Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies

A Scholars' Initiative

Charles Ingrao, Thomas A. Emmert

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781612492278
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

It has been two decades since Yugoslavia fell apart. The brutal conflicts that followed its dissolution are over, but the legacy of the tragedy continues to unsettle the region. Reconciliation is a long and difficult process that necessitates a willingness to work together openly and objectively in confronting the past. Over the past ten years the Scholars' Initiative has assembled an international consortium of historians, social scientists, and jurists to examine the salient controversies that still divide the peoples of former Yugoslavia. The findings of its eleven research teams represent a direct assault on the proprietary narratives and interpretations that nationalist politicians and media have impressed on mass culture in each of the successor states. Given gaps in the historical record and the existence of sometimes contradictory evidence, this volume does not pretend to resolve all of the outstanding issues. Nevertheless, this second edition incorporates new evidence and major developments that have taken place in the region since the first edition went to press. At the heart of this project has always been the insistence of the authors that they would continue to reconsider their analyses and conclusions based on credible new evidence. Thus, in this second edition, the work of the Scholars' Initiative continues. The broadly conceived synthesis will assist scholars, public officials, and the people they represent both in acknowledging inconvenient facts and in discrediting widely held myths that inform popular attitudes and the electoral success of nationalist politicians who profit from them. Rather than rely on special pleading and appeals to patriotism that have no place in scholarship, the volume vests its credibility in the scientific credentials of its investigators, the transparent impartiality of its methodology, and an absolute commitment to soliciting and examining evidence presented by all sides.

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Latinka Perović, team leader
Andrew Wachtel, team leader

Christopher Bennett	Tvrtko Jakovina	Davorka Matić
Mark Biondich	Goran Jovanović	Louis Sell
Audrey Helfant Budding	Dejan Jović	Predrag Simić
Cathie Carmichael	Matjaž Klemenčič	Arnold Suppan
Dušan Djordjevich	Todor Kuljić	Ljubinka Trgovčević
Danica Fink-Hafner	Tomaz Mastnak	Frances Trix
Eric Gordy		Mitja Žagar

This chapter rests substantially on scholarship commissioned by the Scholars’ Initiative, most notably Lenard Cohen and Jasna Dragović-Soso, eds., State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008), and on a series of articles by Sabrina P. Ramet that appeared in special issues of Südosteuropa 55 (2007), and Nationalities Papers 32/4 (December 2004), which was subsequently republished in Thomas Emmert and Charles Ingrao, eds., Conflict in Southeastern Europe at the End of the Twentieth Century: A Scholars’ Initiative (New York & London: Routledge, 2006). The National Endowment for Democracy provided funds for individual research conducted by Dejan Jović. In writing the final draft Andrew Wachtel focused on the preconditions and causes of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, Christopher Bennett on the complex chronology of the breakup.

The team benefited from the earlier leadership of Lenard Cohen and Jasna Dragović-Soso (2001-2004), and Sabrina Ramet (2004-2008), as well as from extensive comment and criticism during project-wide reviews in March-April 2004 and January 2005, from the four anonymous outside referees engaged by the publishers in 2007-2008, and by several team members who assisted in addressing their concerns in the final draft published here.

THE DISSOLUTION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Andrew Wachtel and Christopher Bennett

The violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s occasioned a great deal of writing, both popular and scholarly. By now, at least in the academic community, there is substantial agreement as to the causes and chronology of the dissolution, though this has not necessarily trickled down to the popular level (particularly in the independent states that emerged from the carnage). This chapter is not meant to add significantly to the scholarship on this topic. Rather, it sums up much research that has been done by other scholars and represents, we believe, a broad consensus within the profession. Insofar as it can claim originality, it is solely in the metaphor we will use to describe the process.

There is certainly no denying that Yugoslavia always faced multiple threats to its stability and longevity. Explaining its demise is, therefore, no simple task. A metaphor drawn from medicine will be helpful to understand our overall understanding of the issue. When a human being dies it is sometimes the case that a single cause of death can be established: heart failure, a stroke, for example. In other cases, however, multiple organ systems fail more or less simultaneously in a cascading series of disasters. Death, when it occurs, cannot be ascribed to loss of liver or kidney function but to the combination of interlinked failures whose origins can often be seen to stretch back relatively far into the past, well before the final crisis began. The collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s is analogous to a case of multiple organ failure. The patient had been in delicate health for some time. Although its ailments were not necessarily terminal, its survival required constant attention and careful treatment by a devoted staff of caregivers.

