The Different Aspects of the European Project

At a time when the European project is demanding a renewed commitment from its citizens it is useful to examine the parameters of engagement to the nation and earlier forms of identity. From this, European citizens can take some useful aspects, but other parts they ought to discard if they are determined to fully pledge their allegiance to the Union.

The twelve starred flag on a field of blue, the ‘Ode to Joy’, and ‘Bella Ciao’ are perhaps the easiest parts of a ‘European’ identity. On the other hand, other aspects may prove a bit harder to assimilate: new languages, additional taxes, new political, geographical, and economic information. These come together with dilution of political agency caused by enlargement and federalism, with increased competition, and even new military and defense commitments. All of these are a few of the more noticeable demands placed on the would-be citizen of the European Union. Coming from a place rich in varying traditions, the ‘nation state’, these demands will be taken on with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Trying to understand the old allegiances can help prepare for the new.

The Myth Of The Nation

Of all the social myths one of the more difficult to reconcile logically is “nationalism”. Unlike justice, progress, popular democracy, or even heaven and the after-life, the ‘nation’ is supposedly a well defined, observable phenomenon of human societies. However, under-scrutiny this notion and its simplistic appeal fall apart to an unanticipated extent. This concept is perhaps as elusive as it is familiar.

What exactly is a “nation?” Is the nation a collection of borders that have changed numerous times, even in recent memory? A collection of peoples whose genetic mix is so great and diverse that they are hardly distinguishable from their neighbors and even related to such far flung ancestors as Central Asians, Turks, Semites, Africans, Neanderthals or Denizovs found the world over? Or perhaps it consists of a collection of languages but then how many to include? From this, it would seem that nationalism is one of the most vague notions we adhere to. However, it is still one of the most persistent and  troublesome myths in modern times. People will build their identity around it. As a consequence, we also define states, organise passions, start wars, and justified mass killings because of it.

The Dawn of the Nation State

In the modern era the birth of the nation state links to the decline of the Holy Roman empire, from about 1200 CE onwards. We ought to remember that Empires are not nations, they are made up of numerous ethnicities. Empires would normally recognise citizens of all different origins in one way or another. Peoples maintained their original identities even while being and identifying themselves as an integral part of the empire. Nation states are different. They may accept minorities within their borders, but may also insist on their assimilation. The boundaries of an empire are fluid things, expanding and contracting over time, those of the nation state are perceived as fixed for eternity, though in reality they are not.

A nation is more similar, but not identical, to a kingdom. A kingdom starts as the birthright of an individual and it evolves into a jurisdiction. The loyalty of the kingdom’s subjects is to the natural right of the king derived from God, even though the king is not a god himself. By contrast the right of the nation to exist is enshrined in natural law, not in the authority of a single person.

Somewhat akin to race, an even more nebulous concept, though a solid fixture of 21^st century vocabulary, the nation comforts, protects and gives us a sense of identity while it also exacts a psychological toll. It makes numerous demands of its adherents including ultimately death to protect its projection of power and its dominant class. However, a nation does not give it citizens unlimited access to its power and wealth in return. The share they get will depend on the socio-economic status. It can go from virtually nothing for the homeless to untold wealth and power for a fortunate few. Efforts to legitimise a ‘safety net’, a guaranteed income, constitutional or other birth rights and entitlements like universal education have come and gone in the nation state. They remain precarious.

War and Security, the Myth of a Nation’s Power

It wasn’t always that the nation was thought to be the guarantor of security for the community. In the feudal era, the feudal lord was responsible for the community’s defense. He ordered the construction of a defensive fortress where he resided and wherein the community took refuge in times of danger. The feudal lord organised the men who would accompany him to battle, assured the provision of their equipment when social custom didn’t require them to do so themselves, mapped out their strategy and led them into battle. They were also responsible for external relations of the community, making alliances where he saw fit breaking other alliances for the community’s protection or advancement.

When kings began to replace local feudal lords, the king’s armies, first in parallel with local forces and afterwards replacing them, became the principal guarantor of power. The identification of the king, though his domains would often be contiguous with what would later become the nation, was a process imbued with religion and faith as well as power and relationships.

From Kingdom to Nation

As God’s incarnation on earth the king’s existence imposed special loyalties and obligations on the subjects. Lese-majesteor, deposing a king was no longer a simple political matter but a direct affront to God and his power. But it was not directly an affront to the community or the nation.

During the middle ages and through to the modern period in Europe kings could and did come from other countries. The Monarchs of England are today from Germanic descent, Queen Elizabeth retaining only a minor lineal connection to the British kings of the past. The Austrian Hapsburg house ruled for long periods in France, Spain and the Netherlands as well as Austria-Hungary, they acquired those positions through marriage and conquest.

It wasn’t until later that the idea of nation, a legally bound territory with some consistency in ethnicity, customs, and laws started to become the principal repository of security. The predominance of the nation as a political organisation continues today. It has been eroded both from above and from below. From above by supra-national organisations, like the former Soviet Union and the European Union, and from below by strong regional independence movements such as in Scotland, Catalan region, or Northern Italy and Corsica.

The European Union An Empire or Supra-National State?

The current European Union presents itself halfway between some of the more ambitious alliances of the past and today’s somewhat tenuous notion of nation as a federation of regions.

In the past, however, national loyalties were constructed not inspired by treaties between different parties. France, the UK, Italy, and Germany were all built from regions who had little desire to join anything larger than themselves except on a limited basis in times of external threat. School curriculum, the clergy, the consecration of festivals, holidays, and symbols, all contributed to fostering national identity at a time when local loyalties were still stronger. Even Greek City states, so famously successful in attracting the loyalty of their citizens, were originally built on forced migrations from the surrounding countryside. In time, festivals, gods, and other attractions of the Polis would make their citizens feel Athenian, Spartan, Corinthian (or other) and then Greek. Similarly, European identity will need to be crafted as part of an ongoing, emergent process.

Moving Forward

Ultimately, the creation of the nation states and its allegiances was a gradual process that happened over time. With this in mind, the lack of initial wide-spread enthusiasm to the notion of Europe should not be insurmountable. However, we ought to be careful in relying on symbols, holidays, religious sermons, or even laws like universal conscription to build the sentiment of belonging to a European nation today. Times have changed too much, people are better informed, educated, and accustomed to individual freedoms. The key to success will be in choosing carefully sustainable values on which to build the Union. Many of these are already in place in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens and the European Charter. Respect for these values including the more divisive ones such as human rights, minority rights, immigrants’ rights, and territorial integrity, and the ultimate surrender of sovereignty will be key to the successful emergence of Europe. In contrast, allowing individual, regional, national, or religious interests to prevail will make the building of a successful union more difficult.

Stephen Sposato

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While the alliances that ended up fighting each other in the First World War might seem like a foregone conclusion to us today, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those same European Powers were still settling into their various alliances. Germany and Austria-Hungary seemed bound together, the two diplomatically isolated states France and Russia found common ground for that exact reason. Across the channel, Great Britain – while uncertain of its allegiance – certainly did seek closer relations with Germany. But how serious were these talks, and were these two powers close to joining forces?

The Dawn of Anglo-German Relations

Following the dismissal of Bismarck, Wilhelm II and Count Leo von Caprivi (Chancellor of Germany 1890 – 93) promised to continue the foreign relations Bismarck had set in place. Lord Salisbury (British Prime Minister 1886 – 1892 and then again 1895 – 1902) was not convinced, saying: ”if he [Wilhelm] thinks thus today, what guarantee have we that he will not change his mind overnight?”.

Three months after taking office, von Caprivi announced the signing of an agreement with Britain, the Heligoland Agreement. Through this treaty, Germany surrendered all claims in Zanzibar and the island of Pemba, and in return, Britain gave Germany the island of Heligoland. Germany also agreed to a border of German East Africa proposed by the British. In doing so, Germany lost access to Uganda and the sources of the Nile. However, Salisbury convinced the Sultan of Zanzibar to their sell coastal claims on East Africa, which gave Germany control of the coast. Ultimately, both Powers benefited from the treaty, which resolved former bones of contention.

While Wilhelm considered abandoning German East Africa, they nevertheless sought colonial prestige. One more British concession was that German East Africa now bordered the Congo Free state, a colony Germany hinted they might buy in the future. While the Agreement stirred political rumblings in both states, Salibury was pleased that it halted German expansion in Africa. Von Caprivi was even more against colonies than Bismarck, saying that ”the worst thing that could happen to us would be for someone to give us the whole of Africa”. Despite this, he understood the value of settling disagreements with Britain.

The Reception of the Heligoland Agreement in Europe

The Agreement did not sit well with France, who saw a possible future inclusion of Britain into the Triple Alliance, as Heligoland allowed Britain to focus on the Mediterranean. A later naval treaty between Italy and Britain made the French even more suspicious of British plans. The fall of the first Salisbury government in 1892, replaced by the Gladstone government, put Lord Rosebery, who favoured improved relations with Germany, as Foreign Secretary. This seemed to indicate that Salisbury’s policies would continue.

