Heart-space, home-space, safe-space Reflections on the Yugoslavian conflict by Palden Jenkins 15 April 1999

Understanding the background to the current Kosovo crisis is complex. Across Europe there is much empathy with Kosovans, and consternation without rancour toward most Serbians. A complexity of stray feelings clouds the issue. Many people seem deeply, personally stirred by this conflict.

Why? Because it touches our own lives, personally. It concerns safety, our right to exist as we are, our emotional heritage and future. It dredges up hidden, trans-generational shadows accrued across the centuries. It asks us what we should do about these shadows now. Especially with regard to tribalism.

Deep in the mists of our history, we have a dim recall of tribal living which is re-activated in situations like this. Tribes were familial, secure and locally-evolved, providing social hearths to gather round. They were not just functional living units – they were social-psychological safe-spaces, home-grounds. They gave a sense of social bonding, of connection and tradition. These needs are difficult to fulfil today – we're now more on our own.

Up to about 1500 years ago, there was space for movement in Europe if tribes couldn't get on. For reasons unremembered, the Serbs moved from the Pripet Marsh area, now in Belarus, in the 600s. They migrated probably because of growing numbers and changing fortunes, and to avoid asiatic marauders such as the Avars.

They occupied a niche created by the fluxings of Rome, Byzantium and the Huns. Kosovo, a picturesque, homely hill-and-valley enclave, became the Serbs' much-loved safe-space. Fighting off foreign encroachment (initially from Byzantines, Bulgars and Magyars) became their historic habit.

The Balkans offered many enclaves. It had become ethnically complex by the Middle Ages. There were Macedonians and Illyrians (Albanians), long affected by Greece and Rome, plus immigrant Slavs such as the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, plus other incomers such as the Bulgars (relatives of the Huns) and Magyars (Hungarians). Into this came the Bogomils, exile Byzantine heretics, who settled in Macedonia and Bosnia. Later, there came missions from Byzantium and Rome, seeking converts and influence. Balkan ethnic groups nevertheless retained their distinctness.

The Serbs, united as one nation around 1169, became a dominant local power in the early 1300s. They invaded Albania, Montenegro, Macedonia and Greece. This was their high-point. But they were soon painfully beaten by the newly-arrived Ottoman Turks, who fought them at the Field of Blackbirds (Kosovo Polje) in 1389. This was a defining, painful moment for Serbs. Like the Battle of the Boyne for Irish Catholics, it broke the heart of the nation. The pain from this event still affects Serbs today, and Serb nationalists pull on its memory.

At the Field of Blackbirds, Serbian feelings and their home-space, Kosovo, were pierced to the heart. The loss of their home-space imprinted a shadow of victimhood and national failure on the national psyche. Quite a few nations, including Britain, suffer such imprints. National downfall sparks a variety of responses over time, including quiet grudging suffering, fighting back or becoming an expansionist power. Here, the hidden heritage of the British interlocks somewhat with that of the Serbs. British heart-space was broken four times by foreign invasion (Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans) and has been threatened many more times since. Both countries, as a result, act out an emphasised inferiority-superiority complex, a dogged national stoicism.

There is something uncomfortable which is conveniently overlooked in history. It rests with this contentious statement: a culture is destroyed and a people's heart is broken only if they, between themselves, are already fragmented, already hardened with mutual distrust. The splintering of the tribal 'circle of power', the growth of heartlessness and disappointed cynicism, usually starts as an internal ethnic matter. Outside pressures have a roughly equal chance of either strengthening or fragmenting the heart of a people – as NATO actions against Serbia currently demonstrate.

The collective responsibility for social and ethnic disintegration rests with ordinary people and the choices they make when confronted with its early signs. They can permit it to happen or prevent it. When the symptoms arise, something has to be done. If shoulder-shrugging prevails, the slippery slope gets steeper. The majority goes into denial, or they hope things will sort themselves out. Only later does disaster arise to pinpoint the truth. Once society fragments emotionally, the social guilt thus generated is usually projected on to scapegoats, minorities or 'enemies', to keep the denial going. Here lies a cause of much distress in history.

For many different peoples, this breakdown took place during their social transition from tribe into nation – into ethnic adulthood and recognition. Tribes frequently formed confederacies, yet such alliances held firm only while common interests prevailed. Thus, the Romans invaded Britain by craftily exploiting divisions between the different British ('Celtic') tribes. Divide and rule. Later, the English exploited such differences between their imperial subjects, starting with the Welsh, Irish and Scots. The diverse Balkan peoples were similarly exploited over time by Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, Habsburgs, Russians and Germans. Big power intervention has caused trouble in the Balkans for over two millennia.

