Perception and policy. Balkanism and the Dutch intervention in Bosnia

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Perception and policy

Balkanism and the Dutch intervention in Bosnia

Erik de Lange 6032400

History (Research MA) University of Amsterdam 2014

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‘Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule;

cigarette, computer, t-shirt, television, tourism, war. Nobody speaks the

exception. It isn’t spoken, it is written; Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It is composed;

Gershwin, Mozart. It is painted; Cézanne, Vermeer. It is filmed; Antonioni,

Vigo. Or it is lived, then it is the art of living; Srebrenica, Mostar, Sarajevo’

- Jean-Luc Godard, Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993)

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Introduction

The Yugoslav wars of the 1990’s were also a conflict of images, the disintegration of

Yugoslavia was also the disintegration of an image. The abandoned villages in Bosnia’s hilly interior, the countless graves on the slopes surrounding Sarajevo, the ruins of destroyed or damaged cultural heritage: they all mark the scope of the conflict and the extent of the violence. They illustrate the nature of the war; the targeting of civilian populations, the wish to eradicate the enemy’s former presence. Yet these markers can only hint at that other side to the Yugoslav conflict. Besides bringing about severe atrocities and mass death as well as cultural and economic destruction, the Yugoslav wars were also fought on the level of perception, representation, and image formation; on the level of imagology.

In 1991, as warfare commenced, the socialist federation of Yugoslavia collapsed into a semantic sinkhole. The idea of Yugoslav federalism based on the brotherhood and unity of socialist egalitarianism imploded as notions of national Serb, Slovene, Croat, and Muslim selfhood rose in prominence. The wars waged under the guise of these nationalist agendas also significantly altered the outside perception of Yugoslavia. Whereas the old federation was once held in high esteem as the most open and liberal of all communist states in Eastern-Europe, its disintegration shifted foreign understanding: Yugoslavia became a region of backwardness and barbarity. Yugoslavia, or rather its follow-up states, became the epitome of older disparaging images of what was supposed to be the nature of the Balkans. Thus the conflict could become known as ‘Balkan’ rather than ‘Yugoslav’. The war, then, was perceived as but the latest rerun of an ancient cycle of violent, even barbaric conflict in the Balkans.

Still, this imagological side to the conflict was not confined to Yugoslavia and perceptions of Yugoslavia. The wars fought in lands adjacent to Italy and Austria also impacted

conceptions of European selfhood. Many outside observers recognised what was happening in Yugoslavia as the local restaging of a European history rife with hatred, violence and

destruction. Others thought it unacceptable that war was waged in such proximity to the continental heartland of Western Europe. Some believed that as the European Community failed to find and enforce a solution to the conflict, the whole development towards European cooperation was irreparably damaged.

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The Netherlands, normally a rather small and easily ignored though not completely

uninfluential player on both a world and European stage, holds a very singular position in this history of imagological conflict. Unexpectedly, Dutch and Yugoslav pasts became intertwined in this episode of violent disintegration. In the function of president to the European

Community the Dutch minister of foreign affairs Hans van den Broek was directly involved in the earliest foreign diplomatic ventures of the Yugoslav conflict. In the years that followed, the Dutch political elite would become a strong supporter of a more active stance,

championing intervention at the United Nations, NATO, and among the cooperating European states. Deeply convinced of acting in a sound and ethically just way, the Dutch government became one of the most vocal advocates of more international commitment to solving the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. The deplorable situation in the Balkans was juxtaposed to idealised notions of Dutch selfhood and the righteous role that the Netherlands could play on the world stage of international politics. This constructed opposition lay at the base of the conviction to act, it was repeatedly worded but with ever increasing prominence as the wars in Yugoslavia continued and debates on intervention unfolded. To follow words with deeds, it was decided, virtually without parliamentary opposition, to provide Dutch military personnel to help in relieving the plight of Yugoslavia’s civilian population and to further the peace process. First a transport battalion was deployed to Croatia to assist in the distribution of humanitarian aid, later actual troops were offered to man the UN mission in Bosnia. The latter were stationed in the East Bosnian town of Srebrenica: an overcrowded enclave of Muslim refugees surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces. The task at hand was protecting the Srebrenica ‘safe area’, or rather to ‘deter by presence’ any Bosnian Serb incentive to attack. In the morning of 11 July 1995 whatever pretence of safety had existed was brutally demolished as Bosnian Serb forces overran the enclave while the Dutch ‘peace keepers’ helplessly stood by. In the days that followed over 7,000 people were killed in one the worst atrocities of the Yugoslav wars. Srebrenica has haunted Dutch historical conscience ever since, destabilising ideas of national moral haughtiness, and becoming perhaps the darkest episode in the contemporary history of the Netherlands.

Plenty has been written about the fall of the enclave and the Dutch decision to intervene in the Yugoslav wars. Various parliamentary inquiries were held and a publicly financed

research committee was set up to shed light on what happened, what did not happen and what could have happen in those dark days of 1995 and the months that preceded them.

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projects were subsequently subject to extensive scholarly debate. What has been understudied in this expanding historiography is the imagological side to the events. How did Dutch

understandings of the Balkans reflect the decision to intervene in the Yugoslav wars? What effects did the shifting perceptions of Yugoslavia and the Balkans have on Dutch policy? Granted, in the hefty Srebrenica report published by the appointed research committee, questions of perception are posed.1 An appendix to the main report even has these questions as its central topic.2 The problem with both, however, is that they fail to link images of the Balkans to the Dutch policy conducted. The two issues are studied in isolation and not

brought together in a single perspective. Hence the study of perceptions comes off more as an illustration of the various arguments raised in Dutch debates on intervention in the former Yugoslavia than as an integral, constitutive part of the decision-making process.

This shortcoming in the historiography can mainly be explained by pointing out the rather simplistic way in which representations of the Balkans are analysed in the Srebrenica rapport and its appendix on Dutch perceptions of the region. Bruno Naarden, emeritus professor of Russian history and author of the perceptional study, categorises Dutch notions of the Balkans according to the basic distinction of negative and positive. He then subdivides on the basis of nationality. Hence, his study tallies the numerous shifts from positive to negative perceptions of Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, Slovenes, and Albanians alike. Though this approach does provide some insight into remarkable reversals it ultimately fails to clarify the functioning of these changes. Naarden argues that a noticeable ‘switch from a positive to a negative image of the Balkans’ occurred as the war in Yugoslavia flared up, but he does not even attempt to inquire into the effect that this ‘switch’ had on Dutch policy.3_{The Srebrenica report itself}

seemingly does take on this problem. It marks the different variations in the images of the Balkans employed in the debate on intervention. Besides noting that these perceptions were influential the exact workings of Balkan images in policy formation largely remain unclear.4 These analytical shortcomings are most certainly caused by the simple dichotomy of positive versus negative images. The practices of image formation are much more complex since they often transcend this easy distinction. That the large body of work on Balkan images in all their subtle varieties is barely consulted in the Dutch historiography illustrates these flaws.

1_{Srebrenica, een ’veilig’ gebied. Reconstructie, achtergronden, gevolgen en analyses van de val van een Safe}

Area (Amsterdam 2002) p. 180.

