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Home » Politics & International Relations » Garner, Ferdinand & Lawson: Introduction to Politics » Student resources » Expanded case studies from the book » Box 8.3: The collapse of the former Yugoslavia

Garner, Ferdinand & Lawson: Introduction to Politics

Box 8.3: The collapse of the former Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia was created at the end of WWI as a state for South Slavs to prevent the return of imperial powers to treat them as colonies ( for a brief history, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4997380.stm).  However, between the wars it was bedevilled by enduring enmity between the two largest ethnic communities, the Serbs and Croats.  During WWII it was dismembered under Axis control. In the ensuing fratricidal conflict, an estimated 1.66 million inhabitants died (for details see www.historyonthenet.com/WW2/statistics.htm).

After Liberation - largely by the Communist partisans under Tito (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josip_Broz_Tito; www.youtube.com/watch?v=6unCvDlaOC8) the Yugoslav state was restored, this time as a federation (see pages 196-203 for a discussion of such systems).  Even the ruling Yugoslav Communist Party was divided into separate federal units.  The six federal republics (Serbia (see www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0108157.html), Croatia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Croatia), Slovenia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovenia), Bosnia-Herzegovina (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnia_and_Herzegovina), Macedonia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Macedonia)  and Montenegro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montenegro)) had equal representation in the federal government, and after 1974 the two autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina in Serbia were granted similar representation.  In recognition of its historic diversity Yugoslavia was by far the most genuinely federal (on this term, see pages 196-203) of the communist states; although the Soviet Union was in theory a federation of 'Socialist Republics', in practice it was dominated by Russia.  In 1963 Yugoslavia created the only constitutional court in the communist world (see pages 192-3 for constitutional courts).

For a long time memories of the blood-letting during the war, a political culture that exalted the shared heroism of the partisan resistance, the pride in a Yugoslav 'road to socialism' based upon workers' self-management, the threat of foreign intervention, - and, not least, Marshall Tito's own robust leadership - all helped to preserve national unity.   Despite occasional challenges to the leadership (e.g. in 1968 a new generation of Croat leaders tried to introduce a more liberal set of policies but were rejected by Tito), Yugoslavia stayed united and prosperous until the Marshall's death in 1981.

Afterwards, however, the state ran into increasing difficulties.  There was no longer any cohesion in the national leadership.  Tito had avoided naming a successor and he had created a federal system with a collective presidency, where the leader of each of the federal republics acted as head of state for just one year in rotation.  He had emphasized the need for national decision-making on the basis of 'consensus' (on this term see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus).  After he was gone, the various federal leaders put the interests of their own republics above those of the state as a whole.  The national economy fragmented into republican units, and inter-republic trade actually declined.  Inflation continued to increase throughout the 1980s.  The national leadership agreed remedies in the federal state capital, Belgrade, and then refused to implement them when the leaders returned to their republics.  No-one was prepared to make sacrifices for the good of the country as a whole.  Popular dissatisfaction grew.  All the nationalities, even the Serbs, the largest grouping, felt that they were the losers of the Federation.  Trust disintegrated across the country.

Then in 1987 the heir apparent to the Serbian leadership, Slobodan Milošević, made a speech at an event commemorating the 600th anniversary of the Serb defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in Kosovo (on the speech see http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzs98u0m38g).  He made an unexpected appeal for Serbs to stand up for their rights and vowed that Belgrade would back them.  This provoked an emotional response across Serbia, which he then tried to turn into a movement to restore decisive national government under his leadership.  Large numbers of Serbs were mobilized to march on Montenegro, and then Slovenia, to bring them to heel.  In turn this provoked apprehension in the other republics about resurgent Serbian chauvinism.  The constitutional court proved ineffective in this crisis.  The collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe exacerbated the sense of imminent dissolution.  Partly to forestall similar developments in Yugoslavia, and partly to keep Milošević at bay, the leaders of the communist parties in Croatia and Slovenia began to call for multi-party elections.

In turn this provoked Milošević to send the federal army into Slovenia and Croatia to try to bring them to heel or, if that failed, to establish a greater Serbia which could protect all Serbs against a repeat of the genocide that they had suffered in WWII. Equally, his main motive can be seen as expansionary; a 'Greater Serbia' had been a long-held ambition in that (dominant) part of Yugoslavia (for a discussion see www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/international/europe/18serbia.html). Whatever his reasons, he launched a civil war that became the biggest conflict in Europe since WWII and destroyed the state of Yugoslavia (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa8ztIxfz-Y). If he felt that the international community would allow him to re-order Yugoslavia without outside intervention, following the original principles of the United Nations (UN – see Chapter 17 for details), he had miscalculated. In 1991, the US President George H Bush had heralded a 'New World Order', in which acts of naked aggression were unlikely to go unpunished even (by implication) if they occurred within the recognized boundaries of sovereign states. To compound Milošević's difficulties, in 1991 Germany – which itself had reunified after the end of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe - recognized the independence of Croatia and Slovenia. Yugoslavia was far too close to the boundaries of the EU to allow one component part of the former Federal Republic to crush the desire for independence in states like Slovenia and Croatia. If these factors were not enough to stir the Western conscience, the subsequent declaration of independence by Bosnia-Herzegovina sealed Milošević's fate. The war against Bosnia-Herzegovia was dominated by the siege of its capital city Sarajevo (which in 1984 had hosted the Winter Olympics, and was a popular tourist destination (for further details see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sarajevo).

The subsequent history of the war was marked by the progressive isolation of Serbia, and its increasingly desperate attempts to retain control of the predominantly Muslim enclave of Kosovo (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5165042.stm). After much deliberation NATO had bombed Serbia in defence of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995; it did so again in 1999, to prevent Serbian aggression against the majority population in Kosovo. After being deposed as leader, Milošević was arrested in March 2001 and put on trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. He died of a heart attack in March 2006, before a verdict had been brought in.

Milošević's sudden death pulled the international spotlight back to Yugoslavia, where problems still remained even after Kosovo's declaration of independence in February 2008 (for details see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo). But having been regarded as a major international flashpoint at the end of the 20th century, the former Yugoslavia was banished from the front pages of national newspapers after the terrorist attack on the US in September 2001. In essence the episode can be seen as a hangover from World War II and the Cold War (see pages 415-8 for diplomatic background). For understandable reasons, after 9/11, American attention was unlikely to be arrested by developments in the Balkans. In 2007, the Serbian entry even won the Eurovision Song Contest (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgcl5K1HHDE), as if to recognize that its nationalistic ambitions had been diverted into more peaceable courses. Yet a resurgence of aggressive feeling remained highly possible in an area where a failed Federal experiment only added to a long legacy of strife.

Further reading:
Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, Penguin, 3rd edition (1996).