Yugoslavia and After

A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth

David A. Dyker, Ivan Vejvoda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317891345
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This new book presents contributions by leading authorities on the origins of the Balkan crisis, the reasons for the decay and dissolution of the old Yugoslavia, the nature of the new regimes, the prospects for solution of the remaining conflicts and for the building of viable successor states.

Chapter 1

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Introduction

DAVID A. DYKER

Why study the former Yugoslavia? Four reasons spring immediately to mind:

1 Yugoslavia, in one form or another, was the political framework for the majority of South Slavs (Yugo-Slavs) for the greater part of the twentieth century. Thus the twentieth century history of the Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Macedonians, not to mention the Montenegrins, Kosovo Albanians and Vojvodina Hungarians, has been played out on a Yugoslav stage. Anyone wishing to understand the dramas that have unfolded on that stage must understand the successive Yugoslav political frameworks, in all their imperfections and ultimate futility.

2 That imperfect and ultimately futile Yugoslavia played, in its second (communist) incarnation, a vital international role, both regional, in terms of the Balkans, and globally, in terms of the Cold War. Communist Yugoslavia was always the dominant power in the communist-dominated part of the peninsula in the postwar period, the only Balkan country to have a truly distinctive foreign policy stance, with Zhivkov’s Bulgaria largely content to be the ‘sixteenth republic’ of the Soviet Union, and Romania and Albania tending, in the post-Stalin period, to fall into more or less bizarre forms of isolationism. If we want to understand the ‘dynamics of the Cold War, and the way it affected an inherently unstable and painfully backward region of Europe, we have to be able to discern not only the key features of communist-Yugoslav foreign policy, but also the internal factors that conditioned that policy.

3 The successor states of Yugoslavia are, each one, worthy of detailed scholarly study in their own right, and there is no successor state that does not present critical policy-making issues for the European Union, the United States, the other OECD countries and Russia. Slovenia is an outstanding success story of economic transition, a country that seems to be able to tell other transition countries where to be conservative, where to be radical in relation to transformation policies. It is a country anxious to gain membership of the European Union, and with a strong case in terms of basic political and economic criteria – but until recently thwarted by a dispute with Italy over property rights which bore a baleful similarity to the kinds of disputes that fuelled the Yugoslav wars. At the other end of the spectrum, both geographically and in terms of levels of economical development, stands Macedonia, a country which cannot, for the moment, pretend to be a serious candidate for European Union membership but which, like Slovenia up to mid-1996, is involved in an arcane dispute with an EU member – in this case Greece – over names and historical symbols, a dispute that has left Macedonia with the curious official (though temporary) title of ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’.

Serbia/Montenegro, newly liberated from the burden of sanctions, has yet to be welcomed back into the global family. And with the Kosovo problem apparently insoluble, and Slobodan Milošević as secure in power as ever and tending to become, if anything, even more dictatorial, the immediate prospects of full normalisation of relations with the rest of the world are poor. This is a problem for the West, because Serbia/Montenegro, economically exhausted and militarily dispirited as she is, remains a major power in the Balkans. It is a major problem for Russia, because Russian public opinion demands that Moscow give more support to Belgrade than is consonant with Russia’s own globalisation agenda. And therefore it is also a problem in relations between the West and Russia. Croatia is somewhere in between Slovenia and Serbia/Montenegro, with significant economic success to its credit, which has nevertheless yet to achieve critical transformational mass, but at the same time with a ‘democratic deficit’ almost as serious as the Serbian one. And because the West has been more prepared to support Croatia in its efforts towards economic and political transition, Croatian shortcomings are that much more embarrassing for the Western allies. Bosnia, finally, is, despite the Dayton agreement, still not really a state at all. It is rather a framework within which three communitarian, even sectarian politico-military constellations may be able to reconstruct a viable consociationalism in the future. It is a framework which is at its weakest in relation to the critical military dimension. And with the Army of Bosnia and Hercegovina now, by common constent, one of the finest fighting forces in Europe, and the Croatian forces in Bosnia equally formidable, the danger that the integument may burst, and the conflict reignite, cannot be dismissed from the council rooms of the West.

