Tim Judah. The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. xvii + 350 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-07113-9.

Marcus Tanner. Croatia: A Nation Forged in War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. xiii + 338 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-06933-4.

Reviewed by Dusan Djordjevich (Stanford University)
Published on HABSBURG (November, 1997)

Croats and Serbs: Two Popular Histories

In the wake of Yugoslavia's collapse, there have appeared in English useful surveys of the history of Yugoslavia, of Bosnia and Herzegovina, of Bosnian Muslims, and of Macedonians.[1] Curiously, however, nothing comparable has appeared on the two primary protagonists. The books under review, marketed in tandem by Yale University Press, aim to fill this gap. Written by British journalists who covered the wars, these books look at the history of Croatia and of the Serbs in light of Yugoslavia's breakup. They are intended for a general educated audience and have a minimum of scholarly apparatus, but the endnotes indicate a serious, if limited, reading of scholarly literature, primarily in English but also in Serbo-Croatian. Each also devotes considerable space to the last ten years, based on the author's own reporting and other published sources; I will discuss these chapters but focus more on the historical sections.

The absence of an adequate survey of Croatian history in English--symptom of a more general historiographical neglect of Croatia--became especially obvious with Yugoslavia's disintegration. When war broke out, as Tanner points out in his preface, many educated westerners had heard of the Ustashas and little else. But even since then Croatia has received surprisingly little attention from scholars and journalists, in part because the conflict in Bosnia soon overshadowed the Croatian war of 1991 as well as its sudden resolution in August 1995. Tanner initially sought to fill this gap, he states, by writing an account of the war in Croatia, which he covered during his time as Balkan correspondent for the London Independent from 1988 to 1994. He then expanded the book into a survey of Croatia's history from the Middle Ages, although the 1980s and 1990s still take up the last third.

The title is somewhat ambiguous, referring to "Croatia" as a "nation," but it does reflect the book's content. On the one hand, as Tanner writes at the outset, it is not "about Croats but about the country of Croatia," the lands associated with the medieval Triune Kingdom: Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia" (p. xii). On the other hand, within Croatia the emphasis is on the history of the Croats and their national movements. These are reasonable choices, but one should expect relatively little coverage of the Serbs of Croatia and even less of the Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina and of Istria.

The nineteen chapters proceed chronologically, the first five carrying the story through the eighteenth century. Chapter One deals with the emergence and changing fortunes of Croatia's medieval kingdom, concluding with the passing of its crown to Hungary in 1102. The next several chapters detail the many conflicts over Croatian territory fought among Hungary, Venice, and Byzantium, and later of course between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. They also focus on the influx of Serb and Vlach settlers and on disputes between Vienna and the Croatian diet over the status of the Military Frontier.

The narrative of the political and military history of these centuries is unavoidably complex, and even the careful reader will surely lose track at times of who ruled what when. Tanner could have made it easier to follow by dividing the chapters into sections. More serious is the lack of any explicit themes which could serve as a framework for the chronicle of events, and which might stay with the reader after the facts have faded. The mode throughout the book is essentially descriptive rather than analytical or reflective. Tanner rarely looks up from the events at hand to offer more synthetic comments, and readers are left largely to their own devices to draw connections between developments, detect any larger themes, or situate Croatia in its wider Habsburg and European context. The result is a rather unambitious and uncompelling survey.

Still, the pre-modern chapters have their merits as a popular introduction to Croatian history. Tanner provides a good deal of essential information and enlivens the text with anecdotes and travelers' accounts. Although most of the book deals exclusively with political history, in the early modern period Tanner also touches on social, economic, and cultural developments. Chapters Four and Five, for example, offer brief but lively descriptions of the rise and fall of the Adriatic pirates known as Uskoks; the "apostles of pan-Slav consciousness" of Renaissance Dalmatia (p. 46); Slavonia's post-Ottoman resettlement and revival under the Habsburgs and Dalmatia's economic decline under Venetian rule; and social and religious antipathies between Orthodox settlers in the interior and Catholics in the coastal towns.

