis), and at his weakest and most intellectually conflicted when discussing the former Yugoslavia in general and Serbia in particular. Milosevic is dealt with in a curiously flat and emotionless way. And in the account of the Kosovo war, Glenny seems at times to fall into the morally bankrupt approach of damning both the Belgrade regime and NATO with more or less the same degree of conviction. But it was not, as Glenny would have it, a case of NATO “claiming this” and Belgrade “claiming that.”

To talk of NATO’s propaganda war, which largely involved overstating military success and the number of Kosovars the Serbs were killing, with the Serb propaganda, which involved denying that more than half a million people had been forcibly deported from their country, is to elide the essential distinction between victims and victimizers. Describing Kosovo in much the way Rose and his U.N. colleagues anatomized Bosnia in these “plague on all their houses terms” is a stance one might have hoped Glenny would have reconsidered and one that is, to put it charitably, morally unbecoming.

It is a pity that Glenny did not stop his narrative with the Cold War settlement in the Balkans. When he writes about contemporary events, he is often intemperate and prone to intellectual shortcuts. In contrast, when he writes as a historian, his tone becomes far more measured and less combative. And a number of these purely historical evocations are brilliant set pieces in the old-fashioned style. He is particularly moving on the culture and tragic fate of Balkan Jewry. It is hard to imagine how his recreation of the world of pre-Holocaust Salonika--the now-Greek city where Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was born and where Glenny lived for a number of years--could be bettered. And his retelling of the extermination by the Nazis and their Croatian fascist allies of the Jews and Gypsies of Yugoslavia is both heart-rending and beautifully judged.

When all is said and done, the argument of “The Balkans” is difficult to accept without serious reservations, but Glenny’s passion and his despair compel respect. He ends the book asking if the sufferings of the Balkans will be allowed to continue. Clearly he believes they will. Perhaps that is why he has written a work of history in which the shrewdest judgments and the most wrongheaded opinions vie for pride of place and in which almost every sentence is imbued with the author’s grief over the cruelty and misery of the fate of this region he clearly loves so deeply.