Response to Sabrina P. Ramet and John R. Lampe, ‘Debates’, JSEB, Vol. 10, No. 1, April 2008, in relation to Aleksa Djilas' review article ‘The Academic West and the Balkan Test’, published in JSEB, Vol. 9, No. 3, December 2007

Professor Sabrina P. Ramet complains that I have ‘dismissed out of hand’ her book Thinking About Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates About the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. Yet, curiously, her reply is longer than that part of my review essay ‘The Academic West and the Balkan Test’ in which I deal solely with her work. My starting point in rejecting Thinking About Yugoslavia owed much to the critical views of America’s leading historical sociologist Michael Mann, which I considered applicable to Ramet’s book. Central was Mann’s insight: scholars who see the nation as a singular actor are themselves thinking like nationalists. Ramet, however, now claims that she agrees ‘wholeheartedly’ with Mann when he ‘rejects any attempt to chastise entire ethnic groups as perpetrators of expulsions and genocide’ (Ramet’s quote from my review essay). After supposedly establishing that this is not what she had done with the Serbs, Ramet delivers a harsh verdict: ‘ . . . Djilas is guilty of false attribution, attributing to me the accounts and views of others, which I merely report’. But does she, in fact, ‘merely report’ those numerous extremist narrations, descriptions and opinions? Are her own thoughts and beliefs different? I think not. Allow me a brief summary of what I have shown in my review essay. When Ramet informs us about various all-encompassing and unqualified attacks on