Serbian Nationalism and theOrigins of the Yugoslav Crisis

Vesna Pesic

UNITED STATESINSTITUTE OF PEACE

Summary v

1 Explaining Nationalism in Yugoslavia 1

2 Integrative Problems: Interwar Yugoslaviaand the Major National Ideologies 5

3 Ethno-national Federalism under Communist Rule 9

4 The Role of Serbian Ressentiment 14

5 The Breakdown of Communism: Collapse and War 23

6 Conclusions 28

Notes 32

About the Author 40

About the Institute 41

CONTENTS

The dissolution of multinational communistfederations and the ensuing armed conflictsthat have emerged with their transformation

into independent nation-states have returned the“national question” (i.e., the relationship of a na-tional or ethnic group to a state that includes mul-tiple ethnic groups within its territory) to the fore-front of debates over international politics, law,and theory. The violent breakup of Yugoslavia, inparticular, demonstrates the inability of the inter-national community to rely on any solid legal prin-ciples, guidelines, or established mechanisms toavoid such chaos and mass suffering when con-stituent parts of these types of multinational statesdecide to go their own way.

The former Yugoslavia was an attempt to ad-dress three fundamental aspects of the “nationalquestion”: (1) the right of a nation acting to createits own state through demands for national self-determination; (2) the right of a national home-land (whether sovereign state or republic within afederation) acting through its diaspora either tomonitor the relative status of its conationals else-where, or to demand national unification and theredrawing of borders; and (3) the rights of mem-bers of national minorities to resist the majority’sformation of a new nation-state either by seeking

cultural or political autonomy or by seceding in or-der to unite with their own national homeland.

A multinational state, such as Yugoslavia, can-not attempt to resolve these questions in any onenation’s favor, lest it risk the collapse of the entirestate. If a resolution of the national question in Yu-goslavia appeared to tilt in favor of any one partic-ular group, the federation’s internal balance wouldbe upset. Thus, Yugoslavia was not only a mosaicof different ethnic nations, but also a system thatwas developed to accommodate these differences.

The creation and maintenance of Yugoslaviahinged on the interdependence of Serbs andCroats, the country’s two largest national groups.These peoples “imagined” the borders of their re-spective states as overlapping and clashing. Noneof the other national groups the former Yugoslaviacomprised, with the exception of the Slovenes,lived within clearly defined ethnic borders insidethe federation. Large numbers of Yugoslav peopleslived within one of the other’s “national” territory.Bosnia-Herzegovina posed the greatest challengeto the peaceful dissolution of Yugoslavia becauseboth Serbs and Croats lived there in large num-bers, and because both Serbia and Croatia had his-torical pretensions to the republic’s territory.

Almost every one of Yugoslavia’s peoples hasbeen perceived as a threat to another nationalgroup and has felt threatened itself. This generalatmosphere of ressentiment, real or imagined,could easily be used to produce the feeling thatone’s national group was threatened with extinc-tion as the object of another’s aggression.

Ever since the founding of Yugoslavia, two dis-tinct nationalist policies have struggled for pri-macy in the debate over the country’s politicalfuture: Croatian separatism striving for an inde-pendent state and Serbian centralism striving topreserve the common Yugoslav state under its do-minion. Croatian nationalism was separatist andoppositional, Serbian nationalism alternated be-tween outright Serbian rule and a strict federalismgoverned through central government institutions.The Croatian policy supported the devolution ofpower from the center outward and found supportamong most other Yugoslav nations, which wouldeventually articulate their own national aspira-tions—Slovenian, Macedonian, Albanian, and (inthe Bosnian experience) Muslim.

v

SUMMARY

Both of these strident, ethnocentric, nationalideologies preordained the failure of any attemptto constitute Yugoslavia as a modern unitary andliberal state. For Serbia, the Yugoslav state becamenothing more than a vehicle for Serbian domina-tion, which, in turn, stimulated Croatian nationalopposition. The first Yugoslav state (1918–41) wasnot only unable to pacify internal conflicts and di-lute rigid national ideologies, but its collapse inWorld War II left no mechanisms in place to pre-vent extreme methods of resolving the nationalquestion.

The League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY)played the role of “mediator” among the quarrelingYugoslav peoples. It promised an ideological reso-lution of the national question through a socialrevolution that subsumed class and national dis-tinctions within a socialist framework. While thecountry’s major ethnic groups were constituted asnations within the new federation, the arrange-ment was best expressed by the classic Soviet for-mula, “national in form, socialist in content.”

The tenuous supranational ideology of Yugoslavcommunism would eventually provoke the federa-tion’s crisis. The weakening and disappearance ofsocialism’s ideological sovereignty raised perforcefundamental and profound questions about Yu-goslavia’s existence as a state, as happened inCzechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.

Despite the regime’s attempts to control na-tional aspirations by institutionalizing them withinthe political and territorial boundaries of the titularrepublics, the more abstract aspects of nationhoodcould not be so confined. Conferring the sense ofstatehood upon Yugoslavia’s major ethnic groupshad far greater consequences in strengtheningtheir territorial integration.

The immediate source of Serbian dissatisfactionin general, and the most tangible reason for the re-public’s nationalist reaction in particular, were theconstitutional provisions that undermined Ser-bia’s territorial integrity. Although the institutionalsystem established under the 1974 constitutionprescribed the “nativization” of all Yugoslav peo-ples within their territorial, republican frame-works, Serbia was frustrated in this regard. Accord-ing to the constitution, Serbia was not a“sovereign” negotiating party like the other re-publics because of the “sovereignty” of its two au-tonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina.

Serbian hard-liners’ main interpretation of the“Serbian tragedy” in Kosovo was that ethnic Alba-nians had gained control through Yugoslavia’s1974 constitution, and that the only way to stopthe “ethnic cleansing” of Serbs in Kosovo was to re-instate Serbian domination there. In the ambiguitysurrounding the “Kosovo problem,” hard-liners or-ganized a putsch in Serbia’s Communist party in1987, bringing the most conservative elementsinto the party’s leadership positions.

During 1988–89, Serbia’s intelligentsia andSlobodan Milosevic’s Serbian Communist partyclique joined forces to encourage a national revolu-tion to create a “unified Serbia” by tapping socialand national discontent in the republic. The na-tionalist ideology of being threatened and hatedfueled this Serbian mass movement.

This nationalist movement also mobilized Croa-tian Serbs by helping to organize meetings wherethey aired their demands for cultural and politicalautonomy. Such meetings only further supportedthe growth of Croatian nationalist movements, in-cluding the Croatian Democratic Union.

The advent of free elections in 1990 and thebreakdown of the communist regime was the cul-mination of what had already been going on formore than a decade in Yugoslavia following Tito’sdeath. Along with the process of democratizationin the republics and the denial of that sameprocess in the federal government, central state au-thority was becoming weaker, approaching a situa-tion of anarchy that bore an unsettling resem-blance to the collapse of the empire that used torule the Balkans. Yugoslavia’s breakup gave newmeaning to the old notion of Balkanization.

As communism collapsed, the strategies of thepolitical actors in each of the Yugoslav republicswere determined by specific elements of the na-tional question on the one hand, and the search for an exit from the communist system on theother. Yet, saving the communist regime remainedthe one method by which conservative elites inSerbia, including the Yugoslav National Army(YNA), could simultaneously preserve the Yugo-slav state and achieve the goal of Serbian unifica-tion within one country.

The dual games (national and ideological)played by all the republics to a greater or lesser ex-tent actually precluded both of two possible pathsto a resolution of the federation’s crisis. The

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republics’ leaders were unable to either reimagineYugoslavia as a democratic and minimal state orbreak away peacefully by creating new, separatedemocratic states.

Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union shared thesame types of multinational federal institutions,ethno-demographic mix of populations, and largediaspora communities whose status would changesignificantly with the dismemberment of both fed-eral states. Both cases involved the creation of newnational states in which one ethnic group becamepredominant. If these and other multinationalstates share the same broad political and ethno-demographic elements, are there lessons from theYugoslav crisis that the international communitycan generally apply to their dissolution and avoidthe possibility of mass violence in their wake?

First of all, the international community shouldactively work with the relevant parties to arrange atemporary status quo compromise if the dismem-berment of multinational states is not preceded byboth an internal consensus on the terms for creat-ing new states, including their borders and the sta-tus of minorities, and a clear conception of futuresecurity and cooperation arrangements.

The international community’s recognition ofthe new states emerging from the Yugoslav federa-tion’s breakup was woefully insufficient to securetheir peace and security. Not only must such recog-nition take into account the internal and externalthreats involved in each case, but it must be real inthe sense that the new state must either be able to

defend itself or be defended by international mili-tary forces. Otherwise the result is highly unstablesituations that lead to victim-states and victimizedpopulations.

In the wider context of the political transforma-tion of East-Central Europe and the former SovietUnion, a more fundamental debate has been rekin-dled: the right to national self-determination andhow this vague principle might be reconsideredand clarified in order to make it a workable con-cept in international law. The abuse of this right inthe Yugoslav case underscores the need for suchan examination, as the right to self-determinationcame to be equated with the right of ethnically de-fined nations/republics to secede from the federa-tion, regardless of the mass violence such an actwould surely entail. The republics’ unilateral actsof secession were in turn met with internal acts ofsecession by minority ethno-national communitiesinvoking the same principle of self-determination.

One crucial precondition for the peaceful appli-cation of the right to self-determination should bethe respect of both territorial integrity and minor-ity rights. Borders cannot be changed by force orwithout consideration of the consequences thatthe redrawing of international borders would havefor all members of the state. Above all, thereshould be some international mechanism that pro-vides for the renegotiation of borders and that en-courages all sides to recognize the consequencesof newly drawn international borders for all rele-vant parties.

The dissolution of multinational communistfederations and the ensuing armed conflictsthat have emerged with their transformation

into independent nation-states have returned the“national question” to the forefront of debates overinternational politics, law, and theory. The forcesfueling the breakdown of these multinationalstates have not been exhausted with the disintegra-tion of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Czecho-slovakia. Most of the successor states of these fed-erations are themselves breaking down. Whetherthere will be a third phase of breakdown that willrequire the resolution of new “national questions”remains to be seen.1

In this paper, I attempt to explain the disintegra-tion of Yugoslavia and why its breakup was not apeaceful one. By way of this example, I also at-tempt to explain in general why and when thedemise of multinational states creates ethnic polar-ization that seems “resolvable” only by force andeven genocide. The violent breakup of Yugoslavia,in particular, demonstrates the inability of the in-ternational community to rely on any solid legalprinciples, guidelines, or established mechanismsto avoid such chaos and mass suffering when con-stituent parts of these types of multinational statesdecide to go their own way. In the concludingsection of this study, I offer recommendations the

international community may find useful in avoid-ing these kinds of conflicts in the future.

For many years, Yugoslavia functioned as anation-state by providing a peaceful compromiseto the conflicting, multifaceted, and perennial “na-tional questions” posed by its constitutive parts.Multinational states, such as Yugoslavia, cannot at-tempt to resolve these questions in any one na-tion’s favor, lest they risk the collapse of the entirestate. If a resolution of the national question ap-peared to tilt in favor of any one particular group,Yugoslavia’s internal balance would have been up-set. Thus, Yugoslavia was not only a mosaic of dif-ferent ethnic nations, but also a system that wasdeveloped to accommodate these differences.Joseph Rothchild emphasizes the almost unbeliev-able diversity of ethnic groups that Yugoslaviabrought under one state: “By virtually every rele-vant criterion—history, political traditions, socioe-conomic standards, legal systems, religion and cul-ture—Yugoslavia was the most complicated of thenew states of interwar East-Central Europe, beingcomposed of the largest and most varied numberof pre-1918 units.”2 Maintaining political balanceand diffusing ethnic tensions was the only way Yu-goslavia could survive. If the Yugoslav state couldnot maintain these essential functions, the “separa-tion” of its intertwined national groups in a full-scale war would be the probable result.

By its very nature, Yugoslavia has never had astaatsvolk (“state-people”) that could “naturally”dominate by its numbers and serve as the founda-tion on which a modern nation-state could bebuilt. (As members of the most populous nationalgroup, Serbs constituted only 40 percent of the to-tal Yugoslav population.) The creation and mainte-nance of Yugoslavia hinged on the interdepen-dence of Serbs and Croats, the country’s twolargest national groups. These peoples not onlyshared a common daily existence, but also “imag-ined” the borders of their respective states as over-lapping and clashing. Thus, a Serbo-Croatian com-promise represented the foundation of Yugoslavia.

None of the other national groups that inhab-ited the former Yugoslavia, with the exception ofthe Slovenes, lived within clearly defined ethnicborders inside the federation. Large numbers ofYugoslav peoples or peoples of neighboring coun-tries lived within one of the other’s “national”territory.3 Bosnia-Herzegovina posed the greatest

1

1EXPLAINING

NATIONALISM IN

YUGOSLAVIA

challenge to the peaceful dissolution of Yugoslaviabecause both Serbs and Croats lived there in largenumbers, and because the two states—Serbia andCroatia—both had historical pretensions to the re-public’s territory.4 Bosnia-Herzegovina was an “ap-ple of discord” between Serbia and Croatia, as therecent war over its division confirms.5

The very existence of Yugoslavia seemed to defythe history of relations among its different nations,which had already waged one ethnic and religiouswar among themselves with the collapse of the firstYugoslavia (1918–41). The feeling of resentmentamong Yugoslavia’s nations, however, did notemerge from this experience alone. To be sure, Yu-goslavia’s national groups all share a common his-tory of struggling to save their distinct identitiesand renew their lost medieval states—a history ofrepressive domination that fostered disloyal andmilitant minorities and arrogant and repressivemajorities. Almost every one of these peoples hasbeen perceived as a threat to another nationalgroup and has felt threatened itself. This generalatmosphere of ressentiment, real or imagined,could easily be used to producethe feeling that one’s nationalgroup was threatened with ex-tinction as the object of anoth-er’s aggression.6 Almost withoutexception, every Balkan nationhas had some territorial preten-sions or expansionist intentionsin one historical period or an-other. The region’s history haswitnessed successive campaignsfor “Greater Serbia,” “GreaterCroatia,” “Greater Albania,”“Greater Bulgaria,” “GreaterMacedonia,” and “GreaterGreece.”7 National ressentimentextended into the relatively recent period of com-munist rule, as the League of Communists of Yu-goslavia (embodied in Tito as the bearer of ab-solute power) frequently resolved nationalconflicts through repressive methods that werenot easily forgotten. In the process of maintaininga balance of power among national groups, everynation/republic had reason to believe that it hadbeen unjustly treated in the Yugoslav state.

The sheer complexity of the former Yugoslavia’scurrent crisis has supported numerous interpreta-tions of its origins. One explanation that has

acquired a certain currency is “nationalism as apower game,” which views the main cause of theYugoslav crisis as an ideology (in the sense of“false consciousness”) of “aggressive nationalism,”perpetuated by members of the old nomenklaturawho seek to preserve their threatened positions ofpower in the face of democratic change. Given thatthese government bureaucrats, party officials, andmilitary officers were overwhelmingly concen-trated in Serbia, this republic was the first to forgean effective conservative coalition under the ban-ner of the old Serbian ideology to inhibit a “demo-cratic revolution” that would drive them frompower.8

In the “nationalism as a power game” argument,Communist elites in Yugoslavia’s other republicsfaced similar reformist pressures and attempted toduplicate the Serbian leaders’ strategy in their ownrepublics. By promoting their own nationalisms,Yugoslavia’s other republican leaders acknowl-edged not only that Serbian threats—real or per-ceived—must be countered, but that nationalismwas the most successful card to play in maintain-

ing their positions of power. In-deed, stirring up nationalist sen-timent seemed to be the mostconvenient strategy for Yu-goslavia’s republican politicalelites, particularly when theycould easily manipulate publicopinion through their control oftheir respective republic’s majorsources of information.9

The problem with this ap-proach is that it treats the “na-tional question” as an epiphe-nomenon of the struggle topreserve power and privilege. Indoing so, it forgets that political

battles in Yugoslavia have almost always devel-oped around the “national question.” Such an un-derstanding of nationalism as “false conscious-ness” discounts the power of national sentimentamong the region’s ethnic groups.

The alternative explanation views nationalismin Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the former Yu-goslavia as a result of historical desires of separatepeoples to resolve their “national question.” Assuch, nationalism is not viewed as a disingenuousploy by political elites to hold onto power, but as aconsequence of modernity in contemporary

2

Bosnia-Herzegovina

was an “apple of

discord” between Serbia

and Croatia, as the

recent war over its

division confirms.

3

international society.10 The very idea of a “multina-tional state” implies the dynamic of the “nationalquestion.” Multinational states significantly differfrom multiethnic states, in that the former are com-posed of separate nations that want to establishtheir political autonomy in order “to ensure the fulland free development of their cultures and the bestinterests of their people. At the extreme, nationsmay wish to secede, if they think their self-determi-nation is impossible within the larger state.”11

When we speak of the “communist federations”that are the subject of this work, we should keep inmind that these states “institutionalized multina-tionality.”12

Yugoslavia was an institutionalized multina-tional state that managed to contain, in the fullsense of the word, disparate and seemingly in-tractable national questions. If we accept the view that there are essentially three fundamentalaspects of the national question, then Yugoslaviacontained all three: (1) a nation acting to create itsown state through demands for national self-deter-mination; (2) a national homeland (state or repub-lic) acting through its diaspora either to monitorthe relative status of its conationals in the newstates emerging from the federation, or to demandunification and the redrawing of borders; and (3) members of an alienated national minority suf-fering from discrimination and acting to resist themajority’s formation of a new nation-state by eitherseeking cultural or political autonomy or secedingin order to unite with their own national home-land.13

In this respect, it should be kept in mind that allthese aspects of the national question existedwithin one federal state, creating a specific internaldynamic that cannot be compared to a similar con-figuration of national questions in other indepen-dent states. These national questions have emergedin their most extreme forms (secession, irreden-tism, or the expulsion of minorities) in the processof Yugoslavia’s disintegration. Once they were soformulated, with the understanding that their pro-ponents could not abandon their commitment totheir particular solution, war was more or lessinevitable.