The friendship of the Triple Alliance was important to Britain both in Egypt and the Mediterranean. On one hand, Rosebery told Paul von Hetzfeldt (ambassador to Constantinople) that Britain might act with Italy (a member of said Alliance) in the Mediterranean, but on the other hand, Gladstone contended that Britain was in no position to ally any nation just yet. On top of this, Germany became more aggressive in their request for a formal treaty, implying that they might turn to Russia following the fall of Salisbury.

This shake-up of the newly formed relation took place during the time of the Eastern Question. As such, Britain was well aware that a Russo-German treaty might threaten British interests. By 1893, Russia and France had almost fully committed themselves to each other, with Britain as their common enemy. Russian efforts to cement their control of Afghanistan directly threatened British India, but harsh British protests forced Russia to retreat. France and Britain argued regarding Egypt, but their troubles were even worse in Siam (Thailand). France announced a blockade of the neutral state, and Britain turned to the Triple Alliance for assistance. Unfortunately for Anglo-German relations, no assistance was forthcoming. Despite this, tensions ran high as Britain sent warships to protect Burma and British citizens. Though France “won” the war against Siam, making Siam the buffer between French Indochina and British Burma, it was at the cost of further worsening relations with Britain.

The Other Side: French-Russian Relations

All the while, French-Russian relations were growing ever stronger, causing a political uproar in Germany. Bismarck had managed to politically isolate France, but now they were threatened with a two-front war. Britain could not be trusted to sit on the sidelines, only a formal alliance would satisfy Germany. When the Franco-Russian alliance became official in 1893, Russia sent a squadron of ships to Toulon, a Mediterranean port. As the Royal Navy was the strongest navy in the area, Britain became incredibly suspicious of these developments.

Once again, Britain turned to the Triple Alliance, and once again Germany remained decidedly cold. In 1894, Germany decided to more or less abandon the African concessions with Britain to placate colonial interests. This was one more nail in the coffin of the relations between the two powers. Even German liberals started to view Britain as their greatest rival, and anti-English sentiments were brewing. Later on, Germany also decided to renegade on a deal struck in 1893. In order to block the French expansion in Africa, Britain had ceded some land to Germany so that German Kamerun would share a border with British Sudan. The Germans had now decided to deal with France themselves by giving them territory Britain had given to Germany.

The Decline of Anglo-German Relations

Ultimately, Anglo-German relations reached their zenith in 1890, after that point Germany seemed to do everything in their power to sabotage those relations, not caring when Britain wanted help, and warming up to France and Russia instead. This was an incredibly short-sighted foreign policy on Germany’s part, constantly moving against British interests.

Eventually, it led to Britain and France resolving their disagreements. France recognised British Egyptian interests and in return, Britain acknowledged French Tunisia. When the two Moroccan crises happened, Britain threw down the gauntlet and forced Germany to back down on both occasions. At the end of the day, Germany had sabotaged all chances of friendship with Britain and it only had itself to blame when they faced Britain as their opponent in the First World War.

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Thaçi resigned in early November and is now facing trial. But he isn’t the only one who has been called to The Hague recently. Former Kosovar Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj was called as well in 2019, triggering the early legislative elections of October 2019. Both men were prominent members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UÇK): a former paramilitary unit, a prominent figure of Kosovar independentism, and one of the main actors of the last war in the Balkans.

Kosovo within the Socialist Federation

Kosovo has been attached to Serbia for centuries and a prominent place of Serbian culture and history, which grew on a territory populated by Albanians that settled there in early Middle Ages. When the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) was formed, Josip Broz Tito and the newly formed Communist government separated Serbia in three parts, in an attempt to weaken Serbia’s influence on the country.

These were Serbia itself and two autonomous regions. Vojvodina in the north of the country, because of the Hungarian minority, and Kosovo in the south because of the Albanian population. Vojvodina had more devolved powers, still considering that this devolution took place under a communist, autocratic state. While Kosovo remained more directly controlled by Belgrade between 1945 and 1963, it received the exact same powers as Vojvodina in 1963.

These concessions were granted by the SFRJ to weaken Serbia’s influence within the communist Federal State. In Kosovo’s case, these were also used to appease Albanian nationalism. One of the main objectives of the Yugoslav government was, indeed, to suppress any form of nationalism in any of the Republics and by extension, autonomous provinces.

When Tito died in 1980, an economic crisis fell on the country and nationalism started to rise again. While the main focus was indeed Serbia and Croatia, nationalism and Albanian irredentism also started to be noticed. The Kosovar and Albanian diaspora that settled in Western Europe strongly supported the movements that emerged in Kosovo, and supported movements that would later merge to form the UÇK.

The Republic of Kosova

In March of 1981, the first significant protests in Kosovo erupted, marking the beginning of the Yugoslav collapse. Students demonstrated for more autonomy and more liberties, whilst the federal and Serbian authorities answered by sending in troops. It ended with several casualties on both sides, thousands of arrests, and the massive sacking of people from the Kosovar branch of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The protesters’ ‘nationalism’ was then considered ‘unacceptable’. Several thousands of Serbs emigrated to Serbia from Kosovo, fearing retaliation.

Fast-forwarding to 1989, on the 600th anniversary of the Kosovo Polje battle, the Serbian government revoked Kosovo’s autonomous powers that were granted through the history of the SFRJ. Kosovo returned to its 1945 status, basically under the tutelage of Belgrade. It was a part of a more global movement called “Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution” in which Milošević arrested and replaced local leaders in Vojvodina and Kosovo to ensure the support of the autonomous regions to his regime for the upcoming wars. 1989 also was the year where the LDK (Lidhja Demokratike e Kosovës, Democratic League of Kosovo) was founded.

Across 1990, the Communist regime officially collapsed and the Serbian government kept suppressing Albanians’ rights. Kosovar officials attempted to maintain neutrality during the war with Bosnia and Croatia, while many Albanian soldiers within the Yugoslav Army deserted. In July 1990, the Republic of Kosova was formed and would self-proclaim its independence in 1991, immediately and solely recognized by Albania. With the escalation of the tensions, Serbian authorities revoked any autonomy that Kosovo had left, at least legally. The Republic of Kosova indeed went on developing its own underground institutions.

UÇK Rising and the Kosovo War

The UÇK would become more and more important in the early Nineties, with more volunteers joining due to the frustration over how Belgrade was treating the Albanian population. Most of their fighters were trained in underground training camps under the patronage of Adem Jashari, one of the leaders of the UÇK.

After the Dayton Peace Agreements of 1995, the situation in Kosovo started progressively worsening. There were often generalized clashes between Serbian forces and the UÇK, the latter targeting Serbian military forces, police, and civilians. Belgrade answered by sending more troops up until 1997, which did nothing but allow the tensions to escalate even more.

The LDK, which as at the time the biggest party in Kosovo (though officially banned by Federal authorities) was highly critical of the UÇK actions, which targeted civilians, and attempted de-escalation. Due to Belgrade’s violent answer, more and more Kosovars saw armed guerrilla as the only option to resist the Serbian forces. This would drive a wedge between the LDK and the UÇK. Indeed, during those times, several spokespersons of the Party or militants disappeared or were killed. The suspicion is that UÇK attempted to eliminate people that would have been classified as ‘traitors’.

By February of 1998, Yugoslav authorities had started engaging in a full-on war in Kosovo by sending the actual army and divisions, not only law enforcement, to crush the insurgency once and for all. The Yugoslavian troops were well equipped but lacked the full knowledge of the terrain the UÇK had. Later, in March 1998, the UN Security Council Resolution n°1160 imposed an embargo upon the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to force Belgrade to cease the repression. It also qualified the UÇK as a terrorist organization. The US envoy to the Balkan, Robert Gelbard, also used these same words to describe it, although it was never the official position of the US government.

During the following months, Kosovo was plagued with war and massacres coming from both sides. Federal troops’ advancement forced the mass relocation of Kosovar civilians. After the failure of Rambouillet Conference negotiations in March, NATO bombings started against various targets in Yugoslavia and Kosovo. The relocation and killing of Kosovar civilians became more and more widespread after that. Shelling, destruction of mosques, houses and entire villages were to be seen all across Kosovo. The war ended with more than a million of displaced Kosovars.

The UÇK answered Yugoslav actions by abducting and killing Serbian civilians all around Kosovo, as well as forcible relocations. The UÇK opened up prison camps and used their prisoners for forced labour, often under the threat of summary executions. Answering the Yugoslav army’s destruction of mosques, the UÇK went up to destroy or damage orthodox churches and monasteries. It is also important to note that the UÇK also intensified its crackdown against Kosovars opposing their violent actions, killing and abducting some of their critics as well.

According to the latest research, the Kosovo war ended with the death of approximately 15.000 civilians. 10.000 of those were Albanians and approximatively 2.200 were Serbs. Millions of civilians ended up homeless or displaced out of their house.

