The Habsburgs and the Balkans: A Rich, Uneven Tapestry
Much ill-informed and superficial nonsense has been published in recent weeks on the Habsburgs in general and on their role in the Balkans in particular. This is a pity because that role is genuinely interesting, often filled with drama and heroism, and in its final stages marked by hubris, folly, and tragedy. Well worth a sober revisit.
The Militärgrenze—The engagement of the Habsburgs in the Balkans started in 1527, after the Hungarian rout at Mohacs, when the title of the slain King Louis II passed to the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand. Ferdinand and his heirs proceeded to establish a fortified cordon that came to be known as the Military Border in Croatia-Slavonia and, eventually, points further east. They did so at a time of Europe’s supreme peril. The Ottomans had subjugated Serbia, Bulgaria, and most of Hungary, until that time a major European power. They ruled all of the Balkans except an outer fringe of Hungary and a few fortified Dalmatian cities supported by Venice, and they were on the move.
Much of the land the Turks conquered in the western Balkans was remarkably inaccessible until recent times. It was beyond the rule of ancient and medieval states and was a refuge for rebels and resisters until recent times, an upland universe of thinly-populated areas. Into this almost stateless zone the Ottoman state pushed remorselessly in the 15th and 16th centuries, establishing its control of towns, valleys and fortresses, and offering new religion or new taxes to the new subjects. As the Turkish raiding parties moved northward, they pushed ahead of them a devastated no-man’s land (serhat). Final attacks were often preceded by years of raiding. This key feature of Ottoman warfare created utter wastelands on both the Turkish and the Christian side of the borders. After the fall of Serbia (1459) and Bosnia (1463), tens of thousands of mostly Orthodox Christians moved into depopulated lands in central and southwestern Croatia, between the Sava River at the southern edge of the Pannonian plain and the Adriatic, which had been ravaged by Turkish attacks.
The Austrians were desperately short of manpower and wanted to deploy the newcomers in defense against Ottoman incursions. To settle them down and give them a stake in the land they were supposed to defend, Vienna was willing to exempt them from feudal obligations and grant them religious liberty in return for military service. The settlers thus became Grenzers, granièari, the guardians of the Habsburgs’ vulnerable southeastern border, the backbone of the antemurale Christianitatis. This German overlay on the enfeebled Hungarian-Croatian line of defense, established at the moment of the Ottoman zenith, proved successful: the Grenzer-reinforced line held. By 1578 the whole Croatian Border from the Adriatic to the Sava River was administered by the Hofkriegsrat in Graz.
In the earliest Habsburg charter for the Border, issued by Ferdinand I Habsburg on September 5, 1538, the settlers were referred to as “Serbs or Rascians” (Serviani seu Rasciani). A century later, in 1630, the Grenzer privileges were codified by Ferdinand II in the Statuta Valachorum, while other contemporary Austrian documents refer to Rasciani sive Serbiani atque Valachi. In the 1660s the Roman Catholic Bishop of Zagreb, Petar Petretiæ, used the designation “Vlachs or Rascians, better still Serbians” (gens Valachorum sive Rascianorum vel potius Servianorum). He also wrote of “Vlachs, or Rascians, or, correctly speaking, Serbs,” Valachi siue Rasciani uel ut verius dicam Serviani nam ex regno Serviae prodierunt (in a report to the Crown Council dated April 21, 1662). The language they spoke, according to the bishop, was the ‘Serbian language, which is by us here known as Vlach’ (Lingua Serviana quae apud nos Valachica dicitur). The semantic confusion is unsurprising. While many settlers referred to themselves as Serbs from the moment of their arrival—which was reflected in their well-documented reverence for the mythologized saga of Kosovo—by geographic origin they were Rascians, as soldiers they were Grenzer, and as shepherds they were Vlachs, members of an upland economy of wandering pastoralists without a fixed locality. (The word Vlach in Bosnia is colloquially used by Muslims for all Christians, Orthodox as well as Catholic, while in Dalmatia it is still used in coastal towns for the people who live inland, regardless of religion or ethnicity.)
Understanding Identities—The notion that Balkan peasantries were uniformly pre-national before their “awakening” around 1848, or that “bourgeois nationalism” kicked into action to the beat of the Marseillaise to astonish an unsuspecting world, is incorrect. It is not a primordialist heresy to state that some identities are far older than the continuous documentary evidence for them. In the Balkans, nationality—a name, its memory, and loyalty to a myth—is plainly older than 1789, let alone 1848. They could not be conjured ex nihilo back in the early 19th century, just as various modern and postmodern constructs (Macedonian, Montenegrin, Bosniak…) are yet to prove their staying power.