4 Each of the successor states shows a striking degree of continuity with one or more aspects of the old Yugoslavia, or in some cases with elements of society and polity that go back before the creation of the First Yugoslavia. Slovenia, it seems, is the legitimate heir of Yugoslav market socialism, able to enjoy the luxury of gradualism in transition policies because so much of the groundwork had been laid before transition officially started. Macedonia continues to be ruled on the basis of the kind of delicate ethnic consensus that Titoist Yugoslavia had seemed so good at (with the benefit of hindsight we can see that it flattered to deceive). Bosnia, by contrast, is faced with the daunting task of trying to build a more sophisticated form of the consociationalism it has practised for centuries, amidst the devastation of war and the spectres of ethnic cleansing. Milošević’s Serbia is a classic case of ‘nomenklatura¹ nationalism’, with an old communist apparatchik, having completed a seamless transmogrification from Marxism-Leninism to nationalism, still in power, and still wielding power in an essentially communist way. Tudjman’s Croatia, too, owes more to Titoist Yugoslav practice than the Croatian president would like to admit, while at the same time also reaching back to earlier incarnations of the Croatian state.

In this volume we have sought to address all these four points: to study Yugoslavia in the context of post-Yugoslav reality, to study the successor states, in their own right, and in the context of the Yugoslav and pre-Yugoslav background – and to fix all these firmly in the global context. In so doing, we have had to grapple with a whole range of methodological problems.

In Part I, ‘The Anatomy of Collapse’, we had originally thought in terms of a ‘division of labour’, with a political scientist treating the political side of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a couple of economists presenting different aspects of the economic side of the break-up, and a political economist putting the whole story into the context of the general trends in Eastern Europe over the past few decades. It soon became clear that this division of labour would not hold. Anyone seeking to tell the story of the collapse of Yugoslavia, whatever their emphasis or disciplinary background, is bound to span the whole gamut of social-scientific methodologies, and is bound to situate their analysis within the context of the story of the decay and disintegration of communism across the whole East European region. So each of the four chapters of Part I tell essentially the same story – but in different ways and with different insights. This has inevitably meant a slight element of overlap, though even where there is overlap, it is enriching overlap, which helps to sharpen the focus through illumination from different angles. And it means that the chapters of Part I have to be taken together, read, as it were, ‘simultaneously’, rather than consecutively.

How to treat the successor states? The former Yugoslavia has not fallen apart neatly, like a ripe orange. Only one of the successor states – Slovenia – has managed to disentangle itself completely from the old constellation and achieve total redefinition as a Central-East European state with the same global aspirations as other Central-East European states like Hungary and Poland. Croatia aspires to the same status as Slovenia, but in practice to a great extent it is still locked into a peculiar, post-Yugoslav political economy in which relations with other successor states – and in particular Serbia/Montenegro – are still critical. Serbia/Montenegro itself remains unrecognised in the West and remains, even with the suspension of sanctions, something of a pariah state. Macedonia, formally as independent as any of them, has still to prove that it is viable as a wholly separate state. But the real problems start when we come to Bosnia. Recognised as a successor state by the international community, Bosnia in practice has been partitioned between three militarised, ethnically based political movements. It was still, at time of writing, quite unclear whether, or in what form, the baroque architecture of the Dayton agreement would actually deliver a system of state administration in this critical region. Even more difficult to handle is the case of Kosovo. Formally (for the world as well as for Belgrade) Kosovo is simply a part of Serbia with a large Albanian populaton. In reality, it is an Albanian-Kosovar shadow state, with government, civil service, social services, etc.

As with so many aspects of the former Yugoslavia, then, the successor states present a spectrum rather than a series of neat categories. We decided to treat Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia/Montenegro and Macedonia as fully-fledged successor states, demanding treatment in terms of their own, individual institutions, policy preoccupations, etc. Bosnia and Kosovo, by contrast, have been treated as unsettled issues, pregnant with the possibility of future instability, even conflagration. In these cases we have, accordingly, placed primary emphasis on the unsettled issues, and the background to those issues, rather than on the structures, or parastructures of state and policy-making.