The question arises, then, why practically eachnation took the most extreme position, which, inessence, made Yugoslavia’s political relations azero-sum game. Was the main cause of this situa-tion the ancien regime’s elites who launched

“nationalism” as an ideology in order to protecttheir threatened positions of power? Or was it theprospect of finally resolving the ever-present “na-tional question,” which would be freed from theconstraints of the old authoritarian political orderwith the arrival of democracy? The related ques-tion, in terms of the federation’s survival, waswhether Yugoslavia could either transform itselfinto a genuine democratic, federal state, or breakup peacefully in light of: (1) conflicting nationalideologies; (2) the existing collective decision-making structure, representing Yugoslavia’s na-tions (through its republics’ representatives) andthe working class (through its vanguard, theLeague of Communists of Yugoslavia); and (3) theenormous apparatus of power that was created bythe “authentic” socialist revolution—the authoritar-ian regime and the legacy of Tito’s absolute rule?

If nationalism takes the form of a quest for na-tional identity through the creation of a nation-state, the most important task is to show why andwhen the nation assumed such worth, therebymaking nationalist demands such a successful po-litical card to play.14 A more comprehensive analy-sis of nationalism, based on specific historical, in-stitutional, and political factors, helps to avoidtreating nationalism as an irrational, “false” phe-nomenon that can be wished away, or as a merepsychological template in the postcommunistsearch for identity. Following the more compre-hensive analyses, this study will attempt to showthat nationalism is a weapon for a new division ofpower in the process of deconstructing the politi-cal space of Yugoslavia and a dysfunctional prereq-uisite in the struggle for security among the newstates emerging from the former multinationalfederation.

This analysis of nationalism’s role in Yugoslav-ia’s crisis will focus on three main factors: (1) thecontradictory institutional structures of the Yugo-slav state; (2) Serbian ressentiment; and (3) thecollapse of authoritarian rule.

The first part examines the contradictory insti-tutional structures of Yugoslavia as a state. WhileYugoslavia was a practical compromise solution tothe conflicting national questions containedwithin its borders, the Yugoslav state lacked the in-tegrative potential necessary to create institutionalframeworks and workable procedures of demo-cratic rule that could accommodate the conflictualrelations among its different national groups. It

was particularly unsuccessful in establishing thelatter, as it was constantly trying to “resolve” na-tional questions—mainly through its repressivestate apparatus—that were anathema to the estab-lishment of a democratic state. The next section ex-plores this matter in detail, comparing the first Yu-goslavia, the centralized, liberal state created afterWorld War I, and the second Yugoslavia, theethno-national federation created under commu-nist rule. This section attempts to show how diffi-culties encountered in both of these state struc-tures became a basis for future ethnic conflicts andthe eventual disintegration of Yugoslavia. In short,both of these Yugoslavias proved unable to over-come the inherent antagonisms of the country’sfundamental national question.

The second and perhaps the most salient factorof the Yugoslav crisis is Serbian ressentiment,which ultimately rejected both the second Yu-goslavia and a possible “third Yugoslavia” as a con-federation of independent states. From the mid-1980s, prominent segments of the Serbianintelligentsia, in conjunction with the republic’spolitical and military elites, pushed Yugoslavia to-ward rapid disintegration with an offensive strat-egy of “finally settling accounts with ‘Tito’s mon-ster.’” An aggressive Serbian nationalism broke thethin thread holding together Yugoslavia’s nationsin a compromise arrangement, pushing toward anextreme solution of its national question throughthreats and warmongering: Either Yugoslavia’s var-ious nations would accept Serbia’s vision of a “nor-mal,” unified state that served Serbian interests, orSerbs from all the republics would “join together”and achieve their national unity by force. The polit-ical elites in all the former republics took advan-

tage of these extreme solutions as an opportunityto save their positions of power and privilege.

The third factor in this analysis is the collapse ofauthoritarian rule, which began right after Tito’sdeath in 1980, and accelerated rapidly during thebreakdown of other communist regimes through-out Eastern Europe in 1989. This collapse in-volved two simultaneous processes of disintegra-tion. The first was the breakdown of the valuesystem of socialist internationalism, which tippedthe delicate balance between socialist universalismand ethnic particularism in favor of the latter. Thesecond was the dissolution of the League of Com-munists of Yugoslavia, which brought the very ex-istence of the Yugoslav state into question—particu-larly if we keep in mind that socialist ideology, asdefined by the LCY, provided the main integrativeforce holding the Yugoslav state together. With thedisintegration of the state and its apparatus of re-pression, nothing could restrain the rise of nation-alism—particularly Serbian nationalism—or returnit to the framework of compromise. Far from lay-ing the foundation for representative and respon-sive institutions that could accommodate the de-mands of Yugoslavia’s nations, the introduction ofpolitical pluralism and free elections at this junc-ture created a “state of nature,” bringing unmedi-ated national conflicts to the stage of open warfare.

Thus, the situation in Yugoslavia during1990–91 can best be described as a “decisive bat-tle” for maximal solutions to the question of na-tional boundaries and legitimate states.15 In orderto provide a complete understanding of the eventsthat led up to this battle and what they mean forthe future of the former Yugoslavia, I examinethese three factors in fuller detail.

4

One prevalent explanation for the even-tual demise of the Yugoslav state is that itnever succeeded in constituting itself as

a political community, as a nation-state whoseidentity conceptually and structurally transcendedthe various nations that it comprised. While thespecial function and purpose of the Yugoslav stateideally would have accommodated a large, diversecollectivity of many different ethnic groups, na-tional minorities, and religions, as well as cultural,economic, and linguistic differences, the realitywas that each of Yugoslavia’s nations sought to useYugoslavia to protect its own particular nationalidentity and develop its own idea about statehood.The more obvious reality was that these differentconceptions of the Yugoslav state were decidedlyasymmetrical: Yugoslav statehood had to competewith its individual nations’ desires for statehood.Yet the Yugoslav state itself would eventually beusurped by the largest nation—Serbs—to serve itsown national interest. To be sure, the creation of aYugoslav nation-state reflected Serbian interests,while Croatian interests (and, later, those of theother republics) fostered the ideal of a Yugoslavconfederation of independent states.

The first Yugoslavia (the Kingdom of Serbs,Croats, and Slovenes) enshrined the idea of

“national unity” in a liberal, parliamentary monar-chy. The idea of “national unity” presumed thatthere lived in Yugoslavia one people with threenames—Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The wartimeallies promoted unification of these “tribes” in acommon state as an expression of the right to self-determination on the basis of nationality, follow-ing the example of the creation of the Italian andGerman nations in the second half of the nine-teenth century.16 Of course, such “Yugoslav ethnicunity” was spurious.17 Its foundation of putativeethnic unity was, in essence, a joint project amongthe various South Slav nations to ward off any ter-ritorial aspirations of neighboring countries and toprotect their national identities through a “unified”Yugoslavia. The state was dominated by Serbian in-stitutions (above all, the Serbian House of Karad-jordjevic), including the military, the political lead-ership, and the civil service. These institutionswere mechanically transferred to the new parts ofYugoslavia, even though these old Serbian institu-tions lacked the integrative potential for a newstate that was five times larger than Serbia and thatnow brought under its dominion fragments of oldempires that were arguably more developed thanSerbia from a legal, cultural, and economic stand-point. After the creation of Yugoslavia as a unifiednation and centralized state under Serbian domi-nation, the Croatian political parties entered theopposition, obstructing the work of parliamentand state organs. Practically from the very found-ing of Yugoslavia, the Croatian national questionwas opened up.

Even before its formation as a state, there weredebates over how the first Yugoslavia should be or-ganized, even though Serbia entered the debateswith a considerable advantage. Serbia had astronger position in the negotiations over Yu-goslavia, largely owing to its reputation as one ofthe victors in the Balkan Wars (1912–13), then as astate on the side of the Entente during World War I(in which Serbs suffered enormous casualties),and finally as an organized military force capableof blocking the pretensions of neighboring coun-tries to Yugoslav lands (primarily Italy’s claims onDalmatia). For these reasons, Serbia believed thatit had the right to speak in the name of all Yugoslavpeoples and to influence decisively the form of thestate in conformity with Serbian national interests.

5

2INTEGRATIVE

PROBLEMS

Interwar Yugoslavia and the Major

National Ideologies

Given the historical circumstances and balance ofpower, the Serbian position prevailed.18

Serbian politicians rejected outright the Croat-ian proposals for a federation. Such a scheme wasforeign to Serbian history. Moreover, anything lessthan a centralized state would deprive Serbia of itsdominant role in ruling the new country. If Serbianpoliticians were to accept the federal model, theywould have to link together all of the “Serbianlands” so that Serbia could be assured of a domi-nant role in such a federation. The “Serbian landsin Austria-Hungary” that would be linked with Ser-bia were understood to include Bosnia and Herze-govina, Vojvodina with Srem, and a part of Dalma-tia. Montenegro, which had already united withSerbia, also fell within these “lands.” Moreover,Serbia had already obtained Vardar Macedoniaand Kosovo in the Balkan Wars. As a result, theSerbian federal unit would be substantially largerthan its Croatian and Slovenian counterparts. Theidea of a federation created on the basis of histori-cal provinces was not up for consideration, since itwould “break up the Serbian nation” and the lead-ing role of Serbia.19 Serbian politicians were notprepared to “drown Serbia in the Yugoslav commu-nity” and rejected the example of the Piedmont re-gion, which renounced its own past for the unifica-tion of Italy. This is the reason why Serbia did notagree to call the new state “Yugoslavia,” whichcame only in 1929 under the dictatorship of KingAlexander.

Debates over how Yugoslavia should be orga-nized—as either a unitary or a federal state—con-stantly plagued the first Yugoslavia, and the de-bates continued on into the second, communist,Yugoslavia until its disintegration. But debatesover the country’s political structure involvedmuch more than arguments about the nature andextent of federal relations in the two Yugoslavias.At the heart of these debates was the ongoing bat-tle to resolve Yugoslavia’s national question. Theopposing sides in these debates almost always di-vided along the lines of the two historically domi-nant ideologies that inevitably destroyed both Yu-goslavias: Croatian and Serbian.

Well before unification, a strong political cur-rent in Croatia advocated an independent Croatiawithin its “historical boundaries,” which includedBosnia-Herzegovina and parts of contemporarySerbia (a so-called Greater Croatia). Because

Croatia long enjoyed an autonomous status underHungarian rule, it joined Yugoslavia as a nationwith a well-developed consciousness about the“right of statehood,” that is, the right to an indepen-dent state.20 Given the circumstances at the time,Croatia was not in a position to exercise this rightor to advance the cause for a federal Yugoslavia.Pressed by an internal Yugoslav movement (whichwas especially strong in Dalmatia and amongCroatian Serbs who were pushing for unificationwith Serbia), Croatia joined Yugoslavia, but with astrong feeling of its unequal position in the part-nership.21 Given its ambivalent relationship to-ward the unified state, and the fact that such anarrangement was ill suited for advancing its owninterests, Croatia maintained a strategic position ofseparatism regarding its conception of the Yu-goslav state. This position alternated between apro-Yugoslav ideal of an autonomous state within aconfederation of other South Slavs and outright se-cession from the Yugoslav federation and the es-tablishment of a truly independent state. Regard-ing the latter position, Serbs posed the onlyobstacle to its achievement, according to the moreextreme strains of Croatian nationalist sentiment.Croatian nationalist ideology and a historical long-ing for the national state it lost a thousand yearsbefore gave ample support for such a position.

Serbia’s basic objective remained the unificationof all Serbs in one state. Following this nationalistideology, Serbia entered World War I with the aimof bringing together all Serbs and Serbian lands,including those in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croa-tia, and Vojvodina (all under Austro-Hungarianrule). However, Serbia officially defined its wargoal as the broader unification of all South Slavswithin one state. The idea of Serbian unificationwas based on two principles. One reflected narrowSerbian interests: It envisioned a large Serbianstate that would be a center of power in theBalkans after Serbian military victories and strate-gic alliances with the other Balkan nations forcedthe dying Hapsburg and Ottoman empires out ofthe region. Serbia achieved this goal, ending Ot-toman rule and annexing Macedonia and Kosovo.The Serbian diaspora had a dual role in fulfillingSerbian unification: providing the resourcesneeded to occupy a dominant position in theBalkans and focusing on the national question.While the borders of this “Greater Serbia” were not

6

7

clearly drawn, Serbia’s more ardent nationalistsinvoked the image of a rebirth of the medieval Ser-bian kingdom lost to the Ottoman Turks at theBattle of Kosovo in 1389.

The second principle was broader: namely,Yugoslavism conceived in a number of ways. Yugo-slavia as a multinational enterprise, and not an ex-panded Serbia, was more popular among promi-nent segments of the Serbian intelligentsia andyouth than in official political and military cir-cles.22 The pervasiveness of Serbian ethnic bound-aries coincided with both the Yugoslav ideal andthe cooperation established in the mid-nineteenthcentury with other nations that in-cluded large Serbian communities,principally Bosnia-Herzegovina andCroatia. However, Serbian politi-cians did not renounce the Pied-mont-like position of Serbia and itsleading role in the creation of Yu-goslavia. Toward the end of WorldWar I, the Serbs realized their unifi-cation plan with the establishmentof Yugoslavia under the slogan “na-tional and state unity.” From thattime on, they considered Yugoslaviathe permanent solution to their na-tional question. Accordingly, theymade great sacrifices during WorldWar I, assigning themselves the roleof the Yugoslav “state people” and“liberators” of the other peoples.23

This dual identity remained a per-manent part of the Serbian nationalcharacter up to the emergence of theSerbian national movement in the1980s, when this tie was brokenwith the rejection of Yugoslavismand Yugoslavia as the Serbianhomeland.

Under the pressure of national,social, and economic problems, Yu-goslavia did not survive for long as aparliamentary democracy. King Alexander’s impo-sition of dictatorship in 1929 decisively defeatedthe idea of Yugoslavia as a liberal state based on“national unity.” Through repression and persecu-tions, the King imposed his own version of na-tional unity, including extensive regional

reorganization aimed at severing ties among ethniccommunities and lessening their potential for re-sistance. This policy was not only unsuccessful, itintensified dissatisfaction among the nationalgroups it sought to include in the monarchy’s idealof Yugoslavism, including Serbia. Such a policyfound support only among diaspora Serbs in Croa-tia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

With the weakening of the dictatorship in 1934,pressure to resolve the Croatian question was sostrong that on the eve of World War II the regimeestablished the Croatian region (banovina). In ad-dition to the traditional Croatian lands, consider-

able parts of Herzegovina andnorthern Bosnia were included inthe new region. The establishmentof the Croatian administrative re-gion, in turn, reopened the questionof where and how far the Serbianlands extended.

During Yugoslavia’s partition inWorld War II, the conflict over thenational question culminated inethno-religious war and genocide inthe fascist Independent State ofCroatia (NDH), which includedBosnia-Herzegovina and part of pre-sent-day Serbia, near Belgrade. Eth-nic atrocities committed by theNazi-sponsored Croatian Ustasheregime in the NDH left an indeliblemark on Serbian national con-sciousness, as well as on the con-sciousness of peoples who sufferedSerbian revenge. The mass liquida-tions that were carried out by thenew communist governmentagainst so-called collaborators and“class enemies” further traumatizedthe Yugoslav nations.

The scale of the massacres in theNDH and other mass executionswould not allow their examination

in the atmosphere of “national reconciliation” thatfollowed the war. Such a possibility was further de-nied by communist ideology, which rejected at-tempts to define the problems of ethnic war in “na-tional” terms. As such, genocide and massacreswere not carried out by members of national

Ethnic

atrocities

committed by the

Nazi-sponsored

Croatian Ustashe

regime . . . left an

indelible mark on

Serbian national

consciousness, as

well as on the

consciousness of

peoples who

suffered Serbian

revenge.

groups, but by “fascists,” “Ustashe,” and “Chet-niks.” Monuments were raised to the victims, but aveil of silence covered over the climate of fear andmutual distrust.24

Ever since the founding of Yugoslavia, two dis-tinct nationalist policies have struggled for pri-macy in the debate over the country’s politicalfuture: Croatian separatism striving for an inde-pendent state and Serbian centralism striving topreserve the common Yugoslav state under itsdominion. Croatian nationalism was separatistand oppositional, Serbian nationalism alternatedbetween outright Serbian rule and a strict federal-ism governed through central government institu-tions. While the former would be nurtured byeconomic growth through a reorientation of theCroatian economy, the latter would have to rely onthe army and the police. The Croatian policy sup-ported the devolution of power from the centeroutward and found support among most other

Yugoslav nations, which would eventuallyarticulate their own national aspirations—Sloven-ian, Macedonian, Albanian, and (in the Bosnian ex-perience) Muslim.

Both of these strident, ethnocentric, nationalideologies preordained the failure of any attemptto constitute Yugoslavia as a modern unitary andliberal state. To be sure, such attempts lacked agenuine appreciation for the term “liberal state.”For Serbia, the Yugoslav state became nothingmore than a vehicle for Serbian domination,which, in turn, stimulated Croatian national oppo-sition and, in a somewhat subsidiary fashion,Slovenian nationalism. The position of the otherYugoslav nations was simply not a matter for dis-cussion. The first Yugoslav state was not only un-able to pacify internal conflicts and dilute rigid na-tional ideologies, but its collapse in World War IIleft no mechanisms in place to prevent extrememethods of resolving the national question.

8

The disintegration of the second Yugoslaviaand the activity of the main actors upthrough the outbreak of violent conflict can

be understood in a specific context, that of a multi-national federal state operating within a socialistframework. Both of these elements, which servedas the bases of Yugoslavia’s renewal after WorldWar II, produced new problems of integration atthe level of both the federation and the new federalunits, or “national states.” New contradictionsemerged with the radical rejection of the civic prin-ciple of citizenship as a means of integrating theYugoslav state and its constituent parts.

“National in form, socialist in content”

The renewal of the country from the start of thewar was taken up by the League of Communists ofYugoslavia, which played the role of “mediator”among the quarreling Yugoslav peoples. Itpromised a resolution of the national question,which from its ideological standpoint, could besettled only as an inseparable part of a social revo-lution. The party’s linkage of social and nationalrevolutions offered a specific way to “resolve” thenational question and constitute Yugoslavia as aunified state. The linkage between nation andrevolution was presented as a comprehensive

arrangement, best expressed by the classic Sovietformula, “national in form, socialist in content.”What exactly did this formula mean for the forma-tion of Yugoslavia as a state, and how exactly wasthe national question “resolved” according to thisformula?