However used or abused by later generations, the foundations of Serb and Croat identity alike rested on real bonds of shared memory and collective experience rooted in medieval times. The argument applies to both sides of the Serb-Croat equation. No less than their Catholic neighbors, Orthodox Grenzers had an extensive religion-supported oral history and a grasp of family origins by the time the modern nation-state system was codified by the Peace of Westphalia. They were Serbs long before they emerged from the “Vlach” chrysalis. The claim that an ethnically undifferentiated Orthodox mélange, formerly Croat or else Vlach in origin, was “Serbianized” under the influence of the Serbian Orthodox Church and its autonomous schools in the 19th century, has its mirror image is the Serbian nationalist claim that most modern “Croats” are the offspring of Catholicized Serbs. It unintentionally gives credence to the assertion that religious conversion created both Serbs and Croats. This claim, however dubious, is often treated as axiomatic by all too many Western authors.
The legal entity of the Kingdom of Croatia survived under the Habsburgs, making it one of the chartered historic nations of the Empire. The resulting notion of its state rights included the key claim that no inhabitants of Croatia were exempt from the jurisdiction of its political and legal institutions. The Military Border was kept separate from the political, legal and administrative system of “Civil Croatia.” For the upholders of Croatia’s state rights the Serbs were unwelcome aliens for as long as they insisted on retaining their distinct name, their autonomous socio-economic and legal status vis-à-vis Civil Croatia, and their Orthodox faith. An obsessive aristocratic resentment at Grenzer priviliges was passed on from one generation to another, and became “democratized” after the collapse of feudalism in 1848. At the historical root of the bloodbath of 1941-5 and the conflict of 1991-95 lay a centuries-old striving of the Croatian elite class to impose legal and religious homogeneity and to re-establish political obedience.
A culturally homogeneous nation-state could not be created from the diversity of nationalities without ethnic cleansing, however. The notion of a racially distinct national community with an exclusive claim to its land was the necessary ingredient to make such a project emotionally and culturally legitimate and therefore possible. That notion was eventually articulated in the aftermath of 1848, in the period of rapid modernization, with the Serb as the essential ‘other’ at its center. The old distaste for the Vlach of the Croatian Estates was about to spread down the social scale. This happened fairly rapidly, within a generation, in the second half of the 19th century. Far from being ancient hatreds the rivalries were ancient in origin but modern in form.
Yugoslavism—It has been said that the identities of latter-day Serbs and Croats had been pre-national until the early 1800’s; but the speed and irreversibility with which they gelled into their distinct national communities indicates that those identities had been well developed long before the fall of the Bastille. Throughout the Habsburg Balkan lands there had existed a division along confessional lines; but what may have been a key cause of differentiation in the early-modern era became but its visible manifestation in the 19th century. Pre-modern religious affiliation, early-modern culture and newly-codified language combined to produce modern identity. The tensions and rivalries had ceased to be ostensibly religious and became openly nationalist. The process was still incomplete when the revolution of 1848 shook the Habsburg Empire. During the revolution the provincial authorities in Zagreb, supported by Vienna, propagated the Serb-Croat commonalities and common interests. This seemed a small price to pay for the willingness of both Serbs and Croats to fight for the Austrian Crown, but proved costly in the long run.
Hungarian resistance to centralism, after the setback of 1849, was crowned almost two decades later with the Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867 which created a confederalized Austria-Hungary. Within the Dual Monarchy Hungary was effectively left to deal with its multiethnic, multilingual plurality of non-Hungarian subjects of the Crown of St. Stephen as it deemed fit. The ensuing Croatian-Hungarian “Agreement” (Nagodba) of 1868 governed Croatia’s political status as a province of Hungary for half a century until the end of the First World War. It recognized Croatia-Slavonia as a distinct political unit but it also confirmed its subordination to Hungary. These developments coincided with the demilitarization (1871) and final abolition (1881) of the Military Border, which after the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary in 1878 no longer served any military purpose.
