Conflicts and seductions: some case studies in the Western Mediterranean World (16th-17th c.)

Abstract

The unexpected disintegration, in 1991-92, of former Yugoslavia -a new name given in 1945 to a state created in 1919 to rally around Serbia all the Southern Slavs of the former Austro-Ungarian and Ottoman Empires- and ruled for 45 years by an independent (from Moscow) communist party, four years of a war that killed first of all civilian populations and displaced millions of people all over the country, and the fragility of the peace at last signed in Bosnia under the American pressure, relived under the eyes of the Europeans, unable of any effectual intervention, a story that looked to them to be part of the past. Even if the position of the Serbs in the Federation -too strong for the non-Serbs and not enough for the Serbs themselves- was the starting point, it became very quickly not only a matter of political and national conflict, as would be, for instance, the struggle for a greater autonomy, or even independance, of a region (like Catalonia or Basque country versus Spain) or a linguistic and ethnic minority (like, in southern Jugoslavia, the Albanians that are now the majority of the population in Serbs dominated Kossovo, or in northern Serbia, Ungarian speaking minority of Voivodina). Closely related, and often assimilated as indissociable and confirming each other, religion and culture could be described as the basic factors of the conflict, because they were or became the key of the identification of both friends and enemies. Their importance was evident between catholic Slovenians, Croatians and Dalmatians from one side, and orthodox Serbs from the other, that were divided by a borderline inherited from the late Roman Empire, with a limited number of enclaves of both sides in the other's territory, the importance of these two factors. But it was even more crucial in Bosnia, that was for more than three years the core of the conflict: for Bosnia was a republic without any strong or "historical" or "ethnic" identity, and as such a kind of example to the contrary, that could only be defined by the long coexistence in the same area of not only "Latins" and Greeks", ie. catholics and orthodox, but also of a large muslim minority, all of them confusely mixed on the field, without any geographical coherence except, in many places, for the opposition between the towns dominated by the Muslim and the coutry-side inhabited by Serbs.peasants.