Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

felt helpless in the political and economic upheavals Yugoslavia had suffered. He had always loved his country and especially his city, Belgrade, but the break-up of Yugoslavia and the following war intensified his feeling of being a Serb. I found this intensity most striking in contrast to the nonchalant way psychologists in England and Australia treat their nationality.

      Then I remembered how intensely we all felt about nationality during the Second World War. It was vitally important both to one’s meaning structure and to one’s physical survival to identify with the nation which was winning the war and to avoid being identified as belonging to an enemy nation. The history of nations is a history of war. Every nation has to invent a national story, and that story becomes its official history, where the great milestones are wars. In official histories Britain looked to Crécy, Agincourt and Trafalgar; France looked to Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena; Serbia to Kosova; America to Lexington and Bunker Hill; Australia to Gallipoli and the Somme. Such events defined the nation, but the event which defined the nation did not have to be a victory. The Serbs were defeated at Kosova, the Australians at Gallipoli. Defeats mean sacrifices.

      The story goes that on the eve of the fateful Battle of Kosova in 1389 Prince Lazar told his men,

      ‘It is better to die in battle than to live in shame. Better it is for us to accept death from the sword in battle than to offer our shoulders to the enemy. We have lived a long time in the world: in the end we seek to accept the martyr’s struggle and to live forever in heaven. We call ourselves Christian soldiers, martyrs for godliness to be recorded in the book of life. We do not spare our bodies in fighting in order that we may accept holy wreaths from that One who judges all accomplishments. Sufferings beget glory and labour leads to peace.’¹⁹

      The Serbs have long memories. Six hundred years later Slobodan Milošovic, President of the Yugoslav Republic, could persuade the Serbs that the sacrifices at Kosova justified many more sacrifices.

      In 1922 the Sydney Morning Herald declared that ‘The Gallipoli campaign has been described as “the most glorious failure in military history”’, and went on to ask, ‘But was it failure to Australia? It has made us a nation. Was the price worth paying? Are not nations like individuals? If the nation is to be born, if the nation is to live, someone must die for it.’²⁰