In the late 1890’s a new generation of political activists started to emerge on both sides of Croatia’s ethnic and confessional divide. They were known simply as “the Youths” (omladina). The discourse of the Omladina came to be characterized by the avoidance of old-style nationalist rhetoric, by political pragmatism, and by heightened concern for social and economic issues. On the Croat side its members (the Progressive Youth) were ready to discard the old denial of the Serbs’ existence and identity. On the Serb side they were ready to accept the notion of Croatian statehood and civic identity as the framework for joint political action. This was the formula that eventually produced the “New Course” in Croatian politics. It key novelty was the notion that the individual, rather than the corporate entity, was the basic political actor. The formula paved the way for the establishment of the Croat-Serb Coalition, the ruling political force in Croatia in the years before and during the Great War. It remained in power until the momentous events in late 1918. It also created the intellectual and emotional climate for the rise of a Yugoslav sentiment.
The Bitter Fruits of 1914—In the decade preceding Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary was in a state of latent crisis. Its mosaic of nationalities could hardly be held together without radical constitutional reforms. A group of scholars around the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, suggested the creation of the ‘United States of Greater Austria’ (Vereinigte Staaten von Groß-Österreich), a federation of autonomous units based on language and ethnicity. These were opposed, for different reasons, by the Hungarian land-owning nobility in the east and by the German nationalists in the west.
The Monarchy tried to overcome domestic tensions, among other means, through expansion in the Balkans, by occupying Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 and annexing it three decades later. In doing so it turned Serbia from a reliable client state of the Habsburgs—as it had been in the 1880’s under King Milan Obrenoviæ—into a rival and ultimately an an enemy under the rival Karadjordjevic dynasty, which was restored after the coup d’etat in May 1903. The Monarchy’s attempts to subjugate Serbia by the means of a tariff war (1906-1911) proved ineffective and even counter-productive, by enhancing Belgrade’s links with Paris and St. Petersburg.
The immediate trigger of the European war in 1914 was the desire of Austria-Hungary to settle accounts with Serbia once and for all, with Germany’s protection vis-à-vis Russia. The essential precondition for the chain reaction was Berlin’s cheque blanche to Vienna, which reflected Germany’s desire to force a preventive war on Russia before its anticipated growth into a first-rate economic and military colossus. The reckless risk included the assumption that Britain would stay out of the war, even though the Shlieffen Plan entailed the blatant violation of Belgian neutrality.
Such issues were hardly considered in Vienna, where the murder of Archduke Francis Ferdinand was seen as an opportunity to neutralize Serbia’s perceived Piedmontism. Vienna watched with consternation the triumph of Serbian arms against Turkey, then Bulgaria, and the doubling of its territory by the Treaty of Bucharest ending the Second Balkan War in 1913. July 1914 was neither an accident nor a tragedy beyond human control. With its blank check hastily granted from Berlin, the Monarchy presented Serbia with an ultimatum that was meant to be unacceptable. It was not meant to be accepted: Austria-Hungary willed a Balkan war, and Germany wanted an European war. With the German march on Liège they ended up fighting a world war that destroyed Europe. The popular Viennese jingle of August 1914, Serbien muss sterbien, suggested that distinctly Balkan bile had been approved in the Mitteleuropa. The consequences were dire.
The sobering news of the Habsburg armies’ military debacles in Serbia were followed by their complete withdrawal by the end of 1914. In 1915 the Monarchy shifted its focus to the Russian front; but after the Allied landings at Gallipoli in April 1915, Germany could no longer ignore Serbia and proceeded to open the Danubian link to Turkey. In October German Field Marshal August von Mackensen led the attack from the north, while Bulgaria joined the war and cut off Serbia’s southern flank. The campaign crushed it but it did not destroy the Serbian army, which, though cut in half, marched across Albania to the coast. Allied ships evacuated 150,000 Serbian soldiers. Following recuperation and rearmament by the French, these troops re-entered fighting on the Salonika Front where they won a decisive victory against Bulgaria in September 1918.
As the war entered its decisive stage in early 1918, the future of the crumbling Monarchy was becoming uncertain. The Allies were prepared to see Serbia expand, after the war, into Habsburg lands with large Serb populations, such as Bosnia and Vojvodina. Until the final months they did not envisage the creation of a Yugoslav state or a thorough dismemberment of Austria-Hungary. Even President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points provided for “autonomous development” for the Monarchy’s nationalities rather than full sovereignty outside its framework.
* * *
Wilson’s was a revolutionary doctrine that could not be contained. It accelerated competing aspirations among the smaller nations of Central Europe and the Balkans that hastened the collapse of transnational empires and gave rise to ethnic conflicts and territorial disputes that still remain unresolved.
