This oversight was compounded when one took the rest of postcommunist Europe into consideration. According to the last U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann (1996: 46), “U.S. policy in Eastern Europe was heavily focused on Poland and Hungary, countries that were moving on the reform path faster than Yugoslavia and without the baggage of divisive nationalism. Yugoslavia would be seen as a poor risk and therefore a low priority.” Indeed, the aid community had its hands full dealing not only with Bosnia but also with the newly democratic countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Explains a USAID employee working on the Balkans at the time, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “We were so overwhelmed with work. A new country was popping up every few months … [USAID] needed to move into all these new places, it was hard enough to move contracts and money, let alone hiring, offices, and getting on the ground.” In the early 1990s, USAID had only a handful of employees working in its newly founded democracy office. Serbia, she says, just “wasn’t a priority. There was so much to do for all the other countries … no one had the energy.”
Nor did they have the will. As news spread of ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, mass rapes, and genocide, the United States and its European allies grew increasingly wary of Serbia. By the early 1990s, Serbia had become a pariah state. The thought of aiding forces within Serbia—however well intentioned those forces may have been—was viewed as distasteful. A former representative of NDI explained, “Serbia had this terrible reputation. The perception was that it was like going into Apartheid South Africa: as long as that regime existed, they wouldn’t go into it.”40 Those promoting aid to Serbia faced an uphill battle. As one former democracy promoter recalls, “Most people in Washington wanted to build a wall around Serbia and let them rot, to tell you the truth. People who were outraged by perceived war crimes … hated the idea of cultivating Serbia.”41 Indeed, as early advocates of foreign aid soon came to learn, it was not a given that people wanted to support change in Serbia.
It was also not a given that they believed that change was possible. David Owen (1997: 1–3), coauthor of the failed Vance-Owen Peace Plan, begins his tellingly entitled memoir, Balkan Odyssey, with the following words: “Nothing is simple in the Balkans…. History points to a tradition in the Balkans of a readiness to solve disputes by the taking up of arms and acceptance of the forceful or even negotiated movement of people as the consequence of war.” With these words, Owen gave voice to a perspective then shared by many policy makers as they set their sights on the looming crisis in the former Yugoslavia. When in 1991 the multiethnic federation erupted in violence, policy makers justified a course of inaction on Serbia—and the Balkans more generally—through reference to irresolvable ancient hatreds.
The ancient-hatreds theory had important implications for democracy aid. Aid, after all, could bear little fruit in a region where good and bad knew no distinction and violence was a normal way of life. The people of the Western Balkans were thus best left to their own devices. This perception was particularly prominent in France and the United Kingdom, where policy makers opposed even the most modest forms of intervention. But it was also prevalent in the United States, where Robert D. Kaplan’s book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History—which preceded Owen’s memoir and lay the foundations for the ancient-hatreds thesis—shaped popular opinion, including that of President Clinton.42
The vision of the Balkans as a primordial and an exotic terrain applied not only to the outbreak of conflict but also to the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, many of whom, Owen (1997: 1) maintained, “were literally strangers to the truth.” Many believed that the Balkans was simply not ready for democracy. As Owen (1997: 2) lamented, leaders of the Balkans “had no experience in democracy.” Their opinions, he wrote, had been formed in a society “where truth was valued far, far less than in the Western democracies” (Owen 1997: 2). The patronizing attitudes of many foreign policy makers made democracy assistance to Serbia a moot topic.
Many donors also questioned whether parties wished to receive foreign aid. IRI’s efforts were repeatedly thwarted during its early ventures into Yugoslavia, in part because of the rising tide of authoritarianism but mostly because of parties’ fear of being unduly stigmatized by their associations with the United States. A former IRI program officer explains, “The fear coupled with the difficult circumstances of the Serbian opposition across the board made our work very difficult. It made it such that they didn’t feel themselves in a position to accept our assistance.”43 Indeed, some donors believed parties themselves were unwilling to accept foreign support for fear of being branded traitors and lackeys. Gerald Hyman, the former director of USAID’s Democracy and Governance Office, for example, believes support from the United States and Europe “would have been the kiss of death” for Serbia’s opposition.44
Yet perhaps the chief reason aid to Serbia’s democratic opposition was not forthcoming lay in the West’s reticence to fully discredit Milošević. Throughout much of the 1990s, foreign policy makers viewed Milošević as a stable—if unsavory—interlocutor. Most important, he was the only figure deemed capable of following through on his political commitments, particularly as concerned Serbia’s Bosnian Serb neighbors. As the CIA explained, there was “no good and politically viable alternative” to Milošević—whatever his faults, he was “the only Serb leader the West can deal with and the only one capable of delivering a comprehensive solution.”45 Richard Holbrooke—the celebrated diplomat lauded for having ended the war in Bosnia—believed Milošević was “key” to achieving regional stability, and he brazenly upheld “a strategy of dealing solely with Milošević.”46
For the leaders of Serbia’s democratic opposition, such sentiments meant not only that foreign officials had little confidence in the opposition’s ability to mount a meaningful challenge to Milošević, but also that they saw little advantage in supporting opposition parties’ efforts to achieve such a victory. To the contrary, regime change would likely have led to greater uncertainty—something the international community was keen to avoid.
Matters were considerably complicated by the troubled state of Serbia’s democratic opposition. Riddled with ego-driven leaders and extravagant personalities, Serbian parties were not only unnerving but also downright scary. In interviews with U.S. and European policy makers and aid providers, Vuk Drašković—the leader of Serbia’s democratic opposition—was invariably ridiculed as “spooky,” “nuts,” “erratic,” and a “prima donna.” Foreign critics of Serbia’s opposition parties tended to fall into one of two camps: According to one view, Milošević’s foes were more “rabidly nationalistic” than Milošević himself and thus posed a far greater threat to Yugoslav security.47 The second view held that Serbian parties were incompetent and thus ultimately unreliable. A Dutch diplomat says, “The consensus at the time was that the opposition was weak and divided. They didn’t know what they wanted.”48 Indeed, for much of the 1990s the world was convinced of the ineptitude and even danger of the Serbian opposition. The consequence of such sentiments was that aid to Serbian parties remained a moot topic. As a result, Serbia’s opposition went unaided, and Milošević’s power structure unhindered. Not only were the results of this policy disastrous but so was the logic behind it.
A Troubled Rationale for Inaction
Many reasons accounted for party aid’s absence in Milošević’s Serbia. Each was as tragic as it was misinformed. Ultimately, however, the decision not to use democracy aid to the benefit of Serbian democrats was dictated not by the best interests of Serbian democracy but by larger foreign policy goals. For most of the 1990s, those goals did not coincide with Milošević’s ouster.
Among the most ludicrous of the reasons legitimizing inaction was the ancient-hatreds thesis. As early as 1989, the CIA located the source of Yugoslavia’s rupture not in ancient animosities or cultural deficits but in the inability of Yugoslav leaders to stem growing nationalism, political divisions, and economic