2_{B. Naarden, Beeld en Balkan. Waarneming en werkelijkheid van Zuidoost-Europa (Amsterdam 2002).} 3_{Naarden, Beeld en Balkan, p. 48.}

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To tackle the issue of Dutch perceptions of the Balkans and their influence on foreign policy I analyse the decision-making process preceding the intervention in Bosnia through the theoretical frameworks of imagology. By studying the shifting Dutch notions of the Balkans in great detail and connecting my findings to an inquiry into the formation of foreign policy on Yugoslavia, I clarify how these images shaped and framed Dutch conduct during the Yugoslav wars. The central problem at hand in is what sorts of images of the Balkans were employed by Dutch policy makers in the debate on intervention preceding the deployment of troops to Srebrenica in 1993. Following the premise that particular perceptions were of great significance in the formulation, presentation and legitimation of policy I search for

articulations of these perceptions in written and spoken statements. To illustrate the

prevalence of some images over others I also look into their formulation in a different genre, namely that of academic writing. The occurrence of comparable, sometimes even completely similar, notions in governmental and scientific circles shows both the omnipresence of certain conceptions as well as the ways in which academics helped legitimize political rhetoric. Analysing Dutch foreign policy in the months preceding the deployment of troops to Bosnia, political scientist Norbert Both has stated that ‘one is studying the behaviour not of a

government but of a single-issue pressure group’.5 Doing ‘something’ about the Yugoslav crisis by any means was this single issue. My aim is to clarify how this strongly felt aim was supported by particular notions, perceptions, and understandings of the Balkans as a unique region clearly differentiated from Western Europe, juxtaposed as it was to an idealised vision of the Netherlands and its international standing.

From the abyss: Yugoslavia and balkanism

While the events of the 1990’s are now commonly referred to as the Yugoslav wars or as the disintegration or collapse of Yugoslavia, back then the reference to the socialist state was often discarded in favour of the signifier ‘Balkan’. The events in the former Yugoslavia were not uncommonly named Balkan wars. This process of naming is in itself remarkable because in the decades preceding the disintegration few outside observers or even inhabitants of the socialist federation would refer to Yugoslavia as Balkan.6 The catastrophe of the 1990’s with

5_{N. Both, From indifference to entrapment. The Netherlands and the Yugoslav crisis 1990-1995 (Amsterdam}

2000) p. 150.

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all its violence and destruction apparently exemplified what was understood as ‘Balkan’. What happened in Yugoslavia was the Balkan image put to practice.

Equally inspired and appalled by this framing of the Yugoslav wars, Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova took on the task of inquiring into the history of the Balkans as a concept or image. Following Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism on the construction of the Orient as the depraved ‘Other’ to a Western ‘Self’, Todorova coined the offshoot term ‘balkanism’.7_{In her}

Imagining the Balkans she goes on to explain the considerable differences between the two

-isms. ‘Unlike Orientalism, which is a discourse about an imputed opposition’, she writes, ‘balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity’.8_{The Balkans are neither ‘here’ nor}

‘there’, they do not belong to Asia nor can they sufficiently be called European.

Geographically the region may be part of Europe, but culturally and historically it has been liminally European at best. The Balkans are antithetical yet internal to Europe. Hence they are ‘Europe’s dark side within’, characterised by barbarity, instability, and backwardness.9

Supposedly the Balkan peoples ‘do not care to conform to the standards of behaviour devised as normative by and for the civilized world’.10

This balkanism may have flared up to unprecedented heights during the closing years of the twentieth century, in its contents it dates back over three centuries. Todorova clarifies this historical rootedness by distinguishing the lineage of the whole discourse from that of its main tropes:

‘balkanism expresses the idea that explanatory approaches to phenomena in Southeastern Europe, that is, the Balkans, often rest upon a discourse (...) or a stable system of stereotypes (for those who shun the notion of “discourse”) which place the Balkans in a cognitive straightjacket. I also argued for the historicity of balkanism, which as a discourse was shaped only in the early decades of the twentieth century, but whose genealogy steps on patterns of representation from the sixteenth century onward. I thus insisted on the historical grounding of balkanism in the Ottoman period’.11

Balkanism as a stable, recurrent set of stereotypes is thus a construct of the years surrounding World War I, a period in which the region experienced a fair share of upheavals as nation states were on the rise and battled each other (and the waning Ottoman Empire) in the Balkan

7_{E. Said, Orientalism (New York 1978) and Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 9.} 8_{Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 17.}

9_{Ibid., p. 47.} 10_{Ibid., p.3.}

11_{M. Todorova, ‘Balkanism and postcolonialism, or on the beauty of the airplane view’ in: C. Bradatan and}

Oushakine, S. (eds.), In Marx’s shadow. Knowledge, power, and intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia (Lanham 2010) 175-196, p. 176.

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Wars of 1912 and 1913. The fragmenting of Yugoslavia into various sides that were involved in bloody conflict was merely a return to old form in the eyes of many outside observers, and thus old stereotypes could become relevant again.

One of the main features of the distinction between civilised Europe and its ambiguous Balkan antithesis is that the division is above all a temporal one. Europe and the Balkans are not so much located in different geographical zones, they exist on different temporal levels. Within balkanism Europe or the West is synonymous to progress and order whereas the Balkans are defined by lack, backwardness and late-coming. Europe in this sense belongs to Time: that is time understood as development, while the Balkans clearly does not.12 It is a division that, according to Todorova, essentially ‘ghettoizes’ the region in a ‘diachronic spatial continuity’.13_{They, the Balkan peoples, exist in a time distinct from ‘our’ European}

one. The temporal divide has shaped historical understanding as well. Whereas the West-European past is characterised by the progress or at least development of a linear chronology, the Balkans are marred by an ever recurring past, a past that never really becomes history. The ‘eternal Balkans’ thus seem to be imprisoned in a closed-off cycle of recurrent crises and instability, which account for the region’s civilizational failings.14

Though balkanism as a system of stereotypes is based on the foundational yet nebulous distinction between Europe and the Balkans, its usage need not be confined to Westerners. Not just British, Austrian, French or Dutch officials, observers and visitors ventilated and upheld balkanist tropes. The same stereotypes have also been (and still are) employed by inhabitants of the region. In an act of shifting the blame that has been termed ‘nesting

orientalism’ or ‘discursive collaboration’, Balkan actors could refer to their more or less direct neighbours as ‘truly Balkan’.15_{Thus Serbians could look down upon Albanians, Croats on}

Serbians, and Slovenes on all of them. Within the study of balkanism there is great caution not to fall into the trap of treating the two sides in the imagological framework as stable,

12_{Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 43.}

13_{Ibid., p. 79. Additionally, she stated: ‘I have been very open about my political agenda: I resent the}

ghettoization of the Balkans. All I can do within my capacity is expose the legitimizing intellectual

underpinnings of this ghettoization. (...) the latter can take the form of crude “balkanism” which is fairly easy to expose. It can also take the form of an “objective” scholarly description and analysis’, M. Todorova, ‘The Balkans as category of analysis. Borders, space, time’ in: G. Stourzh (ed.), Annäherungen an eine europäische

Geschichtsschreibung (Vienna 2002) 57-83, p. 80.