Looking back, the historian can easily find chronic weakness in the Yugoslav body politic’s political, economic, and cultural systems. That it survived without serious threat for its first four decades was due largely to the adeptness of Marshal Tito and the men who succeeded him. Their work was undone during the period 1985–1990 by a particular concatenation of circumstances that pushed the patient from a chronic to an acute stage of disease, leading eventually and seemingly inevitably to the equivalent of multiple organ failure and death. Nevertheless, history is not teleology; death was not necessarily inevitable, for at various points interventions that could have been undertaken might have averted the eventual catastrophe, though there is of course no guarantee.

Admittedly there are those historians who believe in teleology (at least implicitly) and believe whatever aspect of history they study is the ultimate driver of events. This can lead to two problems that we will try to avoid here. First, working back from a particular moment (in this case the collapse of Yugoslavia, but we could equally be discussing the outbreak of World War I or the French Revolution), historians tend to show why that outcome was inevitable, ignoring the paths not taken and opportunities missed that potentially could have led to other scenarios. Second, like medical subspecialists, historians tend to give pride of place to their own objects of study. So although political historians may well recognize that many factors were involved in the demise of Yugoslavia, they will tend to conclude that, in the end, it was political failure that drove the state to its death, just as a cardiologist might tend to think that while multiple organs were affected, in the end it was the heart that stopped. In this chapter we will write like a pathologist, attempting on the basis of the research of a wide variety of “single organ specialists” to reconstruct the complex sequence of events that led to the death of the patient called Yugoslavia while simultaneously pointing out moments when other interventions could have been tried.

Our reconstruction will focus on three spheres whose long-term problems put the Yugoslav state in a vulnerable position entering the late 1980s: these can be called broadly the political (the perceived illegitimacy or at least ineffectiveness of the central state and rise of competing power centers within the country), the economic (the inability of Communist states in general and the Yugoslav state in particular to generate wealth and provide sufficient economic opportunity and prosperity for its citizens), and cultural (the inability or unwillingness of the Yugoslav state to create a sufficiently large group of citizens with a shared national identity and the existence and growth of separate national narratives that directly competed with, and eventually overwhelmed, the Yugoslav narrative). We also recognize that a series of endogenous and exogenous shocks in the late 1980s and very early 1990s drove the patient from a chronic to an acute and ultimately incurable state of disease. Among the latter we will point to a new geopolitical climate created by the weakening of the USSR and especially the strengthening of the EU, which spurred the ambitions and actions of leading local political and cultural actors.

In the case of state collapse, as in our analogy of death, there is always a tendency to try to understand the outcome by delving deep into the past, into the genetics of the state, as it were. One could, in principle, start from the murky moment when separate groups of Slavic invaders entered the Balkans in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. Although few writers have chosen to go that far back, many commentators, particularly in the popular press, did try to explain the destruction of Yugoslavia through recourse to some variation of the “ancient hatreds” argument—Yugoslavia fell apart because its constituent peoples had from time immemorial disliked each other and had only been waiting for an opportunity to get at each other’s throats within the “artificial” creation of Yugoslavia. This explanation has generally been rejected by serious historians for two separate reasons. First, it is possible to find evidence of earlier animosity between or among a variety of groups within many existing states, yet these animosities do not inevitably lead to conflict in the present—think of the bloody battles between German-speaking Protestants and Catholics, for example, or the North and the South in the United States as recently as the 1860s. Second, at least in the case of Yugoslavia, it is difficult to find examples of sustained interethnic conflict before the modern period.