Post-war Kosovo and “Commander Politics”

Immediately after the end of the war in June 1999, while the Yugoslav people were turning against the dictator and the opposition was gaining more and more traction, UÇK guerrilla fighters, despite the efforts of KFOR and UN troops, started to harass Serbian civilians in Kosovo. Beatings, assassination, burning of homes and churches became widespread, as well as pressures on Serbian and Roma communities. Everything was fair game to force them to leave Kosovo.

It is estimated that up to 200.000 Serbs were driven out of their homes by UÇK fighters, in addition to the 90.000 Serbs that had fled during the war. Along with them went several thousands of hundreds of Roma people, although their precise number is unknown.

Kosovo remained de facto under Serbian sovereignty according to international law, but Belgrade virtually lost all control on the province. After years of tensions with Belgrade and poor progress being made, Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence on the 17th of February 2008.

The same year, Carla del Ponte, Chief Prosecutor of the ICTY, famous for chasing Serbian war criminals, made shocking revelations. In The Hunt, a book that came out in 2008, she exposed how several hundreds of Serbian civilians had been abducted by the UÇK and had their organs stolen to be smuggled. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe immediately started an investigation, gathering testimonies. If del Ponte was previously praised in Kosovo for her fight against Serbian criminals, her determination to chase down Kosovar criminals afterwards turned the public opinion against her.

Kosovo has been a battleground between the PDK (Democratic Party of Kosovo, the political wing of the UÇK), the AAK (Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, the party of Ramush Haradinaj) and the LDK since its independence. Several scandals, especially in regard to corruption, have undermined the progress that Kosovo could make. Reports by the European Union, as well as other foreign observers, are all denouncing this situation.

The shady policies led by former UÇK members that went into politics have been ironically labelled ‘Commander Politics’ by part of the country. Last year’s election constituted a break in tradition, resulting in Vetevëndojse gaining the most seats – though Albin Kurti’s government didn’t last long.

Trialling the UÇK

The pressure imposed by the international community led to the opening of Kosovo’s Specialist Chamber in 2016. This was something that Thaçi originally supported but which has sparked angry reactions within Kosovo, both by political parties and the population. There, criticizing the UÇK can be dangerous in some circles, as can be seen in the case of Shkelzen Gashin. A journalist and political analyst, she received death threats in April 2020 after stating that the UÇK committed war crimes.

The crimes committed are, in fact, not something broadly talked about in Kosovo. They’re often relativised, since they were answering the violence of the Serbian forces. The fact that the UÇK crimes are dismissed so summarily is worrying: the main goal of several former high ranking members of the UÇK was to create an ‘ethnically pure’ Kosovo, without any other communities such as the Serbs, Roma people, Kosovar Egyptians and so on.

Thaçi and Haradinaj facing trial may force Kosovo to have an internal debate about the UÇK, its actions, and the role it played in the country’s politics. Minus the LDK, which historically opposed the UÇK actions, nearly all major parties have at least one top figure indicted by the Kosovo Specialist Chamber for past crimes during the war.

The rhetoric of the UÇK shouldn’t be one used in mainstream politics, as it is inherently violent against some of the communities populating Kosovo. All criminals have to be brought relentlessly to justice, and Kosovars can’t an exception to this rule. Only with all the criminals out of important positions, whether it is in Serbia or in Kosovo, can the healing process be truly complete.

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Between the Urals and Siberia

Russia’s heartland is situated west of the Urals on the North European Plain. To the north, south, and west there are open spaces, endless steppe protected by the many forests of the north. To the east, Russia is protected by the Urals. However, these have a low elevation and many passes through them, tapering off to the south. On the north end, expansion reached the Arctic and Finland. There, Russia was protected by the vast emptiness of the tundra, with boreal forests continuing on seemingly forever. This forms the northern shield of the Russian heartland. With its sheer cold, size, and desolation it had prevented major armies from traversing the distance.

During the first half of the 19th century, Russia pressed south into the Caucasus, which forms a neck of land between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Long wars against the Turks and the Persians brought the Russians the control of this region at last. They pushed to the southeast of the mountains, establishing their boundary on the Araxes in 1828. In the southwest, the Russian border was planted at Akhaltsikhe in 1829 and pushed forward to Kars in 1878.

In the second half of that same century, Russia undertook the conquest of Turkestan. This was prompted by Turkic the recurring raids into southern Russia by the peoples of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Khiva. They used to kidnap Russian subjects, primarily women to fill the harems of the Turkic elite. Tsars Alexander II and III had no intention of enduring this humiliation any further. Ultimately, they pushed south to capture the whole of Turkestan and released their enslaved people.

This forward advance brought Russia’s borders to the ranges of the Pamir Mountains, giving some protection toward India and the Tien Shan, which was part of the Silk Road. They nearly reached the Hindu Kush, occupied by Afghanistan. Westwards, they approached the Kopet Dag, forming the border between Turkmenistan and Persia, and the Caspian Sea.

Expansion towards Siberia

The Russian conquest of Siberia, much like the American conquest of the West, was a formative moment in the making of a nation. Just as the spirit of America was in part defined by its pioneers in the West, so that of Russia was defined by its conquest of the East. Many of the basic features of the Russian state reached their perfection (or imperfection) in Siberia. This was not so much a place as it was a state of mind.

The first moves toward Siberia began when the first Russian Czar Ivan IV (the Terrible, r. 1533-1584), captured the city of Kazan in October 1552. Four years later, Astrakhan and the territory associated with that Khanate, were added to the burgeoning Russian Empire. Later, in 1563, Kuchum, the Khan of the Noghay Horde, had defeated and killed the Khan of Sibir, a successor state to the Golden Horde, located east of the Ural Mountains. The Khan of Sibir had nominally been the vassal of Ivan IV. Kuchum promptly assumed his Siberian predecessor’s position of Russian vassal and sent envoys to present tribute. This was to make sure that the Russian Czar did not protest the takeover. Instead, Ivan IV awarded the right to establish settlements east of the Urals to a private family, the Stroganovs,  and allowed them to hire Cossacks to defend themselves.

When the Stroganovs discovered silver and iron in western Siberia, they asked for permission to expand their landholdings. They then hired Cossacks under the command of Yerman Timofeyevich, who later launched an attack on Khan Kuchum and captured his capital, Sibir, in 1583. By 1587, the Russians had consolidated the territory of the former Khanate of Sibir and constructed the city of Tobolsk.

Tobolsk would become the nerve centre of the conquest. From there on out, Russia’s expansion consisted of subduing minor tribes and building forts and outposts to control the countryside. Before the end of the century, Kuchum had been defeated, killed by his own people, and Noghay was integrated.

Eastward expansion and colonization

With their main enemies crushed and annexed, there was now nothing standing in the way for Russian expansion and colonization eastward. Commerce, and particularly fur trade, was the driving force behind this expansion. By moving East along Central Eurasia, the Russians also managed to avoid the remaining, powerful steppe peoples. The highways used were the many rivers and their tributaries, allowing even further expansion to the east. Following the Lena River into the northeast, the Russians established Yakutsk in 1632 and reached the Pacific Ocean, building the first Russian settlement there, Okhotsk, in 1647.

From Okhotsk, Russia moved toward Lake Baikal, reaching even further East to the Amur River basin. Where the upper Amur river turns south lay a town called Albazin. On this site, in 1651, the Russians invaded and began settling. The Manchus, however, did not take kindly to this. They had barely established their authority in China (the Qing Dynasty) when these upstart Russians began colonizing on their doorstep.

Though offended, the Manchus gave diplomacy a try. When this failed, they threw down the gauntlet and attacked Russia, capturing Albazin in 1685. In the Treaty of Nerchinks in 1689, Russia was forced to cede all territory south of the Stanovoy Mountains (or Range), but in return, they gained trade concessions and kept a presence in Okhotsk.

One hundred and sixty-nine years later, in 1858, part of that mass of land, the Primorskiy Kray (the “Maritime Province”), came under Russian control. It was here that, in 1860, the future port city of Vladivostok was constructed. After the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1903, Vladivostok became a large, prosperous city and Russia’s main Pacific port. The city would also play a key role in its economic expansion and defence in the East.

Conflicts along the way

Even though the Qing Dynasty and the Russian Empire seemed to have settled their relations, tensions were brewing. By the time of the Treaty of Nerchinks, modern Mongolia had been captured by the last nomadic empire in that area, the Dzungar Khanate. But over the decades, these nomads were slowly pushed westwards, toward Russia. At the time, the Qing feared that they would not be able to fully incorporate the Khanate. As the Chinese-Russian borders drew ever closer in that area, questions were raised. What if the Russians took advantage to push their expansion into Mongolia? Could the Dzungar people fleeing into Russia be given sanctuary?