14_{A. Hammond, ‘“The danger zone of Europe”. Balkanism between the Cold War and 9/11’, European Journal}

of Cultural Studies 8:2 (2005) 135-154, p. 146; E. Michail, The British and the Balkans. Forming images of foreign lands, 1900–1950 (London 2011) p. 92.

15_{M. Bakić-Hayden and Hayden, R., ‘Orientalist variations on the theme "Balkans". Symbolic geography in}

recent Yugoslav cultural politics’, Slavic Review 51:1 (1992) 1-15, p. 4; A. Hammond, ‘Introduction’ in: Idem (ed.), The Balkans and the West. Constructing the European Other, 1945-2003 (Aldershot 2004) xi-xxiii, p. xvi.

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evident and clearly bounded entities. As British literary scholar Andrew Hammond has noted: ‘the subject and object of a representational framework, through their production of similar imageries, are not always antagonists within that framework but can also be co-conspirators in its assignment of meaning and value’.16 The whole asymmetry could even be turned upside-down as the idea of a wild, uninhibited Balkan spirit was sometimes posed as a virtuous counter-image to the depraved decadence displayed in Western Europe.17 Indeed, the portrayal of Balkan peoples as barbarians was not ‘a purely West-European pastime’.18

Over the decade and a half since Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans was first published, the study of balkanism has become a historiographical field in its own right.19 Despite consensus on the basic principles outlined above, there is fierce debate on the relation

between balkanism and politics.20 ‘It seems curious’, one scholar remarks, ‘that for a field so grounded in Saidian analysis the political interests governing representation are rarely studies of balkanism, despite the fact that a full understanding of the forms and transformations of any discourse is dependent exactly on such analysis’.21_{After all, in his Orientalism Edward}

Said clearly connected the colonial subjugation of the Orient to the systems through which the Orient was represented, perceived, and described. At least in part because the ‘colonial’ status of the Balkans is a contested topic, such connections are much more implicit in balkanism.22 Todorova has hinted at the political ramifications of balkanism while refraining from specifying these links.23 As historian James Evans has concluded in his work on British diplomacy and the creation of the first Yugoslavia (the kingdom that existed from 1919 to 1941) it may be difficult to prove that certain perceptions were instrumental in shaping foreign policy. Perhaps this complication has resulted in the lack of political analysis in

16_{Hammond, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi.}

17_{Z. Milutinović, Getting over Europe. The construction of Europe in Serbian culture (Amsterdam and New}

York 2011) pp. 26 and 77.

18_{A. Drace-Francis, ‘A provincial imperialist and a curious account of Wallachia. Ignaz von Born’, European}

History Quarterly 36:61 (2006) 61-89, p. 81. For examples see V. Drapac, Constructing Yugoslavia. A transnational history (Basingstoke 2010) p. 205 and P. Hockenos, Homeland calling. Exile patriotism and the Balkan Wars (Ithaca and London 2003) p. 141.

19_{V. Harms, ‘From Balkan heights to Western discourse. Maria Todorova and the making of a level playing}

field’, Colloquia. Journal for Central European History XIX (2012) pp. 146-163. Also my own

historiographical overview: E. de Lange, ‘Balkanism as historiography. Development of debate and discourse’ at https://uva.academia.edu/ErikdeLange.

20_{A. Hammond, ‘Typologies of the East. On distinguishing Balkanism and Orientalism’, Nineteenth-Century}

Contexts 29:2/3 (2007) pp. 201-218, there p. 204; Drapac, Constructing Yugoslavia, p. 46; V. Velickovic,

‘Belated alliances? Tracing the intersections between postcolonialism and postcommunism’, Journal of

Postcolonial Writing 48:2 (2012) pp. 164-175.

21_{Hammond, ‘Typologies of the East’, p. 204.}

22_{A. Hammond, ‘The uses of Balkanism. Representation and power in British travel writing, 1850-1914’,}

Slavonic and East European Review 82:3 (2004) 601-624, p. 623.

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balkanism. However, that specific and broadly held assumptions were liable to remain unspoken need not mean that they were not influential.24

A few authors have pointed out that the stereotypes of balkanism were strongly tied to the policies conducted by American and European governments during the Yugoslav wars. Some go so far as to state that balkanism has provided the arbitrary spatial context for the ‘imperial management’ of the region through bombing campaigns and economic programmes.25

‘Balkanism not only represents the Balkans as a place of violence, but it also in part

introduces violence in the Balkans on behalf of its concepts’, states the sociologist Dušan

Bjelić.26

In these cases balkanism supposedly functions as a so-called ‘basic discourse’. Defined as a spatial, temporal, and ethical ideal-type central to bounding radically different ‘Others’ and ‘Selves’, basic discourses are employed to argue for particular policy decisions. In her study of American governmental responses to the war in Bosnia, Lene Hansen claims that the basic balkanist discourse of a ‘violent, tribal, hating, and backwards’ Balkans strengthened the idea that the patterns of regional violence were essentially unbreakable, so there was no ‘moral responsibility for intervening and bringing the war to a halt’.27_{Balkanism thus supposedly}

served a policy of inaction. The opposed basic ‘genocide’ discourse, Hansen claims, rearticulated Balkan uniformity and essentialism by separating a ‘Bosnian victim’ from a genocidal ‘Serbian aggressor’. This alternative frame was instrumental in advocating a different policy, namely one of intervention.28

Though such attempts of integrating the studies of balkanism and Balkan policies are praiseworthy in themselves, they are ultimately flawed in their analytical narrowness. I believe that balkanism is so diverse in its tropes, contents, and functions that it cannot be tied to one policy to the exclusion of another. Stereotypes of the Balkans often appear in

confluence with other discourses. The clearly distinguishable balkanist and genocide discourses of Hansen are untenable in my opinion. Stereotypical readings of events in the region are not only at work in the most obvious or ‘complete’ balkanist discourses. They might just as well underlie the images of ‘Serbian aggression’ and ‘Bosnian victimhood’. The

24_{J. Evans, Great Britain and the creation of Yugoslavia. Negotiating Balkan nationality and identity (New York}

2008) p. 115.

25_{N. Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism. Colonial discourse and Europe’s borderline civilization (London}

and New York 2008) p. 3.

26_{D. Bjelić, ‘Introduction. Blowing up the “bridge”’ in: Idem and Savic, O. (eds.), Balkan as metaphor. Between}

globalization and fragmentation (Cambridge 2002) pp. 1-22, there p. 10.

27_{L. Hansen, Security as practice. Discourse analysis and the Bosnian War (London and New York 2006) p. 96.} 28_Ibid.

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distinction between positive and negative images of the Balkans that is so regularly drawn in Dutch historiography is exceedingly simplistic.29_{Seemingly ‘positive’ perceptions of the}

region like praise for braveness or sympathy for the helpless can be situated within the exact same premises of balkanism as supposedly ‘negative’ representations. To use the frameworks of balkanism in a less clear-cut, broader manner is to gain a more in-depth understanding of the political functions and workings of stereotypical Balkan images. However, such research should start with a clear articulation of methodology in order to avoid the obvious analytical pitfall of proclaiming all statements about the Balkans to be somehow balkanist in content.