Europe may have moved beyond blood-and-soil atavism, west of the Oder at least, but in the Balkans the old heart of darkness keeps beating—and the last heir to the Habsburg mantle helped stoke the ambers in the final decades of his life. He chose to ignore the fruits of the suicidal blunders of 1914 by denying that they were blunders in the first place.
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A very interesting overview. Although I judge the Habsburg role more favorably than Dr. Trifkovic does, the principal feeling I have as I study the history of the places my ancestors lived is gratitude that they decided to come to America.
This Serbophile view of history simply does not in any way excuse the false accusations of Dr Trifkovic against Archduke Otto.
He has not been able to demonstrate that a single one of his "sources" proves the smears against Archduke Otto that he wrote, nor has he been able to gainsay my expose of them.
If he could do so, he would have done so.
But he didn't because he can't.
He should have withdrawn his false accusations but, sadly, he has not done so.
No amount of history lessons can excuse the smears, particularly as he shamelessly produces more at the end of this article - once again with zero evidence to support them.
This is dishonest and unworthy of a scholar. Moreover, such irrational intransigence, symptomatic of nationalist extremism, is what leads nations into war in the first place.
It was what led Gavril Princip to shoot, in cold blood, the heir to the throne and his entirely innocent, pregnant wife, Archduchess Sophia, thus providing the trigger that started the the First World War.
I defend those Serbs who have been unjustly accused but I cannot defend the deeply dishonest accusations of Dr Trifkovic against Archduke Otto and I am sorry to see them in a reputable magazine like Chronicles.
James Bogle
I may add, for those who haven't spotted it, Dr Trifkovic has lifted most of this article out of his book The Krajina Chronicle: A History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia.
It was published last year by the Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies which describes itself thus:
"The work of The Lord Byron Foundation is based on the acceptance that the cause of tolerance in a perennially troubled region can never be advanced by misrepresentation..."
It is a pity that Dr Trifkovic has allowed this ideal to lapse in his misdescriptions of the late Archduke Otto.
JB
#2. Question for Mr. Bogle:
"The answer is simple: Most Orthodox clergy themselves refuse so to do."
I am going to use Mr. Bogle's own standards here. Most, meaning there were more than one and therefore some Othodox clerics would have wanted to give a homily. Why were they not able to? Why didn't they? Why did the Orthodox clergy refunse to participate in the first place since the deceased is so fair minded? Or to put it another way if he is so righteous why wouldn't the Other Christians recognize it? This is an absurd attempt to distort reality.
"Archduke Otto was a proponent of the peaceful co-existence of all members of the three great monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam.He was under no illusion that such an aim is very difficult to achieve in the Balkans but he nevertheless regarded it as a worthy aim—and rightly so."
What a bunch of nonsense. Of course Christians and Jews get along together, Orthodox and Catholics can get along toghether and Muslims used to get along as well but only in countries like Yugoslavia. But they can never do so in the current state of Bosnia! Western social engineers despite all their self esteem and smugnnes were never able to construct or understand such polities anywhere. Now Isetbegovic is a published Jihadist, a one time Nazi supporter. Why Mr. Bogle thinks he can have us believe that Mr. Habsburg did not know this and that Isetbegovic convinced him that he was a mulitculturalist is beyond reason. Seriously, most of the readers here have been around the block a few times.
" Dr. Trifkovic also produces no evidence for his claim that Dr Ceric was the Archduke’s favourite mufti."
I am giggling a little while reading this. Would it be then more accurate to say something like "one of the favorite muftis". You might have gotten dr. Trifkovic there.
"Of course Christians will not agree with those sentiments, but it is of the essence of peaceful co-existence, whether as championed by Archduke Otto, or any other kind, that one learns how to live in the same country with others whose beliefs one does not share.That was the policy of the Habsburg empire, just as it was of the Pontifical States and of other European countries."
Such supposed naivete or I'd venture duplicity is astounding. Serbs were perfectly willing to live in such a state. That got them killed and disposessed by the Catholics, schwatrz gelb or other, while their identity was stolen, their lands taken, their lives ended etc. This happened under the Habsburgs, NDH Croats, early Tito's Yugoslavia. In Montenegro the Njegos Chapel was destroyed in 1969 with the money from the Pontifical States, so they too were very much involved in the process of destroying the Orthodox.
"The mere wish to implement sharia law is not, of itself, evidence of extremism, since, once again, almost all Muslims believe it should be implemented when Muslims are in the majority."