The contradictory nature of Yugoslavia as a statewas apparent from its very inception. On the onehand, the Communist party was able to come topower only as a Yugoslav movement; on the otherhand, it could not hope to attract the “oppressednations” to the revolutionary cause with thepromise of a Yugoslav solution to the nationalquestion. The social revolution, following the tra-dition of the Soviet experience, subsumed classand national divisions within the categories of theoppressed and the oppressor. Simply put, some ofYugoslavia’s nations were “working class,” and oth-ers ranked among the bourgeoisie. According tothe LCY, the “Serbian bourgeoisie” was both a classand national oppressor. Thus, the party did not of-fer a Yugoslavia that its “exploited nations” wouldcontinue to view as a Serbian creation; rather, it at-tempted to move the new Yugoslavian project asfar away from Serbian influence as it could. Thiswas achieved by emphasizing the revolutionaryright of each nation to self-determination and byoffering the promise of a federal organization ofYugoslavia. The resulting framework of social revo-lution (which, according to party ideologists, wascoterminous with the country’s national war of lib-eration) could only be a new, socialist Yugoslavia.In its formulation of the new socialist project, “theparty had come to acquire a sensitivity to the pointof view of the individual Yugoslav nationalitieswhile at the same time being fully committed tofinding a Yugoslav solution to the national ques-tion.”25 How would such a Yugoslavia be consti-tuted? On what institutional assumptions would itbe based?

According to official communist doctrine, Yu-goslavia could not be established as a nation-state,even in a federal arrangement. “Nations” wereproducts of capitalism, not socialism; so any at-tempt to establish administrative units based onhistorical categories, such as nations, was out of thequestion. Unity in the new, socialist Yugoslavia wasto be realized by merging the basic differences (in-cluding national ones) among its various peoples inan all-encompassing proletariat.26 This presumed

3ETHNO-NATIONAL

FEDERALISM UNDER

COMMUNIST RULE

9

10

unity was not political (i.e., national) but apolitical(i.e., class-based) in nature. Until the time whenthis new unity could be fully established, nationswould be recognized and constituted as sovereignstates, but only until that “form” could be tran-scended by an authentic community of workingpeople. Of course, recognition of the nations assovereign states was, from the start, more estab-lished on paper than in fact, particularly with re-gard to their own national policies. The major deci-sions were taken in the central party organs, andall state institutions, including republican govern-ments, were merely “transmitters”of these decisions.

The formula “national in form,socialist in content” establishedYugoslavia as a state based on oneideological project, or more pre-cisely, the absolute and central-ized power of the Communistparty and its apparatus of statepower.27 The subjective dimen-sion of Yugoslavia as a state is ex-pressed by “socialist patriotism,”which reduces its identity to thatof a communist supranationalideology. This tenuous concep-tion of Yugoslavia would later pro-voke its crisis. The weakening anddisappearance of socialism’s ideo-logical sovereignty raised perforcefundamental and profound ques-tions about Yugoslavia’s existenceas a state, as happened in Czecho-slovakia and the Soviet Union.

As long as communist Yu-goslavia could not be defined as anation-state (“nation” defined as ashared political community), norits citizens as constituting a uni-fied nation, its communist leaderscould safely allow its composite parts to be constituted in na-tional terms.28 Yugoslavia institutionalized the re-lations among these nations through an unusualfederal arrangement based on a hierarchy of twokinds of ethno-nationality. Enjoying the higherstatus were the “constitutive nations” that origi-nally “joined together in the common state” andtheoretically enjoyed the right to be recognized assovereign states. Thus, Yugoslav federalism was

based on an ethno-national sovereignty that wouldbear the seeds of future ethnocracies once its so-cialist framework fell apart.29 Five constitutive na-tions were so recognized—Croats, Macedonians,Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes—each of whichwas territorially and politically organized as a re-public in the Yugoslav federation. One republic,Bosnia-Herzegovina, was not recognized under thenational principle until 1971. After the recognitionof Muslims as a separate ethno-nation, Bosnia-Herzegovina became a republic consisting of threeconstitutive peoples: Serbs, Croats, and Muslims.

The constitutive nations en-joyed the status of states (re-publics), while all of the other na-tional groups held the status ofnational minorities with recog-nized cultural rights. Later on, thisstatus was elevated to the level of“nationalities” (narodnost), grant-ing them proportional representa-tion at the local level, and at theprovincial/republican and federallevels for larger minority groups(e.g., Hungarians in Vojvodina).Within the Serbian republic, twoautonomous provinces wereformed: Kosovo, populated pri-marily by ethnic Albanians, andVojvodina, populated by signifi-cant numbers of ethnic Hungari-ans and other minorities.30 Underthe 1974 constitution, both ofthese regions took on a state-likestatus similar to that enjoyed bythe republics.

Despite the regime’s attempts tocontrol national aspirations by in-stitutionalizing them within thepolitical and territorial boundariesof the titular republics, the moreabstract aspects of nationhood

could not be so confined. Conferring the sense ofstatehood upon Yugoslavia’s major ethnic groupshad far greater consequences in strengthening theterritorial and ethnic integration of these nations.That is, their rights to be “constitutive” were recog-nized not only within their respective states, butalso among their conationals inhabiting the terri-tory of other Yugoslav republics. In some cases,these ethnic diaspora communities viewed the

The formula

“national in form,

socialist in content”

established Yugo-

slavia as a state

based on one

ideological project,

or more precisely,

the absolute and

centralized power of

the Communist

party and its

apparatus of state

power.

11

constitutive nature of Yugoslav nationhood as giv-ing them the right to extend the sovereignty oftheir national “homeland” to the territories they in-habited. Such was the case with Serbs in Croatia,constituting 12 percent of the republic’s popula-tion in 1991. Later, this status would produce enor-mous problems, giving Croatian Serbs the “right”to secede from Croatia, and giving Croatia theright to deny them this status by designating themas a “minority” in its new constitution. An evenclearer example was in Bosnia-Herzegovina,where, according to the same principle, three na-tions held sovereignty: Serbs, Croats, and Mus-lims.31 This principle held for Yugoslavia’s othernations as well, but it did not have the same conse-quences due to the significantly smaller share ofother nations in their populations.

Yugoslavia’s institutionalization of these two op-posing principles of integration—territorial-politi-cal and ethnic—posed an apparent contradictionthat had two major consequences.32 First, none ofYugoslavia’s constitutive nations acquired its ownnational state (with the exception of Slovenia,which was more or less ethnically homogeneous),since members of other “constitutive” nations livedwithin their borders. The second consequencebears on the issue of the right to self-determina-tion. Specifically, who is the bearer of that right inthe Yugoslav experience? Does self-determinationapply to the republics or to “peoples” as membersof national groups? (Serbian nationalists insistedon the latter, referring to the federal constitution,which states that “nations” and not republics“joined together” to form the common state.)

There was a third consequence whose signifi-cance would become increasingly apparent in laterconflicts: When “constitutive peoples” were in theminority of a particular republic, they were deniedthe exercise of their cultural rights, since theyalready enjoyed such rights in their own titularrepublics. Thus, for example, Serbs in both Croatiaand Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Croats in the latter,could not carry out their own cultural policies asethnic groups, nor could they maintain culturallinks with their home republics.33 Such policiesnot only precluded the possibility of peacefully in-tegrating national minorities into the majority eth-nic group’s titular republic, but they preventedthese minorities from maintaining vital culturallinkages to their national homelands within theterritorial and political framework of that republic.

This absolutized the political (i.e., state) criteria forguarding and protecting the “nation” in the ethno-cultural sense. Moreover, this arrangement latergave Serbia’s policy of unifying all Serbs unlimitedpossibilities for playing upon Serbian discontentin order to escalate conflicts in Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina.

This system was the logical consequence of re-jecting the civil state as a framework for integrationunder the socialist regime. Such a “supranational”arrangement could be maintained only with theunlimited power of the Communist party, whichkept an eye on any and all attempts to raise na-tional consciousness to the level of nationalismamong Yugoslavia’s myriad ethno-national groups.

Could the new Yugoslavia have succeeded in at-tenuating the country’s two major national ideolo-gies—Serbian domination and Croatian sepa-ratism—that threatened the very survival of theYugoslav experiment? The obvious answer is thatit could not, but less obvious is why it could not.Was the Yugoslav experiment doomed to fail fromits inception? The key to answering this deeperquestion once again lies in the different percep-tions of Yugoslavia’s two main ethno-nationalgroups about the purpose of the new federation.

The revolutionary bases—national and social—underlying the legitimacy of socialist Yugoslaviacan be understood as a compromise between thetwo major national ideologies. Yugoslavia’s newfederal arrangement within a socialist context notonly provided all of the region’s major nationalgroups their own territorial sovereignty, but en-sured a de jure equality among the federation’snew states. At least this was the perception amongmost of the Yugoslav nations, including Croatia.Serbia perceived the new federation differently: Yu-goslavia’s renewal under a strong, centralized com-munist order would once again fulfill Serbia’s his-torical quest to unify all Serbs in one state.34 Serbsaccepted the new federation and the borders thatdefined its republics and provinces only becauseYugoslavia, not the republic of Serbia, would nowbe the guarantor of their national interest. In spiteof its new configuration, Yugoslavia’s basic asym-metry survived under the guise of arbitrary “na-tional balancing acts” that would later serve as thebasis for new nationalist grievances. The most ob-vious of such “national balancing acts” was theoverrepresentation of Serbs in the federal organsof power—military, police, and administration.

12

Disproportionate numbers of Serbs outside of Ser-bia joined Partisan forces in World War II andwere active in the revolution. For their efforts as aloyal cadre, these Serbs were awarded state andparty positions in these republics in dispropor-tionate numbers. This circumstance especiallycaused discontent among Croats, even though thenumbers of Serbs did not undermine the domi-nant position of the Croatian cadre in its own titu-lar republic. On the other hand, this circumstance“balanced off” the reduction of Serbia as a republic(with its two autonomous provinces).35

Centralism and decentralism

Beginning in the early 1960s, the debate over cen-tralism versus decentralism in the federation high-lighted the differences between the two fundamen-tal views of Yugoslavia’s national purpose. Serbia’sofficial policy strategically sided with the center ofpower and “Yugoslavism,” resisting until the endof the decade the push for decentralization andeconomic reforms that would lead to a redistribu-tion of power in favor of the republics andprovinces.36 Croatia and Slovenia extended theiroriginal support of economic decentralization tothe central Yugoslav party and state apparatuses,resisting periodic attempts by the party to renewthe idea of “Yugoslavism” outside the context of“socialist patriotism.”37 This position found sup-port among the other non-Serbian republics andprovinces, not because of similar economic inter-ests, but for political reasons—namely, to weakenthe central government as a Serbian stronghold.Thus Croatia (along with Slovenia and the othernon-Serbian republics) adopted the strategy ofloosening and weakening the central role of thefederation, preferring that it merely represent thepositions the republics and provinces had alreadyagreed on.

If one event foreshadowed the specter of na-tionalism in postwar Yugoslavia, it occurred in1964 at the Eighth LCY Congress, which rejectedthe idea of “Yugoslav culture” as assimilationist.Croatia and its supporters denounced “integralYugoslavism” as a chauvinist policy advanced bySerbian hegemonists. Similarly, the congress re-jected the “bourgeois prejudice about the wither-ing away of nations” and the specious notion that“national differences will disappear quickly after

the revolution.” These viewpoints were judged asbeing not only incorrect but also bureaucratic,“unitarist,” and hegemonic.38 In line with such crit-icism, the congress witnessed a complete turn-around in efforts to establish Yugoslavia as a na-tion-state. From that point on, nations/republicswere to become the real bearers of sovereignty, asall nations have the right to do. At its next con-gress in 1969, the LCY followed the same pattern,transferring party power to the republican organs.Thus, Yugoslavia’s Communist party practicallydisappeared as a unified organization, although itcontinued to function primarily because of Tito’ssacred and absolute power.

The devolution of power initiated at the EighthLCY Congress eventually produced a series ofcomprehensive constitutional changes that culmi-nated in the 1974 constitution. Tito’s personalpower was strengthened under Yugoslavia’s newbasic law (which only served to codify the tremen-dous growth of his personality cult during the1970s), as was the political role of the YugoslavNational Army, which became the ninth memberof the collective presidency of the LCY, along withthe eight representatives of the republics andprovinces.39 On the other hand, the new consti-tution also transferred power to the republics. Inthe federal organs, decisions had to be made ac-cording to consensus (with each republic andprovince holding veto power). All of the republicswere represented equally in government bodies;the provinces had a smaller number of representa-tives, but this did not affect their position. Repre-sentatives in federal organs consisted of “delega-tions” from the republics and provinces, and theywere accountable to these bodies for their deci-sions. Republics and provinces could developtheir own independent foreign relations, and theorganization of territorial defense was left up tothe republics as well.

The formal bearers of sovereignty in Yugoslaviawere its nations. Without the agreement and ap-proval of the country’s eight national states (six re-publics and the two provinces), the federationcould not function, as it did not have its ownautonomous source of authority.40 The need foragreement among disparate national states operat-ing within a framework of overlapping federal andconfederal jurisdictions (the proscribed powers ofthe federation were fairly broad) meant that every

13

question was necessarily “nationalized,” inevitablyleading to national confrontations on a regularbasis.41 Under the 1974 constitution, so-calledinternational relations were established within Yu-goslavia.42 Every question affecting the entire fed-eration first had to be cleared in one’s own stateand returned to the federal level for final agree-ment. Since there were no federal bodies with theirown source of legitimacy that transcended that ofthe republics, Yugoslavia under the new constitu-tion could neither frame issues in terms of their im-pact on the federation as a whole, nor arrive at fed-eral solutions that attempted to effect compromiseoutcomes.

Finally, the 1974 constitution established a sym-metry that precluded linking Yugoslavia’s identitywith any particular republic. As such, Yugoslaviaessentially had no citizens; rather, it was inhabitedby citizens of its respective republics. In reality,though, the country’s political life belonged to Titoand the Yugoslav National Army. The country’s

political elites would begin their competition forreal political power only after Tito’s death in 1980.

The institutionalization of Yugoslavia as anethno-national federation constituted the first stepin dismembering Yugoslavia along ethnic lines.This analysis suggests that Yugoslavia, as a multi-national state, was formed in such a way that itemerged and survived only under the aegis of au-thoritarian rule, and that the battle for ethno-national statehood results in either the construc-tion of a common “nation-state” that seeks to pacifyseparate national identities, disintegration into in-dependent states, or the formation of a confedera-tion (which is not a “state” in the real sense of theterm). However, neither possibility obtained inpostwar Yugoslavia, since asymmetrical nationalinterests and the very institutional structure ofmultinationality precluded these alternatives.Rather, Yugoslavia’s states resorted to yet anotheralternative—to change Yugoslavia’s internal bor-ders through prolonged, bloody conflict.

Thus far, this study has attempted to explainthe fragility of the Yugoslav state in terms ofboth the dominant national ideologies that

shook its foundations from its very creation andthe institutional frameworks within which na-tional conflicts evolved.

Tito’s principal strategy in maintaining nationalpeace sought to curb the power of the largest re-public (Serbia) and prevent the separation of theothers from the federation. After his death, such apeace had little chance of surviving absent asupreme arbiter. No legitimate political institu-tions existed in Yugoslavia to both regulate con-flicts among different national groups and supportthe ideal of a unified nation-state, a common situa-tion for all multinational states in the communistbloc. This circumstance was particularly conve-nient for the rise of ethno-nationalism in thesecountries.43

Sources of crisis in Serbia: The nationalist response

The crisis in the former Yugoslavia, characterizedfirst by the political disintegration of the countryand then by its descent into full-scale war to alter re-publican borders, cannot be understood withoutan analysis of the crisis that broke out in Serbia in

the mid-1980s. This crisis had its origins in thepowerful nationalist movement under the leader-ship of Serbia’s Communist party. Initially, itsought the restoration of the Yugoslav federationbased on the authority of the Communist party,but it soon grew into a movement for the creationof a “Greater Serbia.” With each passing day, thismovement intensified national conflicts andpushed the crisis toward the denouement of warthat eventually engulfed all of Yugoslavia. Thecountry could have embraced a democratic re-sponse to the collapse of the communist systemonly under the condition that all participants pur-sue a moderate policy.44 Unfortunately, Yugoslaviawas robbed of such a conditional alternative withthe triumph of conservative factions in the Leagueof Communists of Serbia and the ascension of Slo-bodan Milosevic as its leader in 1987.

The Serbian crisis had multiple origins, three ofwhich can be identified as the most profound.

Serbia’s problematic position under the 1974 con-stitution. As noted previously, the League of Com-munists of Yugoslavia was not immune to theforces that rendered federation-wide institutionsineffective in guaranteeing Yugoslavia’s existence.The LCY’s waning authority as the basis of Yu-goslav integration was viewed by the Serbs as jeop-ardizing the Serbian national interest for all Serbsto live in one state. “Every Serb who had partici-pated in the national liberation movement becameconvinced that the new Yugoslavia was becomingan inter-nationally founded federation in which . . .the ideological principle had precedence over thenational.” This conviction, “as shown by the identi-fication with Yugoslavia as a formula of inter-nationalism, was the core of most Serbs’ nationalconsciousness up until 1974. . . .”45

This fundamental legitimacy crisis was bol-stered by the existing constitutional arrangementthat defined Yugoslavia as a state by “mutual agree-ment” of the republics and provinces. Yugoslavsovereignty had been essentially seized and di-vided up among the federation’s national groups.The symmetry established between the republicsand provinces vis-à-vis an empty central authoritymade it senseless for Serbia to maintain its “inter-nationalist” position against the “nativist” posi-tions of other republics.46 Yugoslavia’s future was

414

THE ROLE OF SERBIAN

RESSENTIMENT

heading toward either confederation or disintegra-tion as the communist system weakened. TheSerbian cultural and political elite did not acceptsuch a future, fearing that the forces propelling Yu-goslavia toward dissolution would also destroy thefundamental Serbian national goal—that all Serbslive in one state. Viewed as such, Serbian national-ism was a reaction to the fading of what Serbs con-sidered a symbiosis between “Serbianism” and“Yugoslavism” that was mediated by the commu-nist system. With the disappearance of this sym-biosis, the problem of the Serbian diaspora clam-ored to be resolved once again.

