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Since President Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder all have made plain that Serbia will get no aid while Slobodan Milosevic remains in power, that means moving from the present regime to a real Serbian democracy. Yet Milosevic remains very firmly in power. Indeed, he makes periodic threatening noises towards Montenegro, the other republic whose addition to Serbia makes what is left of Yugoslavia. One large obstacle here is the Serbs themselves. They rightly claim to have been demonized in recent years as a people with genocide written into their genes. Though the recent string of Balkan wars was in fact power-driven aggression by the post-communist clique around Milosevic, it was blamed by many in the West on something in the Serbian national psyche. As a result, when Serbs carried out ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Bosnia, they were excoriated; when they were victims of ethnic cleansing, in Krajina and now in Kosovo, they received little sympathy. And because there is something odd in the Serbian national psyche--namely, a cultural predisposition to national self-pity--they feed on these injustices and refuse to accept any responsibility for the crimes committed by their forces in their name. Thus they tend to unite against the rest of the world, which in practice means uniting around Milosevic. And the opposition, divided and demoralized, is too weak to challenge his regime effectively. Into this political vacuum, however, has stepped someone who at first sight might be mistaken for a refugee from a Ruritanian operetta--namely, Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, heir to the Karadjordjevic dynasty and the descendant of a Serbian national hero. Nor does Prince Alexander's own story lack its romantic moments. Because the king of Serbia has to be born on Serbian soil and Alexander's parents were in wartime exile from the Nazis in London at the time of his birth, Winston Churchill and King George VI declared the room in Claridges Hotel where he was born to be Serbian national territory for that day. In other respects, he is a thoroughly modern figure who spent the long years of exile building up a business in Britain and who has his own dynastic Web site (www.RoyalFamily.org). He and his wife, the Greek-born Princess Katherine, run a charity to relieve distress in the former Yugoslavia that at least tries not to discriminate among Serb, Albanian and Bosnian, Muslim and Orthodox. And last week he was in Canada raising funds for it, addressing audiences of expatriate Serbs and making a case for restoring constitutional monarchy. In front of a friendly audience in Toronto, he mixed reassurance with home truths. He condemned the NATO bombing of Serbia but he also called on Serbs to recognize that under Milosevic they too bore some responsibility for the recent wars and the breakup of Yugoslavia. He recognized that Croatia and Slovenia had probably gone for good, but hoped that a future democratic Yugoslavia could include Bosnia and Kosovo. And he warned his audience that this would mean Serbs accepting an equal place, but not a pre-eminent one, in such a federal state. It was a message they needed to hear--and might not have accepted from anyone else. To anyone who recalls how King Juan Carlos transformed Franco's authoritarian regime into Spain's first stable democracy in the 1970s, the crown prince's scenario is not especially far-fetched. When a democracy is in the fragile process of being established, a monarch is able to draw on traditional sources of authority to give it a precious stability. He can call on the best people of all parties to form a transitional government of national salvation when none of them would agree to serve under each other. When attempts are made to overthrow the new democracy--as happened in Spain--the rebels will bow to a king when they would shoot a prime minister. And because people know that a monarch's long-term interest lies not in looting the country, but in transferring it richer, stronger and safer to his heir, they can give him a trust that they give to no political bird of passage. Mature constitutional republics such as the United States may not need a king for stability and continuity; the recent history of the Balkans suggests that a constitutional monarchy there would offer the best chance for a stable, democratic Serbia--and therefore for the peace and tranquillity of the rest of us. Chicago Sun-Times September 24 1999 Letters to the editor As author of the 1992 book Kosovo and a first-generation American, I
take exception to John O'Sullivan's column ["The prince who would be king,"
Sept. 14]. It is offensive to describe as "odd" a proud nation of Serbian
people who lost 52 percent of their adult male population as American allies
in World War I, and 1.7 million people as allies in World War II.
William Dorich, Los Angeles |
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