Methods and obstacles in discourse analysis

If balkanism can be termed a discourse, then the obvious method of studying its usages and functions is discourse analysis. When Todorova first defined balkanism as discourse, she did so by clearly referring to the work of Michel Foucault. Following his writing and thinking, discourse can concisely be defined as a domain of statements which, at various levels of abstraction, constitute a way of representing aspects of the world.30_{Representations through}

stereotypical images are at the core of balkanist discourse as defined by Todorova. Questions of imagology and discourse are thus clearly intertwined. In studying the functions of

balkanism it is important to note that discourses not simply ‘reflect’ the reality to which they refer, discourses rather become realities in their own right.31 The images in balkanism are not mere distortions of a ‘real’ Balkans that exists outside discourse. As these images circulate and are acted upon, they become constituent parts of everyday reality. However, discourses are not bounded, delineated entities. Different discourses that are defined by different ‘macro-topics’ can be combined in a relationship of mutual reinforcement. Through such

‘interdiscursivity’ tropes of balkanism can for example be merged with discourses on asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in order to advocate a stricter refugee policy.32

Amidst ‘interdiscursive’ linkages and a plurality of functions, the actual influence of a discourse can be difficult to discern. The question of causality is thus highly debated with two

29_{A. ten Cate, Sterven voor Bosnië? Een historische analyse van het interventiedebat in Nederland, 1992-1995}

(Amsterdam 2007) p. 85; Naarden, Beeld en Balkan, p. 48.

30_{B. Banta, ‘Analysing discourse as a causal mechanism’, European Journal of International Relations 19:2}

(2012) 379-402, p. 392.

31_{S. Jäger, ‘Discourse and knowledge. Theoretical and methodological aspects of a critical discourse and}

dispositive analysis’ in: R. Wodak and Meyer, M. (eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (London 2001) 32-62, p. 36.

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opposed and combatant theoretical strands appearing in the literature. One does away with the issue of causality, taking the stance that the idea of causal connections is misguided in the study of discourse. Accordingly, inquiry should be directed away from notions of the cause to something. The focus should not be on the problem of why something exists but how it is what it is.33 This stance is based on the idea that discourses and practices cannot be separated and studied independently. One author states: ‘representations (...) and policy are linked through discourse, but they do not stand in a causal relationship with one another as

representations of discourse are simultaneously the precondition for and (re)produced through articulations of policy’.34_{Discourse causes a policy as much as it is caused by the policy, both}

are ‘mutually constitutive’ and drawing a causal relationship between the two would thus be a flawed undertaking.35

Still, despite the contingency of history, the choice for a discourse or a policy closes off other options. The use of balkanist rhetoric and the support for interventionist policies cannot, in isolation, explain an event like the fall of Srebrenica. Both, however, did appear in unison and together they can clarify how political consensus was reached, how oppositional

discourses and alternative policy suggestions were countered, how events were perceived and incorporated in the dominant representational frameworks. Proving that balkanism caused intervention is a difficult and probably fruitless undertaking. Showing how balkanist tropes were used in policy formation and debate, on the other hand, illustrates the ways in which discourse can work in precluding alternative options, in closing off the contingency of history. In this sense discourse can be a causal factor. Causation is then understood as ‘directionality, as enablement or constraint on agent’s desires and practices’.36_{By studying the ways in which}

balkanist discourse was used to frame and constrain policy debates on the wars in Yugoslavia, I will provide insight into the central influence of balkanism on the Dutch decision to

intervene in Bosnia.

My methods for studying images and representations in this manner are closely affiliated with the methodology of critical discourse analysis. Belonging to the highly interdisciplinary field of sociolinguistics and having expanded significantly during the 1990’s, critical

discourse analysis deconstructs political processes of inclusion and exclusion through

33_{D. Campbell, National deconstruction. Violence, identity, and justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis and London}

1998) p. 5.

34_{Hansen, Security as practice, p. 10.} 35_{Ibid., p. 28.}

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analysing implications, insinuations, symbolisms and clichés.37_{Exemplary questions in this}

sense are: How are persons named and referred to linguistically? What traits, characteristics and qualities are attributed to them? And, by means of what arguments is exclusion justified and legitimized?38 I will pose such questions in my study of Dutch governmental statements as found in policy papers, statutes, speeches, and publications by officials. Most documents in the archives of the relevant ministries are not freely accessible yet. Therefore my main

archival sources in this project are the published minutes of the House of Representatives. Openly accessible online, these records provide insight in the gestation and articulation of interventionist policies. They clearly show how intervention in Yugoslavia was debated and how eventual consensus on the issue was reached. These parliamentary records as well as government reports and ministerial letters are scanned for the presence of ‘discourse fragments’ or specific tropes of balkanism and the ways in which they strengthen an

argument.39 As a single text can contain various fragments I will analyse and group them on the basis of themes and concepts.40

Issues like the stabilisation of governmental discourse and the ways in which it encounters criticism are central to my methodology and research aims. To illustrate the latter question of neutralizing dissent I will analyse whether academics reproduced or contested the official discourse of policy makers. The choice for these focal groups goes back to the basic assumption of critical discourse analysis that ‘similarities between the language of science and the language of institutions’ exist.41_{Academics can be seen as ‘symbolically powerful’ in}

the sense that their arguments are held in high esteem, based on the reputation and authority of scientific expertise.42

My central question of what sorts of images of the Balkans were employed by Dutch policy makers in the debate on intervention in the Yugoslav wars of 1991-1993, will be answered by using these methods. To do so, I subdivide and structure my argument in three parts that are subsequently historiographical, thematical and chronological in orientation.

The first part is a more expansive discussion of the historiography on Dutch diplomacy and international relations during the earlier stages of the Yugoslav wars. I expose in greater detail

37_{M. Meyer, ‘Between theory, method, and politics. Positioning of the approaches to CDA’ in: Methods of}

critical discourse analysis, 14-31, p. 27.

38_{Wodak, ‘The discourse-historical approach’, pp. 72-73.} 39_{Jäger, ‘Discourse and knowledge’, p. 47.}

40_{Kovačević, Narrating, p. 9.}

41_{R. Wodak, ‘What CDA is about – a summary of its history, important concepts and its developments’ in:}

Methods of critical discourse analysis, 1-13, p. 6.

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the shortcomings of these publications, particularly in their analysis of perception and image formation. Accordingly, the balkanism at work in this historiography is of specific interest. By pointing out such balkanist lines of reasoning I am able to explain how some of these analytical flaws have come to be so prevalent and widespread in the historiography. Also, in a more reproductive fashion, I describe the relevant decision-making structures of the Dutch government and single out some key actors within these institutions.

