THE POWER OF NATIONALITY

The Balkan Express: Fragments From the Other Side of War
by Slavenka Drakulic’ (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993)

Introduction

Bloody war ripped the former Yugoslavia and left a collection of war-torn newly created states behind. People’s identities were ripped from them, and the most important identifying label was one’s nationality, which had been a distant consideration prior to the war.

Excerpt from pages 50-51

Some of my foreign friends from that time cannot understand that they and I have less and less in common now. I am living in a country that has had six bloody months of war, and it is hard for them to understand that being Croat has become my destiny. How can I explain to them that in this war I am defined by my nationality, and by it alone? There is another thing that is even harder to explain—the way the awareness of my nationality, because of my past, came to me in a negative way. I had fought against treating nationality as a main criterion by which to judge human beings; I tried to see the people behind the label; I kept open the possibility of dialogue with my friends and colleagues in Serbia even after all telephone lines and roads had been cut off and one-third of Croatia had been occupied and bombed. I resisted coming to terms with the fact that in Croatia it is difficult to be the kind of person who says, ‘Yes, I am Croat but . . .’

In the end, none of that helped me. Along with millions of other Croats, I was pinned to the wall of nationhood—not only by outside pressure from Serbia and the Federal Army but by national homogenization within Croatia itself. That is what the war is doing to us, reducing us to one dimension: the Nation. The trouble with this nationhood, however, is that whereas before I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character—and, yes, my nationality too—now I feel stripped of all that. I am nobody because I am not a person any more. I am one of 4.5 million Croats.

Questions and Discussion

What does the author mean, “I am nobody because I am not a person any more. I am one of 4.5 million Croats.”

The author says she is less like her foreign friends now that she has experienced six months of war. How does war (violence) change a person?

What does your nationality mean to you? Should one’s nationality be a defining label? It is likely that the author had more in common with many of her Serbian friends than she had in common with other Croats.

Nationality became the most important identity marker during and after the war. Brainstorm other sides of identity (eg. career, profession, hobby, houseowner, father/mother etc.).