the balkans and pacifism

what do i want to say about the balkans regarding pacifism? one huge shitty thing in the region was the expansionist ideas, the irredentism. everybody wanted to get in on macedonia, for example. croatia and serbia feuded over bosnia hercegovina. bulgaria was all over thrace. greece had its megali idea. serbia always had its hooks in kosovo, an overwhelmingly ethnic albanian territory. etc. etc. 

where's this itch come from? more territory makes a state more powerful, sure, but why did it capture public imagination so much? the biggest issue was the power vacuums, topped off by the demographical scrum. when the ottoman empire got booted out of macedonia, etc., there was all this territory and all sorts of people and no government and no single country to swallow it up. and so there's war. simple enough. 

irredentism also comes about from without the country. bulgaria, for example, got its itch for southward expansion in large part from its refugees fleeing northward, who then agitated to return south under the flag, and arms, of their adoptive nation. so that, too. 

there're also racist, nationalist movements that spring up among benighted people and threaten minorities. the idea of "greater serbia" gained tremendous currency during the ustase regime during world war two. serbs WERE cleansed, terrible things DID happen, and the resultant fixation on having every serb be in a state together, and never a minority, ultimately lead to terrible things. 

reading The Balkans, by Misha Glenny, has made me think these things. it's also reaffirmed in my mind that all this stuff happens in states full of poor, ignorant people. investments in a country's infrastructure, and education, and industry, is the best and simplest way to stop wars from happening. 

as far as arguing that Violence Always Makes Things Worse, there's a lot of individual things to point at, but putting together a grand argument is way beyond me. there were the yugoslav partisans launching deliberately quixotic attacks on nazi positions solely to provoke retaliation against the locals who would then often join up the fight against the nazis. 

i originally started with all this because i wanted to know what the world should've done in the face of milosevic's bad behavior. did the world have to stop Greater Serb violence with violence? 

a calculation that's super taken for granted these days but which i'd like to undermine is that it's better for a thousand people to die in a war to stop the ignoble, peace time political murder of a single person. warrior-on-warrior casualties are infinitely easier to stomach than civilian deaths. that thinking leads to a lot more heinous (but noble!) death and misery than there'd otherwise be, i think.