The narrative is generally accurate. More troubling than some omissions and minor errors of fact is a tendency to rely on traditional anachronistic interpretations. As Aleksa Djilas noted in his New York Times review, Tanner's book "is not entirely free of nationalistic romanticism, and he approaches the pantheon of Croatian national heroes with excessive reverence."[2] He depicts Bishop Grgur of Nin, for example, as a tenth-century "champion of an autonomous Croat national Church" (p. 9). Grgur did defend the Slavic liturgy, but the conflict between the bishoprics of Nin and Split was likely more of a jurisdictional issue than an expression of linguistic and "ethnic struggle" (p. 23). Tanner does not cite the works of more critical scholars of the period, such as the prominent medievalist Nada Klaic, nor refer to the lively debates they have provoked. Even in a survey, one can address such questions without overburdening the narrative; indeed, as Noel Malcolm has shown recently in his short history of Bosnia,[3] discussing historiographical controversies can be an effective way to both present the past and explore its uses.

The adherence to a patriotic teleology becomes a more serious problem in the chapters on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tanner builds the narrative around individual portraits: Ljudevit Gaj, leader of the Illyrian movement; Josip Jelacic; Bishop Strossmayer and Ante Starcevic, champions of Yugoslavism and pan-Croatianism respectively; Stjepan Radic; Archbishop Stepinac. Some of these, such as Gaj's, are well done. Chapter Seven, "1848," offers colorful accounts of Jelacic's personality and exploits. Along the way Tanner provides a basic outline of key moments in the Croatian struggle for the diet's authority and against Hungarian domination.

But this rather quaint chronicle of leaders and events fails to ask many of the important questions about the development of Croatian nationalism. Noticeably absent among his sources are the two foremost postwar historians of the period, Jaroslav Sidak and Mirjana Gross.[4] Tanner would have benefited from their discussions of the various forces working against Croatian unity and from their appreciation of the achievements of the Illyrianists, whose standardization of the language laid the groundwork for nation-building. Indeed, the concept of building a nation is not present, the book's subtitle, "A Nation Forged in War," notwithstanding. The elites of whom he writes, from the Middle Ages on, are assumed to be the nation's spokesmen. This is especially unfortunate since Croatia could in fact present an interesting case for considering both continuities and differences between early modern and modern identities; between long-standing concepts of a "political nation" and "state right," and nineteenth-century political demands and understandings of nationhood. But Tanner never raises these issues, so at the end he does not question, nor leave the reader in a position to assess, Franjo Tudjman's claim to have realized a "Thousand-Year-Old Dream" (the title of Chapter Eighteen).

The sections on Yugoslavia through the late 1980s are uneven and on the whole inadequate. Tanner moves quickly through the crucial years from the 1880s to the 1920s in Chapter Nine. The reader gets little sense of the conflict between Croatian and Serbian state ideas, the various forms of Yugoslavism that attracted Croatia's youth and intelligentsia, or the mass-based national movement that emerged under Radic's leadership in the new state. The account of Yugoslavia's creation is very sketchy and sometimes inaccurate, particularly with regard to Serbia's war aims. Two subjects are covered in some detail: Chapter Eleven is informative on Croatia during the Second World War, about which little is available in English, while Chapter Thirteen makes good use of insiders' accounts of the Croatian Spring of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The rest is spotty and superficial, marked by a number of questionable choices. The chapter called "The Sporazum," the 1939 agreement creating an autonomous province of Croatia, contains more on Prince Paul's personality than on the Sporazum; the 1950s have all but disappeared; there are just two sentences on the constitutional changes of the 1970s and their effects on the balance of power between the federal government and the republics (p. 203).

