Posted on November 11, 2020

Can Europe Learn the Lessons of Yugoslavia?

Tomislav Sunic, American Renaissance, September 2001

Yugoslavia

The drama of the former Yugoslavia is a text-book example of how multiculturalism leads to chaos. If three quite similar East European peoples went murderously to war against each other, one can imagine what will happen when intercommunal wars in multiracial cities of Western Europe gather steam. To anyone not completely blinded by “anti-racist” propaganda, what has happened in Yugoslavia casts a very dubious light on the viability of multiracialism.

Events are forcing themselves into public notice, and the first cracks in the belief in multiethnic conviviality are beginning to appear. For years, local turf wars between young Germans and Turkish gangs were seldom reported by the German media. Now even journalists in the ultra-liberal Der Spiegel can no longer avoid reporting on the “ticking ethnic time bombs” in the suburbs of European capitals. Street battles between native Britons and East Asians that leave scores of injured can no longer be hidden or underreported. News about muggings of whites in Brussels, and beatings of elderly Parisians have crept into the local papers, though they are still on the sixth or seventh page.

The racial profile of Europe has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. A visit to any large town in Western Europe will turn up staggering numbers of uneducated non-whites, mostly Muslims. Just as in the United States, any criticism of these newcomers is branded as “racism” or “fascism,” but in private, there is much resentment of Third-World immigration.

What brought about this influx? Germany, which has been the economic locomotive of Europe, still suffers from an almost pathological national masochism and the hovering stigma of inborn fascism. This is behind the pathetic German wish to buy forgiveness through “checkbook diplomacy,” financial handouts to immigrants, and open arms to the downtrodden of the world. The Catholic Church also peddles Hollywood-style sentimentalism about immigrants and multicolored brotherhood.

When racial turf wars break out — whether in Berlin, Marseille, or Oldham — the liberal media and ruling elites still focus on unpleasant consequences rather than on causes. They persist in that incoherent but fashionable panacea: The remedy for xenophobia and multiracial friction is to let in yet more non-Europeans rather than expel the ones who are already here. Since the arrival of relatively small numbers of non-whites causes friction and tension, the solution is to bring in millions more!

As in the United States, there is a growing tendency among European whites towards sullen political apathy and flight from non-whites, punctuated by sudden outbursts of hostility towards foreigners. That supra state, the European Union (EU), is a volcano waiting to explode.

Russia and Eastern Europe have been largely spared the immigration onslaught, and are now the last major white enclaves on the planet. According to statistics on the number of Third-World residents in Western Europe compiled in 1995 by the Catholic relief association “Caritas,” Western Europe has over 19 million foreign immigrants while Eastern Europe has practically none.

At the same time, in one of the great ironies of our time, East and West have swapped places in terms of freedom of inquiry. During the Communist terror it was forbidden to question Marxist dogma. Today, it is in Western Europe that criticism of racial or historical dogma can end the career of a scholar or politician, and even send him to prison. By contrast, in the bookshops of Moscow, Budapest or Zagreb one can find plenty of books about race or historical revisionism. It is not to be ruled out that Eastern Europe will become the safe haven for Western dissidents, just as the West was once a haven for dissidents from the East.

What is more, despite the horrible legacy of communism and continuing poverty, it may be in Eastern Europe that we will eventually find political transparency and efficient democracy. For democracy to work, losers in elections must be willing to bow out gracefully. They do this only if they believe the winners share the same fundamental understanding of national goals. In multiethnic societies, where political parties form along ethnic lines, and every ballot is a racial head-count, elections are not just political choices; they become expressions of national identity. With stakes this high, democracy collapses, just as it did in the former Yugoslavia.

Likewise, now that Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union have broken apart, most citizens of Eastern European nations speak the same language. As Steve Sailer of the Human Biodiversity Institute points out, people can monitor their government’s performance effectively only when everyone has a common tongue. “In a multilingual polity with an activist state such as the EU,” he writes, “it becomes impractical to follow what is going on. Thus power flows to a multilingual elite.” This observation has relevance for the United States, too, as its Spanish-speaking minority begins to reach critical mass.

The multiethnic fray in Yugoslavia and the potential for similar eruptions in Europe are in perfect accord with what people like Noble prize-winner Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey have taught us about human nature. Likewise, the well-known German scholar and ethologist Irenaus Eibel-Eibesfeldt points out that one can learn to respect the Other, only when the Other lives on his separate turf, or under his own jurisdiction. The closer one is to the Other, the greater the risk of conflict. Prof. Eibel-Eibesfeldt writes that fear and hostility are common reactions to the “foreigner” in all races and cultures. Human beings form close-knit communities that exclude foreigners.

Assimilation and integration of the foreigner is possible if he looks like a native, but it becomes difficult if he does not. As Prof. Eibel-Eibesfeldt concludes, “with side-by-side living of mixed ethnicities, the prognoses for the maintenance of harmony look bleak. Each ethnic group feels itself under threat by the other ethnic group. The majority ethnic group fears being overwhelmed by the foreign ethnic group, and the minority ethnic group fears the domination of the majority. History teaches that in such an environment, conflicts are bound to occur sooner or later.” (Krieg und Frieden: Aus der Sicht der Verhaltungsforschung, [War and Peace: From the Perspective of Ethology, published 1984 by Piper Verlag, expanded version, 1997]).

People who differ from each other appreciate each other best when they live apart. When they are forced together into an unnatural union, intercommunal violence is bound to erupt into a never-ending spiral of incrimination and hatred. The proponents of multiculturalism refuse to understand this, and continue to trumpet their belief in utopia, particularly to brain-washed young whites.

It has now been abundantly proven that multiracialism is academic nonsense and works nowhere in the world. The safest, healthiest, and most prosperous countries are those that enforce strict immigration laws, and whose citizens are homogeneous and proud of their roots. Scarcely-populated Iceland and densely-populated Japan are good examples of viable states.

Multiracialism under different names and slogans and in different legal forms has for decades provided the intellectual fodder for leftist intellectuals forced to abandon Communism. It is intolerable for them that the multicultural experiment in Yugoslavia failed, and Western countries have spent billions of dollars trying to force Balkan peoples that hate each other to live together. Now that the multiethnic states — Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, Yugoslavia — are gone, left-leaning EU officials have doctored up a new multiethnic role model, the European Union itself.

The small yet growing number of nationalist, anti-multicultural young people all over Eastern and Western Europe may yet put an end to this dangerous fantasy. At the same time, unlike in the United States, there are influential political parties like the National Front in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, and the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, whose leaders fully understand that the future of Europe lies in the balance. Whatever one may think of the merits of pan-Europeanism, there might have been some hope for a union that was racially and culturally European. Now, with more than 15 million immigrants in its midst, it is questionable whether the European Union can even call itself European. How to come to terms with its own inefficient and terrified bureaucracy, and how to weather the storms of its own impending racial balkanization? These are the questions on everybody’s mind — and on no government agenda.