Vol. 12 No. 12 · 28 June 1990
pages 10-11 | 2561 words
On the Stambul Train
Basil Davidson
- Struggle for the Balkans by Svetozar Vukmanovic, translated by Charles Bartlett
Merlin, 356 pp, £18.50, January 1990, ISBN 0 85036 347 0
If the sovereign nation-state is truly nearing the end of its useful life, as political philosophers here in Western Europe now seem ready to persuade us, so that regional unities of one kind of another may replace it to the general good, the tendency looks far more problematical further east. Resounding nationalism, or rather nation-statism, the two being by no means necessarily the same thing, is what presently appears to reign from Lithuania to the Black Sea or further east again, and from Slovenia to Albania by way of a newly abrasive ‘Serbianism’. The Bluntschlis of the 1990s, romantic or otherwise, may even now be sharpening their sabres, or at any rate their wits, at the prospect of another bout of Balkan wars. The traveller on the Stambul train will expect adventures. It may be so.
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Letters
Vol. 12 No. 17 · 13 September 1990
From Roy MacGregor-Hastie
It is an extraordinary achievement, if that is the right word, to review a book about the struggle for the Balkans without mentioning Romania once (LRB, 28 June). Balkan means mountain, and that is what the region is all about, but the Carpathians are as important as any other range and saved the Daco-Romanians from Magyars and, indeed, Basil Davidson’s assorted South Slavs. But then, he thinks that ‘effective economic government from Belgrade’ is inevitable, and that ‘the only alternative can be secession’ when everybody else who knows that part of the world knows that secession has already begun. Catholic Slovenia has, in effect, gone, and Catholic Croatia will follow soon enough. I would not be surprised to see Islamic fundamentalism affect Bosnia and Herzogovinia or even bits of Macedonia.
There will be no Yugoslavia in ten years’ time. When I was in the Banat earlier this year (on the Romanian side of the border), there was a lot of talk about Greater Serbian chauvinism and there is a certain amount of apprehension among Protestants and Catholics alike, remembering Serb Orthodox persecutions in the past. Perhaps some of your readers, old-fashioned Marxists and Communists like Davidson, were never told that it was a Protestant pastor who created the turmoil which suggested to Elena Ceausescu the palace revolution which, indeed, took place, but put her among the dead.
And what is all this talk of Davidson’s about Partisans (always with a capital letter)? What a bunch of gangsters we now know they were, in Italy, Yugoslavia and elsewhere in South-East Europe. In Romania they are facing up to the truth that a lot of monuments to these ‘heroes’ will soon follow those to their patron, Stalin. Who knows, in Davidson’s disintegrating Yugoslavia we may hear the truth about Mihailovitch one day.
Roy MacGregor-Hastie
Chairman, British Association for Romanian
Vol. 12 No. 20 · 25 October 1990
From Basil Davidson
With delay I notice a letter in your issue of 13 September that calls for a few words. Your correspondent, writing as a student of Romania, upbraids me for not having written about Romania when reviewing for you a book about wartime Macedonia. He should continue his studies: there was no Romanian presence in Macedonia, one of the great blessings upon which that usually unfortunate country has been able to congratulate itself. Though apparently a modest learner himself, he appeals ‘to your readers, old-fashioned Marxists and Communists like Davidson’, to learn more. I have to disappoint him again, for I have never been either of those things. I went to fight in Yugoslavia against an enemy coalition, which included Romania’s Army, as a serving British soldier, because I was sent to do so. I remain very glad that I was able to do that, though even more that, unlike no few of my British and Yugoslav companions, I survived. Maybe the history of the Second World War should also figure in your correspondent’s studies.
Basil Davidson
North Wootton, Somerset