If the sections on modern history have critical flaws, the last hundred pages or so can be read quite separately as a worthy addition to the literature on Yugoslavia's breakup. Tanner does not aim to be comprehensive or analytical, and there is little information on international diplomacy or on Bosnia beyond some insightful observations on the Muslim-Croat fighting. Instead, he concentrates on providing an account of the political and military struggle between Zagreb and Belgrade in 1990-91. Tanner's sympathy for his subject sometimes colors his reporting: references to discrimination and violence against Serbs in Croatia, for example, are brief and defensive, and Croatia's "Yugo-nostalgics" get short shrift. But few books offer as much detail on the Croatian political scene. He makes good use of his own interviews, and of memoirs by key protagonists that have appeared in former Yugoslavia, to get at the machinations behind the scenes. Among other things, an interesting portrait of Tudjman emerges. Tanner agrees with David Owen[5] that Tudjman was a more skilled statesman than his frequent depiction as a foot-in-mouth bungler would allow. On Tudjman's own terms, Tanner concludes--by creating a "state with all the proper accoutrements" belonging to "Croats alone"--"[t]he scale of his achievement could not be denied" (pp. 299-300).

Tanner's story ends abruptly with the fall of the Krajina. A brief "Postscript" offers some thoughts on the new Croatia. The author is realistic about the chances Serbs will return, but hopeful that authoritarian trends will wane. At the end he suggests the need to build good relations with Bosnia and Serbia, for Croatia might otherwise "remain on the outside of Europe looking in, perched uncomfortably where it had been so often in its embattled and tragic past, on the ramparts of Christendom" (p. 304). This final sentence of the book seems like a last-ditch effort to tie together the historical and contemporary sections, which Tanner does not do in the text. Its language is fortunately not typical of Tanner's straightforward style, but it does highlight the uncritical adoption of romantic self-images that informs his narrative.

In contrast, Tim Judah, as his title suggests (The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia), is explicitly interested in national myths. A reporter on the wars in ex-Yugoslavia for the Economist and The Times of London, he aims to explore those aspects of Serbs' historical consciousness that enabled their leaders to draw "on the malign threads of their people's history to bind them and pull them into war" (pp. xi-xii). Therefore, unlike Tanner, Judah adds thematic sections to his chronological narrative in order to trace certain ideas over time.

This can be an effective strategy. The first chapter, for example, begins with the arrival of the Slavs, and then follows the spread of the Serb population over the centuries to the west and north of their medieval heartland, setting the stage for future conflicts among incompatible national claims and for the "simplification" of the South Slav mosaic in the 1990s. Following an account of the medieval Nemanjic dynasty in Chapter Two, the next chapter introduces the book's central motif, the epic of the Battle of Kosovo. After examining what little is actually known about the battle, Judah discusses the legends and epic poetry that arose around it, and how during Ottoman rule this folklore, along with the Serbian church, preserved stories of medieval glory. Here and in later chapters, he traces how the cult of Kosovo--with its themes of the nation's heroism, betrayal, martyrdom, and resurrection--was established in the first half of the nineteenth century and then invoked and reinforced at various moments of history.

These moments, primarily the uprisings and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, form the core of the historical narrative. Judah provides some essential information to situate the reader but does not aspire to provide a complete account of these events, nor certainly of the modern history of Serbia or the Serbs. His main interest lies in how these episodes were inspired by, and in turn took their place as part of, the national consciousness. The most recent episode of course is the Second World War, to which Chapter Seven is devoted. Judah discusses the Ustasha massacres and makes clear their central place in contemporary Serbian memory, and describes as well how this history and memory were abused in recent years. He also writes about Chetnik massacres of Muslims, part of a running discussion of Serb attitudes toward the "Turk." Here the Montenegrin prince Njegos's famous epic poem Mountain Wreath (1847) figures prominently, at once a celebration of national liberation and a battle cry against "apostates."