Building from this description of structures, I analyse the images of the Balkans used within Dutch governmental circles. This second part is based on a wide array of published governmental reports and memoires of individual officials. To these various texts I bring the methodology of critical discourse analysis to distinguish discursive fragments. These

fragments are regrouped according to theme and then discussed in greater detail. In ordering discourse fragments thematically I point out the interdiscursive potential of balkanism by showing how it appears in a multitude of connected discourses. Some of the most central themes in this regard are multiculturalism, ethnicity, primitivism, and World War Two. To clarify the consolidation and pervasiveness of these representations, I show how academic writing often helped to strengthen and spread specific images of the Balkans.

In the third and final part of my argument, I connect these themes to the chronology of the Dutch decision-making process. The moments at which certain representations sprang up or died down are of particular interest. By connecting such fluctuations to concrete episodes I am able to provide insight into the ways in which balkanism worked in policy debates and could frame decisions. Since a day-to-day reconstruction of almost three years of discussion would be equally exhaustive and difficult to grasp, I pick certain ‘key events’ to pinpoint my analysis on. These can best be described as moments where pressing information manifests itself on the political agenda and influences decision makers or forces them to engage with public criticism.43 An exemplary ‘key event’ is the surrender of the East-Croatian town of Vukovar on 18 November 1991. The Fall of Vukovar proved to be a major change in the Dutch Foreign Ministry’s perception of the war, allegedly sharpening anti-Serbian attitudes.44

In studying such ‘key events’ I can trace the stability of the discourse themes described in part two. To illustrate the historicity of perceptional shifts I discuss these episodes in a backwards chronology, starting with the deployment of Dutch troops to the Bosnian enclave of

Srebrenica in 1993 and ending with the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars in 1991. Consensus on

43_{Hansen, Security as practice, p. 32.} 44_{Both, From indifference, p. 129.}

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policy (and also on images) can create a notion of stability, of historical stillness. To deconstruct this sense of stability I turn around the order of events and show when these ‘stable’ policy suggestions and images sprang up, how they were contested, and how short their lineage could be. The seemingly vested interests and outlooks that accompanied the deployment of troops to Srebrenica at the height of Dutch interventionism in the Yugoslav wars had only consolidated shortly beforehand. The decision-making process leading up to this intervention had gone through different stages of perception in which balkanist tropes were utilised in various degrees and to diverging ends. Though the departure of Dutch

military personnel in 1993 came with a consensual discourse that claimed inalienable interests and contained a clear formulation of Balkan Otherness as opposed to idealised selfhood, the outbreak of war in 1991, only thirty months earlier, was taken notice of and debated in much more uncertain terms. Yugoslavia may have come to be seen as the ‘eternal Balkans’ and its war of disintegration as an orgy of barbaric bloodshed, but this had not always been so.

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1. Backs turned East. Diplomatic structures and Balkan

knowledge

Ratko Mladić’s forces descended from the hills on the morning of 9 July 1995. After days of smaller attacks and provocations, the Bosnian Serb general led some 1,500 soldiers to the valley enclave of Srebrenica. Their approach met with bullets that zoomed high over their heads. Not a single hit, no cries of the wounded. The misfired shots were not a sign of lousy marksmanship, the Dutch UN-peace keepers that were stationed in the enclave never intended to cause any casualties. They simply, and fruitlessly, tried to deter the advancing combatants by sound of gunfire and the suggestion of resistance. Heavily outnumbered, the Dutch Blue Helmets waited and hoped for air support – in vain. In the days that followed, the ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica fell and the tens of thousands of enclave inhabitants were evacuated under chaotic circumstances. When the dust settled, and an eerie quiet fell over the deserted streets of Srebrenica, around 7,000 people were still reported missing. It would later become clear that they had been executed and buried in mass graves surrounding the valley. The judgment in the trial against one Bosnian-Serb army commander involved in these atrocities describes the crimes in a most concise yet pressing manner:

‘Within a few days, approximately 25,000 Bosnian Muslims, most of them women, children, and elderly people who were living in the area, were uprooted and, in an atmosphere of terror, loaded onto overcrowded buses by the Bosnian Serb forces and transported across the confrontation lines into Bosnian-Muslim held territory. The military-aged Bosnian Muslim men of Srebrenica, however, were consigned to a separate fate. As thousands of them attempted to flee the area, they were taken prisoner, detained in brutal conditions and then executed. More than 7,000 people were never seen again’.45

On April 10 2002, a stately hall in the old parliamentary quarter of The Hague was packed with ministers, members of parliament, and high-ranking military officials. They silently listened, some maybe with a sense fearful foreboding, as Hans Blom, renowned historian and head of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), presented the report that he and a sizable group of fellow researchers had worked on for the past six years. Faced with

45_{The judgement of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’s trial chamber in the case}

against Radoslav Krstić cited in R. Hayden, From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans. Studies of a European

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questions of guilt and responsibility, the Dutch cabinet of ministers had ordered the institute to inquire into the history of Srebrenica’s fall. Taking much longer than expected, the task resulted in a hefty report that totalled over 6,000 pages, appendixes included. Only two days after it had been presented, the so-called NIOD or Srebrenica report was discussed in parliament. The debate that ensued resulted in the abdication of the government of Social-Democrat Prime Minister Wim Kok.

The fall of the enclave and the publication of the report have merged to become the historical event Srebrenica. They have become enmeshed to such a degree that, at least in Dutch historiography, one is rarely discussed without mentioning the other. This

entanglement was voiced even by those who had been involved in both affairs when a Christian-Democrat parliamentarian admitted that, to him ‘there are now two truths, first are my own recollections, second is the NIOD report, and both tend to diverge a little’.46 The double-sided event Srebrenica has not just profoundly influenced actors’ personal

understanding of the past; it has also caused larger historiographical reverberations. Besides the NIOD report two parliamentary inquires have been commissioned; a large scholarly bibliography has been published; a string of documentaries and a three-hour dramatized mini-series have been broadcasted, and; several novels have been authored, at least one of them putting an alternative ‘what-if?’ spin on the events of July 1995.47_{A former official at the}

Ministry of Foreign Affairs went so far as to diagnose the nation with a ‘Srebrenica-syndrome’ – its symptoms: fear of commitment to international missions and anxious isolationism.48_{Accordingly, Srebrenica has been added to the official canon of national}

history as a black, awkward question mark in the recent past. As such, Srebrenica questions and problematizes notions of moral haughtiness reflected in a supposed Dutch tradition of neutrality, exemplified by foreign policy during most of the twentieth century.49

46_{Parliamentary enquiry Srebrenica, Archief Staten-Generaal (ASG), Tweede Kamer (TK) 2002-2003, 28 506,}

no. 5, p. 124.

47_{For a bibliography see I. Depla, X. Bougarel, and J. Fournel (eds.), Investigating Srebrenica. Institutions,}

facts, responsibilities (New York 2012); among the documentaries are Srebrenica. A cry from the grave (1995), De Dutchbat tapes (2002), Generaal van Srebrenica (2001), and Ik kom terug… Als het vrede is (2008); the

miniseries is De enclave (2002); respective novels are E. Runia, Inkomend vuur (Amsterdam 2003), B. van der Hem, De fuery (Leeuwarden 2010), and H. Heeresma, De held van Srebrenica (Soesterberg 2005).