So which is it then, Mr. Bogle, is Ceric for mulitculturalism or for Islamism? Cannot be both (please don'T say it) In the meantime, are the Christians supposed to coexist until the Muslims fully take over? Mr. Bogle accuses me of irrationality but this to me sounds as demented. I suggest he tries living among the Muslims for a while
"The real test of extremism consists in what is to be included under the rubric of sharia law."
C'mon Mr. Bogle, we are trying to keep this exchange somewhat intelligent. How can you make such a statement? Sharia law is what it is, it is writtten and handed down from the beginning of Islam and cannot and will not ever change. I'm sorry but dreams of multicultuyral paradise nobody buys. The fact that it is propagating suggests a craven agenda at work. As it has been pointed elswhere, one possible such goal happens to be the subjugation or the destruction of Orthodoxy. Since Mr. Habsburg always happens to be around places and people that are instrumental in accomplishing this, we deduce by circumstantial evindence that he was up to no good. (I know you only accept written confessions and in flagrante delicto evidence, but I believe for the rest of the world this will just have to do.)
"The indisputable fact is that Kosovo was largely inhabited by Muslims, long before the war started. Some put the figure as high as 90% Muslim. It is not therefore surprising that some might take a different view of the Serbianisation of Kosovo, even if it was once an important part of Greater Serbia."
Greater Serbia!?? Anyway, I can see that Mr. Bogle is not familiar witht the history of the area. Let's put it this way then: If Westminister Abbey was surrounded by 90% Muslims, would the City of Westminister then qualify as a seperate country and not a part of Greater England? (I hope that Mr. Bogle will avoid answering here in terms of suppresion of Albanians by Serbs and oppression and ensuing warfare as a justification for independence.)
Now Mr. Habsburg was there in support of Albanians, just as he was in support of Bosnian Muslims previously, and just as he was in Croatia congratulating the war criminal Tudjman in returning Croatia to the Western fold. I also imagine that there may also be a connection between Mr. Habsburg and the Vatican attempt to readmit the Montenegrin Orthodox into Catholicism currently under way. With his involvment in Chechnia, how many more incidnents need to be brought up before we establish thet Mr. Habsburg did not like the Orthodox? Well here then: In his obituary in the Serbian daily Politika (owned by a German company) where it was mentioned that Mr.Habsburg was a friend of president Roosevelt and that he suggested to the president that Voivodina should be returned to Hungary after WW2.
"The lesson of history is that narrow or fanatical nationalism is never likely to serve the twin aims of justice and peace. Indeed, it has often been the harbinger of the very opposite."
I have responded to this quote already elsewhere. In summary, it has been long overdue for smug Westerners to stop trying to rule and bully the rest of the world physically or intellectually.
"It was what led Gavril Princip to shoot, in cold blood, the heir to the throne and his entirely innocent, pregnant wife, Archduchess Sophia, thus providing the trigger that started the the First World War."
I have responded to this already in another post also, but Mr. Bogle apparently cannot give up the ghost. "Entirely innocent pregnant wife". Please! Instead of presenting the Habsburg empire as one of the most successful entities, one should be aware of the vicious and deliberate policies to destroy the Orthodox Serbs, an agenda that was apparently very dear to the Hansburg's heart. (By the way, I read that the heart was actually buried in Hungary apart from the body!) And this erudite multilingual historian and always ready-to-return politician never found the time in all those years to speak on the atrocities of Jasenovac, the atrocities in Ukraine, the need to preserve the world famos Orthodox Churches of Kosovo and Mt. Athos,(prince Charles found the time!).
C'mon Mr. Bogle, let's stop this charade!
"
Lifted the article from the book that Dr. Trifkovic wrote himself! Are you serious? i think it is no use, I had enough.
As a Serb who experienced brutal Albanian violence as a child in the seventies in the city of Pec and now lives in Germany, I noticed that sort of bithciness that Mr. Bogle displays towards the Serbs always comes from the left, - people close to ideology of the German Green Party are smearing Serbs and Serbia in a very similar manner (..."rapists"... "Arkan"... "Great Serbia"..."Nazis"... "opressed Albanians"...in my ears this is adding insult to injury). Interestingly, quite a few of them also boast with their Catholic faith, quite like Joseph "Joschka" Fischer (born in Hungary), who never missed an opportunity to stress the Catholic aspect of his personality. I am not entitled to judge whether these people are "true" Catholics or not. I just wonder where all the true Catholics were (especially in Croatia and Hungary), when Serbs were butchered, dispossesed, Ortodox churches destroyed, our lifes made miserable for very, very long time.