Because of this, the 4th Qing Emperor began poking St Petersburg in the 1710s, pressuring Russia into signing an agreement. They did this largely by interfering with trade caravans in the area. The Russian fur traders were indeed the largest reason behind Russian expansion. Despite Peter the Great having his hands full with the ongoing Great Northern War, he decided to end the border conflict before his death. After much discussions and drawing up of maps, in 1728, the Treaty of Kyakhta was signed.

This treaty remedied most of the diplomatic and territorial issues between the two empires. It thus ensured that Russian trade could once again start in earnest. This trade was extremely valuable for the colonists and Russia’s expansion overall, helping cement Russia as a major economic power in Europe. From this moment on, until 1904, Russia kept its grip on the East and continued increasing its value, strategic and economic, and was even capable of extending their tentacles further down into Chinese territory.

This continued until the rising Japanese Empire, to the surprise and fear of the West, crushed the Russian Empire during the Russo-Japanese War. This led Russia to lose its possessions on the Liaodong Peninsula. But even today, the Russian East, from Vladivostok to the Urals, remains a growing, integrated part of Russia. It is fundamental to understand it in order to understand Russia.

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German unification, however, had deep roots. As the battlefield of choice should the Cold War go hot, Germany lived with the constant danger of complete nuclear annihilation hanging over its head. The two German governments made themselves the model of competing ideological systems, focused on defeating and superseding one another. Thirty years on, the scars of this confrontation still haven’t fully healed, and the pains of unification remain under the political spotlight in Germany. This momentous anniversary is as much a case for reflection as it is for celebration. And it is with reflection in mind that the story of German unification must be re-examined.

World War 2 ends

Following the end of the Second World War, Europe had been split in half between the Allied nations in the West, and the USSR with their satellite members of the Warsaw Pact in the East, separated by an “Iron Curtain” as Winston Churchill so famously said while delivering a speech in Fulton, Missouri. While Germany had suffered immensely, and now found itself torn into several pieces, each controlled by one power, most of Europe was reeling due to postwar poverty and hunger. This was one of the reasons that Western Europe, much to the dismay of the USA, saw strong, communist parties, heavily aligned with Moscow, popping up. Italy and France in particular deserve a mention.

The Americans managed to counter this Soviet threat, as they saw it, with the Marshall Plan, named after US Secretary of State, George C Marshall. The program provided broad economic aid to European states on condition only that they work together for their mutual benefit. The Soviet Union and its satellites were invited to participate. Finland and Czechoslovakia were willing, and Poland and Hungary showed interest.

Of course, Stalin could not allow this to happen and so forbade participation by the Soviet satellites. The Marshall Plan helped restore prosperity to Western Europe and set the stage for Europe’s unprecedented postwar economic growth. It also led to the waning of communist strength in the West and to the establishment of solid democratic regimes.

In February 1948 a dramatic and brutal display of power of Stalin’s new policy took place in Prague. The Communists expelled the democratic members of what had been a coalition government and murdered Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister and son of the founder of Czechoslovakia, Thomas Masaryk. President Eduard Benes was forced to resign, and Czechoslovakia was brought fully under Soviet rule.

Germany is split

These sort of Soviet actions increased American determination to go ahead with its own arrangements in Germany. The Russians swiftly dismantled German industry in the Eastern zone, but the Americans chose to try and make Germany self-sufficient, which meant restoring rather than destroying its industrial capacity.

Disagreements over Germany produced the most heated postwar debate. When the Western powers agreed to go forward with a separate constitution for the Western parts of Germany in February 1948, the Soviets walked out of a joint Allied Control Commission.

Berlin, while well within Soviet control, was governed by all four powers. The Soviets chose to seal off the city by closing all railroads and highways to West Germany, in an effort to drive the Western powers out of Berlin. The Western Allies responded to the Berlin Blockade with an airlift of supplies to the city that lasted almost a year (June 1948 – May 1949). In May 1949, the Russians were forced to back down and to open access to Berlin.

The incident greatly increased tensions and suspicions between the two opponents and hastened the separation of Germany into two states, a situation that prevailed for 40 years. West Germany (BRD, Bundesrepublik Deutschland) formally became the Federal Republic of Germany in September 1949, and one month later, East Germany (DDR, Deutsche Demokratische Republik), became the German Democratic Republic.

The Iron Curtain starts opening

In 1989 Soviet domination and communist rule in Eastern Europe came to an abrupt end, the USSR swallowed Eastern Europe after the Second World War, but they were not able to digest there, their ambitions exceeded its resources. It could no longer afford to garrison half of Europe and maintained an enormous military and police state apparatus that was unsustainable.

Soviet wealth was also largely illusory in that it was a closed economy, industry was inefficient because it had no competition to make it more efficient. Thus, when the Soviet market was opened to real competition, it proved unable to compete with much more efficient European and American production. This was much as Trotsky had predicted all along, and much as Andrei Parshev lamented would always be Russia’s fate.

The Soviet Union simply refused to intervene in the reemergence of Solidarity in Poland and Hungarian moves to independence, because they no longer had the power or desire to do so. And so, in the autumn of 1989, popular demonstrations erupted in many East German cities. The most important occurred in Leipzig, where the streets filled with people demanding democracy and an end to Communist Party rule.

Soviet Premier, Michail Gorbachev, told the Communist Party that they would no longer support them. With startling swiftness, the Communist leaders of the East German government resigned, making way for a younger generation of Communist Party members. These new leaders, who remained in power for only a few weeks, promised political and economic reforms. They convinced few East Germans, however, and the emigration to West Germany continued.

German unification is complete

In November 1989, in one of the most emotional moments in European history since 1945, the government of East Germany ordered the opening of the Berlin Wall. Tens of thousands of East Berliners crossed into West Berlin to celebrate, visit families, and to shop with money provided by the West German government. Shortly thereafter, free travel began between East and West Germany.

These changes were reflected also in the stance of the international community. Late in 1989, the ministers of the European Economic Community accepted in principle the unification of Germany. This led to reunification becoming a foregone conclusion by February 1990, accepted by the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France. Soon after, the Communist government of East Germany, after failing to reorganize itself, was swept away in free elections.

The revolution in East Germany had broad ramifications for international relations. The citizens of the two Germanies were determined to reunite. With the collapse of the Communist Party government in East Germany, there was no longer a viable distinction between them. Today, thanks to this spirit of unification of the German people, we can celebrate the 30th anniversary of German Unity.

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Napoleon III’s creation

Napoleon I introduced the gold franc standard in 1803, which had the precise measurements and metal composition needed to have a stable currency. Half a century later, in 1865, Napoleon III used this same standard to model the Latin Monetary Union on. The LMU had both gold and silver coins, set at an exchangeable ratio of 1:1.15, effectively making the currency function on bimetallism.

The idea was to have national currencies follow the LMU standard, so all member states could use each other’s currency and know for certain that the value of the coins was the same. On the 23^rd of December 1865, the LMU treaty was signed by France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland. All four countries could issue coins under the Latin Monetary Union standard mentioned in the treaty, which would then be accepted in any of the other partner countries. This meant that, for example, French merchants accepted Lire and Italian merchants accepted Francs. The goal was to promote commerce and exchanges between the signatory countries.

The Expansion of the Latin Monetary Union

The idea had a stunning success and attracted other nations to join the Union. Greece joined in 1867 and started minting its Drachma under LMU standard. Then Spain and Romania started the talks to join the Union, but the negotiations failed. Nevertheless, both decided to unilaterally mint their currencies to respect the LMU standard.

Negotiations happened with Austria-Hungary, but they ended rejecting the change, refusing to adapt to the concept of bimetallism as currency. They did, however, sign a separate treaty with France on gold coins and minted some gold Gulden (Forint) in LMU standard.

Other states joined the Union without signing the treaty: all French colonies had to transition to the LMU standard (including Algeria) in 1865, Peru joined in 1863, Colombia and Venezuela in 1871, Finland in 1877, Serbia in 1878 and Bulgaria in 1880. At that point, the LMU already expanded much further than simply a European currency. Finally, when Albania gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, it used coins from all over the LMU instead of keeping the Ottoman Lira, before it adopted its own currency in 1925.

Why it failed

Despite its apparent success, the LMU was deeply flawed and several critical mistakes were made in its set up and development. Key downfalls were the abuse and the breaches of the treaty. In 1866, the administrator of the Papal Treasury, Giacomo Antonelli, decided to increase the Vatican’s silver coinage by the equivalent of Belgium’s total. To mint this enormous amount of money, he changed the amount of prescribed metal in the coins, in direct violation of the treaty. The Papal coins flowed in the Union and debased the currency, proving very profitable for the Vatican. But the French and Swiss Banks rejected the Papal coins (despite Napoleon III’s tacit agreement with Giacomo Antonelli). The Papal States were ejected from the Union in 1870, owing 20 million Lire (the equivalent of almost 83 million Euro today).

Greece did the same thing as the Vatican in the beginning of the 20^th century, lowering the amount of gold to save its economy and hence debasing the value. They were expelled in 1908, but eventually readmitted in 1910. France and Italy, too, abused the LMU by printing paper money based on the bimetallic currency, which was technically outlawed. The two countries printed an extensive amount of money to finance their projects, while other Union members had to bear the costs.