The immediate source of Serbian dissatisfactionin general, and the most tangible reason for its na-tionalist reaction in particular, were the constitu-tional provisions that undermined Serbia’s territo-rial integrity. Although the institutional systemestablished under the 1974 constitution pre-scribed the “nativization” of all Yugoslav peopleswithin their territorial, republican frameworks,Serbia was frustrated in this regard. According tothe constitution, Serbia was not a “sovereign” nego-tiating party like the other republics because of the“sovereignty” of its two provinces, Kosovo andVojvodina.

According to the 1974 constitution, the re-publics and provinces were almost completely onequal footing regarding rights and duties. At thefederal level, provinces had veto power, equal rep-resentation in the collective Yugoslav presidency,and the right to represent their own interests with-out consulting the republic—most often in opposi-tion to it. Serbia’s representation at the federallevel covered only the territory of “Serbia proper”(i.e., Serbia without its autonomous provinces),even though such a jurisdiction was not defined inthe constitution. In ethno-demographic terms, thismeant that Serbia’s representatives in the federa-tion could speak for only 42 percent of the Serbsliving in Serbia.47

Following the period of constitutional reform inthe late 1960s, Serbia’s provinces seized all the at-tributes of statehood—legislative, judicial, and ex-ecutive powers—even those not constitutionallygranted to them. The provinces changed their ownconstitutions independently, maintained relationswith foreign countries (e.g., Kosovo with Albania),and created their own territorial defense. Lawswere passed by consensus of all three units; if the

provincial parliaments did not accept Serbian pro-posals, they applied only to Serbia proper.

Soon after adoption of the 1974 constitution,the Serbian leadership called for a change in theSerbian republic’s status. Why it wasn’t changedimmediately is obvious: The constitution couldnot be changed because the federation’s memberscould not reach an agreement regarding this mat-ter.48 In 1976, the Serbian leadership submitted arequest to change the constitutional provisionsspecifying the republic’s composition, seeking toencompass Serbia’s provinces formally. The docu-ment justifying this request to change Serbia’s sta-tus was called the “Blue Book” (made public onlyin 1990). Denounced as a nationalist tract, the doc-ument was received with “knives” by political lead-ers in the other republics and particularly in theprovinces.49

The situation continued into the early 1980s,when the focus of attention shifted to Kosovo, theSerbian province that was the scene of growingethnic tension. The Serbian leadership at the time,headed by Ivan Stambolic, made concerted effortsto change the status of Serbia vis-à-vis its provinceswith the agreement of the other federation mem-bers. However, opening up discussions on thismatter was becoming an increasingly painstakingprocess. In order to change the constitution, an ef-fective pro-Serbian coalition was required. Whennone was forthcoming, Serbia interpreted themaintenance of the constitutional status quo as thework of an anti-Serbian coalition. After the out-break of nationalist demonstrations in Kosovo in1981, in which ethnic Albanians demanded repub-lican status for Kosovo—which would bolsterclaims to the right to self-determination—the ques-tion of Serbia’s constitutional jurisdiction took oneven greater importance; its resolution spelled ei-ther political survival or failure. Indeed, Kosovo’sthreat to Serbia’s territorial integrity had been gain-ing momentum since 1968, when the Kosovarleadership gave its support to an Albanian nationalmovement in the province whose principal goalwas to gain republican status for Kosovo.50

Kosovo and the “ethnic threat.” Demonstrationsamong Kosovo’s overwhelmingly ethnic Albanianpopulation were the second reason for the crisis.Setting Kosovo apart as a de facto republic createdthe conditions for a Serbian nationalist reaction.

15

Kosovo was considered the cradle of Serbian me-dieval culture and the symbol of national historyand mythology.51 During the first years after the1981 Albanian demonstrations and the impositionof martial law in Kosovo, the LCY provided the of-ficial, socialist interpretation of the disturbances,branding them as instances of “counterrevolution”by Albanian separatists. Viewed in such a way, theYugoslav leadership avoided identifying ethnic fac-tors as the cause of unrest.

A starkly different interpretation of these eventsemerged from the Serbianparty leadership, which capi-talized on the symbolicmeaning of Kosovo and la-tent Serbian nationalism inorder to strengthen its argu-ments for changing Serbia’sconstitutional status. TheSerbian Communist party re-defined Kosovo as an ethnicthreat, tapping nationalmyths surrounding Kosovoand the history of the greatSerbian medieval state. Thefederal government toler-ated Serbia’s ethnic reaction,which centered on the possi-ble loss of Kosovo as a “holyland.”52 The “Albanian ene-my’s” goal, according to the Serbian party leader-ship, was being realized by the forced expulsion ofSerbs from Kosovo,53 while ethnic Albanians es-caped prosecution from a sympathetic provincialgovernment for crimes such as rape, murder, theft,desecration of Serbian graves, and various othertypes of intimidation.54 Serbian emigration fromKosovo came to be viewed by Serbia as nothingshort of an exodus under the pressure of Albaniannationalism, although clearly there were other fac-tors at work.55 Anyone who dared to mentionthese other reasons (economic, educational, etc.),particularly if the person was from another Yu-goslav republic, was ruthlessly attacked and de-nounced as an enemy of the Serbs.56 Serbian griev-ances were not thoroughly investigated, since thevery act of checking suggested doubts about theSerbs’ claims of victimization.57 Not even repres-sion of the “rebellious” Albanians, the military oc-cupation of Kosovo, or the imprisonment ofhundreds of Albanians changed Serbs’ opinion

that their brethren in Kosovo suffered increasingpersecution, evidenced by continued Serbian emi-gration from the province.58

The main role in defining the situation inKosovo was taken over by an organized movementof Serbs from Kosovo that had the support of theOrthodox Church and the Serbian intelligentsia.These Serbs’ demands were almost always aimedat constitutional changes that would establish aunited Serbia, but they endeavored even more tochange the ethnic domination in Kosovo. Their

main interpretation ofthe “Serbian tragedy” inKosovo was that the eth-nic Albanians had gainedcontrol through the 1974constitution, and that theonly way to stop the “eth-nic cleansing” of Serbs inKosovo was to reinstateSerbian dominationthere.59

Both interpretationsof the problem, the con-stitutional position ofSerbia as an unequalparty in the federationand the matter of ethnicAlbanian domination inKosovo, distanced Serbs

from a diagnosis of the republic’s real problem: de-termining the basis of Serbia’s political communityand its political identity. To be sure, the same prob-lem applied to Yugoslavia as a whole, but it is notan exaggeration to say that the locus of Yugoslavi-a’s demise was in Kosovo. The federation was po-litically unequipped to protect its citizens—Serbsand ethnic Albanians in this case—because it hadno nonviolent instrument (above all, the rule oflaw) at its disposal to neutralize and pacify thesetypes of ethnic conflicts.

The ethnic politicization of Kosovo increasedthe number of interpretations of the conflict, de-pending on who was speaking: “genocide” (theSerbian interpretation), “normal migration” and“vehicles of Serbian nationalism” (Slovenian), “dis-possession of ethnic Albanians and political ter-ror” (Albanian). These interpretations strained re-lations among the republics. On the one hand,Slovenia and Croatia backed the Albanian nation-alist movement. On the other hand, Serbian

16

Kosovo demonstrated that

ethnic conflicts could be

invented and exacerbated

through media propaganda.

This effective tool became the

principal mechanism for

intensifying ethnic conflicts in

Yugoslavia.

responses increasingly acquired overtones ofnationalism, repression, propaganda, and outrightlies.60 Kosovo demonstrated that ethnic conflictscould be invented and exacerbated through mediapropaganda. This effective tool became the princi-pal mechanism for intensifying ethnic conflicts inYugoslavia. In essence, the media dramaticallystaged reality for millions of Serbs and turnedwhatever potential existed in Serbia for ethnic ha-tred into a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The antidemocratic coalition. The third factor inthe Yugoslav crisis involved the concentration ofthe old regime’s conservative forces in Serbia. Theprivileged layer of central and local Communistparty bureaucrats and members of the state’spower apparatus (military and police) viewed withconcern the nascent democratic changes takingplace in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. De-mocratization of the “first country of socialism”threatened Yugoslavia’s status quo and the privi-leges and positions these elites enjoyed. They werethreatened by domestic liberal opposition as well,which was strongest in Belgrade at the time. In theambiguity surrounding the “Kosovo problem,”these conservative political elites organized aputsch in the Serbian Communist party in 1987,bringing to the forefront the party’s most conserva-tive elements, led by Slobodan Milosevic.

The party conservatives’ support of the militaryapparatus was not hidden. General Ljubicic, one ofthe most influential officers in the Yugoslav Na-tional Army, greeted Milosevic’s candidacy as pres-ident of the Serbian Communist party with this en-comium: “Slobodan has committed himself to thebattle against nationalism, against liberalism, andagainst all forms of counterrevolution inBelgrade.”61 Criticism of the moderate wing in theLeague of Communists of Serbia as being unfaith-ful to Tito’s politics was accurately read as an accu-sation of having betrayed national interests. Onboth tracks—defending Tito’s cult of personalityand resolving the Kosovo problem—a power strug-gle took place through party purges, consolidatingthe party’s victorious faction, establishing controlover the most influential media outlets, and attack-ing the liberal opposition.62

Serbia’s conservative power apparatus tappednew sources of energy and support in the well-spring of Serbian national frustration. The Yu-goslav National Army excelled in this technique,

with its “evaluations of the situation” that charac-terized the “soft communist” reformers as agents ofthe “new world order,” whose goal was to deny “so-cialism [the ability] to rectify its mistakes and showits strength.”63 The Western countries (especiallyGermany) were routinely denounced as enemiesof Yugoslavia for both undermining socialism anddestroying the Soviet Union as a state and militarypower. In fact, the army was an instrument not ofthe state, but of the party; as such, it was the mainpolitical force (together with the Serbian party fac-tion that maintained its power) posing the mostformidable obstacle to change. When communismbegan to split along all its seams, the army rushedin first to help defend the system. Its actionsshould come as no surprise, since it was defendingits own privileges. Officers in the YNA joined Yu-goslavia’s conservative apparatchiks in draggingSerbia into an “antimodern” revolution, which be-came the social and political background for de-fending the Serbian national question.64

By the end of the 1980s, a powerful and effectiveantidemocratic coalition was firmly in control ofSerbia’s political scene. One side consisted of ex-treme nationalist elements in the Serbian Ortho-dox Church and the Serbian intelligentsia, whoserole was to produce propaganda and formulate na-tionalist ideology. The other side consisted of theconservative party apparatus, the army, and thepolice, who used this nationalist ideology to holdonto their positions of power. Although their mo-tives were different, the members of this “national-ist-communist” coalition65 complemented eachother and jointly pursued an aggressive policy oftearing down Yugoslavia and recasting it in theirown mold: Either Yugoslavia would become acountry according to Serbian (i.e., Serbian Com-munist party) standards, or else Serbia would em-bark on the path toward creating a “GreaterSerbia” by force. In the end, the new countrywould encompass all of Yugoslavia’s Serbs andkeep the members of the ancien regime in theirprivileged positions.

Escalation of the conflict: The Serbian offensive strategy

The principal mechanism for escalating intereth-nic conflicts in a multinational state begins whenpolitical elites in tenuous positions of powersuccessfully portray their ethno-nation as being

17

threatened by another.66 The political players willthen manipulate this “ethnic threat” to advancetheir interests in holding onto political powerand/or vanquishing competing elites. Members ofSerbia’s broad coalition of conservative political,military, and cultural elites pushed each other to-ward an extremist definition of the “nationalthreat,” creating a constant escalation of the con-flict among all the other Yugoslav nations. Themore this coalition emphasized the perceptionthat the Serbian nation was threatened, the morethe other ethnic nations perceived threats to theirown security. This defensive reaction was, in turn,used to confirm the threat to Serbia, giving it theright to increase the level of its “defense.”67

This vicious circle of defending against ethno-national threats began in the 1980s with the “eth-nic threat” in Kosovo and the uncertainty over thesurvival of Yugoslavia’s state and society. The con-flict developed in the context of a preemptive vi-sion of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, which incitedthe struggle for power and security among all of itsnations’ political leaders. Reality was becomingmore and more a daily fabrication based on mu-tual name-calling and consciously crafted lies. Eth-nic clashes were becoming more frequent andmore intense in a political scene whose script wasbecoming increasingly predictable.68

For its part, Serbia used three offensive strate-gies for grabbing power while working to ensureYugoslavia’s disintegration and, at the same time,beginning the process of nation- and state-build-ing. The Serbian leadership’s new vision of state-building now relied on mass nationalist move-ments that coalesced around the idea of redividingthe Yugoslav space and creating a powerful, all-encompassing Serbian state.69 This new vision in-formed the Serbian intelligentsia’s redefinition ofSerbia’s national identity, as reflected in regularlyrepeated media images and historical myths.70

Serbian ressentiment. The very expression of Ser-bian nationalism and the new vision of the Serbianstate invoked by Serbian nationalist intellectualsaggravated ethnic tensions.71 The task of redefin-ing the Serbian nation was undertaken by both theconservative faction of the Serbian intelligentsiaand the Serbian Orthodox Church in collaborationwith the political leadership, which had controlover the mass media. The reawakening of Serbiannational consciousness followed classic methods

of “nation-building,” including descriptions of “na-tional treasures” and cultural uniqueness.72 Theyencouraged the Serbian national community toimagine itself as an “endangered species” that ur-gently needed its own state in order to protect it-self from other “species.” The basic emotion uponwhich Serbian national identity was built was theenmity of other Yugoslav peoples.73 This is best il-lustrated in the words of the writer and “father ofthe Serbian nation,” Dobrica Cosic: “The enemiesof the Serbs made Serbs Serbs.”74 Another well-known Serbian writer expressed the same thought:“The Serbian issue was started and opened by oth-ers. They straightened us out by blows, made ussober by offenses, woke us up by injustices,brought light and united us by coalitions. Theyhate us because of Yugoslavia, and now it seemsthey do not leave her, but us.”75

Ressentiment—the dominant sentiment of beingthreatened and hated throughout Yugoslavia—in-formed Serbian nationalism, which consisted oftwo basic components. One was entirely for do-mestic purposes, providing the conservative Ser-bian leadership with a convenient taxonomy ofreal and fabricated Serbian grievances against Yu-goslavia’s other nations. By constantly returning tothis repertoire of current and historical wrongs,the Serbian leadership was able to keep nationalistpassions running high.

The second, external, component contained arevision of Serbian relations with other nationsand with Yugoslavia as a whole. This new set of re-lations appeared for the first time in 1986 with theunofficial publication of the Serbian Academy ofSciences and Arts’ draft “Memorandum,” whichwas an attempt to present systematically the situa-tion of the Serbs as a whole nation. Based on thatdocument and many positions taken by well-known Serbian writers and members of the Ser-bian Academy of Sciences and Arts appearing dailyin the Serbian media, seven key themes of Serbianressentiment are identified here.76

1. Yugoslavia is a Serbian delusion. Accordingto this theme, Serbs were naively duped into ac-cepting Yugoslavism and the fraternal bonds of itsother nations, while those “brothers” were contin-ually building their ethno-national states on thebones of dead Serbs who fought in wars of libera-tion. Only the Serbs love Yugoslavia, they were theonly ones to fight for her, they were the only onesto abdicate their Serbian nationality in the name of

18

Yugoslavian unity. They lost considerable “histori-cal time” in coming to the realization that Yu-goslavia was a Serbian delusion. They had every-thing to lose in accepting the Yugoslav project, andother nations had everything to gain. The Serbswere the victims of their own futile Yugoslavism:“The contemporary Serbian national conscious-ness is soiled by ideological fraud . . . with itsstrongest spiritual footing in its national defeats,the illusory Yugoslavian. . . . The contents andforms of national consciousness of other Yugoslavnations are a priori anti-Yugoslav.”77 But now,“there is a growing consciousness that Yugoslaviais a mass grave of the Serbian people. . . .”78

2. The conspiracyagainst the Serbs. Duringtheir entire Yugoslav his-tory, Serbs were exposedto the conspiracy of theComintern, the LCY, andTito (the Croat) andKardelj (the Slovene), whoplayed the leading roles inYugoslav decision makingand who implemented Yu-goslavia’s anti-Serbian pol-icy. As part of its social rev-olution and the struggleagainst Serbian hege-monism, the LCY acted toreduce Serbia to the Turk-ish pasha’s outpost in Bel-grade and promoted thedisintegration and assimilation of the Serbian peo-ple: “Austro-Hungarian and Comintern ideologyunited in Titoism. In setting up republican-politi-cal territories, developing republican etatisms . . .and instituting the 1974 constitution, Titoism wasdoing everything to disintegrate the Serbian na-tion, and it succeeded in doing so.”79

3. Serbia is exploited. Serbia was economicallyexploited by Croatia and Slovenia, which explainsits economic backwardness. The largest part of theSerbian Academy’s “Memorandum” was devotedto this theme, formulated in the following way:“During the entire postwar period, the economy ofSerbia was exposed to nonequivalent exchange. . . .There is not the slightest degree of suspicion thatthe relative retardation of Serbia primarily resultedbecause of smaller investments per capita, and notbecause of the effectiveness of investments. . . .

One gets a picture of an oppressed and neglectedeconomy in the Yugoslav space. . . . The situation ofSerbia should be observed within the pattern ofthe political and economic domination of Sloveniaand Croatia, who were the initiators of changes inall of the previous systems.”80

4. Serbs are the losers, because they are theonly ones who do not have a state proper. Theywin at war, but lose in peace. All their war victorieswere canceled out in peace settlements (i.e., twoBalkan wars and two world wars). Serbs, alongwith the Montenegrins, sacrificed their earlierstates for the foundation of Yugoslavia. “The na-tion which after a long and bloody struggle came

once again to have its state[that is, after the long Ot-toman occupation], whichalone fought for and ac-quired democracy, andwhich in two world warslost 2.5 million compatri-ots, lived to see that a partycommission created by theparty apparatus found thatafter four decades in thenew Yugoslavia it was theonly nation that did nothave its own state. A worsehistorical fiasco in peace-time could not be imag-ined.”81

5. Serbs are exposed tothe hatred that all Yu-

goslav people have toward them. Hatred towardSerbs is a dominant theme in the writings of Ser-bian intellectuals, expressed in many differentways. Each Yugoslav nation has its own distinct ha-tred toward Serbs. For instance: “MacedonianCommunists have simply ‘Macedonized’ Serbs(i.e., they have committed ethnocide against Serbsin their republic).” And so it goes for each nation.This theme in Serbian ressentiment contends thatthe republic had to endure “the unequal and hu-miliating position of the Serbian people in the pre-sent-day Yugoslavia under the rule of an anti-Serbcoalition, especially of ‘Serbophobia,’ which in thelast decades has grabbed wide layers of Slovenian,Croatian, Albanian peoples, and some parts of theMacedonian intelligentsia and Moslems. . . . TheAlbanian national minority for longer than twodecades from its motherland hounds the most

19

The principal mechanism for

escalating interethnic

conflicts in a multinational

state begins when political

elites in tenuous positions of

power successfully portray

their ethno-nation as being

threatened by another.