48_{P. van Walsum, Verder met Nederland. De kritische terugblik van een topdiplomaat (Amsterdam 2001) p.}

107.

49_{These issues also strongly influenced Dutch historical writing on the Second World War, contributing to a}

fierce debate on the diffuse moral ‘greyness’ of most passively pragmatic people during the Nazi occupation. Particularly insightful is the controversial work by Chris van der Heijden and the historiographical debate that it set in motion. C. van der Heijden, Grijs verleden. Nederland en de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam 2001).

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This neutrality was, of course, quite visibly abandoned during the Yugoslav wars as the Dutch government actively pushed for intervention in the region. Presumably because of the idea that to be neutral may in practice also mean complacency, indifference, even passive collaboration. These darker sentiments lurking under the veneer of neutrality were also manifest among the army personnel stationed in Srebrenica. Operating under mandate of the UN’s UNPROFOR mission in the former Yugoslavia, the deployed Dutch had to act as peace keepers and were forced refrain from taking sides too actively. Faced with insufficient

provisions and mostly cut-off from other UNPROFOR forces, they grew frustrated as

attempts to unarm combatants within the enclave failed, and were puzzled by the death of one colleague at the hands of a Srebrenica inhabitant. Under the duress of chaotic, dirty, and generally poor conditions, sentiments of repulsion grew among segments of the Dutch battalion. They started to look down on the people whose safety they had to guarantee. A female soldier who did not share such attitudes was disparagingly referred to as the ‘local lover’.50_{Repulsion and arrogance followed in the wake of neutrality. Comparable detachment}

and haughtiness was ventilated in the remarks of one lieutenant who, while reading Noble laureate Ivo Andrić’s historical novel Bridge over the Drina, concluded that the local population was ‘not just physically but also mentally entrapped’.51

Such statements illustrate how ideas of Balkan inferiority were at play right up to the dramatic climax of Dutch involvement in the former Yugoslavia. The officers in charge of the Dutch battalion in Bosnia had to take a course in ‘local culture’ in the months preceding their deployment. There they heard that the Balkans had ‘always’ meant trouble, and that it was therefore difficult to discern victims from perpetrators. The clear opposition of Serb aggressors versus suffering Muslims had been ‘artificially perpetuated by the media’, or so these officers were taught.52 While much work still needs to be done to find out how this training shaped attitudes and actions towards locals, it is clear that image- and discourse-formation are of considerable importance in all stages of the Dutch intervention in Bosnia.

50_{F. Westerman and B. Rijs, Srebrenica. Het zwartste scenario (Amsterdam 1997) p. 123.} 51_{Ibid., p. 120.}

52_{Ibid., pp. 118, 119, and 121. Also the archival sources relating to this training, stored at the International}

Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. ‘Stukken betreffende historische en politieke achtergronden in Joegoslavië’, Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG, Amsterdam), Archief Vereniging van Dienstplichtige Militairen (AVDM), inv. nr. 1071; ‘Stukken betreffende de opleiding en voorbereiding van Joegoslaviëgangers en het Centrum voor Vredesoperaties (CVV)’, IISG, AVDM, inv. nr. 1070. Of additional interest is L. Sion, ‘Dutch peacekeepers and host environments in the Balkans. An ethnographic perspective’,

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So much is confirmed by the Srebrenica report, which devotes quite some space to the issue of Dutch perceptions of the Balkans. Still, it does not manage to analyse these concerns in a truly satisfying way. Hence insight into the discursive side to the Dutch engagement with the Yugoslav wars is seriously lacking. Employing the methods of critical discourse analysis and the frameworks of balkanism I point out how stereotypical depictions of Yugoslavia as a Balkan country were instrumental in making sense of the wars and formulating policy options. Why the current historiography fails to provide such insight is the first concern of this chapter. After discussing the grappling with imagology in the Srebrenica report in greater detail and pointing out its shortcomings, I turn to strengths of the historiography. These mainly lie with clarifying the structures of decision making in Dutch foreign policy.

Additionally, I look into the ways in which knowledge of the Balkans was generated in and spread through these structures. In this regard, the relationship between academics and officials has my particular interest. By discussing these various issues the institutional and intellectual frameworks to my subsequent imagological analysis become apparent. The sorts of statements that present the Balkans as a distinct entity and continuously re-employ a set of recurrent stereotypes about the region’s diffuse Otherness were uttered in a particular

institutional context. As I clarify in this chapter, the organisation and workings of the relevant Dutch institutions worked to perpetuate this discourse.

Imagology in historiography

‘Those who are familiar with the history of the Balkans’, the Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van den Broek once remarked, ‘know how unpredictable the region is. How things can

escalate there’.53_{Cited in the Srebrenica report, the statement is but one of the many recorded}

ventilations of a particular understanding of the Balkans and their history. It is an

understanding that is based on fear of instability, while, naturally, the course of history is ultimately unpredictable everywhere. Yet the words of Van den Broek designate the Balkans as unique on the basis of this incalculability. Exemplary as it is, the statement illustrates the prevalence of perceptions of Balkan unicity and otherness among the most senior Dutch government officials. The authors of the Srebrenica report, recognising the pervasiveness of Balkan images, admit that the study of perceptions is absolutely central when trying to make

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sense of Dutch involvement in Yugoslavia.54_{Van den Broek is thus described as having had}

‘a very negative impression of Yugoslavia and its inhabitants in general, and of Milošević in particular’ right from the first international mediation efforts in July 1991.55_{Though indexing}

such notions, perceptions and attitudes in great detail, the report only summarily manages to integrate these imagological factors in a reconstruction of policy formation. In the Srebrenica report, the ideas of Balkan particularity simply led to misperceptions of the conflict’s nature and the intentions of local actors. Thus the governments of the European Community were always one step behind local developments because they continuously misread what was going on in Yugoslavia. Hence there was no clear insight in the pragmatically rather than idealistically nationalist nature of Milošević’s intentions, while the supposed chaotic nature of the conflict distracted attention from the long lines of control that existed between

paramilitaries on the ground and the national governments in Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia.56 Still, this analysis of (mis)perception in the Srebrenica report is more concerned with

accounting for mistaken ideas of the Balkans and the Yugoslav conflict rather than clarifying how these ideas facilitated Western intervention in Bosnia.

The additional study of Balkan images that was issued by the NIOD as an appendix to the main report is hampered by other, yet connected analytical shortcomings. Written by

professor of Russian history, Bruno Naarden, Beeld en Balkan takes a longue durée approach to Dutch and West-European perceptions of the Balkans. He illustrates how Dutch

understanding of the Balkans developed over the course of four centuries and was shaped by direct engagement with the region and its inhabitants. Additionally, Naarden convincingly situates these contacts and resulting representations in a broader international framework which clarifies how Dutch perceptions of the Balkans would often resemble those in other European countries.