News is emerging today that Kosovo occupation troops led by German General Erhard Buhler are to enforce the Albanian takeover of road crossings and "customs" posts leading into the still Serbian part of northern Kosovo. It is part of the KLA effort to enforce a "trade embargo" against Serbia that will starve the Serbs into leaving their homes and complete the ethnic cleansing of Orthodox Christians from Kosovo. The Albanians attempted the takeover last week and local Serbs were effective in physically resisting it. Now it appears the German army will be used to subdue the Serbs.
Three times in the last one hundred years Serbia has been bombed and occupied by Germans. In all three instances Serbia posed no threat to Germany and in all three instances Germans executed or tolerated a bloody occupation notable by many well-documented atrocities against the Serbs.
In my numerous business trips through Austria and Germany I have found that a deep animus for Slavs in general and Serbs in particular remains an ingrained part of the cultural milieu. One senses it instantly in the manner in which they are reported on in the media and one senses it from ordinary Germans who, while conditioned to be politically correct as regards so many other ethnicities, often enough feel free to tell Serbs even to their face that there appears to be something inherently wrong with them.
The German pope recently felt compelled to politically and diplomatically upset relations with a Serbian Church whose patriarch had reached out to him to strengthen ties. He chose to honor a Croatian archbishop whose past remains ambiguous as regards relations with the criminal Ustasha regime in the eyes of many Serbs and yet chose to forego honoring the many victims of the Ustasha, which he could have just as easily done. Serbs regarded it as an unnecessary affront and I regarded it as a particularly undiplomatic choice for a German pope with Nazi youth affiliations, irrespective of how harmless said affiliations may have been.
(Some may jump in to claim he did nothing wrong and I'll respond in advance by saying while he may or may not have done anything wrong his diplomatic corps certainly would have known and he himself is well informed enough of the history to understand what his actions would be interpreted as by Orthodox Slavs. That he proceeded as he did speaks for itself.)
And, as much harm as has been done to Serbia by recent political regimes from the Anglosphere, the same ingrained cultural animus for Slavs or Serbs is not an immediately recognizable or recurring feature of British or American culture. There is no German equivalent of, say, Pat Buchanan or John Laughland, to speak out against the abuse of Serbia. There are plenty of Germans who've spoken out passionately against the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, but if a prominent German opponent of the wars on Serbia has emerged I have yet to hear of him.
These may be unconnected anecdotes and anecdotes may be unrepresentative or unfair. But alas they color our perceptions and my perception is shared by many Serbs: that most Germans regard Serbs as an inferior and evil people and have little inhibition in hating them, that they will favor Muslims if it means getting a strategic political advantage over the Serbs, and I expect few if any Germans, Catholic or otherwise, to lament the destruction of Orthodox Christian communities at the hands of Islamic expansionists.
I am reminded by a friend that I have overlooked the Austrian writer Peter Handke in stating that no prominent Germans lent their support to Serbia in these recent wars of Yugoslav dissolution. Admittedly I had overlooked him - perhaps because I so often regarded him as "one of us". Because I respect his views and applaud his courage in standing up for justice when so many others wished to shout down his opposition, I would like to mention him here as a notable exception to my above statement. Mr. Handke has suffered both financially and otherwise for his desire to speak up on behalf of Serbs.
@ Jack Bailey – It does not sit easily in the mouth of one who uses descriptors like these “a bunch of nonsense”, “beyond reason”, “duplicity”, “demented” and “charade” to complain about the style or arguments of others.
Your language is not immediately obvious as being the highest exemplar of rational discussion.
But I shall answer you briefly, out of courtesy to you.
“…some Othodox clerics would have wanted to give a homily. Why were they not able to? Why didn’t they? Why did the Orthodox clergy refunse to participate in the first place since the deceased is so fair minded? Or to put it another way if he is so righteous why wouldn’t the Other Christians recognize it?”
Their refusal was principled and not due to Archduke Otto. Orthodox clergy often refuse to participate in the Sacraments and ceremonies of those with whom they are not in communion. I do not criticize them for it. They believe Orthodox Christianity is the true Christianity and do not wish it to be compromised in any way. I salute them for avoiding offence to their religious consciences.