St Sava, a Serb royal who became a monk, brought about the Serb adoption of Orthodox Christianity in the 1100s, both for religious and geopolitical reasons. He once said "Serbia is in the East to the West and in the West to the East". In this he encapsulated the geopolitical dilemma of Serbia, still operating today. By aligning with the East (Orthodoxy), Serbia gained big-power protection from Byzantium. Yet this drove Serbs into rivalry with their Slavic neighbours, the Croats, who became Catholics and Western-oriented.

Two centuries later, when the Ottomans invaded, the Serbs retained their Orthodox national traditions. Meanwhile, Albanians and Bosniaks mostly adopted Islam, adapting to the prevailing Ottoman order. Serbs saw these new Muslims as contemptible traitors. Many Serbs migrated north from Kosovo into today's Serbia from the 1400s onwards. But the dream of a Greater Serbia, broken by the Turks, was not forgotten.

What caused Serbian nationhood and pride to fall to the Ottomans? It was not solely Ottoman military might. How was the Serbian heart already weakened? The answer lies in the transition from tribalism to nationhood – in Serbia this was in the 1100s.

Across medieval Europe, nationhood was usually defined by monarchs and nobles, sanctioned by the Church. Nobles, initially from powerful tribal families, became increasingly drawn from loyal and successful henchmen whose royal allegiance was rewarded with power and estates. Property systems and social rights thus changed considerably. This transition constituted a betrayal of the ordinary people, a powerful wrenching away of communal trust. It was deeply felt.

Tribal chiefs had largely held power on behalf of their people – even if imperfectly. Medieval nobles held power on behalf of their king, over the people. Often they had little personal, emotional connection with their subjects. Their feudal duty was to rule localities, gather tithes and taxes, raise fighting forces and keep order. The lords' ascent to power meant ordinary people's own loss of status, rights and influence. Tribesfolk became bound serfs. Individually, some gained and some lost, yet, for everyone, the extended tribal community disintegrated.

To uncover the emotional wrenching-point where modern Serbian nationalist resentments arose, it is therefore inaccurate to look at the Ottoman defeat of the Serbs in Kosovo in 1389. We need to go further back to Serbia's transition into nationhood in the 1100s, and to the feudal cleavage of Serb society accompanying it. Here the nations' heart, its social immune system, was weakened. The short-lived, ambitious rise of Serbian power in the 1300s, followed by its collapse at the hands of the Ottomans, hardened the pattern. And the list of subsequent national tragedies, including two world wars, toughened it even more. This aspect of the national psyche became embodied in the hard-nosed nationalism of Slobodan Milosevic and his kind in the 1990s.

Other nations have had their own variations and degrees of social tragedy, internal betrayal and external threat, harking back to medieval and ancient times. This is possibly why the poignancy and tragedy of events in 1990s Yugoslavia hits other Europeans in a surprisingly personal way – it reminds us of something in ourselves. Yugoslavia jiggles a dormant memory.

In our wars and strife we unconsciously, ineptly and ruinously fight to reinstate safe-space and heart-space – at least for our own people. We have deep, hidden memory-traces of the childhood and youth of our peoples. A memory of security, folk-songs and kinship gatherings, of knowing everyone we meet – even if romanticised. It's a cuddly feeling, like falling asleep in someone's lap. This childlike, even feminine, feeling affects even the toughest and most rational of people – especially when things go wrong. When mixed with pain, it can become suicidal or lash out. It sometimes overrides sanity and forethought. Strangely, this touchiness generates the very passion which fuels war and atrocity.

When a person experiences hardship, deprivation and trauma in childhood and youth, they tend to see themselves as pitted against a cruel world. This happens to nations too. Uncomfortably, the Balkan crisis prompts us to ask questions about ourselves. What makes the British jump into war so much? What makes us feel compassion for victims and refugees? What makes us take it upon ourselves to intervene in Kosovo – deep down, beneath the geopolitical rationales? Perhaps the answer is this: we are reminded of ourselves. Deep feelings are activated, arising from our collective historical experience and the jostling archetypes and imprints within our national psyche.

There is a Kosovan in each of us somewhere. This safe-space business irks us, since we are unsure where the edges of our tribal heart-space now lie. Are English Brits or Anglos? Are Ulsterfolk British or Irish, neither or both? Are we primarily British or Europeans? Or world citizens? Do our hearts live happily within our sovereign national boundaries, or do they overspill frontiers? Whatever principles we establish as we redefine the safe-space of Kosovans and Serbs, our own notions of home-space are now under review too.

Diplomats, politicians and generals come and go, yet trans-generational feelings last a long time. This is no justification for war, ethnic cleansing or xenophobia, yet respecting this demonstrated fact helps us understand Serbs, Kosovans and ourselves. The approaching new millennium brings with it an undercurrent of hope to resolve and heal old national and international wounds. Is this a vain idea? In the tragic complexity of the Balkans, happy solutions look impossible. This frustrates us personally. It is not only revulsion, sympathy or concern which fire us. There's something to learn about us here, if we choose to look at it. This might help in establishing peace in the Balkans too.

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