Another critical problem, perhaps the main one, was that bimetallism is subject to fluctuation in the value of the two metals used, gold and silver. New silver extraction and refining techniques, huge increase in silver imports by France and Belgium, and a natural decrease in silver value led to huge stress on the Union’s economy. The exchange rate of 1:1.15 was no longer the reflection of the real value.

The Germans used this to their advantage, exchanging overvalued silver coins for gold coins that they would insert in their own monetary union, the Zollverein. In response to this, the mintage of silver coins was entirely suspended in 1878. From this date to the end, the LMU became de facto gold standard only. Payment in silver was still allowed, but customs were only in gold.

The previous failures completely destabilise the Union, with World War I giving the final blow to the project and ending all monetary collaboration. While the LMU was only officially dissolved in 1927, in practice its use really disappeared at the beginning of the war.

The Impact of the Latin Monetary Union

The primary goal of the Union was to nurture international trade and to bring the countries closer. While Napoleon I tried to unite Europe by force, Napoleon III tried to unite Europe through its currency. However, looking back, most economists agree that it only had a limited impact on trade. The period between 1865 and 1874 was the only moment where real increase in international trade with positive effects on the economy was visible.

Unlike the Zollverein, which was one of the key factors of Germany’s unification, the LMU failed to bring the countries closer. Its numerous flaws were fatal for anything to happen. It however inspired the creation of the similar Scandinavian Monetary Union, a union formed by Denmark and the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway. It also served as a model on which to take lessons from to avoid the mistakes made in the past to make the Euro a more sustainable currency.

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The Beginnings: prehistoric populations

Homo Sapiens is thought to have emerged on the continent of Africa and migrated outward from there. The greatest gene variety is found among African populations. As the number of genetic mutations grows with time, this would place the oldest human population in Africa. Mutations like blue eyes – thought to have originated in the Baltics because of its greater frequency there – blond hair or light skin, emerged later among more isolated populations. These have not been isolated long enough, nor experienced enough different mutations, to constitute distinct races or species. Most of the human genome is found on the African continent in native populations. Indeed the mutation for white skin is found on an island populated by African migrants in the Indian Ocean even as it is widespread elsewhere. The original populations of Europe were thought to have dark skin, and frequently blue eyes.

Humanoids of various types were found outside of Africa – notably the Neanderthals in Europe and on the Asian steppes, and the Denisovans, largely in Asia. Little is known of their origins but Neanderthals met and interbred with Homo Sapiens. Today’s European genome has on average about 4% Neanderthal genes.

About 20,000 BCE, during the period of the “last glacial maximum”, much of Europe was covered with ice and uninhabitable. A warming period ensued which continues to this day, and small groups of people began to populate Europe in greater and greater numbers: Homo-Sapiens from the Middle East, and Neanderthal. This warming trend was interrupted by the “Younger Dryas” a period of cooling and re-glaciation in Europe around 12,000 BCE. Three “foyers” of habitation remained during the Younger Dryas: an area around what is now the Basque country, southern Italy, and South Western Russia. The population was forced to exit the rest of the continent by the ice and cold. After warming trends resumed about 10,000 BCE Europe was repopulated from these three areas as well as from the Middle East.

The end of the Mesolithic period, about 6,000 BCE, finds an indigenous hunter gatherer population in Europe. The development of agriculture in the Middle East created pressure on the land. This led to an exodus of hunter gathers from this region and later of farming populations themselves, looking for better land, into Europe. Indigenous Neanderthal had already become extinct after some inter-breeding with Homo Sapiens.

More prehistoric mingling

Resulting from these early migrations a European population with a high frequency of Semitic and Turkic genes from the Middle East is then found throughout Europe, except in the Baltics and northern regions where populations from the Russian “foyer” dominated. The situation continues with gradual modification by immigrants into Europe from the Russian steppes until the beginning of the Bronze age from 4,000 to 5,000 BCE. These new Indo-Aryan immigrants are part of the Indo-European language group, which also went Eastward and South from their original home on the Russian steppes into Northern India (Sanskrit) and Persia (Iran). The Germanic and later Slavic branches of the Indo-Aryans resettle the continent and either suppress or intermingle with the old-European populations.

Only in Southern Italy and Spain do the old European populations of Semitic and Turkic descent remain dominant, but this is to be reversed later in Spain with invasion by the Visigoths and in Italy, but only partially so, by the Lombards – both Germanic tribes. Italy was also the recipient of a Semitic Jewish immigration during the Jewish diaspora of the Roman period and remains to this day, especially in the South, somewhat distinct genetically.

The Indo-European influx leads to the Etruscan, Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, followed on by the Trojan, Greek and Roman civilizations in Europe and Asia minor.

A caveat is necessary here. Research on pre-historic populations, based initially on archeological finds and linguistics, has been recently supported by genetics. Though scientific in every sense this research remains somewhat speculative until much more evidence is available.

From here on out, our still relatively simple heritage becomes inexorably mixed with that of all surrounding regions and half the world. Ancient Egypt had close relationships with both Greek and Roman civilizations and those of the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. Unknown populations called the Sea People invaded the Eastern Mediterranean during what is known as the “collapse of bronze age civilizations” and dominated for a time.

Wars, empires and plagues

After the historic civilizations of the region were rebuilt in the iron age, Carthaginians from North Africa, probably themselves Phoenicians, invaded Europe through France, Switzerland and over the Alps into Italy. Defeated by the Romans, they settled into southern Italy for decades before eventually being driven out.

On the borders of the Eastern Empire different people vied with Roman armies for dominance. Parthes (Indo-Iranians), Amazons, Saracens and eventually a Mongolian steppe tribe, the infamous Huns, all intermarried and took mates by force in the territories they conquered, leading to population mixtures difficult to quantify before modern genetics.

In addition to armies and invasions one can not underestimate the role of trade, cultural exchange and immigration in bringing populations together and modifying the European gene pool. A recent study of DNA extracted from remains of ancient Romans by Stanford University and Italian researchers found a remarkably high percentage of non-indigenous genetic material, leading researchers to conclude that the city was even more cosmopolitan than originally thought. But this was probably true of many of the cities of the Empire where most people lived.

Our readers will be somewhat more familiar with the admixture of European populations through trade, immigration, colonization and, of course, war in the period after the fall of the Roman Empire. Population bottlenecks leading to narrowing of the genetic pool like that of the Bubonic plague, or the destructive Thirty Years’ War may be less known for their demographic effects. Some of the more notable foreign influxes in the post Roman period include the Muslim invasions of the 8^th century, stopped by the Francs at Tours but remaining in control of Spain for more than half a millennium. The Moors brought an important Jewish migration from the Middle East in their wake.

The Mongols from across the great Asian steppes, eight time zones away, reached the Soja river in Hungary before turning back in 1241. The Turks in their turn reached the gates of Vienna before being turned back in 1683 and continued for centuries in the Balkans.

European ethnic groups themselves were inextricably mixed during the several millennia of the European project. The Vikings became Norseman and then Normans, invaded England, decimating the Anglo-Saxon nobility and changing the language from an exclusively Germanic tongue to one heavily influenced by Latin and French. Returning to whence they had recently come, they then fought the hundred years war in Western France, bringing a good bit of the now Anglo-Norman culture with them. Recent findings indicate an extensive Viking demographic presence, and not simply one of coastal marauders, in the previously largely Celtic gene pool of Ireland. Viking or Norman conquest went as far as Sicily where it is estimated that as much as 10 t0 20 percent of the population now has blond hair or blue eyes. Sicily was itself also subject to and heavily influenced by Arab conquests as were parts of the Italian peninsula and earlier by Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans.

Examples of the movements of European folk groups are too numerous to count: Slavs and Turks moved into the Balkans, Hungarians settled in Northwest Romania, Albanians in Italy, Greeks along the Italian coast. With these movements, cultural and physical intermingling always followed. The great European cities have always been international centers.

European colonizations around the world also resulted in considerable inter-mingling of populations with many former colonists and their offspring returning to Europe. Amerindian and French allies fought together against the British in North America. Black creole, originally from Africa, became products of French civilization, yielding in turn Europeans like Alexander Dumas (The Three Musketeers), Aimé Césaire (Discourse on Colonialism) and Leopold Senghor (French Academician) among their progeny. Some of these ex-colonies are now part of France.

Citizenship and Ethnicity

Surely even if European genetics is so diverse, citizenship or ethnic identity can define who is a European? Legally this is perhaps correct, at least as far as citizenship is concerned, and making exceptions for dual citizenship, but over time even this concept of “European” has proven elusive. The Romans originally granted citizenship to only propertied males of Rome. This was soon expanded as the empire grew. Rome granted citizenship to many conquered cities and provinces, many in Africa and Asia, but often only partial citizenship with much curtailed rights. For a time during the dark ages the idea of legal citizenship was replaced by feudal property laws and fealty to be supplanted later after the Renaissance by the ability of duchies and patented localities to determine who were their own citizens.