In the historical sections, which make up the first half of the book, Judah frequently looks ahead to recent events to argue his case that the manipulation of this store of myths and memories "goes far towards explaining how and why they [Serbs] went to war in 1991" (p. xi). He shows ways in which politicians and intellectuals revived prejudices, heroic self-images, and a sense of historical victimization, fueling support for nationalist policies and eventually violence, as well as denial, indifference, and defensiveness. He holds Milosevic responsible above all, although he also remarks that the official taboos of Tito's Yugoslavia were unhelpful, for their effect "was not to make people forget, as was the intention, but to leave the wounds unhealed" (p. 132).

Judah anticipates one possible objection. It has been considered politically incorrect, he complains, to bring up the Balkans' violent past, because "to make reference to history in this way was considered the sin of 'moral relativism,'" absolving the Serbs of guilt and the west of its duty to intervene (p. 74). One can discuss the influence of history, he insists, while condemning its manipulation, and point out the relevance of past violence against Serbs without reducing the responsibility of the Serbian leadership for the recent wars and atrocities.

This is true, of course, as far as it goes. But there are other objections to be made to Judah's emphases. First, for all the importance of the Kosovo mythology to Serb identity, Judah overemphasizes its past and present role. "In all of European history," he writes, "it is impossible to find any comparison with the effect of Kosovo on the Serbian national psyche" (p. 30). The notion that Prince Lazar rejected an earthly for a heavenly kingdom "is not a metaphor, it is primordial" among Serbs (favorably quoting a Belgrade professor of psychology, p. 37). Significantly, Judah is struck not only by "the importance of the epic poem in Serbian cultural life," but by the supposed "coincidence of the epic and history." Thus the Serbs who fled Croatia in 1995 were consciously making "Lazar's choice," proving "to their own satisfaction that it was 'better to die in battle'--or at least flee your ancestral home--than 'live in shame'" (p. 40). Or maybe not: "The Serbs, caught up with Lazar's myth, believe that they always stand and fight. When defeat looms, though, they are as prudent as any other people. They run." So rather than Lazar's, "they were Arsenije's children," reenacting the exodus of 1690 (p. 310). Milosevic's speech in Kosovo Polje in April 1987, exhorting Serbs to stay in Kosovo, is followed by a speech attributed to Prince Lazar on the eve of the Battle of Kosovo. Judah juxtaposes them portentously, without comment, although any relationship between them, in Judah's mind or Milosevic's or the audience's, is far from self-evident (pp. 29-30).

The constant search for resonance with national myth serves to undermine Judah's trenchant criticisms of Serbian propaganda. When he notes that the Serbian Academy's notorious Memorandum, for example, drew a "direct line... from the migrations led by Patriarch Arsenije in 1690 to the present" (p. 159), the reader cannot help but notice that Judah does exactly the same thing. Fundamentally, Judah, like Tanner, shares the romantic vision and epic sense of nationalist media and intellectuals, even when he gives their interpretations an ironic twist. One result is an over-reliance on patriotic-minded literature, for the most part by emigre scholars or Serbian authors in translation. This is evident notably in his treatment of the Ottoman Empire (or "the Turks" as he consistently prefers), where he adheres closely to Balkan nationalist assumptions.

Judah looks frequently for contemporary parallels with history as well as with myth. Milosevic's ideas and methods are a "striking...emulation" of Garasanin's in the mid-nineteenth century (p. 59); tensions in Bosnia in 1875 are "eerily" similar to those in 1992 (p. 82). Occasionally such comparisons are indeed suggestive, and might have been illuminating had he actually argued them. Instead they are tossed out quickly and indiscriminately, and they beg many more questions than they answer. He almost never uncovers any differences between the present and the past. The overall effect of course is to show a land frozen in time, both in fact and in the minds of its inhabitants.

