Postscript. The Eternal Return of the Medieval

Summary

Sometimes both sides of a political divide will deploy the medieval as a conceptual weapon. We can see both sides of the political medieval—the medieval as crucial heritage and dark medievalism—in Slobodan Milošević, the former President of Yugoslavia and Serbia indicted for war crimes by the International Court of Justice at The Hague. In his infamous Gazimestan speech on June 28, 1989, given at an event to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, a 1389 battle between invading Ottoman Turks and Serbian forces, Milošević's speech, which is generally considered to have helped instigate the ethnic cleansing and bloodshed that would soon destroy thousands of lives, referred to the battle as “an event of the distant past which has great historical and symbolic significance for its future.”98 The event, for Milošević, is distant enough that it is not important to distinguish between what is true and what is legendary about the battle, or even whether the Serbians won or lost to the Ottomans. “If” the Serbians lost, it was due in large part to the disunity of the Serbian people, which Milošević then uses to call for solidarity and unity today. What Milošević is doing, of course, is calling for ethnic solidarity against the enemy other. In 1389, Serbians “regarded disunity as its greatest disaster. Therefore it is the obligation of the people to remove disunity, so that they may protect themselves from defeats, failures, and stagnation in the future.” As with traditionalist conservatism as well as more extreme variants of the right, here again is a fantasy of medieval ideals of ethnic and racial solidarity and communal identity, and the call for such a communal identity today. Consider the ethnic cleansing that was about to happen against Islamic Albanians in Kosovo. Milošević ended his speech by saying that Serbia in 1389 was defending not just itself but Europe; Serbia was the “bastion that defended the European culture, religion, and European society in general.” Here, again, is a kind of European racial community defending itself against the Muslim foreigner. The fourteenth-century battle between Christian Serbian and Muslim Ottoman Turk is deployed as a jingoist call to arms. To rally his people and consolidate his power, the vicious tyrant Milošević draped himself in medievalism.