As usual Paul Phillips provides informed and nuanced
commentary regarding the former Yugoslavia. I shall
comment on several points that either call for further
clarification or regarding which there is real disagreement.
I accept Paul's remarks about language, although the
point about no discontinuity on the ground still holds. It
is a gradual change. However, Slovenian stands out as
the most distinctive of the South (Yugo) Slav languages.
Nevertheless it is a fact that one can manage pretty well
in Slovenia in Bulgarian, something I have observed in
person. (BTW, "cebula" is onion in Polish too, showing a
more northern Slavic influence in Slovenian.)
There is serious dispute whether or not Macedonian
should be viewed as a distinct language or not. In Milovan
Djilas's _Conversations with Stalin_ (Djilas was Montenegrin)
he recounts the exiled Bulgarian Communist leader (Zhivkov?)
asking him as his first remark whether or not what the
Macedonians spoke was closer to Bulgarian or to Serbo-
Croatian. Hmmm.
It would not surprise me if the current Croatian leaders
were attempting to differentiate their language from that of
the Serbians. Again, I note that many of these official distinctions
have been imposed from above for just such political purposes.
As a personal anecdote I note that in the early 1970s I visited
the Three Brothers restaurant in the Serbian neighborhood of
Milwaukee, Wisconsin (an excellent restaurant and still there)
and, while waiting to be sitted, naively asked the bartender if
he spoke "Serbo-Croatian." I was rather coldly informed that
"there is no such thing as Serbo-Croatian." Oh.
With respect to the figures on income distribution, my source
for the earlier Slovene-to-Kosovan ratio is Fred Singleton and
Bernard Carter, _The Economy of Yugoslavia_, 1982, London:
Croom Helm, p. 117. The precise number was 3.3 and for 1947.
I would have to go dig the book up to find their source. For 1988
I have as "per capita social product" in US dollars, $5,918 for
Slovenia and $662 for Kosovo, about nine to one. The source is
Evan Kraft, "Evaluating Regional Policy in Yugoslavia,"
_Comparative Economic Studies_, 1992, vol. 13, p. 13. I stand
to be corrected by better sources on all of these, and personally
have always found the idea that Yugoslav policies led to
greater regional inequalities to be rather depressing.
I have read much of the Albanian efforts to "ethnically
cleanse" formerly Serb-inhabited villages during the period
of autonomy (dating from 1945). I have not seen details of
how this was carried out, although I doubt that it was done in
as brutal a manner as the recent Serbian activities in both Bosnia-
Herzegovina and Kosovo have been.
BTW, there seem to be considerable differences in various publications
about the exact time that the ethnic Albanians
became a majoritiy in Kosovo and it may have predated WW II, although it
almost certainly did not predate the twentieth century.
Barkley Rosser
Professor of Economics
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807 USA
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thursday, March 25, 1999 7:54 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:4546] Re: Re: Protest against the Bombing
Although I am in large agreement with Barkley's post (there are
several other matters on which I do disagree), I think the comment
below is quite factually wrong. Whereas Serbian and Croatian are
for the most part very similar (or at least were until Tudjman began
to change the language so that it no longer resembled Serbian) as
are, I believe, Macedonian and Bulgarian, Slovenian is quite
different though related. Slovenians do not understand Serbian or
vice versa. Only about 40-50 per cent of the words are the same.
For instance, the word for worker in Serbo-Croat is 'radnik', in
Slovenian 'delavec'; onion in S-C is 'luk', in Slov it is 'cebula' (to give
two examples where the words are totally unrelated.) Furthermore,
the Slovenes have a different grammar involving not only singular
and plural but also 'dual'. Newscasts on Slovenian TV orginating in
Zagreb or Belgrade usually are subtitled simply because many
Slovenes don't understand Serbo-Croat. And so on.
I also believe Barkley's figures on income disparities are wrong. In
the 1950s the ratio of Slovenia to Kosovo was closer to 15 to one
and declined up to the 1980s to the area of 5 to 1 before increasing
again as the decentalization of economic powers and the decline of
national economic policy increased the regionalization of the
Yugoslav economy. Furthermore, the autonomy of Kosovo had
lead the Albanians to set up their own schools which specialized in
Albanian culture and language to the detriment of technical and
scientific studies. (Also I have been told when I was there in the
late 1980s shortly before the breakup, but can not verify, that there
was strong islamic opposition to educating female students
particularly in practical or work-related areas.) The lack of 'human
capital' made it very difficult to invest in economic development
despite the large funds made available to Kosovo through the Fund
for the Faster Development of Less Developed Regions. As a
result, taxes transfered primarily from Slovenia and Croatia to
Kosovo for economic development projects was largely wasted in
projects that never became operational or were absorbed in
massive cultural white elephants such as the national library in
Pristina. The autonomy of Kosovo prevented the Serb or
Yugoslavian governments from planning these investments in any
way that could be integrated into a national development strategy.
Meanwhile, the Albanians had been practicing an ongoing and
quite vicious process of ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo. It
is interesting that, in the name of preventing ethnic cleansing, the
US is giving military aid to the greatest ethnic cleansing operation
in the history of Yugoslavia.
By the way, isn't it time to begin the real impeachment of Bill
Clinton for real 'high crimes and misdemeanors'?
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba
From: "J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Copies to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [PEN-L:4539] Re: Protest against the Bombing
Date sent: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 16:27:47 -0500
Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> OK, sigh, I guess I'll get into this one, although
> I view it as pretty murky and not an easy call, although
> I think that ultimately this bombing is a mistake and
> could well lead to a really ugly mess. I hope not.
> But let's get some of the history right for starters:
><snip>
Although Slovenian,
> Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian are officially
> viewed as distinct languages, it is a fact that somebody can
> manage just fine with Bulgarian in Slovenia, and that one can
> walk from Varna, Bulgaria on the Black Sea to the northwest
> corner of Slovenia without ever encountering a linguistic
> discontinuity or divide. These "languages" are artifices of
> governments and higher level entities.
>