But – one cannot blame the funeral organizers for this, still less Archduke Otto who was dead and in a coffin.
“Orthodox and Catholics can get along toghether and Muslims used to get along as well but only in countries like Yugoslavia.”
If the Muslims are jihadists bent on destroying the Orthodox then they cannot be “getting along together”, can they? You can’t have it both ways.
“Serbs were perfectly willing to live in such a state. That got them killed and disposessed by the Catholics, schwatrz gelb or other, while their identity was stolen, their lands taken, their lives ended etc. This happened under the Habsburgs…”
As Dr Trifkovic himself demonstrates in his writings, the Habsburgs were among the protectors of the Serbs. It tended to be others (e.g. Croats, Hungarians, Communists) who were not.
“In Montenegro the Njegos Chapel was destroyed in 1969 with the money from the Pontifical States, so they too were very much involved in the process of destroying the Orthodox.”
Not quite. The Pontifical States ceased to exist in 1870 – not 1969.
The Njegos chapel was destroyed in 1969 by the Communists. Are you suggesting that Pope John XXIII was supporting Balkan Communism? Do you have any evidence for this novel accusation?
“I’m sorry but dreams of multicultuyral paradise nobody buys.”
I thought you were in favour of Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims getting along together in former Yugoslavia? Did you change your mind halfway through your post?
“If Westminister Abbey was surrounded by 90% Muslims, would the City of Westminister then qualify as a seperate country and not a part of Greater England?”
If you mean that the City of Westminster was 90% Muslim then there would, indeed, be a distinct danger that it might become a separate mini-state or at least separately-governed enclave. Have you been to Bradford, lately? It is virtually a Muslim town.
You mistakenly think that I am naively unaware of the demographic threat to the integrity of European nations.
“I hope that Mr. Bogle will avoid answering here in terms of suppresion of Albanians by Serbs and oppression and ensuing warfare as a justification for independence.”
You may relax. I do not think that there is any such automatic justification of independence.
The concerns of Archduke Otto related to human rights violations, not support for revolution.
“…how many more incidnents need to be brought up before we establish thet Mr. Habsburg did not like the Orthodox?”
If you are right, then why did he make firms plans to ensure that Orthodox prelates and clergy were invited to his funeral? His press spokesman tells me that he was on very good terms with Metropolitan Michael Staikos of Vienna. Do you have contrary evidence?
“Instead of presenting the Habsburg empire as one of the most successful entities, one should be aware of the vicious and deliberate policies to destroy the Orthodox Serbs, an agenda that was apparently very dear to the Hansburg’s heart”.
“Apparently”? Is that the best you can do?
Where is your evidence, sir?
I think, with great respect, the “charade” consists in the repeated attempt to smear Archduke Otto without any supporting evidence to back up the smears.
And I agree – it is time to stop the charade.
To Nicholas Moses - the editor has exercised his right to close off discussion on the page of my second article and so I could not reply to you there.
I shall do so here instead.
In fact, I agree with much of what you say.
You are right that my use of the word "tolerance" and other words has been misinterpreted to mean something rather different to what I meant by it.
I can also see that it has a negative connotation for some people posting to this website because it is seen to embrace a whole weltanschauung of a particular kind to whcih they object.
That, however, was not what I meant by the word.
In fact, therefore, some of the disagreements may be more semantic than real.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments.
Monsieur, thank you for your response. If my own opinion on the matter means anything, I'll throw it out here, in hopes that it might help articulate some of the thoughts flying around here...
If the late Archduke supported UN and NATO interventions in Bosnia and Albania on the grounds of humanitarian justice, I believe that he committed a serious error. I do not, however, necessarily agree with those who would attribute this error to bad will on the Archduke's part. I get the impression that his years of collaboration with the Christian Democrats (a European faction whose compromises with and concessions to the revolutionary libertine order over the past century are well documented) colored his judgment and pulled his heart strings on a catastrophe of the moment at the expense of clear thinking about the long-term consequences of internationally-sanctioned Islamic rule in Bosnia and Kosovo.
My principal point of disagreement with you, M. Bogle, then--and I think this is the principal point of disagreement of most other participants--is not your defense of the character or intentions of the late Archduke, but your apparent defense of the UN/NATO doctrine in the Balkans. That however is not a subject on which I am an expert, and it is a question rather distinct from the question of the Archduke's character but one which, due to the passions surrounding the issue, has become conflates with it. My own view is that these issues can and should be dealt with separately.