Later, nation states applied notions like ius soli and ius sanguinis to try to define and control their subjects. Today Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain and Hungary offer citizenship under widely differing rules to individuals descending from a national forbearer (ius sanguini), even when they have never set foot in the country or speak a word of the language. Rules often do not require more than one grandparent to have been born or descended from someone born in the country.

France, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Germany (after 2000) offer limited ius soli under certain conditions, usually that in addition to the child one of the parents was born there, or the child waits until a certain age. The rules are as complicated as there are countries and have changed often.

Ethnicity is not much help either. Certainly speaking a European language or dialect is a clear marker of ethnicity, though non Indo-European languages like Finnish, Hungarian Estonian and Sami, all Finno-Ugric, and Euskara (Basque) are spoken within Europe. The Basque language Euskara may be the only language still spoken to have originated on the European continent prior to the introduction of Indo-European languages. These originated on the Russian steppe in Asia and are also spoken in India and Iran. Foreigners can also master both European language and dialects.

Not even common experience is all that helpful. An Albanian’s experience of the last century is totally different from an Englishman’s or Pole’s. Nor are European food and other ethnic traditions determinate. It would be hard to define a common European aspect to food and families retain these customs to differing degrees.

Is there a core set of European values? Not all Europeans would espouse any one set or even sub-set of values. Even Christian values disputed between Protestant and Catholic are honored more often in the breech.

Globalization is hardly new, the human race one large family. Genes, values, languages, music, dance and food all travel liberally. “European” is a project of human beings who call themselves Europeans and participate in what we call Europe. Other definitions do not stand scrutiny.

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Ceaușescu is overthrown

In mid-December 1989, the first inklings of civil unrest made themselves heard against Romania’s communist rule. The spark that lit the revolution was the public protest held by the Hungarian minority of Timișoara, in western Romania, against the attempted eviction of a Hungarian pastor who had criticised the regime in a TV interview. A huge uprising subsequently broke out in the city a day after, on the 17th December, and the police opened fire, killing approximatively 100 people.

In an attempt to placate the rising unrests and re-establish control over the country, on the 21st December Ceaușescu addressed a support rally of over 100,000 people, many of whom were workers that had been brought in to attend this assembly under threat of being fired. This decision backfired: two minutes into his speech, the crowd started turning against him and eventually developed into a full-fledged riot.

Ceaușescu was forced to hide and later flee when the entire city began to rise against the regime forces and its infamous political police, the Securitate. Ceaușescu and his wife fled the capital on the 22nd of December, but were captured not too long after that. After a show-trial on the 25th of December, the dictator and his wife were executed by a firing squad, marking the end of 42 years of Communist rule.

Although it had developed and culminated in just a few days, the Romanian revolution witnessed a regular use of disinformation tools by regime forces, with Securitate agents and officials attempting to create a wind of panic within the country and turn fighting groups against each other. Additionally, confusion amongst the military due to contradictory orders in the days following Ceaușescu’s fleeing vastly contributed to the death toll of the revolution. By the time the violence ended, over a thousand people had lost their lives.

After the Revolution

With Ceaușescu’s flight from Bucharest, political organisations started to rise from the underground. One movement in particular quickly became the main political actor leading the aftermath of the revolution. The FSN (Frontul Salvării Naționale or National Salvation Front) was composed of several high-ranking members of the existent Romanian Communist Party who had been vocal in their opposition to Ceaușescu since before the revolution. 

The FSN was quick to establish an interim government, led by Ion Iliescu as president and Petre Roman as the Prime Minister. On the 27th of December, with the violence finally placating, Ion Iliescu, a former friend of the Ceaușescu couple and an important official within the Romanian Communist Party, announced the abolition of the one-party system and called for free elections, to be held in May. These would be the first free elections Romania would have since 1937. 

The FSN Government

The FSN had originally promised not to stand in the May 1990 presidential and legislative elections. Despite this, in February the organisation registered as a political party, and by May they stood as a united front with a number of election candidates picked from the high-ranking officials of the former Socialist Republic. Iliescu, leading candidate for the presidency, insisted that the country had to move forward rather than focus on investigating the crimes of the former leaders. On the other hand, transitional justice was something that was strongly demanded by the other political parties that had emerged from the ashes of the revolution.

FSN knew that to win the elections they would have to portray themselves as something the people were familiar with. Iliescu used his charisma to be seen as a man close to the Romanian people. The party had no strong organised opposition running against them at the time and could boast the support of much of the international community. It thus came to no surprise that he was elected president with more than 85% of the votes and that FSN won a majority in both chambers of the Romanian Parliament, with Petre Roman remained Prime Minister, and its government started cautious economic reforms. With almost no opening on the rest of the world before 1990, Romania had, at the time, a severe lack of political culture.

The overwhelming support for the FSN would not last. While anti-Communist protests had already begun (or better, had never stopped) during the FSN’s interim government, the elections caused an uptick in civil unrest. Attacks against the government started at the hands of both the newly formed opposition parties and of the young generation and educated people, who had had a small taste of what it was freedom was like in most western European countries and liberal democracies. The violence of the demonstrations escalated in June 1990 during the so-called Mineriad.

The Mineriad

Discontent against the continuation of the former Romanian Communist Party under another name, on the 22nd of April 1990 opposition parties and students organised a peaceful demonstration and march in Bucharest. The goal was to ensure an investigation in the events which had taken place during the revolution, the political independence of the Romanian Television station, and to ban all former members of the Romanian Communist Party from the new government. The demonstration soon became a sit-in that would last for over a month.

The numbers of demonstrators dropped after the FSN’s May victory, but many remained. The government attempted to negotiate, but on June 11th, the sit-in turned violent due to dissatisfaction over the results of these negotiations. Rioters attacked the government’s palace, and the police, military forces and army were called in to contain the violence. This uninterrupted protest between April and June 1990, led by university teachers and students, would become known as the Golaniad.

In order to clear out the protests, the government also called to Bucharest industrial workers and coal miners from the Jiu Valley, in South-West Transylvania, who were mostly in support of Iliescu’s government. On the 14th of June, the miners, led by trade union leader Miron Cozma, charged the protesters alongside governments forces and police. The result was a very violent confrontation and hundreds of wounded people.

While the pro-regime media claimed that the miners’ attack on the protesters “protected the newborn democracy”, the international community as well as the newborn independent and opposition press were shocked by this intervention and harshly questioned the legitimacy of the new government. The FSN only claimed that it “defended itself against anti-democratic protesters”.

FSN Splits: A Chance for the Opposition

Even though opposition to FSN and Iliescu’s government was at the time growing, the regime attempted to retain power by exerting control over powerful media outlets, trying to influence debates and delegitimise opponents. The local geopolitical context, which included Yugoslavia’s collapse and the invasion of Moldova by Russian forces, was used as a tool by the government to present itself as a stability token, ensuring freedom and fairness reigned inside the country.

Despite this united front to the population, however, tensions within the echelons of the party started to rise. In April 1992, due to tensions between Prime Minister Petre Roman and Iliescu, the FSN split. Iliescu left with his supporters and founded the Democratic National Salvation Front, rebranded one year later as the Social Democratic Party of Romania.

Only a few months later, in September, general elections in the country reconfirmed Iliescu as president, and the Democratic National Salvation Front entered into a coalition with left-leaning and ultra-nationalist parties such as the PRM (Greater Romania Party). Petre Roman’s FSN only got 10% of the votes in both chambers of Parliament, and while he remained as party secretary, the party would be rebranded in 1993 as the Democratic Party.

In the midst of the chaos happening within the former FSN, one particular electoral alliance rose to the occasion. The Romanian Democratic Convention (CDR), composed of several centre-right political parties, managed to become the main political opposition and second-largest party in Romania between 1992 and 1996. Its impact was positive enough that during the 1996 elections, Emil Constantinescu, leader of the CDR and presidential candidate, managed successfully defeat Ion Iliescu in the second turn of the presidential election.

Constantinescu wasn’t affiliated in any way to the former Communist authorities and was an early opponent to the FSN. His term, although marked by some progress within the institutions and allowed foreign investors to enter in the hope of revitalizing the Romanian economy, was also undermined by the most important governmental crisis of the decade.

Ciorbea and the Governmental Crisis

While Constantinescu led the Presidency, the government was left in the hands of Victor Ciorbea. During his term, which would only last under mid-1998, Ciorbea attempted to advance Romania’s transition towards a market economy. As part of this process, he introduced a number of austerity measures, including the closure of several bankrupt factories. Ciorbea’s reforms were met with protests and opposition from the population and workers, leading to significant protests and calls for his resignation.

With Ciorbea’s resignation in 1998, only halfway through his term, important quarrels within the CDR continued to occur. The ensuing political chaos provoked a significant dissatisfaction within Romanian society, and the rest of Constantinescu’s term would be continuously marked by protest movements.