20

populous Yugoslav people.”82 The Serbian nationis “surrounded by hatred, which made its peacemore tormenting than the war.”83

6. Serbs are exposed to genocide, again perpet-uated by their enemies’ enduring and immutableanti-Serb policies.84 The motive of Serbia’s leadersin provoking fear and ethnic clashes was to re-mind Serbs of genocide’s ever-present proximityand to prevent a new genocidal campaign againstSerbs. This theme was renewed in a variety ofways, but mainly through the display of pho-tographs and accounts of Ustashe atrocitiesagainst Serbs in all of the republic’s major newspa-pers and on television programs.85 An exhibit de-voted to Serbian genocide traveled around Serbiafor months.

Orthodox priests demanded that they be al-lowed to take Serbian victims murdered in WorldWar II out of mass graves and to rebury them withdignity.86 Exhuming mass graves and the reburialof remains has a symbolic role of defining the bor-ders of the Serbian state: Where there are Serbiangraves, there are also Serbian borders. The numberof past genocide victims increased every day dur-ing this particular Serbian nationalist campaign,which led to disputes with Croatia over the exactnumber of Serbs murdered. The number of victimswas, in fact, overstated in order to force the Croatsto publicly deny the inflated numbers. In such afashion, the Serbs could conclude that Croatswanted to hide their genocidal crimes againstSerbs in order to deflect attention from prepara-tions for another future campaign: “It seems to methat that which disrupts relations between Serbsand Croats now is connected to the genocidewhich was perpetrated against the Serbian peopleby [the Croatian Ustashe regime]. . . . We can con-clude that this hiding of genocide represents anappeal to history for a repeat. . . .”87 Thus, “Serbsare the people who are constantly exposed togenocide.”88

7. A national state of all Serbs. An identity cre-ated from others’ hatred meant that inevitably Serbswould want to “clean their house” of all those whohated them: “After genocide, . . . after the 1974 con-stitution, . . . it is difficult to understand why Serbstoday do not reasonably and obstinately aspire to astate without national problems, national hatreds,and Serbophobia.”89 “We Serbs have to learn tothink that we can live alone.”90 Thus, the issue of aSerbian national state is seen as an “issue of freedom

and the right to exist for the Serbian ethnos as thewhole of its spiritual, cultural, and historical iden-tity, irrespective of the present-day republicanboundaries and the Yugoslav Constitution. If thisfreedom and the right are not respected, then thehistorical goal of the Serbian people—unification ofall Serbs in one state—is not realized.”91

These nationalist themes, which were perpetu-ated by the Serbian intelligentsia through the re-public’s major media outlets, would not have beenentirely successful if they had not been taken upby Serbia’s political and military elites as part oftheir daily activity, although they did not publiclyexpress such views. Serbia’s conservative intellec-tuals and, later on, the republic’s nationalist oppo-sition parties, were the voice of official nationalistpolicy. At the beginning of 1991, it was officiallydisclosed that Slobodan Milosevic accepted theright of all peoples to self-determination, but hedid not accept the existing republican borders. InMarch 1991, at a closed meeting with the leaders ofall Serbian municipalities, Milosevic stated thepossibility that Serbs could “live alone”:

Borders, as you know, are always dictated by thestrong, they are never dictated by the weak. There-fore it is basic for us to be strong. We simply be-lieve that the legitimate right and interest of theSerbian people is to live in one state. That is thebeginning and the end. That legitimate interest ofthe Serbian people does not threaten the interestof any other nation. Anyway, why would theyneed those Serbs who bother them so much inKnin, Petrinja, Glina, Lika, Banija, Kordun,Baranja, if this problem is of such magnitude?And, if we have to fight, God help us, we will. Ihope they will not be so crazy to fight with us. Be-cause, if we cannot work and produce well, atleast we know how to fight.92

Political mobilization: The “antibureaucratic revo-lution” and the unification of Serbia. The only wayout of this “national catastrophe,” according to Ser-bia’s intelligentsia, was by encouraging a Serbianuprising. The hope was for a national revolution inwhich the Serbs would again be able to create theirown national state. This so-called antibureaucraticrevolution, which was organized from above byMilosevic’s party clique with the help of Serbsfrom Kosovo and the secret police, drew upon thenationalist ideology of “being threatened andhated.” During 1988–89, the revolutionary forces

took shape as a mass movement to create a “uni-fied Serbia,” successfully tapping social and na-tional discontent in the republic, especially overthe situation in Kosovo. Political mobilization de-veloped through mass “meetings of solidarity”with Serbs from Kosovo. These meetings wereused as an extra-institutional way of tearing downthe leaderships in Serbia’s provinces (Vojvodinaand Kosovo) and in Montenegro. More than sixtysuch meetings were held across Serbia, in which3.5 million people participated. There were fewplaces in the republic where these “meetings oftruth” were not held. Although the slogans variedfrom place to place, they were all distinctly nation-alist and even racist in content. For the first time,people appeared at these meetings dressed inChetnik regalia.93 At the November 1988 meetingof “Brotherhood and Unity,” held in Belgrade andattended by more than one million people, callsfor hounding Slovenia out of Yugoslavia were pub-licly heard for the first time. At the same gathering,Milosevic spoke in ominous tones about the use offorce:

This is not the time for sorrow; it is time for strug-gle. This awareness captured Serbia last summerand this awareness has turned into a materialforce that will stop the terror in Kosovo and uniteSerbia. . . . People will even consent to live inpoverty but they will not consent to live withoutfreedom. . . . Both the Turkish and the German in-vaders know that these people win their battlesfor freedom. . . . We shall win despite the fact thatSerbia’s enemies outside the country are plottingagainst her. . . . We tell them that we enter everybattle with the aim of winning it.94

Just a few short months after Milosevic’s speech,Serbia seemed to be preparing for such a battle.The republic enacted a series of sweeping repres-sive measures in Kosovo in March 1989. A coupd’état brought a Serbian puppet regime to powerin Montenegro. At the same time, the populist andauthoritarian Serbian national movement investedits national leader with absolute power, therebymaking democratization and a clear break with theancien regime impossible.95

In the already weakened Yugoslav presidency,Serbia could no longer count on a majority of votesin the collective body. The attempt of the SerbianCommunists to dominate the LCY failed at its ex-traordinary (and last) congress in January 1990,when the Slovenian and Croatian representatives

walked out, thus signaling the end of Yugoslavia’sCommunist party.

Mobilization of the Serbian diaspora: The Croat-ian nationalist response. Serbia’s third strategicmove involved the mobilization of the Serbian di-aspora in Croatia by directly linking its loyalty toSerbia’s survival. Ethnic skirmishes using diasporaSerbs in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina wereplanned with the idea of tearing the republicsapart along ethnic lines. In the climate of national-ist hysteria surrounding a “unified Serbia,” the Ser-bian nationalist coalition had little trouble spread-ing rumors of possible genocidal campaignsdirected at the Serbian diaspora communities inthese republics. Such rumors were largely in-tended to mobilize the diaspora Serbs, and theywould not have been successful had there been norecognizable strain of Ustashe nationalism inCroatia’s official policy. If Croatia had not fallenvictim to its own national chauvinism, Serbia’s en-tire strategy would have failed.

Slovenia was the first to clash with Milosevic, at-tacking him for destroying the leaderships in Voj-vodina and Montenegro. These attacks were wel-comed with open arms, since they rallied Serbsaround anti-Slovenian sentiment. At the sametime, Slovenia was using Milosevic to justify itsplans to secede from Yugoslavia. In fact, secessionwas already under way in 1989, when the Slovenesproclaimed that federal laws were valid in Sloveniaonly if they conformed with Slovenian law. TheCroatian Communist party kept silent because ofthe republic’s Serbian minority, ever aware that anattack on Milosevic would cause a major rift withCroatian Serbs. Yet, the silence could not lastforever.

Serbia’s mobilization of Croatian Serbs startedwith an unsuccessful attempt to organize a meet-ing of solidarity in Knin with Serbs and Montene-grins from Kosovo. Belgrade inundated the Kningathering with constant messages, and the SerbianOrthodox Church assisted by publishing a textthat claimed the situation of Serbs in Croatia wasworse than that of Serbs in Kosovo and that suchterror would force Serbs to migrate toward theeast.96 The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Artsalso contributed by organizing a conference on theCroatian war memorial at Jasenovac, once moreheating up the unavoidable theme of the Croatiangenocide of the Serbs; an accompanying tract

21

accused Croatia of assimilating Serbs living in therepublic. The Serbian Writers Association also or-ganized a meeting in 1989 with the theme of “Ser-bophobia,” where Croatian genocide was onceagain featured prominently. Finally, all kinds ofSerbian emissaries were sent to Knin to inciteCroatian Serbs, and the response this time seemedpromising. The meeting was set for February 28,1989. Well-trained “advance people” came fromSerbia, shouting out Slobodan Milosevic’s nameand carrying posters with his visage looking outover the crowd, waving the Serbian national flag,and singing nationalist hymns.97

Soon after this event, the Croatian DemocraticUnion appeared on Croatia’s political scene. Dur-ing the creation of the nationalist party, its leader,Franjo Tudjman, accused the Croats of beingsilent, and attacked the system in which the “sover-eignty of the Croatian people” had been made animpossible goal. In the republic’s parliament just acouple of days later, it was suggested that the Croa-tian Constitution be changed so that it would nolonger stipulate that Croatia was also a state of theSerbian people. Thus, the process of Croatia’s eth-nic homogenization began.

Finally, at the February 24, 1990 inaugurationof the Croatian Democratic Union, in the presence

of Ustashe émigrés and Croats waving their na-tional flag, Tudjman delivered his well-known re-mark that the “Independent State of Croatia [un-der the Ustashe regime] was not only a chauviniststate, but also the result of specific historic factsand the will of the Croatian people to create theirown state.”98

During this short period, Croatian Serbs be-came tightly organized. They formed their ownparty and began to express their territorial preten-sions. First, they expressed these ideas as the needfor cultural and then political autonomy; finally,they threatened secession if Croatia were to be-come an independent state. Meetings were heldthroughout the republic at which young men ap-peared in Chetnik regalia, shouting “This isSerbia!”

Tudjman won the elections in Croatia. This wasthe greatest gift that Milosevic and the rest of Ser-bia’s nationalist coalition could have received. Af-ter Tudjman’s victory, unremitting media propa-ganda from both sides further exacerbated theconflict. Now Serbs were really threatened, andwar was no longer a remote possibility. The labelsthat each side had attached to the other had in factbecome their identities: Both Chetniks andUstashe had reappeared in Yugoslavia.

22

By the late 1980s, the emerging democraticmovements across Eastern Europe weregathering momentum. In Yugoslavia, by

contrast, national movements were gearing up toestablish their own states. The breakdown of thecommunist regime and the advent of free electionswas the culmination of what had already been go-ing on for almost a decade in Yugoslavia. Alongwith the process of democratization in the re-publics and the denial of that same process in thefederal government, central state authority was be-coming weaker, approaching a situation of anar-chy that bore an unsettling resemblance to the col-lapse of the empire that used to rule the Balkans.Yugoslavia’s breakup gave new meaning to the oldnotion of Balkanization.99

At first glance, it could be concluded that Balka-nization was the predictable outcome of the col-lapse of communism and the end of the Cold Warbalance of power. This allegedly “natural” state ofaffairs in the region, which had long suffered fromunresolved national questions and old conflictsamong the three founding nations of Yugoslavia(Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes), generally has beenregarded as the explanation for the country’s on-going violence. Nationalist antagonisms in post-communist Yugoslavia appeared to confirmNietzsche’s “eternal return”: Once again, Slovenesand Croats were fighting for their independent

states, and Serbs were struggling for their own uni-fication within one state. How could history repeatitself in such a stereotypical fashion? What hiddenmechanism accounted for this repetition? Had fivedecades of communist rule had no effect on the“national question”? As stated at the beginning ofthis study, the Communist party combined two el-ements to create the Yugoslav state: 1) resolutionof the national question, and 2) social revolution.In order to understand the most recent Balkaniza-tion of the region, both elements must be takeninto account. As communism collapsed, the strate-gies of the political actors in each of the Yugoslavrepublics were determined by specific elements ofthe national question on the one hand, and thesearch for an exit from the communist system onthe other.

After five decades during which Yugoslavia’sCommunist leaders preoccupied themselves with“external” and “internal” enemies of the regimethat could threaten their privileged positions, theenemy suddenly had become real. That this enemycame from the “first socialist country,” whereGorbachev granted “permission” to all the commu-nist countries to choose their own way, was theclearest sign that communism was losing its ideo-logical ability to maintain these leaders in power.

Various strategies for dealing with the impend-ing downfall of communist regimes typicallyframed the responses to nationalist conflictsthroughout the region during the 1980s, but Yu-goslavia’s republican elites could not agree on ajoint policy for managing the mounting threats totheir multinational system. At its last congress inJanuary 1990, the Serbian Communist party, ledby Milosevic and supported by the Yugoslav Na-tional Army, sought to reinforce the communistregime’s role of holding Yugoslavia together; butother republican leaders, particularly in Sloveniaand Croatia, did not want to continue down thatpath. They clearly perceived that a departure fromthe communist system could serve as their pathaway from Yugoslavia and toward the establish-ment of their own independent states. Thus, eachof the republics was pursuing a separate policy,combining the national cause with ideologicalchoice.

Saving the communist regime remained the onemethod by which conservative elites in Serbia, in-cluding the YNA, could simultaneously preservethe Yugoslav state and achieve the goal of Serbian

23

5THE BREAKDOWN OF

COMMUNISM

Collapse and War

unification within one country. After the conserva-tives took power in 1987, they saw little advantagein democratic change. This is unfortunate. In fact,the only way that Serbia could have successfully re-solved its national question of all Serbs livingwithin one state would have been for it to take theleading role in democratization, offering a multi-party system, a liberal federation, and a free-market economy. Such was the path taken by otherrepublics, first by Slovenia and Croatia, and thento some extent by the other republics. The conser-vative Serbian elite believed it was left with few op-tions: It defended the old regime and opposed po-litical pluralism and economic reform.100

The dual games (national and ideological)played by all the republics to a greater or lesser ex-tent actually precluded both of two possible pathsto a resolution of the federation’s crisis. The re-publics’ leaders were unable to either reimagineYugoslavia as a democratic and minimal state or tobreak away peacefully by creating new, separate,democratic states. These games led to the finalstage of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, which wentthrough four phases: (1) introducing varying de-grees of political pluralism, which fostered and insome cases even maximized the interests of the dif-ferent republics; (2) giving precedence to nationalgoals over economic interests and political reform;(3) establishing national states as ethnocracies,that is, differentiating citizens’ rights and obliga-tions along ethnic lines; and (4) negotiating theage-old question of Yugoslavia’s political form.Taken together, these four phases amounted to aprelude to war.

Political pluralism

The republics witnessed the formation of a varietyof new political parties during 1989–90. Sincemost of these parties to varying degrees advancednationalist programs, political pluralism in Yu-goslavia was strongly colored by nationalism fromthe very start. In April 1990, Slovenia and Croatiaheld their first free elections; the Communists lostin both cases. Meanwhile, Serbia’s official policy re-mained at the level of reform rhetoric; Serbianleaders continued to advocate political pluralismwithout actually introducing a multiparty system.However, once all of the other governments in theregion had squarely embarked on the path of

political reform, Serbia had no choice but to acceptmultiparty elections. The League of Communistsof Serbia rechristened itself the Socialist Party inJuly 1990. Although all of the communist parties inthe various republics entered their respective mul-tiparty elections under new names, only in Serbiaand Montenegro did these renamed communistparties win, and only then with the support of theYNA. At that time, the YNA openly supported theSerbian side—or, more precisely, Milosevic’s Social-ist Party of Serbia. The three main tenets of thiscoalition were: 1) both partners were against lib-eral and democratic changes; 2) both viewed thenew Yugoslavia as a vehicle for advancing Serbianand military interests; and 3) both had majorityparticipation of Serbs. The other republics’ newparties were able to push the Communists into theopposition, and in doing so the republics could as-sert that they had become “democracies” by virtueof having overthrown their communist predeces-sors. In Serbia, on the other hand, a combinationof communism and nationalism won out.

The most important fact about these first freeelections was that they confirmed the power of theoffensive strategy of defending national interests.Bosnia-Herzegovina’s first and only elections wereparticularly instructive when viewed from thisstandpoint. The Bosnians had a chance to vote forthe liberal and reformist party of the then Yugoslavprime minister, Ante Markovic. Indeed, his partyseemed to be the most popular in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But it turned out that the peoplefrom each of the three national communities wereafraid to take the chance to vote for the civic par-ties, fearing that the others might vote for national-ist ones—a typical “prisoner’s dilemma.” Thus, theresults of the elections mirrored the national cen-sus; almost all citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovinavoted according to their national affiliation. Na-tionalist parties won in all of the republics, exceptMacedonia.101

Maximal nationalist programs became en-shrined as state policy in the main rival republics,Serbia and Croatia. In both republics, oppositionparties decided to expand nationalist agendasrather than devise alternative programs that wouldstrike some balance between nationalist and de-mocratic goals, between extremist and moderatenational policies. Some of the ultranationalist op-position parties, in cooperation with their

24

respective state governments, set up their ownarmies and paramilitary formations, which eventu-ally would be responsible for horrible crimes.

The centrality of ethnicity in Yugoslavia’s politi-cal life grew as the victorious nationalist partiesspread beyond their borders, serving the interestsof their conationals, or “constituent peoples,” wholived in other republics. Thus, Franjo Tudjman’sCroatian Democratic Union openedbranches for Croats living in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Vojvodina. Simi-larly, Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovinaand Croatia formed local branchesof the Serbian Democratic Party with guidance from Belgrade.102

The Muslim Party of DemocraticAction, led by Alija Izetbegovic, orig-inated in Bosnia-Herzegovina butsoon expanded to Serbia and Mon-tenegro to support the Muslims liv-ing in Sandzhak. Moreover, largernational minorities, such as theAlbanians and Hungarians, estab-lished their own ethnic-based politi-cal parties, first in Kosovo and Mace-donia and then in Vojvodina,respectively. Thus, the whole spaceof Yugoslavia and the republicsthemselves were divided up by eth-nic parties with their various publicand hidden agendas.

