Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff

that the next generations tore apart.
    He tells me about setting off in an American Willys jeep in the summer of 1945, as Vice President of the new Yugoslavia, to establish the border between Serbia and Croatia. “I was a Montenegrin, after all,” he says with a smile, “and so I was supposed to be impartial.” What principle, I ask him, did he use to decide which villages were to go to the Croats, which to the Serbs? “The ethnic principle,” he says, and he describes how he counted up the ethnic percentages in each village along the border before deciding which ones would belong to Croatia, which to Serbia. This was the border the war was fought over, and to this day Serb nationalists accuse Djilas of selling out Serbian interests to the despised Croatians.
    He was both a key architect and map-drawer of postwar Yugoslavia and the first Communist dissident in Eastern Europe. He broke with Tito in 1953 for betraying the ideals of the partisan movement and for allowing the new Communist state to be taken over by a new bureaucratic,privileged class. For this, Tito had him imprisoned for nine years. It was in prison that he learned his meticulous, heavily accented English, using a dictionary to translate Milton’s Paradise Los t into Serbo-Croatian.
    I expect him to blame his old enemy, Tito, for failing to understand ethnic nationalism, but he shakes his head vigorously. Tito’s handling of nationalism could not be faulted. He gave each republic just enough autonomy to satisfy nationalist demands, without compromising the unity of Yugoslavia. His fundamental mistake was that he never managed a democratic succession. He never created the institutions and the state of mind necessary to make democracy work. The minute the Communists began to disintegrate, Yugoslavia itself began to fall apart.
    I ask him whether democracy and nationalism are compatible. In the Yugoslav case, could a democratic system have held the country together? Yes, he insists, gradual democratization, gradual relaxation of one-party rule, might have resulted in the kind of democratic culture that could have allowed the nationalisms of the region to share power together. And why didn’t he democratize in time? “Because he was both the master and the slave of the privileged Communist class,” Djilas says, with the relish of a man who has lived to see his original heresy proclaimed the truth.
    By failing to democratize in time, Tito threw away all of his achievements. In the end, the Communists proved no more successful than the Austro-Hungarians or the Turks in mastering the region. “We Communists,” he says, “were the last empire.”
    How does he understand the nationalism that has torn his Yugoslavia apart? Balkan-nationalism, he argues, was an imported Germanic ideology, which reached these regionsonly in the 1870s. Immediately, it had a fatal impact, tearing apart the complex ethnic tissue of peoples and nations who had grown together as neighbors over the centuries. He thinks of nationalism still, not as an intrinsic folk emotion, but as an alien virus, the work of city intellectuals who stirred up unlettered people and pushed a successful multi-ethnic experiment over the precipice. Few people I meet in Belgrade believe MiloÅ¡ević himself has any deep nationalist convictions. He merely knows that when he shouts from a podium, “Nobody will ever beat the Serbs again!” they applaud him to the rafters.
    The West’s greatest mistake, Djilas then says, is that it has “satanized” the Serbs. This comes as a surprise from someone constantly vilified in Serbian nationalist propaganda as a betrayer of Serbian interests. Yet Djilas is insistent: by placing exclusive blame on the Serbs for both the Croatian war of 1991 and the Bosnian war of 1993, the West has delivered the Serbian population into the hands of MiloÅ¡ević and the nationalists.
    Thus far, the Balkan sorcerer