At the Turn of the Century, the Spectre of Nationalism

With Constantinescu’s coming to an end, the year 2000 consolidated the realisation that he had been unable to successfully bring the stability he had promised back in 1996. As a consequence, he did not run for another presidential term. Ion Iliescu saw this as the perfect moment to return to the front of the political stage, taking once again the role of the person who would save Romania.

With such a familiar and historically controversial figure heading the Social Democratic Party of Romania on one side, and the right-wing and centrist parties struggling to choose a strong presidential candidate on the other, Romanian voters were discontent. Many saw Corneliu Vadim Tudor, leader of the PRM (Great Romania Party), a former prominent supporter of Ceaușescu now converted to ultranationalism, as the only viable candidate to vote for.

Tudor never tried to hide his extremist tendencies, publicly calling for the execution of people he considered as opponents if elected. However, while he did reach the second turn of presidential elections together with Iliescu, pro-democratic protesters rallied behind ‘the lesser evil’ and, on the 10th December 2000, voted Iliescu into the Romanian presidency once again with 66% of the votes. 

Post-2000 and Beyond

Eleven years after the revolution, some things promised to change Romania for the better never happened. Significantly, the promise of banning former Communist leaders from government after the revolution never materialised. The 2000 election is a good case study to show how the former members of the Communist dictatorship found their way back into the Romanian political life in several different parties.

The very fact that former members of the Communist elite led the country for several terms after the revolution may be key in understanding the struggle that exists up to this day, within the Romanian Republic. While the situation within the country has significantly improved since 2000, especially with its entry in the EU in 2007, many experts and Romanians say that so much more could have been done with a cleaner break from the past Communist political class. At the turn of the century, the story of the reborn democracy in Romania was only at its beginning.

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Broken treaties: the events leading to the conflict

The first Mithridatic war had ended badly for Pontus – its armies soundly smashed by Rome, saved from total destruction only by other conflicts attracting the Republic’s attention. Mithridates had assumed he could push Rome from Greek-speaking lands before they could muster a reaction, but this backfired catastrophically: now Rome was free to cement its hegemony in Greece and western Anatolia. The King of Pontus was declared a friend of Rome in the peace treaty, which was a common trap, as such a declaration demanded an extremely punitive reaction should such a person act against the Republic in the future.

After his crushing defeat in the first war, he significantly altered his military organisation, favouring a combination of skirmishing and cavalry tactics rather than the hoplite style formations, long since proven ineffective against Roman legions in anything other than perfect circumstances. Tensions in the region also came from neither Mithridates nor Murena (Sulla’s lieutenant left to deal with Anatolia) fully respecting the treaty, itching for an excuse to resume fighting. In addition to all this Mithridates, in a fit of paranoia, had his eldest son executed on the suspicion that he wanted to usurp the throne. Not content, he  then started openly suspecting his general Archelaus, who defected before he met the same fate. Archelaus then informed Murena of Mithridates’ military preparations and encouraged a pre-emptive strike.

The Second War

Murena apparently followed Archelaus’ suggestions, as he suddenly marched into Cappadocia and sacked Comana, wiping out much of Mithridates’ cavalry in the process. The war so began, but the King didn’t respond with force – in order to buy time, he instead officially protested Murena’s breaches of the treaty. During this time, the Roman general began raiding Pontus itself, looting 400 villages before a representative of the Roman senate could come and order him to stop. However, this didn’t stop the conflict. The representative also said that the halt order had not been put in written form, through an official decree. Murena apparently took this as tacit permission to continue, with Mithridates thinking the same.

When Murena came across the Halys river again, Mithridates had gathered an army and completely routed Murena, pushing him into the mountains and then out of Cappadocia. Sulla, furious at Murena, sent a tribune named Gabinius both to threaten Murena into standing down and to secure peace with Mithridates, who now held the upper hand. He insisted on gaining more territory in Cappadocia, tying its king Ariobarzanes to his dynasty by betrothing his daughter to him. Thus ended the second Mithridatic War, with a modest victory but a substantial propaganda boon for the King of Pontus.

The Third War: Good Omens for Mithridates

After the second war, Mithridates made efforts to establish peace with Rome. He tried to get the treaty agreed with Sulla formally ratified, even being willing to give Ariobarzanes the rest of his land back to secure it. Unfortunately for Pontus, by the time his emissaries arrived, Sulla was dead, and the senate was completely uninterested in discussing the matter. Mithridates likely considered this a statement of hostility. The Roman lack of interest started the Third War, as Mithridates soon had his son in law, Tigranes II of Armenia, invade Cappadocia. This invasion however resembled more a massive raid than an attempt at conquest, as Tigranes primarily wanted to capture people he could use to populate his new city of Tigranocerta. Rome immediately recognised Mithridates himself as the cause of this attack – a fact, it seems, made deliberately obvious by the King.

In preparation of the proper conflict he secured the help, or at least neutrality, of regions surrounding the Roman Republic, and massively expanded his army. Leading up to the third war were negotiations between Mithridates and Sertorius, the rebel governor of Hispania, conducted via the pirates of the Mediterranean. They agreed that in exchange for support, once in power Sertorius would recognise Mithridates’ right to rule all of Anatolia except for the existing Roman province of Asia. The King of Pontus then allowed one of Sertorius’ generals sent to aid him to essentially act as governor in the name of the latter’s rival government. Finally, Mithridates tried to ensure the neutrality of Egypt via a royal marriage, and began building his military strength in earnest, drilling his troops in the hope of matching Roman discipline, stripping luxuries and gilding in order to make room for military equipment on his ships. In total, Mithridates managed to gather an impressive force of around 140,000 infantry and 16,000 cavalry, between his own well trained forces and those of various mercenaries and barbarian tribes he managed to rally to his banner.

The King of Pontus then opened hostilities in style, with an elaborate slaughter of horses sent rushing over a cliff pulling a chariot, as well as a great fire sacrifice. These theatrics were deliberately engineered to appeal to all his followers, matching similar rituals to the gods performed by ancient Greeks, Scythians and Persians.

The real war then began. Mithridates marched his army into Paphlagonia using the failure to ratify the treaty of Dardanus by Rome as his casus belli. He then quickly took Bithynia, which willingly surrendered to him. At Chalcedon, he conducted a slaughter of Roman civilians and their Hellenic allies trapped outside by the cowardly governor Cotta, though this time he did not continue the practice of murdering prisoners after the battle. Against this seemingly unstoppable force was one of Sulla’s proteges, Lucius Lucullus, with a severely outnumbered force of around 30,000 men and 2500 cavalry. To make things worse, two of his five legions were the tough but frequently mutinous “Fimbrian” legions.

The Third War: Bad Omens for Mithridates

The King of Pontus was in a very strong position. As such, Mithridates attempted to bring Lucullus to battle at Otryae, but an apparent meteor strike spooked both generals, who viewed it landing between their armies as an omen that they shouldn’t fight on that day. From here, things started to rapidly go south for Mithridates. He moved on the city of Cyzicus and laid siege to it while attempting to convince the defenders that Lucullus’ approaching army was that of his son in law Tigranes II. Also, during this siege Mithridates received the news that Sertorius had been murdered and Pompey’s legions were wiping out what resistance was left in Hispania.

One of Mithridates’ Sertorian advisors, Lucius Magius, suggested allowing Lucullus to camp wherever he wanted as he claimed to be able to bring about the defection of the two Fimbrian legions. The failure of this gambit effectively handed Lucullus the mountain passes which both armies relied on for foraging, limiting Mithridates to naval resupply. With this change in circumstances, Mithridates resorted to trying to storm the city before winter set in and his army starved. He had by, this point, built huge siege engines to attack both the land and sea walls of Cyzicus. However they weren’t enough, and the assault was repelled by the city’s forces, helped by chance. While Cyzicus’ citizens desperately tried to plug a breach in their walls, a major gale destroyed or toppled many of Mithridates remaining siege engines. This was perceived by both sides as divine intervention, with the people of Cyzicus making sacrifices in the gods’ honour.

Mithridates’ advisors encouraged him to retreat, but the King refused, insisting on redoubling their efforts, building more siege engines and tunnels to try to break into the city. This fateful decision was partly due to hearing about the start of the third servile war, along with the successes of his general Eumachus in southern Anatolia and the massacres that came to signify his forces’ advances. While his generals tried to conceal the extent of his food problem, Mithridates eventually discovered that his soldiers were resorting to every desperate measure: from eating weeds and pack animals to cannibalism of dead comrades in the most extreme cases. A plague soon followed.

In response to these crises, Mithridates tried to send some of his forces and all of his cavalry on a long route around the mountains in the hope of preserving them, however Lucullus managed to catch this contingent, consisting heavily of ill or injured troops, and proceeded to march the survivors back, parading them in front of Mithridates’ remaining army. This humiliation was made worse upon hearing that the Galatians, who were allied to Rome out of hatred for Mithridates’ murders of their leading families, had pushed Eumachus out of southern Anatolia. Further demonstrating that when it rains it pours, another major storm wrecked Mithridates’ new siege towers, demoralising his remaining forces.

