By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
So then: would Montenegro be independent today if Belgrade had accepted the Z-4 Plan and if Greater Serbian nationalism had not publicly executed Zoran Djindjic?
Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn’t.
Either way, the question is a reasonable one.
Here’s the thing. In Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle” (whose “Ubik” I warmly recommend), Japan and Germany have won the Second World War and rule over America. The novel is a fine example of what literary and film theory calls pseudohistorical metafiction. Like most things with fancy names, this one isn’t especially complicated. The phrase is formed by combining two terms. The first is pseudohistory, meaning fraudulent, supposedly historical scholarship based on falsifications—roughly what we’ve been forced to endure in this region from the mid-1980s to the present day, the kind of “scholarship” on which the European and American right has been riding nonstop. The second is historiographic metafiction, a term coined by postmodern theorist Linda Hutcheon to describe the marriage of metafiction and historical fiction (that is, imagined history; that is, pseudohistory). To make it entirely clear, metafiction refers to prose that constantly reminds the reader that they are reading fiction—prose that makes no pretense of possessing mimetic qualities, prose that insists it is not a representation of reality. The most famous example of metafiction is, to the surprise of the uninformed reader, Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”.
The questions this text deals with belong to that register.
The Z-4 Plan was prepared by the “Zagreb Four” group—Russia, the United States, Germany, and France—in an effort to end the war in Croatia.
Among other things, the plan envisaged:
- complete monetary independence for the Serbs in Croatia, including fiscal policy and a separate currency;
- state-like attributes for the Serbian Krajina, including its own coat of arms, flag, anthem, and police;
- special status for the eleven municipalities in which Serbs had constituted a majority according to the last Yugoslav census of 1981, together forming the “Serbian Krajina”;
- the Constitution and laws of the Republic of Croatia would apply in Krajina, but only after being approved by Krajina’s representatives;
- Krajina would elect its own president;
- Krajina would be demilitariсed, and the Croatian army could enter only at the invitation of Krajina’s president;
- no Krajina official would be subordinate to any Croatian official.
To put it briefly: under the Z-4 Plan, the Serbs in Croatia would have received less than a state, but more than autonomy.
When Belgrade rejected the plan, Tudjman opened a bottle of champagne. So, the legend goes. The road to Operation Storm was open.
But why don’t Mandic, Vucic, Porfirije, Dodik, and Knezevic ever talk about that?
From today’s perspective, isn’t it obvious that rejecting the Z-4 Plan was an absolute national catastrophe?
Krajina, having rejected the highest degree of autonomy ever offered to anyone anywhere, fell in four days, without resistance. Those people simply fled. There are claims that, at the session of the Supreme Defence Council on 14 August 1995, Milosevic said that the Serbs from Croatia had “run away like rabbits.” Allegedly, he even remarked: “More of them died fleeing with the civilian population than would have died holding the lines!”
The fall of the Serbian Krajina fundamentally shook the Serb Republic and accelerated the end of the war in Bosnia.
So: had Z-4 not been rejected, there would have been no Operation Storm; had there been no Operation Storm, we can only speculate when and how the war in Bosnia would have ended. There is no doubt that Serb Republic would have had a strong anchor in a Serbian Krajina protected by the Z-4 Plan.
Since many Montenegrin “independence supporters” matured into national and state-building politics only after Greater Serbian nationalism had lost in both Croatia and Bosnia (just as the pitiful defectors from the DPS flocked to the church protest movement once Milo’s rule collapsed), and since the DPS itself only split once every half-paralysed bird on the branch—except the SNP—knew that the project that had brought them to power had failed, the question arises: what would have happened had there been no Operation Storm, and had the war in Bosnia dragged on?
Likewise, had Djindjic survived and attempted, in a certain sense, to westernise Serbia, US and EU opposition to Montenegrin independence would have been ironclad, while the narrative of Montenegrin independence would have been dismissed as irrational and romantically nationalist, in contrast to the narrative of a democratic Serbia and Montenegro entering the European Union together and quickly. By killing Djindjic, Greater Serbian nationalism effectively pushed Montenegro into independence.
That’s what I’m trying to tell you.
Since the pro-independence side won by a margin of ten percent, the referendum came to be interpreted as the expression of the Montenegrin people’s love of freedom. Had the unionist side won instead, the referendum’s outcome would have been interpreted as an expression of Montenegro’s historic attachment to Serbia. Either result would have been declared “natural, organic, and historically determined.” Yet to claim that the outcome could not have been otherwise, that it was somehow predetermined, is laughable. Victory in the referendum was achieved not then and there, but here and now—not in history, but on the ground, in a political, propagandistic, diplomatic, financial, and intelligence struggle.
Or take this example. An important football match. After extra time, it’s still a draw. Penalty shootout. The coach decides that his best player will take the final kick.
If he scores, someone will say: the best remain the best when it matters most—of course he scored. But if he misses, someone else will observe: the other team pressed him all game, they kept kicking him, he was exhausted by the middle of the second half—of course he missed in the end.
“Of course” is overrated. Necessity is overrated. There is less of it in this world than people imagine—certainly less than fanatics of every stripe believe. And certainly, less than the frauds who, while leading you into ruin, keep assuring you that your prosperity is inevitable.
God, evidently, is a very busy fellow who has no time to concern Himself with our individual destinies. Nor with the destinies of entire peoples. When you consider how many great states have disappeared, how many empires have collapsed, it’s hard to believe that Montenegro extinguishing itself would echo through the universe as some great catastrophe.
“Necessity” is most often a matter of hindsight. Once things have happened, we connect the scattered dots—what, before the process was complete, appeared to be only the outline of chaos—and we create a pattern, a path that afterward seems like the only one that could ever have existed. No. Almost as a rule, it could have gone this way, and it could just as easily have gone another.
What I’m talking about is contingency—the opposite of necessity.
What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s possible, even quite likely, that we’re screwed. But not inevitably.
(Columnists’ opinions and views do not necessarily reflect those of the CdM editorial staff)