Although the “hatred” that drove Yugoslavia to its death may not have been ancient, this does not mean that its roots are to be discovered only in the very recent past. There is a good deal of scholarly consensus that the experience of the first Yugoslav state, which came into existence at the end of World War I, is relevant to understanding the prehistory of the disease that killed the patient in the early 1990s. Although the new state was born with high optimism, serious political problems surfaced quickly, particularly a tension between the Serbs’ vision of a tightly centralized, unitary state and the federal model sought by Croats and, to a lesser extent, by Slovenes.¹ These political problems, which plagued the state almost throughout its entire existence and which ultimately proved insoluble in the interwar period, were documented extensively by Ivo Banac in his classic study The National Question in Yugoslavia.² Of course, if South Slav unitarism irritated some Croats and Slovenes, nonconstituent peoples in the first Yugoslavia (like the Albanians, Muslim Slavs, Macedonians, Hungarians, and Germans) had even less reason to be satisfied with their lot. The political weakness of the interwar Yugoslav state certainly made its destruction at the hands of the Axis powers easier in 1941, and the distrust and hatred among ethnic groups within Yugoslavia was exploited by the occupying powers between 1941 and 1945.³

Important as the interwar period was to creating the background conditions for the formation of the post-World War II Communist state, the development of that state itself is far more crucial to understanding the bases for Yugoslav collapse in the 1990s. The Communist-led government that came to power in the aftermath of World War II was well aware of the savage intertribal fighting that had claimed at least one half of the total casualties sustained among Yugoslavs. They believed, and probably correctly, that the roots of this fighting lay in the failure of interwar Yugoslavia, particularly the constant conflict between Serbs and non-Serbs, which had been its most characteristic and tragic feature. In the political arena, there had certainly been ample cause for resentment, as the Belgrade government had undoubtedly—sometimes with malice aforethought, sometimes not—slighted Yugoslavia’s non-Serbian citizens. In the cultural arena, the situation had been far less dire, but there remained a deeply held suspicion on the part of many non-Serbs that Yugoslav nation building, particularly state-sanctioned Yugoslav nation building, had in fact been nothing more than an attempt to Serbianize the country.

Tito and his followers were not about to repeat the mistakes of the royal administration, but neither were they prepared to give up control over the country as a whole. Their political solution was the paper creation of a federal system (as enshrined in the 1946 constitution) in which equal rights were vested in six national republics (Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Serbia, with the latter including the autonomous province of Vojvodina and the autonomous region of Kosovo-Metohija). At the same time, central control was assured by reserving true political power in the country for the fully centralized Communist Party. Thus, as one historian put it succinctly: “A study of the formal constitutional provisions does not convey the reality of Yugoslav society in the early post-war years. Just as the autonomy of the republics and the communes was severely circumscribed by the centralised nature of the administrative hierarchy, so the structure of government was controlled by the Communist Party.”⁴

Regarding the “national question” the new government trod a fine line. Before the war, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia had been a strong supporter of unitarist Yugoslavism, even before such a policy had officially been embraced by the government.⁵ And although the Communists’ attitudes toward unitarism wavered during the thirties, they never really abandoned it.⁶ However, the Yugoslavism envisioned by the Communists was, at least theoretically, quite different from that proposed by most other interwar unitarists. Interwar unitarism had been based fundamentally on a racial principle: the three constituent Yugoslav peoples were seen as one, and differences between them were ultimately inessential. The goal of the majority of the unitarists, therefore, was to effect a synthesis of the separate national cultures into a new Yugoslav culture, thereby recreating a unified Yugoslav people and nation. The Communists, on the other hand, “maintained that the creation of a new supranational ‘universal’ culture was fully compatible with the flourishing of individual ‘national cultures’ in a particular multiethnic country.”⁷ Such a supranational culture went beyond the national to the ideological, and it would overarch and connect the national cultures rather than eliminate them. As such it was potentially sympathetic to a variety of supranational strategies that had arisen during the interwar years as a challenge to the vision of a unified multicultural Yugoslavia.

During World War II, of course, rather little could be done to establish a supranational organization. Although the central committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party continued to function during the war, the partisan groups that did the bulk of the fighting were organized on the local, rather than the national level. This policy was dictated by the conditions of German, Italian, Bulgaria...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to second edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Dissolution of Yugoslavia
• 2. Kosovo under Autonomy, 1974–1990
• 3. Independence and the Fate of Minorities, 1991-1992
• 4. Ethnic Cleansing and War Crimes, 1991-1995
• 5. The International Community and the FRY/Belligerents, 1989-1997
• 6. Safe Areas
• 7. The War in Croatia, 1991-1995
• 8. Kosovo under the Milošević Regime
• 9. The War in Kosovo, 1998-1999
• 10. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
• 11. Living Together or Hating Each Other?
• 12. Montenegro: A Polity in Flux, 1989-2000
• Appendix: Rosters
• Index