Mithridates’ attempt to retreat at this stage was catastrophic, and his effort to distract Rome with ships filled with gold failed, with the Romans capturing the gold before it could even be embarked. His remaining forces suffered atrocious casualties both from drowning and the pursuing Romans, with the survivors seeking refuge in Lampascus. Mithridates did succeed in evacuating his troops and the locals from the subsequent Roman siege, by directing his pirate allies to evacuate them by sea. However, the navy he left in the Hellespont took severe casualties from yet another major winter storm.

Lucullus proceeded to mop up Mithridates’ remaining forces in the region, which included capturing the traitor Varius. His armies in Bithynia enacted comparable reprisals to the  atrocities conducted on Romans by Mithridates. However, due to the incompetence of his second in command Voconius, Mithridates himself was able to escape, albeit having lost nearly his entire land force. Lucullus then marched into Pontus, where he successfully defeated Mithridates and sent him fleeing to Tigranes while he fully occupied Pontus itself. He soon moved to fighting Tigranes, but the battles were largely inconclusive, with Lucullus being hamstrung by his mutinous troops which prevented him fully exploiting his victories.

The tide finally seemed to turn in favour of Mithridates. Whilst in Armenia, he took advantage of Lucullus’ temporary halt, and managed a surprise attack to regain control of Pontus, while Lucullus was undermined by a political conspiracy involving Clodius Pulcher and Pompey. This forced the general to retreat and allowed Mithridates to consolidate his gains. As a result of these setbacks, Lucullus was removed from command, supplanted by Pompey.

Pompey moved quicker than Mithridates, using a night attack calculated to make Mithridates’ archers believe his men were closer than they actually were, and managing to catch and route Mithridates’ army, driving the survivors back towards Armenia. This time, however, Tigranes refused to protect him. Mithridates was now forced to flee towards the Bosporan kingdom with Pompey on his tail. While the Iberi and Albanoi tribes tried to delay the Roman forces, Pompey burned them out of their forests as a response to their guerrilla tactics. After losing track of Mithridates he turned to deal with Tigranes.

The Death of Mithridates

Tigranes surrendered when Pompey attacked his stronghold of Artaxata, surrendering Syria, Phoenicia and Mesopotamia in exchange for being forgiven and allowed to rule Armenia as a friend of Rome. Meanwhile, Mithridates managed to stabilize his situation. After escaping to the Bosporan kingdom, he took control of the region after his son Machares committed suicide, and proceeded to purge those he considered treacherous, including one of his other sons. He then tried to ask Rome for a conciliation, but Pompey rejected Mithridates’ overtures for peace while he was securing the Levant.

With no options left, he prepared a desperate plan to lead an army all the way to Italy, but the heavy preparations incited revolts and mutinies within the kingdom. The most significant was that of his son Pharnaces, who usurped him in his rebellion. At this point Mithridates committed suicide, rather than risk being handed to Pompey. Having purposefully cultivated an immunity to poison, this relatively painless method failed. He asked his bodyguard Bituitus to kill him by the sword – Bituitus “rendered the king the service that he desired”.

Conclusion

The decades-long struggle with Mithridates threatened Roman dominance in Anatolia and Greece – crucial regions for the soon-to-be Empire. After a long effort, the costly wars ultimately led to Mithridates’ suicide, when the Romans, helped by chance and Pompey, ground down his supporters and subdued his allies. After the dust settled, the Romans were left in total control of Anatolia and the Levant, finally enjoying stability in the area, now having a border with Parthia. Mithridates’ son Pharnaces would later try to recover his empire, only to be defeated by one Julius Caesar.

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Media, Disinformation, and Fake News

On the eve of the 21st century, a conflict on European soil erupts involving an essential weapon: the media. The instantaneity of modern media played a huge role in spreading propaganda and waging war in the minds of the citizens, in addition to waging it on the ground. A large amount of the public has instant access to it, controlling narratives and thus the masses. The manipulation of the Yugoslav population started with a regional media war.

The Federation of Yugoslavia had a federalised radio diffusion system, but lacked control over regional media, allowing each belligerent to promote their propaganda against other ethnicities within the same country. It was organised to create division and conflict within the general public in order to achieve nationalistic cohesion and justify the need for the war. National rhetoric became omnipresent and any initiative taken by the central government or by local authorities became highly politicised.

Waging a war can only be achieved successfully when the population supports it or gets involved. This is exactly how the political parties used the media to spread their ideology and foster the demonisation of their enemies, emphasising on existing tensions.

Several well-known propaganda techniques were used during the period of the war, such as cognitive dissonance, disinformation, scapegoating and name-calling to create tensions, and the creation of false stereotypes to influence the mind of the public. Nenad Pejić, author of the paper Media’s Responsibility for the War in Former Yugoslavia outlines a personal experience during the war: it demonstrated that educated adults were unable to discern false information from facts. There are countless examples of the media showing corpses and telling the public that they were Serbian victims killed by the Croats before the actual identification of the corpses had even begun.

This analytical failure in the public’s thoughts was partly due to the “CNN effect” which the Balkans suffered from. Immediate information and shocking images made the headlines every day and disappeared the next, without properly displaying facts. Svetlana Slpašak explains in her paper The War Started at Maksimir: Hate Speech in the Media that “no information of any importance had reached the public without comment or interpretation. The public was continuously kept in the state of mental adolescence”. It shocks public opinion and gives no in-depth explanation due to the shortening of attention span. Moreover, the media also used emotion to foster reactions from the public and played on hatred or fear, in the same way as clickbait and fake news do.

How ethnicity was used to justify war to the public

Insofar as there were no federal media, each faction started propagating information according to which side they were on, using ethnical arguments to reach this goal. In Serbian media, the Croats, the Albanians and the Muslims were portrayed as the masterminds of a conspiracy against Serbia, placing the Serbians in the role of the oppressed. On the other hand, Western media, which was mostly anti-Serbian, chose to only publish photos of Bosnian Muslims crying, refugees, and similar scenes. Serbian victims were never portrayed sympathetically, only as an aggressor, trivialising the Bosnian Serb victims of the war.

This trivialisation from both sides led to another consequence. Every individual is no longer an “individual”, but merely one of many in an ethnic group it belonged to, without individual responsibility. As Mr Pejić quoted Slavenk Drakulić: “This is what the war is doing to us – reducing us to one dimension. Before, I thought I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character and -yes- my nationality too. Now I feel stripped of all of that”.

As a consequence of this depersonalisation, some Serbians committing atrocities will commit them in the name of all Serbians and all Serbians will partially bear that responsibility. Reaching this level of association requires important preparation of the messages propagated and reduces the individuals into basic and simple stereotypes, denuded of anything personal to create more hatred. This partly explains the scale of the cleansing. Mass media fuels participation to mass ethnic violence, involving citizens in the fight. A parallel may be drawn between the actions perpetrated in Rwanda and the use of radio to push every citizen to fight. No government is responsible, everybody is: it has become a civil war.

In the years following Tito’s death leading to the breakup of the Federation, all sides started glorifying their past, especially Serbia, which created a past filled with symbols and heroism against the Ottoman invader. The Serbian media called the Bosnian Muslims “Turks” because of their religion and called the Serbian heroes because of their fight against them, generating more violence.

Long-term effects and the current use of media in ex-Yugoslav countries

As much as this series of events belongs to the past, the effects of mass manipulation still have an impact in ex-Yugoslavia. Not only the stereotypes created during the war remain in citizens’ minds, but the media continues to publish such information in each country, showing little interest in peace-building.

Croatia now has an issue with nationalist rhetoric with the revival of a certain nostalgia of the Ustaše regime. There are several reports in the country of ethnic-related violence towards Serbians in public places. Mixed marriages, recurrent before the war, led to family disputes and domestic violence.

Serbia’s media remains the government’s propaganda medium as proven by independent organisations such as Reporters Without Borders. The State remains a strong actor in the media market by attributing funds non-transparently to those who support the government.

Bosnia’s situation remains divided along ethnic lines. The media in the Bosnian Federation supports the Bosnian State and cohabitation, while the media in the Republic Srpska supports the interests of ethnic Serbians.

This article has focused on the Croatian and the Bosnian Wars, but it is notable that anti-Kosovo rhetoric in Serbia remains high, just as there is anti-Serbia rhetoric in Kosovo. Serbia witnesses tenacious ethnic related violence against Kosovars and Albanians. Each media outlet in both Serbia and Kosovo portrays the normalisation talks as a zero-sum game, as if each step was a victory against the enemy. As in every war, propaganda messages are spread to give legitimacy to one side or the other to receive public support from the masses, and Yugoslavia was no exception.

Guest article by Valentin Dantec. This content does not necessarily reflect the official opinion of My Country? Europe. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the author. 

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