This is actually Judah's point about one of his main subjects, ethnic cleansing. "[O]nly the name was new" in the 1990s, but the same "logic of village burning, massacres, expulsion, and flight" was present in Ottoman-Habsburg wars (p. 15). Serb militias "knew from the experience of generations exactly what to do" because "their forefathers had been as practised at the art of village-burning as they were in fleeing from their own flaming hamlets." But these practices are not unique to Serbs; rather they are peculiarly Balkan, "have always been a feature of war in the Balkans, and the last war was no different from any that went before it" (p. 75). As proof, he cites at length the Carnegie Endowment report on the Balkan Wars, which points out: "When an excitable southern race, which has been schooled in Balkan conceptions of vengeance, begins to reason in this way, it is easy to predict the consequences. Deny that your enemies are men, and presently you will treat them as vermin" (p. 84).

I do not think one should dismiss "Balkan" aspects of the recent conflicts out of hand, but they deserve a better advocate. There are certainly similarities between the aims and practices of soldiers and states in the wars of 1912-13 and the recent Yugoslav wars. One can reasonably go further back and ask whether brigand and frontier traditions and patriarchal notions of honor and vengeance have persisted in the region and played their part in the conduct of the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, along with collective memories of past atrocities, obstinate dehumanizing stereotypes, and so on. Indeed, these are topics ripe for careful research. Judah, however, does not approach them carefully. He simply presents every episode of intercommunal violence in the Balkans as a telling harbinger of the 1990s. He does not explore the new elements that modern states and nationalist ideology brought to the equation, nor consider any possible comparisons to national conflict and ethnic cleansing beyond the Balkans. His one outside point of reference is Nazi Germany, in the form of a few casual asides suggesting similarities between the psychology of Germans then and Serbs today.

Judah quotes frequently from travelers and foreign observers--from Edward Brown in the 1670s through Alberto Fortis, Arthur Evans, Edith Durham, John Reed, Rebecca West--to show how little has changed in the Balkans. Kosovo in particular is depicted as a "land of the Living Past," a place where the whip periodically changes hands and life is an "elemental struggle for existence and survival of the strongest" (quoting favorably from Durham's comments in 1908, p. 306). I was hopeful at one point that Judah was going to use these accounts to better purpose: Chapter Six opens with the British glorification of "gallant little Serbia" during the First World War, contrasted with Edward Crankshaw's rebuttal in the Fall of the House of Habsburg (1963), in which he wrote of the Serbs' "treachery and cruelty" and "habit of conspiratorial violence." It seemed the point would be to discuss changing images of Serbia and their uses. Instead, Judah comments simply that "in the wake of the demise of communism and another treacherous and cruel war brought about thanks to the habits of 'conspiratorial violence,' one has to wonder whether any more proof is needed of man's predilection to repeat history" (p. 91).

If Maria Todorova's recent Imagining the Balkans continues to generate discussion, as in the exchange on HABSBURG in September, Judah should certainly take his modest place among contemporary recyclers of hoary balkanist motifs. Were they not crucial to his arguments, some of them--and there are a lot--could be shrugged off as another reporter's attempt to be colorful. (He often adopts a breezy journalistic style, as the subheads indicate: "High Noon of Empire," "From Pig Dealers to Princes," "Goodbye Slovenia, Hello Croatia," "Supergrandpa to the Rescue.") But Judah, and the Yale Press, claim the book is a scholarly history, so it needs to be held to higher standards.[6]

By focusing on some of the stories Serbs tell themselves, Judah neglects many less exotic but perhaps more essential elements of Serb nationalism. Aside from Ilija Garasanin's Nacertanije of 1844, the long-term plan for Serbia's expansion, Judah pays very little attention to the development of Serbia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the nature of its national ideologies, political cultures, and state traditions. These are important as myth as well as history: nostalgia for Serbia's "golden age" of 1903-14, for example. There is even less on nationalism among the Habsburg South Slavs, and thus no useful discussion of the points of conflict and congruence among the various Serb, Croat, and Yugoslav state and national ideas.