The priority of national overeconomic interests

At the beginning of 1990, the newYugoslav prime minister (whowould also be its last), AnteMarkovic, introduced a dynamicprogram of economic reform, suc-ceeding in reducing the galloping rate of inflationfrom an annual 2,600 percent to zero in about sixmonths. He offered a vision of a new economic sys-tem governed by market principles and privatiza-tion, making room for a political union of a new,democratic Yugoslavia. Markovic attained consid-erable popularity throughout the country, even su-perseding in this respect the “fathers” of its domi-nant nations, Milosevic and Tudjman. Indeed, for atime it seemed as though a united Yugoslavia

might succeed in acquiring a new lease on life.With his liberal political outlook and substantialeconomic success, Markovic represented a realchance for the various nations to avoid the path ofwar and destruction and, instead, turn toward a fu-ture based on modernization and eventual Euro-pean integration. During 1990, the standard of liv-ing rose as hard-currency reserves swelled to $7.1

billion, twice their 1989 level. Thecountry’s foreign debt decreasedand repayments took place onschedule.

Markovic’s economic and politi-cal program ran counter to the na-tionalist politics pursued by the vari-ous republics. Markovic eschewedthe endless discussions about Yu-goslavia’s future political form, in-sisting that the term used for such aform (i.e., federation or confedera-tion) was not important. What mat-tered most to Markovic was main-taining a consensus on theusefulness of an integrated, well-functioning state that would facili-tate economic reform. To consoli-date political support for his ideas,Markovic founded his own politicalparty, the Alliance of Reform Forcesof Yugoslavia, in July 1990. Unfortu-nately, this came after the formationof the nationalist parties and theelections in Slovenia and Croatia,too late to influence developmentsin these two breakaway republics.Markovic founded his party inBosnia as a symbol of Yugoslavia’sethnic diversity and as a concreteembodiment of the multiethnic ideaof “living together.”

Curiously, Markovic’s program was both suc-cessful and popular in all the republics, includingSerbia, but he was unable to convert this popular-ity into electoral support for his party. He failed inBosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro, andhad relatively little success in Macedonia. Therewas little doubt that the decisive factor inMarkovic’s defeat was insecurity about voting forsomeone who did not represent one’s own ethniccommunity; too many people believed that voting

25

Some of the

ultranation-

alist opposition

parties, in

cooperation with

their respective

state govern-

ments, set up

their own armies

and paramilitary

formations,

which eventually

would be

responsible for

horrible crimes.

only for their own national leaders would guaran-tee their safety.

Although practically none of the republicanleaders (except those in Macedonia) supportedhim, Markovic faced an especially ruthless attackfrom Serbia. Slobodan Milosevic clearly intendedto destroy this unpredictable obstacle to his ownpolitical plan for restructuring Yugoslavia’s politi-cal space.103 When Markovic proposed constitu-tional changes to embrace further economic re-form and to make room for federal elections,Slovenia and Croatia joined Serbia in blocking hisproposals. The republics thus decisively precludedthe possibility of an economic and democratic re-construction of the federal state and a democraticdialogue about Yugoslavia’s future. After the politi-cal leaders squandered this opportunity, nationalconflicts gained momentum. The country wasswiftly moving from one crisis to yet another.

Ethnocracies and war from inside therepublics

The new republican governments produced theirown internal instabilities by discriminating againstnational minorities (or groups sharing the ethni-city of peoples from other constituent republics).This discrimination created a vicious circle: In or-der to realize their desire for national sovereignty,the newly elected governments developed power-ful and militant nationalist movements backed bypropaganda, discriminatory policies, and viola-tions of human and civil rights. Backed by the re-publican political leaders, these movements pro-duced disaffected and separatist minority groupsthat, in turn, posed a real “disturbance” to the re-publics’ national sovereignty and territorial in-tegrity. In reaction to the militant separatist behav-ior of these minority groups, the republics quicklyacquired the highly centralized, authoritarian ma-chinery of states that were ill suited to the hetero-geneous composition of their population. The gov-ernments of Serbia and Croatia were typical of thissituation, the former in relation to the Albanian mi-nority in Kosovo and the latter in relation to itsSerbian minority.

Armed conflicts first broke out in Kosovo afterSerbia abolished its autonomy. Subsequent repres-sive measures in Kosovo then provoked fresh

revolts, mass demonstrations, and the eventual,complete alienation of the Albanian minority. InJanuary 1990, approximately forty thousand stu-dents staged demonstrations in Kosovo, demand-ing both an end to the extraordinary political mea-sures and the release of Azem Vlasi, a Kosovarpolitical leader who was on trial. By the beginningof February, Kosovo was on the brink of civil war.The Yugoslav National Army intervened againstthe demonstrators, killing twenty-seven ethnic Al-banians and wounding many more.104 In July1990, ethnic Albanian delegates to Kosovo’sprovincial assembly submitted a declaration pro-claiming Kosovo a republic. A few days later, theSerbian legislature dismissed Kosovo’s provincialassembly. The ethnic Albanians of Kosovo thenboycotted the elections in Serbia to show that theydid not recognize Serbia as their country. Finally,they created their own shadow government andheld a “secret” referendum on the question of anindependent Kosovo.

Croatia’s failure to provide adequate minorityrights guarantees fueled the fires of rebellionamong Croatian Serbs, who had already beenstrongly supported from Belgrade and had raidedlocal police stations to supplement their armscaches.105 The new Croatian government con-fronted armed resistance when it set out to takeover and change the ethnic composition of the po-lice stations in predominantly Serbian areas of therepublic. The violence started in Knin in August1990, when Croatian government officials begangathering arms from the police stations and pre-vented Serbs from taking them. In the largely Serb-populated Krajina region of Croatia, Serbs werepreparing to hold a referendum on their politicalautonomy, a prospect that inflamed tempersthroughout the rest of Croatia. The government inBelgrade encouraged the discontented CroatianSerbs, spreading propaganda about the inevitablerepetition of the Ustashe genocide against theSerbs in World War II. With the rejuvenation ofthese memories, Serbia’s leaders promoted the fearof a complete return to the past among Croatia’sSerbs, pushing them even closer to the precipice ofwar.106 In mid-1991, conflicts escalated in those ar-eas of Croatia populated by large numbers ofSerbs, who were openly supported in their effortsby the Yugoslav National Army.107

26

Negotiations, collapse, war

After seventy years of existence, the circle wasclosed: Yugoslavia found itself repeating the samehistorical debate about what form the Yugoslavstate should take. Just as had occurred seventyyears before, a number of different proposals wereon the table again. Slovenia and Croatia proposedconfederation, an arrangement that was to be con-strued as resembling the structure of the EuropeanUnion. The proposed confederation would consistof sovereign and internationally recognized statesthat would regulate matters of joint interest, suchas a common market, defense and security, humanrights, and European integration.108 Serbia andMontenegro proposed a “democratic federation,”which in practice would have meant the termina-tion of the confederal elements introduced by the1974 Yugoslav constitution.109 The proposal ad-umbrated a set of classical federal principles, in-cluding the sovereignty of citizens at both the fed-eration and republican levels.110 The third andmost conciliatory solution was advanced jointly byMacedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which envi-sioned Yugoslavia retaining its identity as a stateand its republics as sovereign entities.111 All threeproposals failed, since the protagonists—Sloveniaand Croatia on the one hand, and Serbia on theother—were in no mood to compromise. The com-promise solution aimed at saving Yugoslavia pro-posed by Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina wasrejected just weeks before the war started.

Direct negotiations between the national lead-ers began in the spring of 1991. The talks producedno results in part because the leading republicshad already decided unilaterally and in secretcoalitions to follow their own particular interests.Slovenian and Serbian leaders came to an agree-ment that Slovenia could secede and that Serbshad a right to live in one state. Another secretagreement between Tudjman and Milosevic, cre-ated as far back as March 1991 in Karadjordjevo(Serbia), formed an alliance against Markovic anddivided up Bosnia-Herzegovina between Serbiaand Croatia.112 These so-called reserve alternatives

were under way long before direct negotiationsstarted. Slovenia and Croatia were preparing togain their independence—by force, if necessary.113

The Serbian side was preparing for a war to estab-lish a Serbian national state, but not within the ex-isting “communist” borders.114

Finally, federal agencies started to collapse withthe withdrawal from the Federal Assembly of firstthe Slovenian and Croatian members and then therepresentatives from Bosnia-Herzegovina andMacedonia. By September 1991, the Yugoslav pres-idency was reduced to a “rump” composed of onlySerbian and Montenegrin representatives. Thisprocess paralleled the individual republics’ refer-enda on independence (beginning with Sloveniaand ending with Bosnia-Herzegovina) and theirsubsequent declarations of independence. Croatiaand Slovenia declared their independence in June1991. The Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herze-govina and the Serbian Republic of Krajina de-clared their independence in December 1991.

War erupted in Slovenia in June 1991 whenSlovenes removed federal signs along the Sloven-ian border and occupied the border outposts andcustoms offices. The Yugoslav federal governmentsent a unit of the YNA to replace Yugoslav bordersigns and return the federal customs officers totheir posts. The YNA decided to fulfill this task bymoving into Slovenia with tanks and carrying outtheir orders with force. Slovenian Territorial De-fense units responded by attacking the YNA de-tachments, which were defeated in a few shortdays. The YNA then quickly withdrew fromSlovenia.

Immediately thereafter, war broke out in Croa-tia between the rebellious Serb population and theCroatian police guard. The YNA sided with theCroatian Serbs under the pretext of protecting theSerb population from genocide and ensuring itsright to self-determination. The YNA practicallywaged a war against Croatia, as it would do later inBosnia-Herzegovina; the Croatian forces alsojoined in the latter conflict. So began the long andtragic division of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Serbs andCroats.115

27

Ihave confined my analysis of the Yugoslav crisisto the internal factors that led to both the col-lapse of the state and the onset of war. The in-

ternational community has had an important influ-ence on the crisis and a decisive impact on thedynamics of the conflict. A proper treatment of theconflict itself, important though it may be, wouldgo beyond the framework of this study. Neverthe-less, based upon my analysis of the internal factorsof Yugoslavia’s breakdown, I offer some recom-mendations in the form of conclusions that may beuseful for international decision making on ways toavert such conflicts in the future. I offer these broadrecommendations despite the fact that the Yu-goslav case is unique, just as the factors contribut-ing to the breakdown of all multinational federa-tions are unique. Still, we can draw some importantlessons from Yugoslavia’s demise, especially withregard to the critical ethnic problems that stillplague the former Soviet Union and East-CentralEurope.

Yugoslavia and the USSR shared the same typeof multinational federal institutions, ethno-demographic mix of populations, and large dias-pora communities whose status would change sig-nificantly with the dismemberment of both federalstates. Both cases involved the creation of new na-tional states in which one ethnic group became pre-dominant. The politics of ethnic unification invites

conflicts over borders (for example, Nagorno-Karabakh in the former Soviet republic of Azerbai-jan, and the Krajina region in Croatia). Secessionthat does not entail a change of either borders orminority-majority status (as was the case withSlovenia, a uniquely homogeneous republic in theYugoslav federation) might still lead to an imbal-ance in the ethno-national composition of the restof the multinational federation, encouraging otherethnically mixed regions or republics to claim theright to self-determination in order to avoid the po-tential domination of one of the remaining federalunits.

Therefore, the first conclusion we can draw fromthe case of Yugoslavia is that the international com-munity should treat the dismemberment of multi-national states with great caution, attempting tomoderate the tempo of state dissolution and thusavoid an all-or-nothing result. Otherwise, it is virtu-ally impossible to establish procedures for peacefuldecision making. Here, too, it is important for theinternational community to avoid spurious as-sumptions in deciding how it should respond tothe crisis (for example, the convenient assumptionthat nationalism is a benign ally in the struggleagainst communist regimes).

Although Yugoslavia never succeeded in creat-ing a wholly legitimate and democratic state, nei-ther did it comprise an “empire” in which all its con-stituent nations had the same desire forindependence from the center. As I have argued inthis study, Yugoslavia was a patchwork of ethni-cally mixed regions, and it contained just as many“national questions” as there were approaches toresolving them. Not all of these approaches in-volved the kind of ethnic symmetry necessary for asuccessful political outcome. Some of Yugoslavia’srepublics, like Slovenia and Croatia, were more in-clined to push for the complete devolution of thefederal state. Serbia, on the other hand, played therole of the state’s guardian, trying to maintain thepower of the center for its own interests. The inter-ests of Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina weresomewhere in between these two dominant posi-tions. Creating independent, ethno-national statesfrom the disintegrating federation was highly prob-lematic from the very beginning, since the maximalsolutions proposed for most of Yugoslavia’s vari-ous national questions were in fundamental con-flict with one another. The all-or-nothing nature ofthese solutions, leavened with the nationalist

628

CONCLUSIONS

fervor with which Yugoslavia’s republican politicalleaders pursued them, made war and gross viola-tions of human rights natural accompaniments.This scenario applies throughout the region.When a maximal solution is proposed for one na-tional question, then all other competing nationalclaims emerge in the same extreme form. In thesepredictable and potentially lethal conditions, suchconflicts require early preventive actions that aimat inhibiting the rise of extreme solutions and theescalation of nationalist responses.

A major problem with the dismemberment ofYugoslavia, as executed by extreme nationalistpolitical elites, was the apparentabsence of alternative solutionsthat would have prevented (orstopped altogether) the warand reestablished peace andsecurity in the region. Thus, I offer as another recommenda-tion that the international com-munity actively work with therelevant parties to arrange atemporary status quo compro-mise if the dismemberment ofmultinational states is not pre-ceded by both an internal consensus on the termsfor creating new states, including their bordersand the status of minorities, and a clear conceptionof future security and cooperation arrangements.

This last item gives rise to the question ofwhether reaching agreement on procedures thatenable the conflicting parties to arrive at any sortof consensus is even feasible in such profoundcrises. What happens if the parties can find nocommon ground to work out the decision-makingrules and institutions—or, short of these, compro-mise solutions—that will govern the dismember-ment of the country? Absent such commonground, solutions typically appear as a fait accom-pli; and once they are under way, workable politi-cal solutions and peaceful attempts to prevent orstop violent conflicts are almost impossible to find.Thus, the Vance-Owen proposal for ending thehostilities in Bosnia-Herzegovina came too late;that is, after the Bosnian Serbs already held morethan 70 percent of Bosnian territory. At the sametime, the international community did not reallypress for acceptance of the plan, since its memberscould not reach a firm consensus among them-selves. The United States, for example, did not

express much enthusiasm for the plan, apparentlybecause it would have required an uncertain—andundesirable—degree of U.S. military participationto bring the plan to fruition.

Because there was no internal consensus in theYugoslav case, two messages should have beensent by the international community to Yugoslavi-a’s republican leaders: (1) that no unilateral deci-sions about secession would be accepted, and (2)that the use of military force would be met with amilitary response. Asking the antagonists to re-spect human rights, democratic institutions, andinternational law was tantamount to doing noth-

ing to prevent conflict. If thevarious leaders of Yugo-slavia’s warring factionsobserved these rights andprinciples in the first place,they would not have foundthemselves suddenly tryingto vanquish one another.

To be sure, the interna-tional community’s recogni-tion of these new states waswoefully insufficient tosecure their peace and

security. Not only must such recognition take intoaccount the internal and external threats involvedin each case, but it must be real in the sense thatthe new state must either be able to defend itself orbe defended by international military forces. Oth-erwise, the international community produceshighly unstable situations that lead to victim-statesand victimized populations. The experience inBosnia-Herzegovina has discredited the concept ofcollective security, and has severely underminedthe credibility of the UN and NATO. Similarly, theconflict has weakened the Organization for Secu-rity and Cooperation in Europe and has cloudedthe otherwise bright prospects for future Euro-pean integration and its institutional machineryoverall.

In the wider context of the political transforma-tion of East-Central Europe and the former SovietUnion, a more fundamental debate has been rekin-dled: the right to national self-determination andhow this vague principle might be reconsideredand clarified in order to make it a workable con-cept in international law. The abuse of this right inthe Yugoslav case points up the need for such anexamination, as the right to self-determination

29

The experience in Bosnia-

Herzegovina has dis-

credited the concept of

collective security.

came to be equated with the right of ethnicallydefined nations/republics to secede from the fed-eration, regardless of the mass violence such an actwould surely entail. The republics’ unilateral actsof secession were in turn met with internal acts ofsecession by minority ethno-national communi-ties, invoking the same principle of self-determina-tion. The international community, meanwhile,did very little to clarify the situation.In fact, its actions during the earlystages of Yugoslavia’s dissolutionprobably contributed more than anyother factor to dashing theprospects of the multinational feder-ation’s giving birth to sovereign, in-dependent states in a peacefulfashion, as its recognition of the newstates was based more on strategiccalculations and risk-aversion thanon an established international legalprinciple. The failure to developguidelines for the application of thisprinciple only served to exacerbateconflicts and provide the justifica-tion for nationalist pathologies, suchas so-called ethnic cleansing, andthe violent eruption of emergingmini-states.

This is not the place to developeither a new concept of self-determi-nation or the criteria for the recogni-tion of this right by the internationalcommunity. Rather, a more practica-ble endeavor would be simply tosuggest that the international com-munity discourage claims to collec-tive rights that infringe upon theenjoyment of individual ones, espe-cially in East-Central Europe and theformer Soviet Union, whose citizensare still making democracy’s requisite psychologi-cal transition from collective to individual rightsand the observance of civil liberties. Future discus-sions about the notion of self-determinationshould start from an investigation of the specificcharacteristics of new cases emerging in the post-communist era. Drawing on the arguments elabo-rated in this study, I would suggest that a minimalprecondition for the international community’ssupport of a nation’s claims to the right of

self-determination be a viable political communityin which the full rights of citizenship do not de-pend upon membership in the dominant ethno-national group and whose democratically ex-pressed will for independence transcends theethnic base of the state.