This research agenda in itself diverges from analysing the functioning of such perceptions during the recent Yugoslav wars. Instead, Naarden is more concerned with the tension between image and reality, his central problems being: are notions of Balkan mentalities and characters irresponsible generalisations or Western imaginings that have little to do with reality? Or does reality remain discernible in these clichés?57 Naarden opts to take middle ground. On the one hand, he studies these Balkan perceptions as a product of Great Power

54_{Srebrenica, een ‘veilig’ gebied, p. 180.} 55_{Ibid., p. 341.}

56_{Ibid., pp. 1087-1088.}

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geopolitical interests. On the other, Naarden argues that such images are not merely

constructed fantasies. He states: ‘Presumptions need not always be completely false. (...) It is naive to think that there’s no truth backing up the image’.58_{What these considerations about}

the empirical validity of images do not shed light on is the functions that these images serve. Both Naarden’s study and the Srebrenica report in general do not clarify how Balkan perceptions were used in the formation and consolidation of foreign policy. The two

publications rather try to do the reverse: analysing how circumstances in international politics influenced perception. In itself a relevant undertaking, this emphasis nevertheless leaves another side to the imagology in the Yugoslav wars untouched. With Naarden this omission may simply be seen as a result of the questions he raises and the answers that he wants to provide. In the Srebrenica report, however, the hiatus has more to do with questions of narrative scope and historical methodology. The report does bring together a vast array of relevant citations, examples, and references but it does not manage to present this material in a convincing analytical framework. Indeed, the report’s commission has been criticised for having produced an annalistic rather than historical work.59

Another clarification of the shortcomings in the historiography is a lack of theoretical sensibility. Despite the fact that Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans, the work that introduced the study of Balkan perceptions under the moniker of balkanism, was published right around the time when the NIOD was in the initial stages of its research, the complexities and subtleties of Todorova’s work are largely absent. The report and its appendices do

reference Todorova, but they stick to a simplistic dichotomy of negative versus positive Balkan images that betrays the analytical finesses of balkanism as she defines it. Besides leading to a somewhat shallow engagement with problems of imagology, these failings are also apparent in the reproduction of the very balkanist lines of reasoning that should have been subject to analysis.

Some of the most basic tropes of balkanism are replicated in the Srebrenica report. The notion of a Balkan historical Sonderweg springs up from various pages. A sizeable prologue concerning the long prelude to the wars of the nineties opens the report. Spanning Balkan history from the Great Schism of 1054 to the formation of nation states in the nineteenth century, right up to Slovenia and Croatia’s declarations of independence in June 1991, the prologue aims to situate recent events in a longer timeframe. The premise on which it does so

58_{Naarden, Beeld en Balkan, p. 19.}

59_{F. Ankersmit, ‘Een schuld zonder schuldigen? Morele en politieke oordelen in het Srebrenica-rapport’,}

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is that of untimeliness. At the end of the twentieth century, with the bipolar nuclear threat having come to an end, explosions of violence were globally expected to diminish,

‘particularly in the Balkans’, holds the report. Yet there, in Yugoslavia, violence flared up to heights not seen in Europe since the Second World War. The course of history in the Balkans thus took on a highly singulary turn, moving backwards instead of forwards, not in par with the rest of the world.60 By opening the report in this manner, the history of the Yugoslav wars is thereby framed as an unmistakably Balkan affair. The strife unrolled in a historical time all of its own, utterly distinct from the course of West-European history. Accordingly, the Balkans are presented as the site of civilizational fault lines where Roman Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy and Asiatic Islam clash. The scope and visibility of violence in the region is meanwhile taken to be a product of a ‘delay in modernisation’ caused by its peripheral, borderland status.61

Naarden’s work on perceptions of the Balkans is plagued by a comparably ambivalent engagement with balkanism. While referencing the concept, he simultaneously subscribes to one of its most blatant imageries: the notion of a Balkan mentality. Through his inquiry into the relation between image and reality, Naarden stubbornly concludes that the Balkan mentality is ‘partially factual truth’. In his opinion, though, it is complex and many-sided instead of simply violent and barbaric, as the stereotype holds.62_{According to him, this}

mentality, however diffuse it may be, clearly distinguishes the Balkans from Western Europe because it is the result of ‘unique Balkan history’.63_{This reasoning tempts Naarden to make}

curious statements:

‘One cannot rule out that the Polish, Hungarian and Czech will to be western after 1989 contributed significantly to the formation of a socio-psychological climate in which political and economic changes were rapidly brought about. [In] most Balkan countries that will is significantly weaker, or even absent, among large parts of the populations and their political elites, a fact that can hardly been seen as anything other than a mental characteristic’.64

Though an extreme example, the furthering of such platitudes is, in a sense, exemplary of the faults in the current historiography.

60_{Srebrenica, een ‘veilig’ gebied, p. 37.} 61_{Ibid., p. 303.}

62_{Naarden, Beeld en Balkan, p. 105.} 63_{Ibid., pp. 99 and 105.}

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Structures of decision making

In spite of its flawed engagement with issues of imagology, the Srebrenica report is very insightful when it comes to the institutional order of Dutch foreign policy. Perhaps a result of its annalistic leanings, the report minutiously identifies the key officials in the relevant ministries and their contributions to the decision making process. As such, it provides the ramifications to this study of image formation.

At the start of the 1990s, the Dutch Foreign Ministry was not very attentive to Yugoslavia (or, for that matter, to Eastern Europe in general). As the closing decade to the twentieth century commenced, a mere three officials in the ministry were concerned with the whole of Eastern Europe, that is: the states of the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia, and Albania.65 The set-up of this Eastern Europe Division was the legacy of a Cold War geopolitical outlook in which the communist states were all grouped together as ‘the East’. Not very concerned with those countries, Dutch post-war governments basically conducted foreign policy with their backs turned east, focusing almost solitarily on trans-Atlantic relations and West-European cooperation.66_{As Norbert Both argues, the Cold War lived on not only in the set-up of the}

ministry but also in general attitudes: in policies on NATO, a future European Union, and the promotion of international order and society little to no thought was given to Central and Eastern Europe.67_{It took until 1988 before the first official foreign policy outline on Eastern}

Europe was formulated. And even this paper was criticised as being more of an extended analysis of the current situation in the region than a truly coherent guideline for conducting policy and managing diplomatic relations.68

With the outbreak of hostilities in Yugoslavia, the number of civil servants concerned with the so-called Western Balkans was swiftly increased to six. The Eastern Europe Division, headed by Harm Hazewinkel and his deputy Ellen Berends, was strengthened by a special post for the coordination of Yugoslav affairs, filled by A.M. van der Togt. From 1992 onwards, weekly meetings were commissioned by this departmental co-ordinator in order to discuss the latest developments and identify policy options.69 This division itself was part of the larger Department for European Affairs, headed by Onno Hattinga van ‘t Sant, which was responsible for bilateral contacts in Europe.

65_{Both, From indifference, pp. 55-56.}

66_{M. van den Heuvel, Uit het leven van een anticommunist. Herinneringen aan Oost-Europa (Bloemendaal}

1997) p. 158.

