Realm of the Black Mountain

"The last one is Montenegro. The book is Realm of the Black Mountain by Elizabeth Roberts. Elizabeth Roberts was at Oxford, and was the wife of the master of Trinity College. I think he was the British ambassador in Belgrade, and when she was there she became interested in Montenegro and wrote this book. It was the first book that I read about the history of Montenegro. What I concentrate on in my own book is a short period, 1910 to 1918, when Montenegro was a kingdom. Montenegro was an Allied state in World War I and the only Allied state which wasn’t restored afterwards. It was swallowed up, by very devious means, by the Serbs – who were one of our other allies. It’s a bit like Poland after World War II . That is, one of our allies, the Poles, would be swallowed up by a bigger and more powerful ally, namely the Soviet Union. And we, the British and the Western Allies, who can’t do anything about it, tend not to notice. So it’s a bit of a pointer to the inequities or hypocrisies of Allied policy. Throughout World War I, one of the war aims was the restoration of occupied Allied countries like Belgium and Montenegro. Well, the chapter goes on. Montenegro is swallowed by Serbia, and then of course Serbia becomes part of Yugoslavia, until 1992 when the Federation of Yugoslavia is reduced to Serbia and Montenegro, the last two parts that hold together. Then the Montenegrins begin to feel increasingly uncomfortable with Milosevic and Serbia, they split, and Montenegro is recognised as a sovereign state member of the United Nations in 2006. As soon as that happens, the ex-communist leader of Montenegro puts up a statue – to whom? The last king of Montenegro. So they begin to cultivate Montenegro’s independent history. It’s all to do with identity, and identity has many roots. Language is one of them. The Montenegrins speak Serbian. In fact, they call themselves Serbs. So in Serbia the Montenegrins are just part of us. We weren’t taking over another country, they say, we were welcoming other Serbs back into the fold. The parallel is Austria. Are Austrians German? Well, they speak German. But they have very different traditions, and they don’t think of themselves as German. Hitler behaved like the Serbs, saying, “I am the chancellor of Germany and I’m Austrian. Of course we will take over Austria and we will be welcomed by the populace, because the Austrians, as everybody knows, are Germans like the rest.” Well they’re not. They have a different history. And the Montenegrins have a different religious history. The Montenegrin orthodox church had broken away from the Serbian orthodox church. Some of them do. In Belarus or parts of Ukraine there are still statues of Lenin. But this Soviet connection is cultivated by people who see the Soviet Union as not being Russian, but as being a multinational empire which is trying to develop a different Soviet identity – Homo Sovieticus – in which smaller nations like Belarus or Ukraine could be on an equal footing with the Russians. The same is true of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav identity was cultivated by Croats who wanted to get away, as it were, from their own nationalists and create a new Yugoslav community in which Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Macedonians could all live together in peace and harmony. Big question, small answer. The answer is force, violence. In Belarus, Stalin goes in and he shoots virtually the entire intelligentsia of this little country. Tito in Yugoslavia was extremely brutal and murderous against people who didn’t agree with him – Croat nationalists or whoever. I’ve just been to the Cheltenham [literary] festival, and one of the questions was: Is Putin trying to revive the Soviet Union? Part of the afterlife of the Soviet Union is, of course, in Putin’s brain. Putin is ex-KGB, an organisation founded to preserve the Soviet state which failed completely. Putin must have a terrible sense of failure. In fact, he has said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of modern times. So sure, Putin, in the back of his mind, would like to reassemble if not the Soviet Union, then some sort of empire, a broader Russian-dominated grouping which would be a modern version of the Soviet Union. I don’t think he’s got a cat’s chance in hell. It’s an absolutely key question. I think that a crisis such as we see developing now makes it absolutely essential for Europe to refocus itself, to weigh up what its aims and perspectives are. The changes that happened in 1989 and afterwards were unprepared for. Nobody saw it coming, the collapse of the Soviet bloc and all these countries dying to join the union. Enlargement took place without any real change of governance. Systems which were designed to rule six countries of similar economic and political development simply don’t work with 27. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Enlargement took place, and the eurozone was created without any due recognition of basic facts. Basically, no enforcement. You set up a common currency, and you lay down rules that you’re not allowed to increase your debt to more than whatever it was. The first country to break them was Germany. Then the French broke it. And then along come the Greeks, who say, “Ah, well if the big boys can get away with it, who’s going to control us?” It’s got completely out of hand, because the eurozone was set up without enforceable rules, without the political mechanisms for governing this currency area. I think it’s obvious now that they either have to transform the eurozone quickly and make it workable – give it rules which can be observed and for which there are penalties – or it really is going to fall apart. And behind that is the European Union. Is there a European identity strong enough to overcome the national identities of its member states? It’s touch and go. But I’m an optimist. I think there will be one hell of a crisis. I doubt if the EU will disappear, but it will be severely chastened. And it will have to put its house in order. Otherwise it will become one of the vanished kingdoms. It wouldn’t be unprecedented for that to happen. This interview was published on October 27th, 2011"