Complexity Science and World Affairs

Chapter Three: A Crucial Test Case:Why the Baltic Is not the Balkans

3 9 I want to say something . . . for the NEWS! I recently saw on TV. . . . Did you know, wretched girl, that the Serbs are the oldest nation? While the Kraut and English and American, six hundred years ago were eating pork with their fucking hands, we had this, and we’d gallantly . . . pick! At the Serbian court we ate with a fork and the Kraut with his damn fingers. Serbs . . . the oldest nation! [New speaker] It’s this fork that drove us in here, into a cave. —From the Serbian film Pretty Village, Pretty Flame [Lepa sela lepo gore] (1996)1 Here is a test for complexity science. Can it explain why, as communist rule collapsed in Eastern Europe, human development advanced relatively steadily in the Baltic region—but languished in most of the Balkans? Both regions had been repressed by alien despots for centuries; both were inhabited by combustible mixes of ethnic and religious groupings. Why then the near absence of ethnic violence in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania while most of the former Yugoslavia roiled in civil and cross-border war? Why the rapid consolidation of democracy and market economics in the Baltic countries compared to halting movements toward political and economic freedom—not chapter three A Crucial Test Case: Why the Baltic Is not the Balkans 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 16 17 18 19 20 4 0 C O M P L E X I T Y S C I E N C E A N D W OR L D A F FA I R S only in Yugoslavia but in most Balkan polities? This chapter examines several potential explanations including those from complexity science. It concludes that divergent profiles in societal fitness go far toward explaining divergent patterns of development in the Baltic and Balkan regions. Contrasts between political leaders in the two regions were also critical, but they served as immediate causes that reflected long-term, underlying differences in political cultures and societal fitness. A glance at other post-communist regimes helps to put the Baltic and Balkan cases in perspective. As detailed in chapter 5 below, transitions in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia went relatively smoothly. For Russia and most other former Soviet republics, many aspects of postcommunism were difficult and remained so in the twenty-first century. So this chapter focuses on two sets of outliers—the Baltic republics and the states that emerged from Yugoslavia, with some references to other Balkan states—Albania, Romania, and Bulgaria. Two other Balkan states, Greece and Turkey, with no heritage of communist rule, are mentioned only in passing. Why study these contrasts? Is this a meaningful case or just a straw man? In 1988–1991 it was not clear that the Baltic peoples—Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians—could or would reemerge, without war, as modern nations. Their successes may suggest lessons for others—in the Balkans and elsewhere— struggling to restrain ethnic conflict and develop in freedom. How to Measure Transitions in the Baltic and the Balkans Casualties from Ethnic and Political Conflict The three Baltic republics regained independence from Moscow with little violence and soon flourished in conditions of political and economic freedom. Many Balkan communities, by contrast, suffered years of civil and cross-border violence. The most telling comparison between the two regions is the number of persons killed in ethnic or political fighting during the transition from communist rule. None died in Estonia and fewer than forty altogether in the other two Baltic republics—all killed by Soviet troops. In the former Yugoslavia, by contrast, more than one hundred thousand civilians and soldiers died fighting in 1991–95. The conflict forced nearly 2.2 million people to flee their homes, moving mostly to regions within the country controlled by their own ethnic group, but with many moving abroad (Judah 2000, 101, 133–34, 361; Tanner 1997, 278). Besides physical suffering, there was also great psychological trauma. (Flögel and Lauc n.d.) Considerable ethnic cleansing and rape took place. Long after the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, many thousands of persons remained uprooted in the Balkans—Europe’s largest refugee population since the 1940s. A C R U C I A L T E S T C A S E 4 1 Ethnic minorities in Slovenia constituted only 13 percent of the population, but they too faced...