The Penguin History of the World

After the Cold War, the fate of peoples in eastern and south-eastern Europe seemed for the first time in the century entirely and evidently in their own hands. Like the old dynastic empires or the extemporizations of the German and Italian dictators in the Second World War, the Communist scaffolding of the region had now collapsed. As much buried history re-emerged and more was remembered or invented, what appeared was often discouraging. Slovaks felt restive about their inclusion in Czechoslovakia, but Slovakia itself had a large Hungarian percentage in its population, as did Romania. Hungarians could now agonize more openly over the treatment of Magyars both north and east of their borders. Above all, old issues escalated rapidly into new violence and crisis in the former Yugoslavia. In 1991, as all the former republics of the Yugoslav federal state declared their independence, wars were being fought between local Serbs and the new governments of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serb minorities were supported by the government in Belgrade, headed by the militant Serb nationalist Slobodan Milošević, and by the remnants of the Yugoslav federal army.

The civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina led to the worst atrocities against civilians in Europe since the end of the Second World War, as the three main ethnic groups – Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosniaks – tried to control as much territory as possible, often driving out the other population groups as they advanced. At Srebrenica Serb forces massacred several thousand Bosniak civilians in 1995, and Serbs besieged the Bosnian capital Sarajevo from 1992 until 1995. Both the European Union (as the EC was now called) and the United States were reluctant to intervene, and it was only military setbacks for the Serbs that made an agreement possible at Dayton, Ohio, in December 1995. From being a peaceful mosaic of different ethnic groups, Bosnia-Herzegovina had given rise to the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ – the expulsion by force of peoples who were defined as enemies. Croatia made use of the decline in Serb military fortunes throughout the region to reclaim Krajina, driving out many of the majority Serb population there. Having gone from one disaster to another in his so-called ‘defence’ of the Serbs, Milošević was finally toppled in 2000, after his heavy-handed policy in the Albanian-dominated region of Kosovo had led to NATO intervention against his troops. Fearful of a repetition of the Bosnian atrocities, the western allies had at last found agreement to intervene.

Thus, the early 1990s left millions of east Europeans facing grave problems and difficulties. Agreement was lacking on legitimating principles and ideas. In so far as the region had possessed ‘modernizing’ élites, these, whether effective or not, were usually to be found in the old Communist hierarchies. Unavoidably, professionals, managers and experts whose careers had been made within the Communist structures continued to govern, because there was no one to replace them. Another problem was the fickleness of populations now voting freely as the immediate euphoria of political revolution ebbed. There was nostalgia for the apparent security of the old days. As people cast about for a new basis for the legitimacy of the state, the only plausible candidate often seemed to be the nationalism that had so often bedevilled past politics, sometimes for centuries. Old tribalisms had quickly resurfaced and imaginary histories were soon turning out to matter as much as what had actually happened in the past.

Some ancient confrontations had, tragically, been brought to an end by the Second World War. In the most horrifying and greatest instance, the Holocaust, as people had come to call the Nazis’ attempt to extirpate the Jewish people, had ended the story of eastern Europe as the centre of world Jewry. In 1901 three-quarters of the world’s Jews had lived there, mostly in the Russian empire. In those once Yiddish-speaking areas, only a little more than 3 per cent of Jews now live. Nearly half of the world’s Jews are now to be found in Israel, and the other half mainly in the United States. In eastern Europe, Communist parties anxious to exploit traditional popular anti-Semitism (not least in the Soviet Union) had encouraged emigration by harrying and judicial persecution. In a few countries this virtually eliminated what was left in 1945 of the Jewish population as a significant demographic element. Two hundred thousand Polish Jews surviving in 1945 had soon found themselves again victims of traditional pogrom and harassment, and by 2010 those who had not emigrated numbered a mere 3,000, less than 0.01 percent of the population. The heart of the old eastern European Jewry had gone.