As preconditions for the peaceful application ofthe right to self-determination, one other factor

should be present when invokingthis right: the respect of both territo-rial integrity and minority rights.This does not mean that the bound-aries between states are immutable.It does mean, however, that theycannot be changed by force or with-out consideration of the conse-quences that the redrawing of inter-national borders would have forother members of the state. Aboveall, there should be some interna-tional mechanism that provides forthe renegotiation of borders andthat encourages all sides to recog-nize the consequences of newlydrawn international borders for allrelevant parties.

The right to self-determinationought not be exercised at the ex-pense of the rights of others, partic-ularly those who will become mi-norities in the new states. Thismeans that plebiscites, referenda,and ethno-national coalitions—which, by their very nature, excludethe voices of newly created minori-ties—are not adequate foundationsfor the formation and recognition ofnew states. Indeed, in the case of Yu-goslavia, they became a treacherousroad to war. Various new forms of

national self-expression, autonomy, and politicalrepresentation must be developed to fit the newsituations arising in complex, multiethnic states to-day. But none of these variations should be so en-cumbered by collective national ideologies as tooverride the liberal ideal of individual liberties andcivil rights.

I have described here a typical case of ethno-na-tionalism, which is characterized by a rigid ideol-ogy and the aggressive politicization of national

30

Above all,

there

should be some

international

mechanism that

provides for the

renegotiation of

borders and that

encourages all

sides to recognize

the consequences

of newly drawn

international

borders for all

relevant parties.

identities. Another important conclusion that canbe derived from this case is that the interpretationof both national membership (i.e., citizenship) andthe nation itself plays a key role in shaping policiesconducive to the establishment of a democratic na-tion-state. Human collectivities that define them-selves in organic terms, as “superfamilies” in whichmyths about blood ties provide the predominantimage of communal identity, find it difficult to es-tablish universal, democratic rules of governance.Their goal of creating a state for “their people” willalways be out of reach, as other people “get in theway” and must be removed—by force, if necessary.It is impossible in this part of the world to create astable state on the basis of the sovereignty of oneparticular ethnically defined group.

This outcome was particularly likely in multi-national Yugoslavia, which suffered from

undemocratic regimes, economic backwardness,and overlapping national goals. The old regime’smore conservative element grabbed the chance toachieve Serbian unification and preserve itself inpower at the same time. In Croatia, new elementsof the authoritarian regime were added to the oldin the service of defending a “young democracy”and creating a new nation-state. In order to estab-lish a permanent peace and to reconstruct the re-gion in economic, political, and cultural terms, thecurrent elites will have to be replaced by new de-mocratic leaders capable of introducing innovativeideas and visions that will foster the developmentof each of these countries and of the region as awhole. Such a perspective is necessary as the onlyway to eliminate the conditions that produce uni-tary national identities and their destructive politi-cal manipulation.

31

1. Charles Tilly also poses the question of whether wewill be faced with a process in which every ethnicgroup seeks its own national state. See his “Prison-ers of the State,” International Social Science Jour-nal 44, no. 3 (August 1992): 329–42.

2. East Central Europe Between the Two WorldWars (Seattle: University of Washington Press,1974), 201.

3. According to the last Yugoslav census, conductedin 1991, the ethnic makeup by republics consistedof the following. Serbia: Serbs, 65.9%; Albanians,17.1%; Hungarians, 3.5%; and Muslims, 2.5%.Montenegro: Montenegrins, 61.85%; Muslims,14.6%; Serbs, 9.3%; and Albanians, 6.6%. Bosniaand Herzegovina: Muslims, 43.7%; Serbs, 31.3%;Croats, 17.3%; and “Yugoslavs,” 5.5%. Macedonia:Macedonians, 66.5%; Albanians, 22.9%; and oth-ers, 12%. Croatia: Croats, 77.9%; Serbs, 12.2%; andothers, 10%. Slovenia: Slovenes, 90%; and others,10%.

4. Bosnia-Herzegovina’s ethnic diversity goes beyondthe number of different ethnic groups living thereand their relative size. Before the onset of the con-flict, one-third of its population lived in townswhose residents—to a significant degree—were theproducts of mixed marriages. The ethnic distribu-tion of the rural population was markedly differ-ent, with two-thirds inhabiting different ethnicallyhomogeneous villages in close proximity to oneanother. As such, the republic had very few ethni-cally homogeneous regions. See Srdjan Bogosavlje-vic, “Bosna i Hercegovina u ogledalu statistike,” inBosna i Hercegovina izmedu rata i mira, ed. Du-san Janjic and Paul Shoup (Beograd: Dom omla-dine/Forum za etnicke odnose, 1992), 40–41.

5. It is no longer a secret that Presidents Milosevicand Tudjman agreed to divide up Bosnia-Herzegovina in the spring of 1991. In a hearing onYugoslavia’s breakup before the House Foreign Af-fairs Committee, Secretary of State James Bakerstated: “We know that the leadership of Serbia andCroatia held long conversations about how to di-vide up Bosnia.” NIN, January 20, 1995.

6. “Ressentiment refers to a psychological state result-ing from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred(existential envy) and the impossibility to act themout. . . .” Liah Greenfield and Daniel Chirot, “Na-tionalism and Aggression,” Theory and Society 23,no. 1 (February 1994): 84. The authors argue thatin the case of “collectivistic and ethnic national-ism,” which is characteristic of all the peoples ofthe former Yugoslavia, ressentiment plays a key for-mative role.

7. Vesna Pesic and Julie Mostov, “A New Challengefor Conflict Resolution: The Case of Yugoslavia,” inYugoslav War, ed. T. Kuzmanovic and A. Truger(Schlaining, Austria: Austrian Study Center forPeace and Conflict Resolution, 1992), 38.

8. V.P. Gagnon, Jr., “Serbia’s Road to War,” Journal ofDemocracy 5, no. 2 (April 1994): 118.

9. One of the most thorough studies of the manipula-tion of public opinion through control of the massmedia in all of the Yugoslav republics involved inthe war is Mark Thompson’s study for Article 19 ofthe International Centre Against Censorship. Seehis Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia,and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Avon: The Bath Press,1994).

10. Charles Tilly thinks that the modern era legiti-mated the principle “that states should correspondto homogeneous peoples, that members of homo-geneous peoples owe strong loyalties to the statesthat embody their heritage, and that the worldshould therefore consist of nation-states havingstrongly patriotic citizens.” Charles Tilly, “Statesand Nationalism in Europe, 1492–1992,” Theoryand Society 23, no. 1 (February 1994): 133.

11. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A LiberalTheory of Minority Rights (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1995), 16.

12. According to Rogers Brubaker, the “Soviet Unionwas a multinational state not only in ethnodemo-graphic terms—not only in terms of the extraordi-nary ethnic heterogeneity of its population—but,more fundamentally, in institutional terms.” RogersBrubaker, “Nationhood and the National Questionin the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: An In-stitutional Account,” Theory and Society 23, no. 1(February 1994): 49.

13. Ibid., 64.

14. For a definition of nationalism as a desire for con-gruity of nation and state, see Ernest Gellner, Na-

NOTES

32

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tions and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: CornellUniversity Press, 1983), 1, 7, and 43. See also LiahGreenfeld, “Transcending the Nation’s Worth,”Daedalus 122, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 47–62.

15. Claus Offe, “Ethnic Politics in Eastern EuropeanTransitions” (paper presented at the conference on“Nationalisms in Europe Revisited” at Tulane Uni-versity, New Orleans, Louisiana, 27–29 March1995), 34. In this analysis of nationalism in EasternEurope, Offe discusses the role of the “decisive bat-tle”: “It is well understood by the ethnic groups inEastern Europe that this is the decisive time atwhich a new game is being started and the ‘originalendowment’ of territorial and legal resources is be-ing distributed, which will determine the relativeposition of the actors involved for the indefinite fu-ture. Both of these assessments, the absence of astable equilibrium and the urgency of the issues in-volved, are apt to inflame ethnic and chauvinisticsentiments and to provoke unilateral preemptivestrikes.”

16. Basically, this was only one current—the so-calledintegral Yugoslavs—which was not popular amongthe masses in Serbia, Croatia, or Slovenia. It wasnot accepted by any of their official representativeswho were involved in negotiations over the newstate. See Vasa Cubrilovic, Istorija politicke misli uSrbiji XIX veka (Belgrade: Nolit, 1954), 450.

17. Branko Petranovic, “Modernizacija u uslovima na-cionalno nestabilnog drustva,” in Srbija u modern-izacijskim procesima XX veka, ed. Latinka Perovic(Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 1994),18.

18. See Djordje Stankovic, Nikola Pasic, Saveznici istvaranje prve Jugoslavije (Belgrade: Nolit, 1984).

19. See Cubrilovic, Istorija politicke, 461–65.

20. Latinka Perovic, Od centralizma do federalizma(Zagreb: Globus, 1984), 125–42.

21. Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984),115–40.

22. Cubrilovic, Istorija politicke, 463.

23. According to some sources, about one millionSerbs were killed in the Balkan Wars (1912–13)and in World War I. See Jozo Tomashevich, Peas-ants, Politics, and Economic Change in Yu-goslavia (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,1955), 225.

24. Croatia’s communist-imposed silence on genocideaided Belgrade’s propaganda in eventually pushingCroatian Serbs into war, and Zagreb’s propagandahelped to confirm Serbia’s suspicions. See BetteDenich, “Dismembering Yugoslavia: NationalistIdeologies and the Symbolic Revival of Genocide,”American Ethnologist 21, no. 2 (May 1994):367–90.

25. Paul Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav Na-tional Question (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1968), 55.

26. Gregory Gleason, Federalism and Nationalism:The Struggle for Republican Rights in the USSR(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), 35.

27. See Slobodan Samardzic, Jugoslavija pred iskusen-jem Federalizma (Belgrade: Strucna Knjiga, 1990).See also Robert Hayden, “Constitutional National-ism in the Former Yugoslav Republics,” Slavic Re-view 51, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 654–73.

28. Brubaker, “Nationhood and the National Ques-tion,” 52.

29. On ethnocracy, see Julie Mostov, “Endangered Citi-zenship,” in Russia and East Europe in Transition,ed. Michael Kraus and Ronald Liebowitz (Boulder,Colo.: Westview Press, forthcoming).

30. Using census data, it is possible to chart thechanges in the ethnic structure of Kosovo. In 1921,65.8% of Kosovo’s population was Albanian and26% was Serbian. The first postwar census in 1948shows that the percentage of Albanians grew andthat of the Serbs decreased. In 1948, Serbs were23.6% of the population, while in 1981 they stoodat only 13.2%. Because ethnic Albanians boycottedthe last census in 1991, there are only estimates ofthe population’s ethnic breakdown for that year:Albanians, 81.6%; Serbs, 9.9%. Nacionalni sastavstanovnistva SFRJ (Belgrade: Savremena adminis-tracija, 1991) and Bilten No. 1934 (Belgrade:Savezni zavod za statistiku, 1992).

The majority of the population of the Au-tonomous Province of Vojvodina was Serbian.They made up 57.3% of the population; Hungari-ans, 16.9%; Croats, 3.7%; Slovaks, 3.2%; Montene-grins, 2.2%; Romanians, 1.9%; and others, 14.8%.

31. After the formation of the Muslim nation, there wasa discussion about whether to recognize its statusregionally—that is, within Bosnia and Herzegovinaonly—or for all Muslims wherever they live—that is,in Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, etc. Itwas decided to recognize the Muslims’ status as a

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“constitutive” people over the whole territory ofYugoslavia. For an interesting discussion of thisquestion, as well as the unwillingness to recognizethe “ethnic Muslims” by individual republics, seeSabrina P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism inYugoslavia, 1962–1991, 2d ed. (Bloomington,Ind.: University of Indiana, 1991), 177–86.

32. Rogers Brubaker contends that “In regions withhighly intermixed ethnocultural communities, . . .where political borders cannot be drawn to coin-cide with ethnocultural frontiers, the territorial-political and ethnocultural models of nationhoodare not so easily reconciled. Widely dispersed eth-nocultural nations, as well as those that overlapwith other ethnocultural nations in inextricably in-termixed frontier ‘shatter zones,’ cannot be neatly‘territorialized,’ cannot easily acquire their own ter-ritorial states. And territorial polities that includesubstantial and self-conscious national minoritiescannot, in the age of nationalism, be easily ‘nation-alized,’ i.e., ‘nationally homogenized.’” Brubaker,“Nationhood and the National Question,” 56.

33. Thus, for example, the old cultural institutions ofSerbs in Croatia were abolished soon after the war,with the explanation that a constitutive people isnot a minority and thus is not entitled to minoritycultural rights. This fact later enabled Serbian na-tionalists to assert that Serbs in Croatia had fewerrights than under Austro-Hungarian rule and were“subject to assimilation.” See Predrag Tasic, Kako jeubijena druga Jugoslavija (Skopje: StampariaKatje, 1994), 181.

34. Serbs outside of Serbia accepted Yugoslavia as theirnational state. “If you awake an average Serb fromCroatia in the middle of the night and ask himwhat is his national state, he will say ‘Yugoslavia.’ Ifyou wake a Croat and ask him the same, he will say‘Croatia.’” Dusan Biladzic, “Skriven nacionalni pro-gram u SKJ,” Filozofija i drustvo IV (Belgrade: Uni-verzitet u Beogradu i Institut za drustvenu teoriju,1993), 119.

35. See Walker Connor, The National Question inMarxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1984), 334–36.

36. Serbian “liberals,” who led the Serbian Communistparty at the end of the 1960s, provided an officialoutlet for Serbia’s political and economic eliteswho were critical of Yugoslavia’s centralism and au-thoritarianism (including Tito’s). Based on theirideas about Serbia’s modernization and economicdevelopment, the “liberal” platform briefly

changed Serbia’s traditional centralist policy. Tito’sextensive purges of “liberals” in both Serbia andCroatia in 1972 aided conservatives’ efforts toreverse the process of decentralization and reformwith “more nationalism and more authoritarian-ism.” On the struggles among the republics overeconomic decentralization and economic reformas a major source of conflict over different nationalinterests, see Dennison Rusinow, Yugoslav Experi-ment, 1948–1974 (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1977).

37. The idea of “Yugoslavism” was not clear and wassubject to different interpretations from the stand-point of different national interests. At the begin-ning of the 1950s, the accent was on national unityand “Yugoslavism,” as was evident in the constitu-tional changes in 1953 and in later discussionsabout “Yugoslav culture” based on the closeness ofthe Yugoslav peoples. A 1954 declaration establish-ing Yugoslav cultural and scientific institutions as-serted that the Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrinlanguages were one. On this occasion, efforts wereundertaken to compile a Serbo-Croatian dictio-nary. But by the beginning of the 1960s, there wasa backlash from Croatia and Slovenia, rejecting theidea of “Yugoslavism” as an attempt at “cultural as-similation.” See Shoup, Communism and the Yu-goslav National Question, 194–212.

38. Veljko Vlahovic, Referat na Osmom Kongresu SKJ(“Report to the Eighth Congress of the LCY”) (Bel-grade: Komunist, 1964), 141–142; cited in VesnaPesic, Kratki kurs o jednakosti (Belgrade: Soci-olosko drustvo Srbije, 1988), 73.

39. See James Gow, Legitimacy and the Military: TheYugoslav Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Press,1992), 59.

40. See Julie Mostov, “Democracy and Decisionmak-ing,” in Yugoslavia: A Fractured Federalism, ed. Dennison Rusinow (Washington, D.C.:Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1988), 105–119.

41. Bare “national interests” tend toward a political“zero-sum” game. Slobodan Samardzic calls thiskind of federalism “combative.” See Samardzic, Ju-goslavija pred iskusenjem Federalizma , 34.

42. Ramet correctly asserts that the Yugoslav systemcan be studied in the context of a “balance ofpower” approach (i.e., within the context of inter-national systemic theories). Nationalism and Fed-eralism in Yugoslavia, 1962–1991, xvii.

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43. See Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism in the Vacuum,”in Thinking Theoretically About Soviet Nationali-ties, ed. Alexander Motyl (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1992), 243–54.

44. Here I use Renée de Nevres’s definition of “modera-tion” in the context of democratization: “Modera-tion means avoidance of extremism and hostility indeveloping positions vis-à-vis other ethnic groups.”Renée de Nevres, “Democratization and EthnicConflict,” in Ethnic Conflict and International Se-curity, ed. Michael E. Brown (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1993), 70.

45. Dobrica Cosic, “The Serbian People’s Great Illu-sion,” Politika, January 10, 1991.

46. Underlying the Serbs’ “internationalism” was a de-cidedly nationalist position, which explains whythey did not have an organized nationalist move-ment—as long as the LCY maintained Yugoslaviaunder centralized rule. Other nations, holdingonto their “nativist” positions, went through theirown nationalist experience: the extensive Croatianmovement at the beginning of the 1970s, theSlovenian highway affair at the end of the 1960s,and the Albanians’ numerous demonstrations inKosovo.

47. Connor believes that the intention of Yugoslavia’sCommunist party was “to gerrymander the Serbiancommunity” that was constitutionally recognized“within the new Serbian Republic as well.” In orderto achieve a balance between Croatia and Serbia,provinces were created in Serbia alone. Connorstresses that the Serbian community in Serbia wasreduced by one-fifth (i.e., 1.1 million people). SeeConnor, The National Question in Marxist-Lenin-ist Theory and Strategy, 336.

48. Ramet contends that the provinces were put onequal footing with the republics with the helpfulassistance of Slovenia and the Croatian nationalistsin power at the time the amendments were made.For more details on the constitutional struggle be-tween Serbia and its provinces, see Ramet, Nation-alism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962–1991,76–78.

49. The appearance of the “Blue Book” spelled the endto the confederal compact in which republican listsof cadres for candidates to the presidency of theLeague of Communists of Yugoslavia were auto-matically accepted. Dragoslav Markovic, who wasin charge of the “Blue Book” on behalf of the Ser-bian leadership, was not elected to the LCY presi-

dency owing to the opposition of representativesfrom other republics and provinces. For a more de-tailed discussion of the “Blue Book,” see VeljkoVujacic, “Communism and Nationalism in Russiaand Serbia” (Ph.D. diss., University of California,Berkeley, 1994), 176–78.

50. Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds—The Disintegra-tion of Yugoslavia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,1993), 51.

51. The Battle of Kosovo, which pitted Serbs againstOttoman Turks on June 15, 1389, symbolizes theloss of the medieval Serbian empire and still re-mains the central event in all of Serbian history.The Battle of Kosovo also shapes a large part of Ser-bian national consciousness and culture, servingas an inspiration for Serbian epic poetry that hasbeen passed down throughout the centuries.