Judah does offer insights on the tensions between the rights of republics and of peoples in Yugoslavia after 1945. Otherwise, his account of Yugoslavia's history is even more cursory than Tanner's. He notes dismissively that Yugoslavia's "politicians spent years squabbling about what sort of state, federation or confederation" the country should be prior to 1991, a "grotesque rerun of all the old debates of the 1920s and 1930s" (pp. 104, 164). But he would have done well to spend more time laying out the substance of those debates. Curiously, there are just eight pages on the 1980s: brief accounts of the Academy's Memorandum and of Milosevic's ascent. Neither Judah nor Tanner address the economic crises of the era or the gradual collapse of central authority. Without such information, it is difficult to make sense of the Milosevic phenomenon or of the breakup. Indeed neither would seem to require much explanation, since Judah's history has pointed inexorably in their direction. Thus already in 1966 Yugoslavia entered a "long pre-war period" (p. 143). And "it can now be seen that many of the debates of 1970-71 in Croatia were simply a dress rehearsal for those of the late 1980s. Without Tito to draw everyone back from the brink, the second time around the national questions were pushed relentlessly to their bloody conclusions" (p. 146).

Such wisdom after the fact calls to mind John Lampe's recent admonition that "going forward into the past makes for bad history."[7] In both books, the slighting of Yugoslavia's history and the almost exclusive focus on conflict reinforce the impression that Yugoslavia could only be a detour from both nations' pursuits of their true, incompatible aspirations. To be fair, the authors are explicitly writing with hindsight, looking for antecedents to the country's violent dissolution. And both claim the breakup was not inevitable. But the story does seem a bit pat as they tell it. These books reflect the current reaction against the misplaced emphases and wishful thinking that once characterized a good deal of scholarship on Yugoslavia; Judah refers to the "blind alleys" of foreign literature (p. 141), while Tanner makes several asides criticizing Communist historians' jaundiced view of Croatian nationalism. I kept thinking, however, that the baby had gone out with the bathwater, and that by failing to consider how Yugoslavia functioned, they cannot explain how it collapsed.

Judah, like Tanner, is much stronger as a reporter. His chapters on the 1990s (Nine through Sixteen) are perceptive on the calculations of politicians and diplomats and on the self-fulfilling prophecies and spiraling violence of the war. No side is spared, though he places most of the blame squarely on Serbia's leaders. He is especially appalled by Milosevic's cynicism, in arming the Serbs and feeding their greatest fears and ambitions, while himself interested only in power. Judah pays more attention than most journalists to the plight of Serbs, but not at the expense of detailing the destruction of Muslim and Croat communities. The narrative is episodic, passing over certain issues but touching on a number of often neglected topics. He has very little on Serbia itself, for example, aside from a chapter on economic life under sanctions and hyperinflation; it does not really fit but is informative and spiced with black humor. Like the Economist for which he reported, Judah has a keen sense of irony. There are insightful discussions of war profiteering and of "cosy local deals and tacit agreements" across front lines (p. 210). Perhaps tellingly, he rarely refers back to his earlier arguments in these later chapters. In fact, his reporting often says more about how and why Serbs went to war than his history. Motives appear more complex and less epic and atavistic than he had made them out to be; contemporary insecurities and living memories seem more important than primordial elements of the national psyche.

Judah too ends his narrative abruptly, without a conclusion. This is one of several signs of haste in both books. The bibliographies are idiosyncratic and inadequate; many of the most important works in English on South Slav history are missing from both. Croatia in particular has a number of minor mistakes and misspellings, and its maps are sketchy and in many places inaccurate; The Serbs, on the other hand, includes detailed and informative maps and useful tables with census data.

