I chose this OCS program because I have never really understood nationalism. I am mixed-race between Chinese and German ancestry without strong connections to either side. My father is from the United States, and my mother is from the United Kingdom, where I hold citizenship in both. I have no “homeland,” no “people,” no coherent “heritage” tied to one place. In what is perhaps a romantic and cosmopolitan outlook, I have always considered the whole world my homeland and its inhabitants equally my brothers and sisters. However, that is not to say I do not have a home. Wisconsin is my home, and I hold some pride in that, but I would not call it my homeland. To me, a homeland is collective, generational, and homogenous, which is something I do not really fit into, and I have always thought I am too far removed from the “national question” to truly understand the appeal of nationalism. Yet traveling through Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina, then spending my midterm break in Kosovo and Albania offered me a glimpse into the emotional power of the homeland and how it is weaponized for political gain.
As we arrived in Belgrade, one of the first things I saw was graffiti declaring, “The only genocide on the Balkans was against the Serbs,” simultaneously invoking Serbian suffering under the Ustaše during World War II and denying the Bosnian genocide. From an American perspective, Serbia is the “bad guy,” and its nationalism is widely condemned globally after the actions of Milošević. Yet there is nothing uniquely Serbian about nationalism. In fact, what struck me was how nationalism and anti-nationalism continue to coexist in the country’s collective memory. Alongside nationalist rhetoric, Yugoslav symbols still litter the streets while Tito and his suppression of nationalist movements are celebrated in the state-funded Museum of Yugoslavia. It is a strange contradiction since even President Vučić, a former member of the Serbian Radical Party and advocate of Greater Serbia, has defended Serbia’s anti-fascist history and intervened to stop plans to relocate Tito’s grave in 2024. Yet I think this contradiction speaks to the enduring power of nostalgia for one’s homeland. For many people, Yugoslavia and the Tito era remain a source of collective memory, pride, and belonging that is viscerally felt and difficult to erase even if their homeland no longer exists.
In Bosnia & Herzegovina, I kept finding myself in these anti-fascist Yugoslav memorials at night. In Mostar, a few of us visited the Partisan Memorial Cemetery, a place we were warned not to go after dark since it is where the fascist youth hang out to deface the graves. Later, I stood in Vraca Memorial Park above Sarajevo, an eerie and crumbling monument now covered in nationalist graffiti. In both memorials, I found myself feeling this strange reverence while surrounded by the names and graves. These monuments were built to commemorate a shared struggle that transcended ethnicity and nation, but they nevertheless evoked many of the same emotions that nationalism does: belonging, sacrifice, and attachment to a collective past. Standing among their ruins, I began to understand the emotional power of shared national history.
In Kosovo, there is very little shared national history since the country only declared independence in 2008, making it incredibly interesting when understanding the construction of nationalism. It is definitely still in the process of defining its identity, but one thing that seems to unite nearly all Kosovars is support for the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with celebratory monuments, murals, and merchandise everywhere. We visited Prekaz, where the Kosovo War is often said to have begun and where KLA leader Adem Jashari was killed by Serbian forces. Since then, he has been elevated into a near-sacred national figure. During our visit, we watched a youth soccer team being paraded past his grave to pay their respects. I found it somewhat unnerving, yet it also showed me how national myths are created and sustained across generations. In practical terms, Jarshari was a terrorist, but as the popular idiom goes, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” and I can begin to understand the national admiration for him in the context of liberatory struggle.
As we entered Albania, I gazed out of the bus window at the Kukës Mountains, listening to Fillim by Erza Muqoli, an Albanian song I have always loved, and I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, maybe I could imagine myself as a nationalist here.” While it was a joke, I think there was a kernel of truth that, in a different life, under different circumstances, I could be moved by the same emotional force that drives people to love their homeland and even sacrifice their lives for it.
The nation plays with your heartstrings. You see a beautiful landscape, and you feel an emotional connection to the land. You visit a war monument on a quiet night, and you feel a solemnity for the fallen. You see young children running around or old men playing chess in the park, and the “imagined community” of the nation (as Benedict Anderson called it) seems very real and worth defending. But defend against what? That has always been my struggle with understanding the homeland. Against change? Against foreigners? Communities are not built through isolation but through interaction, immigration, and cultural exchange. I can understand pride in the place one calls home — the comfort of familiar streets, the quirks of local traditions, the attachment to a community that shaped you. I can even understand admiration for leaders who materially improved people’s lives, like Tito. What I still struggle with is the leap from loving a place to viewing it as a political absolute that necessitates irredentist wars and ethnic cleansing.
Exploring the Balkans has helped me better understand the emotional power of home. Pride, comfort, belonging, and fear are all deeply human emotions. From the monumentalization of Adem Jashari to the Yugoslav nostalgia to the provocative nationalist graffiti, I can see how the visceral and often irrational nature of these emotions makes them powerful political tools, capable of transforming human attachment to one’s home into the political, often violent ideal of the national homeland.