52. The Serbian Orthodox Church was the most atten-tive and immediately accepted the chance to castoff its marginalized role. The revitalization of thechurch was essentially linked to the “dangers” thatwere hanging over the nation. Kosovo became thecornerstone of its strategy to take over the repre-sentation of the Serbian people as a whole. Thechurch’s support in this affair was rewarded by thegovernment in 1984, when approval was given tobuild St. Sava church in Vracar and a complex ofbuildings for the School of Theology. RadmilaRadic, “Crkva i ‘srpsko nacionalno pitanje,’1980–1995,” Republika, no. 121–22 (August1995): iv–v.

53. The population of Serbs and Montenegrins waspermanently on the decline, which I indicated ear-lier. (See note 30.) The number of Serbs who leftKosovo from 1981 to 1985 reached 17,600. SeeTasic, Kako je ubijena druga Jugoslavija, 64.

54. My research on rapes in Kosovo indicates that as of1987, there was not a single “interethnic” rape (i.e.,a Serbian woman raped by an Albanian), althoughsuch cases were constantly mentioned in the press.Under enormous public pressure regarding therape of “Serbian women,” new criminal proceed-ings were introduced if the rape involved individu-als of “different nationalities.” In addition, the rateof such sexual assaults in Kosovo was the lowestcompared to other Yugoslav republics, and thegreatest number of rapes in Kosovo occurredwithin the same ethnic groups. See Vesna Pesic, “O krivicnom delu silovanja: Uporedna analiza saSFRJ, uzu Srbiju, Kosovo i Vojvodinu,” in Kosovskicvor: dresiti ili seci? (Belgrade: Chronos, 1990), 47.

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55. Ruza Petrovic and Marina Blagojevic, Seobe Srba iCrnogorca sa Kosova i iz Metohije (Belgrade: Ser-bian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1989).

56. Tasic, Kako je ubijena druga Jugoslavija, 71.

57. The Slovenes in particular were criticized for notunderstanding the Serbian problem in Kosovo.“The Serbs understood the Slovenes when the Ger-mans ousted them from their homes during theSecond World War, and thus gave them shelter inSerbia.” They did not ask for “proof” that the Ger-mans had truly ousted them. Tasic, Kako je ubijenadruga Jugoslavija, 89.

58. Ivan Jankovic, “Krivicno pravna represija politickinenasilnih ponasanja na Kosovu: 1979–1988,” inKosovski cvor: dresiti ili seci?, 63.

59. This interpretation of the conflict was publicly ex-pressed for the first time at the funeral of Alek-sander Rankovic, the former Yugoslav minister ofinternal affairs. After his downfall in 1966, the situ-ation in Kosovo changed drastically when ethnicAlbanians assumed power. His funeral in 1983 was“transformed into a nationalistic event,” which wasattended by more than 100,000 people. Beneaththe din of thousands of Serbs shouting out hisname, the subtext of the gathering was clear:“When Rankovic was on the job, the Albanianswere peaceful.” Slavoljub Djukic, Izmedju slave ianateme—Politicka biografija Slobodana Milose-vica (Belgrade: Filip Visnjic, 1994), 36.

60. The “Keljmendi Case,” regarding the Albanian sol-dier who killed four sleeping soldiers from differ-ent ethnic groups and wounded several others,was headlined in the Serbian press as “Shooting atYugoslavia” and stirred up extreme anti-Albaniansentiment. Commentaries in Politika implied thatthe Albanians hated not only the Serbs, but all Yu-goslav ethnic groups. Daily accounts of the casepointed up so many contradictions that one couldnot help but get the impression that the barracksmassacre had been orchestrated. See Tasic, Kako jeubijena druga Jugoslavija, 99–100.

61. Djukic, Izmedju slave i anateme, 36.

62. The most influential and prestigious daily newspa-per, Politika, was put into the service of nationalistpolicy in order to create a cult of the new “nationalleader.” The newspaper played a key role in the cre-ation of national intolerance through its aggressivecolumn “Odjeci i Reagovanja” (“Repercussions andReactions”). It spoke with the voice of “the people,”attacking individuals—and even the entire nation—

if the slightest doubt was expressed over Milose-vic’s policies. Such doubt was likened to hatred ofthe Serbian people.

63. General Kadijevic, Yugoslavia’s secretary of defenseand the head of the republic’s military high com-mand from 1989 to 1992, maintains in his bookthat the reformers in power in socialist countrieswere part of the U.S. strategy to defeat commu-nism. These “reformers” had been prepared long inadvance “so that it seemed as though the process ofdestroying the system by way of reforms was beingled by internal Party forces.” Moje vidjenje ras-pada—Vojska bez drzave (Belgrade: Politicka iz-davacka delatnost, 1993), 13.

64. In “The Crisis of Modernity” (Republika, No. 8:“The Slavs and the West,” January 1994), SrdjaPopovic accurately emphasizes that the conserva-tive coalition in Serbia “found its social base inprimitive rural regions which have always beenthreatened by the effort and discipline that mod-ernism requires. . . . Its main opponent is the mid-dle class and the urban population, the mainstay ofcosmopolitanism, commercialism, science, andrationality.”

65. For the similarities and coalitions between thecommunists and nationalists in Serbia and Russia,see Vujacic, “Communism and Nationalism in Rus-sia and Serbia.”

66. William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Iden-tity and International Relations (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1990), 74.

67. Barry R. Posen, “The Security Dilemma and EthnicConflict,” in Ethnic Conflict and International Se-curity, 194.

68. Miodrag Stanisavljevic, Zveckanje Oklopnika(Zrenjanin: Republika, 1994), 25.

69. Dobrica Cosic emphasizes the subordinate role ofnational ideology to state-building with the follow-ing: “Slobodan Milosevic became a politican hav-ing the characteristics of a charismatic leader notwith nationalism as an ideology, but with state-hoodness as a national goal.” Promene (Novi Sad:Dnevnik, 1992), 141.

70. On the relationship between “nation” and “state,”see Katharine Verdery, “From Parent-State to Fam-ily Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contempo-rary Eastern Europe,” East European Politics andSocieties 8, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 225–55.

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71. The issue here is the ethnic interpretation of a na-tion, which is closest to the definition offered byAnthony Smith: “Ethnic concepts of the nation fo-cus on the genealogy of its members, howeverfictive; on the popular mobilization of ‘the folk’; onnative history and customs; and on the vernacularculture.” When politically mobilized, ethnic nation-alism tends to conceive of the nation based on 1) its natural qualities, renewing “pre-existing eth-nic ties”; 2) the politicization of culture, which re-news the ethno-historical tradition; and 3) ethnicpurification, which leads to “segregation, expul-sion, deportation, and even extermination ofaliens.” Anthony Smith, “The Ethnic Sources of Na-tionalism,” in Ethnic Conflict and International Se-curity, 36 and 38.

72. Yael Tamir, “The Right to National Self-Determina-tion,” Social Research 58, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 577.

73. Jack Snyder points out that “nationalist criteria forpolitical identity and alignment are, to some ex-tent, inherently conflictual. Any intensification ofnationalist sentiment is likely to contribute to anintensification of the conflict with other nationalgroups.” See his “Nationalism and the Crisis of thePost-Soviet State,” in Ethnic Conflict and Interna-tional Security, 93.

74. Politika, July 27, 1991.

75. Matija Beckovic, Politika, August 2, 1991.

76. The other face of ressentiment is chauvinism andaggressiveness. The poisoning of the Serbs by oth-ers’ hatred resulted in their hatred toward theother nations. Thus Serbian nationalism acquiredthe classic traits of ethnic “reductionism”—ethnicpurification and chauvinism. Alexander Motylpoints out that chauvinistic nationalism presup-poses the situation in which “nations must bebrought into contact and competition, in whichsome lose and others win.” See Alexander Motyl,“The Modernity of Nationalism: Nations, States,and Nation-States in the Contemporary World,”Journal of International Affairs 45, no. 2 (Winter1992): 313.

77. Dobrica Cosic, Knjizevne novine, December 1,1988.

78. Dobrica Cosic, Promene (Novi Sad: Dnevnik,1992), 62, 72, and 75.

79. Cosic, Politika, July 27, 1991.

80. “Memorandum,” quoted in Osmica, February 12,1989.

81. Ibid.

82. Cosic, Knjizevne novine, December 1, 1988.

83. Cosic, Promene, 259.

84. Croatian genocide against the Serbs is regarded asan enduring historical phenomenon: “It is certainthat for the genesis of the genocidal acts uponSerbs in Croatia one has to look to the times whenthe so-called Orthodox Vlasi (i.e., Serbs under thepressure of Turkish rule in the 16th and 17th cen-turies) started to populate Croatian lands. . . . Theidea of genocide of Serbs was completely finishedin the framework of Austria-Hungary, before WorldWar I started. . . . The long-lasting fermentation ofthe idea of genocide in Croatian society . . . tookroot in the conscience of many generations.”Vasilje Krestic, Knjizevne novine, September 15,1986.

85. For instance, over the course of four months in1985, different daily newspapers were full of sto-ries about crimes that Andrija Artukovic, “theHimmler of the Balkans,” and the Ustashe perpe-trated on the Serbs. For months, Serbia’s majornewspapers ran serials with titles like: “From theHistory of the Ustashe State,” “I Fled from Ar-tukovic’s Torture Chamber at Jasenovac,” “AndrijaArtukovic—The Greatest Living War Criminal,”“Pavelic’s Secret Chambers,” and so on. The “Voiceof the Church” also published a great number of se-rials about genocide against the Serbs, accompa-nied by photographs of decapitated and mutilatedcorpses.

86. Throughout 1990, reports regularly arrived fromBosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia about religiouschanting and services for the victims of genocide,including the exhumation of the victims’ remainsand their reburial. The reports were usually fol-lowed by detailed descriptions of the way the vic-tims were killed. At the same time the ministry ofthe Serbian Orthodox Church sent a warning fromBosnia-Herzegovina that there was a broadening ofthe “vampire Ustashe” atmosphere even there. Be-fore the war of 1991, there was a commemorationof the fifty years of suffering of the Serbian Ortho-dox Church and genocide and the ongoing work ofpriests and others to unearth the remains of the in-nocent victims. This is still being done throughoutBosnia. See Radic, “Crkva i ‘srpsko nacionalno pi-tanje,’ 1980–1995,” xiv.

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87. Jovan Raskovic, Politika, March 25, 1990.

88. Radovan Samadzic, Politika, August 7, 1992.

89. Dobrica Cosic, Knjizevne novine, July 15, 1989.Just before the war, the idea of a Serbian state waspropagated much more openly. Cosic is most clearabout this matter: “The Serbian people have todayall the historical, national, and democratic reasonsand rights to live in one state. . . . If other peoplesdo not want such a Yugoslavia, then the Serbian na-tion will be forced to live freely in its state and aftertwo centuries of struggle will solve for good its ex-istential question.” Politika, January 21, 1991.

90. Antonije Isakovic, Politika, May 25, 1990.

91. Cosic, Politika, January 21, 1991.

92. Quoted in Djukic, Izmedju slave i anateme, 187.

93. Tasic, Kako je ubijena druga Jugoslavija, 124.

94. Quoted in Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism inYugoslavia, 1962–1991, 229–230.

95. Nebojsa Popov, “Srpski populizam,” Vreme, no.133 (May 24, 1993).

96. Tasic, Kako je ubijena druga Jugoslavija, 152.

97. Ibid., 157.

98. Ibid., 187.

99. Balkanization is “a process and possibly a cycle ofempire disruption, small countries creation, localinstability, and a new (or old) empire moving in. . . .The balkanization process was characterized par-ticularly by the attempts of the Balkan nations atautonomous state creation and by wars eruptingbetween them.” Vladimir Gligorov, Why Do Coun-tries Break Up? (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upp-saliensis, 1994), 18.

100. This unfortunate choice was obvious when the oldapparatus created its own political organization,which played an important role in fomenting thearmed conflicts. It was known as the “Generals’Party”; its formal name was The League of Commu-nists—Movement for Yugoslavia.

101. Although the nationalist party in Macedonia re-ceived the most votes of any single party, it did notget a majority of all votes cast. The nationalist partygot 31.67%; the “reformed” communists, 25.83%;the Albanian minority party (PDPM), 14.17%; andthe Alliance of Reformist Forces of Macedonia(Ante Markovic’s party), a mere 9.17%.

102. In these republics, Serbs did not take the name ofMilosevic’s party in order to avoid being associatedwith “communists.” They thus adapted to the situa-tion in these republics.

103. Prime Minister Markovic had to face a number ofvitriolic attacks, including those from politically ac-tive members of the Serbian Academy of Sciencesand Arts. Mihailo Markovic declared: “AnteMarkovic is making a deal with our enemies abouthow to destroy Yugoslavia and Serbia,” Politika, Oc-tober 11, 1991. “We are a country of cleavages andhatred—national, religious, and social,” said Do-brica Cosic, “[and] it is difficult to understand whyPremier Markovic is ignoring the political reality ofYugoslavia, and it is even less understandable howhe thinks that that reality can be overcome throughelections.” Politika, August 4, 1990.

104. Slobodanka Kovacevic, “Hronologija jugoslovenskekrize: 1990–1992,” Medjunarodna politika, nos.1–2 (1992): 110.

105. Ibid., 111. Jovan Raskovic, the leader of the SerbianDemocratic Party in Croatia, anticipated armed re-bellion on June 25, 1990, when the Assembly ofSerbs in Croatia passed a declaration proclaimingthe sovereignty and autonomy of the republic’sSerbs and established a Serbian National Councilto serve as a state-like body to represent their au-tonomy. Raskovic characterized these acts as“Serbs’ rebellion without arms.”

106. On the discrimination against Serbs and the acts ofthe Croatian government that rekindled Serbianmemories of the Ustashe-run Independent State ofCroatia, see Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia:The Third Balkan War (New York: Penguin Books,1992), 12–14. Also see Denich, “DismemberingYugoslavia.”

107. For more details, see Kadijevic, Moje vidjenje ras-pada, 122–144.

108. Borba, October 6–7, 1990.

109. “Democratic federation” as a concept was inimicalto the precepts of Serbian nationalism. The ficti-tious character of that proposal was unacceptableeven to those republics whose interests were coter-minous with the federal organization of Yugoslavia(i.e., Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina).

110. Borba, October 8, 1990.

111. Borba, June 4, 1991.

112. See Djukic, Izmedju slave i anateme, 187 and 190.

113. According to the 1974 constitution, each republichad its “Territorial Defense” (TD), which was inde-pendent from the federal Yugoslav National Army.Martin Spegelj, Croatia’s defense minister and for-mer YNA general, understood TD as serving the “se-curity of the republics against the domination of themajority people” (Serbs). Under his organization,Croatia’s TD could mobilize 180,000 armed troopsin 1982. When the Warsaw Pact broke up, the YNAtook control over the TD system. In 1991, the YNApartially disarmed the Croatian TD. But, after theelections in Croatia and Slovenia, these republics

started to buy arms secretly from foreign sources.See Darko Hudelist’s interview with Spegelj in Er-azmus 9 (1994): 42 and 45.

114. Latinka Perovic defines Serbia’s war objectives inthe following way: “Revision of internal boundaries,exchange of populations, and restructuring of theBalkan political space.” Latinka Perovic, “Yugo-slavia Was Defeated from Inside,” in Yugoslavia,Collapse, War Crimes, ed. Sonja Biserko (Belgrade:Center for Antiwar Action and Belgrade Circle,1993), 63.

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115. On June 14, 1991, Belgrade’s daily paper Borbadisclosed that President Tudjman had informedthe British officials that the Serbian and Croat-ian governments had agreed to divide upBosnia-Herzegovina between themselves. Thearticle also mentioned that in the “circles of Eu-ropean politics such a possibility was alreadyconsidered as one of the options.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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ABOUT THE INSTITUTE

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, nonpartisan federal institution created byCongress to promote research, education, and training on the peaceful resolution of international conflicts.Established in 1984, the Institute meets its congressional mandate through an array of programs, includingresearch grants, fellowships, professional training programs, conferences and workshops, library services,publications, and other educational activities. The Institute’s Board of Directors is appointed by the Presi-dent of the United States and confirmed by the Senate.

Chairman of the Board: Chester A. CrockerVice Chairman: Max M. KampelmanPresident: Richard H. SolomonExecutive Vice President: Harriet Hentges

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Dennis L. Bark, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University

Theodore M. Hesburgh, President Emeritus, University of Notre Dame

Seymour Martin Lipset, Hazel Professor of Public Policy, George Mason University

Christopher H. Phillips, former U.S. ambassador to Brunei

Mary Louise Smith, civic activist; former chairman, Republican National Committee

W. Scott Thompson, Professor of International Politics, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

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Ervin J. Rokke, Lieutenant General, U.S. Air Force; President, National Defense University

Walter B. Slocombe, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy

Richard H. Solomon, President, United States Institute of Peace (nonvoting)

Peaceworks No. 8. First published April 1996.

The views expressed in this report are those of the author or conference participants alone. They do not necessarily reflect views of the United States Institute of Peace.

UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE

1550 M Street NW, Suite 700Washington, DC 20005-1708

Phone: 202-457-1700E-mail: usip_requests@usip.orgInternet: gopher.usip.org

Other titles in the Peaceworks series:

Turkey’s Role in the Middle East: A Conference Report by Patricia Carley (Peaceworks No. 1)

Central Asians Take Stock: Reform, Corruption, and Identity by Nancy Lubin (PeaceworksNo. 2)

From the Managing Chaos conference:

Keynote Addresses by Les Aspin and Ted Koppel (Peaceworks No. 3)

Sources of Conflict: G.M. Tamás and Samuel Huntington on “Identity and Conflict,” and Robert Kaplan and Jessica Tuchman Mathews on “‘The Coming Anarchy’ and the Nation-State under Siege” (Peaceworks No. 4)

NGOs and Conflict Management by Pamela R. Aall (Peaceworks No. 5)

Humanitarian Assistance and Conflict in Africa by David R. Smock (Peaceworks No. 6)

Self-Determination: Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity, and the Right to Secession by PatriciaCarley (Peaceworks No. 7)

UNITED STATESINSTITUTE OF PEACE

1550 M Street NWWashington, DC 20005 Peaceworks No. 8