67_{Both, From indifference, p. 78.} 68_{Van den Heuvel, Uit het leven, p. 158.} 69_{Srebrenica, een ‘veilig’ gebied, p. 223.}

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The influence of the regional divisions within the ministry was, however, greatly diminished by the Minister of Foreign Affairs to the advance of the Directorate of Atlantic Cooperation and Security Matters (DAV).70_{Dutch Yugoslavia policy was thereby aligned to}

NATO frameworks and concerned with trans-Atlantic cooperation. This had the effect that the expertise and experience gathered in the Eastern Europe Division often did not reach or was simply discarded by the minister. That one civil servant in the ministry would later name Hattinga van ‘t Sant, head of the overarching Department for European Affairs and not exclusively occupied with the region, as the main authority with expertise on Bosnia is exemplary of the bureaucratic hierarchy.71 Another senior position was that of Director-General of Political Affairs (DGPZ) because this figure is responsible for the general

coordination of foreign policy, and serves as an important counsellor to the minister. During the early stages of escalating conflict in Yugoslavia this post was taken by diplomat Peter van Walsum.

Not hindered by the internal structures of his ministry, Hans van den Broek (minister of Foreign Affairs) was said to have very strong personal opinions and was hard to press into changing them. The manner in which he held sway over the ministry was characterised as dominant, even arrogant.72 Van den Broek favoured an informal style of leadership. Rather than basing his decisions on official papers produced by his officials, he usually held private meetings with selected employees prior to making policy choices.73 Though he was aware of most papers and memoranda circulating in the ministry, Van den Broek did not follow their premises without debating and often altering them first.

In January 1993, Van den Broek left his ministerial position in The Hague to take up the function of European Commissioner for Foreign Affairs. He was succeeded by Peter Kooijmans, who was also affiliated with the Christian-Democrat party. Prior to his appointment in the Cabinet of Ministers, Kooijmans had been professor of Public

International Law at the University of Leiden. Being considered an academic expert on the issue of human rights, he had been member of a CSCE mission (Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, predecessor to the OSCE) that reported on the humanitarian situation in Yugoslavia from late 1991 to early 1992.74 Kooijmans was passionate about the subject of human rights and emotionally invested to such a degree that his convictions were sometimes

70_{Srebrenica, een ‘veilig’ gebied, p. 223.}

71_{Parliamentary enquiry Srebrenica, ASG, TK 2002-2003, 28 506, no. 5, p. 154.} 72_{Srebrenica, een ‘veilig’ gebied, p. 228.}

73_{Ibid., p. 225.} 74_{Ibid., pp. 799.}

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seen as illustrative of Dutch ‘moral arrogance’ in international affairs. ‘We made a clearer distinction between good and bad than most of the others’, is one of his remarks that did little to counter such impressions.75_{Though at times frustrating his international colleagues with}

such haughtiness, he was perceived within the ministry as an efficient and quick decider.76 As in any democracy, the actions and decisions of the ministers are checked by parliament, which, in the Netherlands, is referred to as the Second and First Chamber: the former is equivalent to the House of Representatives, the latter to the Senate. Following the Dutch participation in the UN mission to Lebanon in 1979, bills were adopted that granted this Second Chamber considerable weight in matters of troop deployment. From then on,

parliament had to be consulted before troops were deployed; a mechanism that was intended to serve as a brake on sending military personnel abroad. During the conflict in Yugoslavia, little of this mechanism remained as there was hardly any parliamentary critique on the decision to participate in an international intervention.77 Precisely because Dutch Yugoslavia policy was hardly subject to in-depth debate, both Foreign Ministers possessed a large degree of autonomy.78 Relus ter Beek, then Minister of Defence, would later state that ‘there were hardly any differences of political insight between the government and the Second

Chamber’.79_{In the Srebrenica report, parliament is heavily criticised for abandoning its}

critical and controlling stance. The absence of critique is mainly blamed on a lack of specific knowledge among members of parliament. There was hardly any alternative understanding of Yugoslav affairs that opposed governmental outlooks on the conflict. Facing the later

parliamentary research committee, one Christian-Democrat MP declared that a lack of expertise lay at the base of this shortcoming.80 Detailed knowledge of the Balkans was a luxury that few possessed in Dutch governmental circles.

Balkan knowledges

Just like there were fairly few officials directly involved with Yugoslavia, there was also relatively little knowledge of the country and the Balkan region within governmental institutions. Even outside of these institutions there were hardly any experts on Yugoslavia. Right up to its demise, the socialist federation received only minimal intellectual attention in

75_{Cited in Both, From indifference, p. 154.} 76_{Srebrenica, een ‘veilig’ gebied, p. 798.} 77_{Srebrenica, een ‘veilig’ gebied, p. 3135.} 78_{Both, From indifference, p. 165.}

79_{Parliamentary enquiry Srebrenica, ASG, TK 2002-2003, 28 506, no. 3, p. 45.} 80_{Ibid., no. 5, p. 88.}

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the Netherlands. Norbert Both states that when war broke out ‘only the Foreign Ministry was oriented to a degree to what was going on in Yugoslavia, a handful of prescient academics and journalists excepted’.81_{Perhaps the most vocal experts on Yugoslavia were stationed at}

the embassy in Belgrade. In the twelve months preceding the conflict, Dutch ambassador Jan Fietelaars repeatedly warned The Hague that events were taking a turn for the worst and federal unity may become untenable.

Such warnings of troubles to come were not heeded. Fietelaars and the Eastern Europe Division (which had voiced similar worries) were seen as too alarmist by their colleagues at Foreign Affairs. The ministry was plagued by a sort of ‘cry-wolf syndrome’: ever since the death of Tito in 1980, the collapse of Yugoslavia had been prophesised too many times. Already in 1985, the renowned Clingendael Institute for foreign affairs had published

Yugoslavia in crisis, an alarmist essay warning that the federation had spiralled downwards

beyond the point of no return.82 The sense of inflated anxiety was described by Peter van Walsum: ‘Because since Tito’s death everyone had really been waiting for the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the admonitions by the Eastern Europe Division were not exactly hot news’.83

Faced with such scepticism, however understandable it may be, it is hardly surprising that the few Yugoslavia experts in the official institutions felt like they were not being taken

seriously.84

Statements that the Yugoslav crisis was ‘expected’ in governmental circles are thus of little significance.85_{There had indeed been plenty of warnings on what was going on in}

Yugoslavia. But because these were usually brushed aside, the outbreak of war still took many officials by surprise. So when the pessimistic prophecies turned out to be more realistic than expected, doves of civil servants hurried to libraries and bookstores to find literature on Yugoslavia. Many of those civil servants felt that there was a great shortage of knowledge on the Balkans within the relevant ministries.86 The Dutch ministries may not have been very different from other services in countries like France and the UK that had also had little direct contact with Yugoslavia.

As the Foreign Ministry in the Netherlands was overtaken by reality it also turned out that whatever institutional knowledge about the region did exist was often faulty. The Srebrenica

81_{Both, From indifference, p. 234.}

82_{M. Broekmeyer, Joegoslavië in crisis (The Hague 1985). Discussed in Srebrenica, een ‘veilig’ gebied, p. 163.} 83_{Cited in Both, From indifference, p. 80.}

84_{Both, From indifference, p. 77.} 85_{Srebrenica, een ‘veilig’ gebied, p. 149.} 86_{Ibid., p. 226.}

Perception and policy. Balkanism and the Dutch intervention in Bosnia