Communism O Nationalism!

By DAVID AIKMAN

Serbia. Kosovo. The names rise up like wraiths from the mists of European history, evoking episodes that dispatched the tumbrels of war throughout the Old Continent 74 summers ago, or paved the way a half-millennium earlier for the Turkish domination of the Balkans. It was at Sarajevo in June 1914 that a Serbian-trained assassin shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, igniting World War I. And it was at Kosovo Field in 1389 that the Ottomans snuffed out Serbian independence.

Those same names echoed throughout Europe last week as Yugoslavia confronted its most serious crisis since Marshal Tito's death in 1980. After years of weak central leadership, Yugoslavia's loose federation of six republics and two autonomous provinces seemed about to fall prey to a new plague of nationalism fomented by the numerically dominant Serbs and compounded by anger at disastrous economic management.

Yet the Serbs are not the only group in the Communist world that are undergoing a revival of nationalism. In the Soviet Union tensions are smoldering in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave in the republic of Azerbaijan. Vigorous popular fronts have sprung up in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Though sanctioned by the local Communist Parties, the movements boldly tested the very limits of glasnost.

Gorbachev probably didn't reckon with this, and nor did Karl Marx. From its first days, Marxism-Leninism has been peculiarly blind to the potentiality of nationalism to trample like an enraged warthog through the neat corn rows of class theory and inevitable revolution. "National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily vanishing," wrote Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto of 1848, "((and)) the supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster." But the same year was the apogee of European nationalist uprisings in the 19th century.

Lenin was no more prescient. In 1916 he declared one of the goals of the Bolsheviks to be "the elimination of the fragmentation of humanity in petty states and the individualism of nations." He thought the workers of Germany would side with Russia after the Revolution of 1917, even though the two countries were still at war. The successors of Lenin and then Stalin seemed surprised when frustration with the Communist system merged with anti-Russian sentiment to help trigger such traumatic events as the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Polish Solidarity movement of 1980.

In Eastern Europe, nationalism has not yet posed a threat to the viability of the regimes themselves. But the winds of the Gorbachev revolution have shaken Czechoslovakia and Poland. In Prague last week, Communist Party Leader Milos Jakes fired Lubomir Strougal, the country's Prime Minister for 18 years, and his entire 22-member Cabinet. Strougal's problem: sympathy for perestroika.

In Poland newly installed Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski took a different approach. As the government continued the daunting task of reaching a compromise with the leadership of Solidarity, the banned trade union, Rakowski invited four independent and opposition figures to join his Cabinet last week. Though all four rebuffed him, Rakowski promised to hold the seats open in case they changed their minds. As he admitted to TIME last week, "Our centralized system for decades has limited individuals' abilities to adapt, to take initiatives. We have to get rid of all those blockages."

So must Yugoslavia, which went its own way after 1948, but whose economic problems are now among the most serious in the region. Living standards have plummeted over the past several months, with inflation now rising at more than 250% annually, unemployment at 16% and a foreign debt of $21 billion. But the withering economy has merely exacerbated, rather than created, nationalist animosities among the six republics and two autonomous provinces that make up Yugoslavia's loose federal structure. Tito, the father of postwar Yugoslavia, often brutally suppressed local nationalist sentiments when they occurred. After his death, that authoritarian rule gave way to a weak rotating leadership designed by Tito to prevent the domination of the country by any one national republic.

The leadership vacuum coincided with bitter ethnic tensions in the autonomous province of Kosovo. Though the province is part of the Serbian republic, Albanians account for at least 77% of its 1.9 million inhabitants, a proportion that continues to increase. Fears of Albanian irredentism and tales of rape and murder of Serbs in Kosovo by Albanians stirred many of Yugoslavia's 8 million Serbs to demand a crackdown on Kosovo and tough leadership to implement it. The man and the hour met in 1986 when Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in the Serbian Communist Party and soon stirred up a wave of nationalist anger over Kosovo.

During the past few months, Milosevic has deftly manipulated his supporters throughout Serbia into pressing for the ouster of moderates opposed to tighter Serbian controls over Kosovo. Demonstrations erupted in Serbia and Voivodina, like Kosovo an autonomous province. In Montenegro last week, police used tear gas and nightsticks to suppress a demonstration by thousands of Milosevic partisans.

The virulence of the nationalist outbursts prompted authorities in Belgrade to put civil-defense units on a state of alert. More ominously, Yugoslav President Raif Dizdarevic warned on national television that further unrest could force him to adopt "extraordinary conditions," a euphemism, presumably, for emergency police powers.

Those words failed to blunt the drive by Milosevic for greater power for himself and Serbia. As party meetings were held throughout the republics in preparation for a meeting of the 165-member Yugoslav Central Committee this week, there was talk that up to one-third of the members might be ousted in a pro-Milosevic shake-up and a purge of incompetents. The Serbian party, meanwhile, hammered away at the Kosovo issue. A Serbian party resolution, backed by Milosevic, demanded the ouster of three top Kosovo party officials, two of them ethnic Albanians. Warned Milosevic: "The people gather in the streets because their institutions fail to settle the matter."

In Slovenia, the country's most Westernized and prosperous republic, party leader Milan Kucan accused Serbia of deliberately fanning nationalist passions. Slovene newspapers have compared Milosevic with Mussolini, and some Serbian journalists regard Milosevic as a sinister new figure on the national stage. Said a currently banned political journalist in Belgrade: "Even during the Cominform and Stalin there was not such systematic and widespread muzzling of the press in Serbia as this. Milosevic is dangerous."

Though Milosevic complains that such criticism of him amounts to "spreading fear of Serbia," his demagogic tactics could backfire at the upcoming Central Committee meeting. He is demanding changes in the federal constitution that would decisively reinforce his powers over Kosovo and Voivodina. But some analysts speculate that his opponents may call for his removal as Serbian party leader at this week's plenum.

Nationalist yearnings figured in the uprisings that shook Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland over the past three decades. No demagogue stepped forward, however, in any of the three Communist countries to whip the populace into mob fury. That is what is happening in Yugoslavia, as Milosevic incites , his Serbs to a fierce nationalism oblivious to Communist Party etiquette. The early success of his campaign does not yet point to the breakup of Communism in Yugoslavia. But Milosevic's mischief, combined with the rumblings in the East bloc, are two sides of the same coin of Marxist economic failure. At a time when the Kremlin has shown a new interest in learning from other Communist countries, the Yugoslav crisis has clearly provided Gorbachev with a graphic lesson in what can happen when economic discontent and nationalism mix.

With reporting by Kenneth W. Banta/Belgrade and B. William Mader/New York