The Legacy of Yugoslavia

Politics, Economics and Society in the Modern Balkans

Othon Anastasakis, Adam Bennett, David Madden, Adis Merdzanovic, Othon Anastasakis, Adam Bennett, David Madden, Adis Merdzanovic

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788317979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What are the consequences of Yugoslavia's existence – and breakup – for the present? This book reflects on this very question, identifying and analysing the political legacies left behind by Yugoslavia through the prism of continuities and ruptures between the past and present of the area. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, it's former states adopted a nation-building process which opted to eradicate the past as such an approach seemed more convenient for the new national projects. The new states adopted new institutions, new market-oriented economic paradigms and new national symbols. Yugoslavia existed for 70 years and to consider the current political situation in post-Yugoslav states such as Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Kosovo without taking into account the legacy and remnants of Yugoslavia is to discount a vital part of their political history. This volume takes a multi-disciplinary and multi-faceted approach to examining the legacy of Yugoslavia, covering politics, society, international relations and economics. Focusing on distinctive features of Yugoslavia including worker self-management, the combination of liberalism and communism and the Cold War policy of Non-Alignment, The Legacy of Yugoslavia places Yugoslavia in historical perspective and connects the region's past with its contemporary political situation.

Part One

Politics and Society

1

Liberalism in Yugoslavia: Before and after the Disintegration

Adis Merdzanovic
Zurich University of Applied Sciences

I Introduction

When dealing with the Western Balkans’ integration into the European Union (EU), we are usually confronted with a two-fold conceptualization of historical development, focusing on the before and after.¹ Before, there was the Yugoslav² socialist system with an authoritarian one-party rule and a strangely collectivized economic system which, throughout its existence, grappled with the problems of nationalism and centralism vs federalism, as well as strong internal economic disparities. When this system collapsed, Yugoslavia disintegrated and violent wars began. After, the post-Yugoslav successor states embarked on a decades-long transition aimed at transforming their political, social, and economic systems in accordance with the principles of liberal democracy and a free-market economy. Membership of the EU, the biggest promoter of these principles in the region, became a teleological fixture in Western Balkans politics.

Successful transition more or less meant having replaced the socialist institutions of politics, economics, and society with a liberal democratic framework, which ensured compliance with the European system of values and beliefs. Yet, due to the specificities of the Yugoslav socialist experience and especially the fact that disintegration happened by means of violent conflict, this transition itself was not only delayed in the Western Balkans context when compared to the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, but it also operated within a distinctly different framework. In fact, starting only in the late 1990s, the Western Balkans countries embarked on two different transformations, both of which were supported by outside actors in one form or another. As Cohen and Lampe explain, the first one was inherent in the EU membership perspective awarded to the Western Balkan states in the early 2000s, which emphasized ‘a full framework for the rule of law under reformed public administrations and regulated private enterprise’. This meant moving beyond ‘the political transition from one-party rule and the maxims of the neoliberal Washington Consensus of the early 1990s’. It also included ‘new constitutions, immediate multi-party elections, and rapid privatizations’, in return for which the ‘West’, i.e. the EU and the US and their associated institutions, offered ‘financial support only to stabilize newly established currencies and discourage inflationary state budgets’. The second transition, according to Cohen and Lampe, followed the conflicts of the 1990s and may be termed a ‘liberal democratic consensus’; it emphasized ‘public and private institution building rather than simply financial stability and military security’ and relied ‘on a broader definition of liberal democracy and a market economy, one whose legitimacy rested on public institutions’.³

Cohen and Lampe’s distinction clearly shows that the external understanding of the region and its engagement within it, at least as far as it formed part of a larger international consensus or narrative, was aimed at a deep transformation of the formerly communist polities into what may be called liberal democracies à l’Européenne. This went further than the generally employed models of mere ‘post-conflict state building’,⁴ for the latter usually limit their scope of engagement to ending the armed conflict and providing a political and economic system fit to sustain the fragile peace. In the Western Balkans, the process of ‘Europeanization’, i.e. the establishment of a system compatible with European values and capable of potentially being integrated into the EU, was not only closely connected with the transformation from socialism to democracy which was ongoing all over the eastern bloc after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also with the specific process of conflict transformation. This is the reason why the transition paradigm, at least in its most radical manifestation, permitted deeper intrusions into the system and necessarily contained the implicit notion that the outcome of transition had to be normatively better than the old order, for the simple reason that the old order had descended into chaos and war. Ultimately, in a truly Hegelian fashion, peace should not only triumph over war but a liberal democracy, society, and economy should triumph over authoritarianism, collectivization and managed economies.

Such an explanation rests on the argument that the process of liberalization in the Western Balkans was introduced after Yugoslavia disintegrated; or, to be more precise, after the wars surrounding its disintegration had ended. Geopolitically, it is the new international liberal order, and regionally the framework of EU association and membership that made the process of a liberal transformation of politics, economics, and society in the Western Balkans possible. The aim of this chapter is to challenge this conventional view. While the Yugoslav system was not liberal, the chapter argues, it nevertheless exhibited some liberal elements, even if these occurred within a socialist framework. In the Western Balkans, liberalism is thus not an external invention of the late 1990s and early 2000s, but existed in certain aspects of daily life well before Yugoslavia’s disintegration. However, by the time the country disintegrated, the domestic elements of liberalism had fallen victim to the state’s general loss of legitimacy and its usurpation by the different nationalist ideologies and leaderships. That is the reason why a continuity of liberalism was hard to achieve, particularly because the 1990s saw almost a decade of wars and nationalist political elites uninterested in creating truly liberal societies, ultimately leading to stagnation in terms of a liberal transition. When the EU association and membership process sought to offer a new momentum for liberalization, its concept of liberalism emphasized aspects that, naturally, were distinctly different to the previous Yugoslav model. As will be shown, they focused on political and economic liberalism, while putting almost no emphasis on social liberalism, which had precisely been the foundation for Yugoslavia’s political, social, and economic legitimacy. Thus, the EU’s template for transition, association, and eventual membership of the Union did not allow for any kind of continuity with the past, not even with its liberal elements. Yugoslavia’s liberal legacy withered away.

The chapter begins by clarifying the term ‘liberalism’, both in a general analytical and a Yugoslav-specific context (section 2). It then moves on to the discussion of the liberal elements within Yugoslavia’s socialist system (section 3) before showing how these elements evaporated as the country’s political system started to loose legitimacy and its violent disintegration became a reality (section 4). After this kind of ‘domestic liberalism’ had disappeared and nationalism had taken over, the new impetus for liberalization came from external actors, chief among them the EU with its association and membership processes. Section 5 therefore discusses the EU’s liberalization approach and explains how its structural and ideological shortcomings prevented the establishment of continuity with the old system. Section 6 concludes the chapter by, inter alia, asking the question whether the main characteristics inherited by the successor states from Yugoslavia are not precisely its historical ambiguities.

II Theoretical approaches to liberalism in the Yugoslav context

1 Three analytical forms of liberalism

‘Liberalism’ is a difficult term to define as it re...