World War I Conference Divides Scholars
Controversy over the meeting’s purpose
speaks to how the interpretation of a turning point like World War I
remains entangled in present-day politics.
World War I Conference in Sarajevo Divides Scholars
BERLIN
— Scholars from the United States and 25 other countries gathered in
Sarajevo last week to mark the centennial of World War I.
Titled
“The Great War: Regional Approaches and Global Contexts,” the
conference was meant to expand and elevate the historical discussion
about the war and its outbreak 100 years ago. But rather than a
respectful salutation of Europe’s triumph over parochial nationalism,
the conference set off an ethnic firestorm in the Balkans that reached
the highest political circles. The controversy speaks to how the
scholarly interpretation of a crucial turning point like the Great War
remains disputed and entangled in present-day politics.
The
conference, which ran June 19-21 in the capital of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, got off to an awkward start when disagreement flared
between its original organizers, the University of Sarajevo’s Institute
for History, and Sorbonne historians associated with the French Embassy
in Sarajevo.
The
French insisted that one of the conference’s purposes be to promote
reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the scene of bloody ethnic
wars during the 1990s. They wanted the meeting to include intellectuals
from the country’s three ethnic groups — Serbs, Croats and Muslims — to
celebrate the centennial. According to Slobodan Soja, a Bosnian Serb and
former ambassador to France, who contributed to the French proposal,
the purpose of the conference was “to start a dialogue between all
The
Sarajevo history institute, however, favored a rigorous academic
conference of European scholars pursuing cutting-edge research on
diverse aspects of the war.
“We
wanted to attract historians to talk, discuss, and argue about these
topics at the highest level for three full days,” explained one of the
organizers, Amir Duranovic, a doctoral student in history at the
University of Sarajevo. “We wanted a conference for historians, not for
Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats, and Muslims.”
In
the end, the French pulled out, and the Sarajevo organizers said they
were unable to attract a single research-paper submission from the
Serb-dominated side of Bosnia and Herzegovina, called Republika Srpska,
or to win over a partner institution to act as a co-sponsor from Serbia proper. Republika Srpska historians said they were not invited to the conference, which they would have gladly attended.
Some
Serb political leaders have accused the conference of bias against
Serbia and say that a revisionist history of World War I is laying the
blame for the war, which claimed 37 million lives, at their feet.
“Serbia
will neither allow a revision of history, nor will it forget who are
the main culprits in World War I,” said Ivica Dacic, a former Serbian
prime minister, while Milorad Dodik, president of Republika Srpska,
called the conference “a new propaganda attack against the Serbs.”
The
antipathies that have flickered over the conference have their roots in
the tangled ethnic identities in the Balkans. The choice of Sarajevo
for the conference, for example, was loaded: It was in the Bosnian
capital on June 28, 1914 that Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb,
assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie,
an event that set off a chain reaction leading to the start of military
hostilities a month later.
Princip’s
nationalist politics and the Serbs’ role in the war remain highly
contentious issues, particularly in the Balkans. The Serbs tend to
consider Princip a hero who struck a blow against the repressive
Habsburg monarchy, which ruled Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time. In
recognition of the centennial, monuments to Princip are being
constructed in downtown Belgrade, the Serbian capital, and in
Serb-dominated eastern Sarajevo.
Mr.
Soja, the Bosnian Serb diplomat, explicitly complained that the
conference brought together the “losers of the war” — universities from
Austria, Hungary and Germany were among the organizers — who refused to
afford Princip the honor he deserved.
In
contrast with that view, most historians from the region and elsewhere
in Europe have tended to see Princip as a terrorist, rather than a hero.
The
conference, moreover, took place against the background of many new
commemorative publications, including the Australian historian Prof.
Christopher M. Clark’s account of World War I’s origins, titled “The
Sleepwalkers.” An astounding global success, Professor Clark’s book has
prompted a substantial revision among historians of the war’s causes.
Whereas in the past German nationalism and bellicosity were singled out
as disproportionately culpable, Mr. Clark lays equal blame on the other
great powers, France, Russia, and Britain.
Furthermore,
he argues that Princip was directly or indirectly an arm of Serbia’s
intelligence services, not a Bosnian teenager acting on his own. Mr.
Clarke also links Serbia’s expansionist campaign at the beginning of the
20th century, and its brutality, to the ethnic cleansing and war crimes
of the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia.
In
Serbia, the response to his theses has been loud and unequivocal. The
commonly heard view is that Serbia fought valiantly against Germany and
the Habsburg Empire on the side of the Entente alliance, which the
United States joined in 1917. Serbia sacrificed greatly for the cause,
losing nearly half of the men it mobilized.
The
Serbian news media has rallied to the country’s defense with headlines
like “Austrians Planned the First World War a Year before the Murder of
Ferdinand”; “Vienna had a War Plan in 1913”; and “We are not to Blame
for the War.”
“I
admit that I wholly underestimated the passionate approaches to the
topic and its meaning for today’s politics in the region,” said one of
the conference’s organizers, Attila Pok, a historian at the Institute of
History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in Budapest, who tried to
broker a compromise between the opposing sides.
Still, Mr. Pok said he stood by the choice of Sarajevo for the conference, citing its symbolic significance.
“This city still carries the scars of the war,” he said.
Another
member of the organizing committee, Florian Bieber, director of the
Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, in
Austria, said that historians from Serbia proper were expected to
participate in the conference but that the organizers could not persuade
a Serbian university to co-sponsor the event.
Mr.
Bieber rejected the charge of anti-Serb bias, saying that only two of
more than 40 panels had been scheduled to deal with the Sarajevo
assassination. He also noted that Mark A. Mazower of Columbia
University, not Christopher Clark, was scheduled to deliver the keynote
lecture, he noted.
Mr.
Bieber said that Serbs had overreacted to the Clark book and to the
intention of the conference. “Clark doesn’t blame Serbia for the war,
but rather the Great Powers — all of them,” he said. “Clark is hard on
Serbia, more so than most historians, but in Serbia his theses are
deliberately misread,” he added, attributing this to domestic politics.
The
controversy around the conference, Mr. Bieber wrote in a recent essay
in Balkan Insight, suggested that forthcoming commemorations would “not
be shaped by reflecting on the past, but by making use of the past for
the present.”
COPY http://international.nytimes.com/
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