In Part II of the book, ‘In the Eye of the Storm’, the reader will find not only chapters on those two unsettled regions, but also chapters on their international and military dimensions. Here again, we faced methodological difficulties. Since every author in the book has had, perforce, to face up to the international dimensions of the particular story they are telling, why have a special chapter on the international dimension? Chapter 9 does, of course, speak for itself. But it may be in place to state, at this introductory stage, some of the underlying factors that have shaped our treatment of the international dimension. It is palpably not enough to look at the international relations of the individual successor states, or even to look at the international context of the former Yugoslavia from the point of view of this or that specific aspect of the internal political dynamics of that state. If the picture is to be complete, both Yugoslavia and the successor states have to be set firmly within the framework of the unique circumstances of a world globalising in conditions of Cold War, and of a successor world where continued globalisation without the trammels of the Cold War has served merely to highlight the fault-lines, the inherent tendencies to fragmentation, which were indeed largely concealed or patched up under conditions of geostrategic confrontation.

With the war now over, at least for the time being, it might seem inappropriate to include a chapter specifically on the military dimension. On reflection, however, we felt that peace had, if anything, strengthened the case for placing in perspective the military configurations of the region, past and present. As long as scholars try to understand communist Yugoslavia, they will have to try to understand the Yugoslav People’s Army, the ‘seventh Republic’. And if scholars and policy-makers want to understand the contemporary political dynamics of the former Yugoslav region, they will have to take account of the unique, and potentially explosive, distribution of military potential of that region. They will have to consider the implications of the juxtaposition of small, lightly armed but efficient armies and large, heavily armed but inefficient ones; more particularly, they will have to consider the likely consequences, in case those small, efficient armies become increasingly heavily armed.

Finally, we had to address the issue of personal colouring. In choosing our team, we placed first priority on expertise – more specifically on ‘hands-on’ expertise. In that context it was only logical for us to ask a Slovene scholar to write the chapter on Slovenia, a Croat (though of British citizenship) to write on Croatia, a Serb on Serbia/Montenegro and a citizen of Macedonia on the most southerly of the successor states. We extended that logic further in asking a Kosovo Albanian to write on Kosovo. We asked a young French scholar with intimate knowledge of Bosnia and Hercegovina to treat the epicentre of the conflict. Finally we engaged the leading specialist on the armed forces of the former Yugoslavia, a Serb, to write on the military dimension. For the more contextual chapters we put together a team of Western-based specialists, some of Yugoslav origin, some not, but all with an intimate knowledge of the area, of the East European region and of the global context.

In so doing, we did not ask Serbs to ‘filter out’ their Serbness, Croats their Croatness – or indeed Americans their Americanness. We believe there is nothing tendentious in any of the chapters that follow. But each specialist follows their own line of analysis, coloured by their personal experience, informed by their special insights, and shaped by their personal standpoint vis-à-vis the conflict. Inevitably, then, there are differences of perspective between authors. But these are differences of sentiment, rather than argument. Some of our authors regret the passing of the Second Yugoslavia, some do not. None see any prospect of the emergence of a Third Yugoslavia within the foreseeable future, and accordingly all insist that, for better or worse, the framework, or rather spectrum, of successor states will provide the institutional context of the South Slav area – for South Slavs, Kosovo Albanians, Vojvodina Hungarians and the international community alike – into the new millennium. And once the focus shifts to the successor states, there is a remarkable degree of consensus among the contributors:

1 All the successor states are, to a greater or lesser degree, ‘unfinished states’ – like the First and Second Yugoslavias; and Slovenia, for all its achievements and stability, is no exception.

2 All the successor states (Slovenia and Macedonia are genuine partial exceptions here) suffer from a problem of ‘democratic deficit’.

3 The weight of traditional political culture weighs heavily on all the successor states apart from Slovenia. To a degree, this factor merely reinforces, or helps to explain, Factor 2, above. Presidents Tudjman, Milošević and Izetbegović are all caudillos in the Karadjordjević/Tito tradition. But there is another, more ambivalent side to the traditional political culture issue which is best exemplified by the cases of Bosnia and Macedonia. To the extent that these two countries ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter One Introduction
• Part I: The Anatomy of Collapse
• Part II: In the Eye of the Storm
• Part III: The Successor States
• Index