Bosnia

If Bosnians had lived together for centuries, where did the idea of eternal enmity come from? Malcolm's answer is that it was largely built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and much of it was built outside Bosnia altogether. Nationalism in the Balkans arrived as an import, a European fashion for organising peoples into distinct nations with historic destinies. In the hands of Serbian and Croatian nation-builders, the mixed population of Bosnia became a problem to be sorted: its Orthodox inhabitants reclassified as Serbs, its Catholics as Croats, its Muslims as an anomaly to be claimed, converted, or explained away.

The past was raided for ammunition. The medieval Serbian empire, the great defeat at Kosovo in 1389, became not history but sacred grievance, a wound to be avenged in each generation. Muslims were recast as the descendants of traitors and Turks, an alien presence on Serbian or Croatian soil. None of this described how people actually lived; it described how ambitious politicians needed them to be seen. The point of the myth was never accuracy. It was mobilisation.

The destruction of Bosnia, in Malcolm's account, was not a spontaneous eruption but a strategy. As Yugoslavia came apart at the end of the 1980s, the Serbian leadership under Slobodan Milošević pursued a project of gathering all Serbs into a single enlarged state. Bosnia, mixed as it was, stood squarely in the way. A country where no group held a clear majority could not simply be partitioned along clean lines — which meant that the lines would have to be created by force, by removing the people who lived on the wrong side of them.

The instrument was the euphemism the war made infamous: ethnic cleansing. When Bosnia declared independence in 1992, after a referendum boycotted by most Serbs, forces armed and directed largely from Belgrade moved to carve out territory. Villages were emptied, populations expelled, towns besieged. The aim was not to win a battle in the old sense but to make coexistence impossible — to render the mixed society ungovernable so that separation would appear to be the only remedy. The camps, the mass expulsions, the shelling of Sarajevo were means to that end.

Here the book turns its argument outward, and this is where its charge becomes uncomfortable. The myth of ancient hatred was not only a Serbian propaganda tool; it was adopted, more or less wholesale, by the Western politicians and diplomats who might have acted to stop the war. If the conflict was the latest chapter in a thousand-year cycle of tribal bloodletting, then it was nobody's fault and nobody's responsibility — a natural disaster, regrettable but beyond outside remedy. The story that excused the aggressors also excused the bystanders.

Malcolm's indictment is that this misreading shaped policy. Western governments treated all sides as roughly equivalent, imposed an arms embargo that in practice hurt the poorly armed Bosnian government most, and pursued negotiations whose logic — dividing the country into ethnic blocs — quietly ratified the very cleansing that had produced the blocs. To accept the map the gunmen were drawing was to reward the method. A history that could have been argued about was instead surrendered to the simplest and most fatalistic version available.

The country that was shelled from the hills in 1992 and 1993 had a past far older and far richer than the war that consumed it. For a thousand years it had absorbed Rome and Byzantium, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, four faiths and countless languages, and had gone on being recognisably Bosnia. That achievement was not an accident of geography or a fragile lull between massacres. It was a way of living, and it was destroyed not by the weight of its own history but by a decision to erase it.