Blog Updates /

I pulled this paragraph from David Rieff’s book Slaughterhouse.

Young Croatians might shop in the same boutiques as their opposite numbers in New York, have the same taste in popular music, or have adapted similar sexual mores, but this did not make them cosmopolitans in the “postnational” sense that characterized so many middle class West Europeans and North Americans. They spoke about themselves as Croats in much the way their grandparents had done when Rebecca West had visited Zagreb … It turned out that having the same haircuts as people in Hamburg, or the same jogging shoes as people in Camden Town, had not altered these young Croatians’ essentially nationalist and tribal understandings of themselves by one iota (p. 62).

When traveling in Croatia/Bosnia/Kosovo, I was struck by the esthetic ressemblance of these countries to Western Europe, despite recent conflict. Yet, while we were doing the same things in cafes and bars back in Denmark and Canada, we were rarely talking politics, particularly as fervently as in Kosovo. And, we also had a means of self-determination in our future – financial and social independence – while these groups were slave to migrant family members sending cash back home. So, while economic globalization and the free market have made some distinct surface changes, the fact that the educational and ideological system had not shifted yet marks the potential for future destabilization. When these remittances stop arriving with the economic slow-down in Kosovo, deep-seated unrest will be enabled.