Before concluding, I should mention a recent article by Robert Baldock, a senior acquisitions editor at Yale University Press, which discusses these books as part of the trend at university presses to recruit authors outside the academy.[8] Baldock, based in London, singles out Great Britain's Research Assessment Exercise, which has forced academics "onto a conveyor belt of publication" and "resulted in swifter, slighter, shallower books." At the same time, academic publishers are "looking beyond the specialty monograph and the 'tenure book' to secure a larger share of the publishing market." Baldock writes that at Yale and elsewhere editors are making a virtue of necessity, especially by turning to journalists, who are producing "works of major scholarship" by combining academic research with their "fieldwork" as reporters.

He cites the books by Tanner and Judah, but a much better model is his primary example, journalist Anatol Lieven's acclaimed book on The Baltic Revolution. In his effort to set the Baltic independence movements in historical perspective, Lieven is fully justified in calling on Czeslaw Milosz's nostalgia for the days when "a reporter, sociologist and a historian used to coexist within one man."[9] While it is perhaps unfair to compare this book to those under review, some of its virtues highlight the others' shortcomings. Lieven is tightly focused on his subjects but never parochial; for example, his narrative is informed by awareness of the scholarship on nationalism, allowing him to place his subjects in a larger context and to go beyond popular understandings. Also, while making his own sharp judgments, he presents a wide range of opinions from both scholars and participants. It seems to me a missed opportunity that Tanner and Judah do not offer a general audience some insight into the range of opinion on any number of important controversial questions with which they are dealing, especially since so little sense of the scholarly discussion on these topics has filtered through in all the media attention of the last seven years. Lieven is more humble in the face of his subjects' complexities, and less insistent on sticking to a single story line.

To sum up, neither book is adequate for undergraduates, and neither fills the need for an up-to-date survey of its subject for a general audience. They offer an introduction to certain important moments in each nation's historical memory, although one must be aware of misleading interpretations and omissions. The portions on the 1990s can be read with profit as vigorous complements to the available literature on the subject.

Notes:

[1]. Surveys published through 1995 are discussed in Gale Stokes, John Lampe, and Dennison Rusinow with Julie Mostov, "Instant History: Understanding the Wars of Yugoslav Succession," Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 136-60. Subsequent works include John Lampe's Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), reviewed on HABSBURG this spring, and Francine Friedman, The Bosnian Muslims: Denial of a Nation (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1996). Yugoslavia's breakup has done little to bring much-needed scholarly attention to Slovenia, Montenegro, or Kosovo.

[2]. "A Collective Madness," New York Times Book Review, June 22, 1997, p. 27.

[3]. Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1994), reviewed on HABSBURG in 1995.

[4]. Two articles in English provide an overview of Gross's interpretations of Croatian national movements: "Croatian National-Integrational Ideologies from the End of Illyrism to the Creation of Yugoslavia," Austrian History Yearbook 15-16 (1979-80): 3-44, and "On the Integration of the Croatian Nation: A Case Study in Nation Building," East European Quarterly 15, no. 2 (June 1981): 209-25.

[5]. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995).

[6]. Without the book's accompanying narrative, Judah's article for the Summer 1997 issue of Daedalus is something of a balkanist tour de force, intended, he writes, to correct the misconceptions of "ivory-tower scholars and lazy editorialists who believe that if a rational argument makes sense in New England or on 'Fleet Street,' it will also make sense in the Balkans" ("The Serbs: The Sweet and Rotten Smell of History," p. 23). For this issue of Daedalus, devoted to the theme, "A New Europe for the Old?," Tanner, too, has reworked portions of his book into an article on "Illyrianism and the Croatian Quest for Statehood."

[7]. Lampe, Yugoslavia, p. 2.

[8]. "Looking Beyond Academe for the Best Scholarly Books," The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 3, 1997, p. B6.

[9]. Quoted in Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2nd. ed., 1994), p. xxxvi.

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Citation: Dusan Djordjevich. Review of Judah, Tim, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia and Tanner, Marcus, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War. HABSBURG, H-Net Reviews. November, 1997.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1474

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