Serbian Nationalism and the Origins of the Yugoslav Crisis
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Serbian Nationalism and the Origins of the Yugoslav Crisis Vesna Pesic UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE CONTENTS Summary v 1 Explaining Nationalism in Yugoslavia 1 2 Integrative Problems: Interwar Yugoslavia and 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 v 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 one nation’s favor, lest it risk the collapse of the entire state. 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 would SUMMARY be upset. Thus, Yugoslavia was not only a mosaic of different ethnic nations, but also a system that was developed to accommodate these differences. The creation and maintenance of Yugoslavia hinged on the interdependence of Serbs and Croats, the country’s two largest national groups. These peoples “imagined” the borders of their re- spective states as overlapping and clashing. None of the other national groups the former Yugoslavia comprised, with the exception of the Slovenes, lived within clearly defined ethnic borders inside the federation. Large numbers of Yugoslav peoples lived within one of the other’s “national” territory. Bosnia-Herzegovina posed the greatest challenge he dissolution of multinational communist to the peaceful dissolution of Yugoslavia because federations and the ensuing armed conflicts both Serbs and Croats lived there in large num- Tthat have emerged with their transformation bers, and because both Serbia and Croatia had his- into independent nation-states have returned the torical pretensions to the republic’s territory. “national question” (i.e., the relationship of a na- Almost every one of Yugoslavia’s peoples has tional or ethnic group to a state that includes mul- been perceived as a threat to another national tiple ethnic groups within its territory) to the fore- group and has felt threatened itself. This general front of debates over international politics, law, atmosphere of ressentiment, real or imagined, and theory. The violent breakup of Yugoslavia, in could easily be used to produce the feeling that particular, demonstrates the inability of the inter- one’s national group was threatened with extinc- national community to rely on any solid legal prin- tion as the object of another’s aggression. ciples, guidelines, or established mechanisms to Ever since the founding of Yugoslavia, two dis- avoid such chaos and mass suffering when con- tinct nationalist policies have struggled for pri- stituent parts of these types of multinational states macy in the debate over the country’s political decide to go their own way. future: Croatian separatism striving for an inde- The former Yugoslavia was an attempt to ad- pendent state and Serbian centralism striving to dress three fundamental aspects of the “national preserve the common Yugoslav state under its do- question”: (1) the right of a nation acting to create minion. Croatian nationalism was separatist and its own state through demands for national self- oppositional, Serbian nationalism alternated be- determination; (2) the right of a national home- tween outright Serbian rule and a strict federalism land (whether sovereign state or republic within a governed through central government institutions. federation) acting through its diaspora either to The Croatian policy supported the devolution of monitor the relative status of its conationals else- power from the center outward and found support where, or to demand national unification and the among most other Yugoslav nations, which would redrawing of borders; and (3) the rights of mem- eventually articulate their own national aspira- bers of national minorities to resist the majority’s tions—Slovenian, Macedonian, Albanian, and (in formation of a new nation-state either by seeking the Bosnian experience) Muslim. vi Both of these strident, ethnocentric, national Serbian hard-liners’ main interpretation of the ideologies preordained the failure of any attempt “Serbian tragedy” in Kosovo was that ethnic Alba- to constitute Yugoslavia as a modern unitary and nians had gained control through Yugoslavia’s liberal state. For Serbia, the Yugoslav state became 1974 constitution, and that the only way to stop nothing more than a vehicle for Serbian domina- the “ethnic cleansing” of Serbs in Kosovo was to re- tion, which, in turn, stimulated Croatian national instate Serbian domination there. In the ambiguity opposition. The first Yugoslav state (1918–41) was surrounding the “Kosovo problem,” hard-liners or- not only unable to pacify internal conflicts and di- ganized a putsch in Serbia’s Communist party in lute rigid national ideologies, but its collapse in 1987, bringing the most conservative elements World War II left no mechanisms in place to pre- into the party’s leadership positions. vent extreme methods of resolving the national During 1988–89, Serbia’s intelligentsia and question. Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian Communist party The League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) clique joined forces to encourage a national revolu- played the role of “mediator” among the quarreling tion to create a “unified Serbia” by tapping social Yugoslav peoples. It promised an ideological reso- and national discontent in the republic. The na- lution of the national question through a social tionalist ideology of being threatened and hated revolution that subsumed class and national dis- fueled this Serbian mass movement. tinctions within a socialist framework. While the This nationalist movement also mobilized Croa- country’s major ethnic groups were constituted as tian Serbs by helping to organize meetings where nations within the new federation, the arrange- they aired their demands for cultural and political ment was best expressed by the classic Soviet for- autonomy. Such meetings only further supported mula, “national in form, socialist in content.” the growth of Croatian nationalist movements, in- The tenuous supranational ideology of Yugoslav cluding the Croatian Democratic Union. communism would eventually provoke the federa- The advent of free elections in 1990 and the tion’s crisis. The weakening and disappearance of breakdown of the communist regime was the cul- socialism’s ideological sovereignty raised perforce mination of what had already been going on for fundamental and profound questions about Yu- more than a decade in Yugoslavia following Tito’s goslavia’s existence as a state, as happened in death. Along with the process of democratization Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. in the republics and the denial of that same Despite the regime’s attempts to control na- process in the federal government, central state au- tional aspirations by institutionalizing them within thority was becoming weaker, approaching a situa- the political and territorial boundaries of the titular tion of anarchy that bore an unsettling resem- republics, the more abstract aspects of nationhood blance to the collapse of the empire that used to could not be so confined. Conferring the sense of rule the Balkans. Yugoslavia’s breakup gave new statehood upon Yugoslavia’s major ethnic groups meaning to the old notion of Balkanization. had far greater consequences in strengthening As communism collapsed, the strategies of the their territorial integration. political actors in each of the Yugoslav republics The immediate source of Serbian dissatisfaction were determined by specific elements of the na- in general, and the most tangible reason for the re- tional question on the one hand, and the search public’s nationalist reaction in particular, were the for an exit from the communist system on the constitutional provisions that undermined Ser- other. Yet, saving the communist regime remained bia’s territorial integrity. Although the institutional the one method by which conservative elites in system established under the 1974 constitution Serbia, including the Yugoslav National Army prescribed the “nativization” of all Yugoslav peo- (YNA), could simultaneously preserve the Yugo- ples within their territorial, republican frame- slav state and achieve the goal of Serbian unifica- works, Serbia was frustrated in this regard. Accord- tion within one country. ing to the constitution, Serbia was not a The dual games (national and ideological) “sovereign” negotiating party like the other re- played by all the republics to a greater or lesser ex- publics because of the “sovereignty” of its two au- tent actually precluded both of two possible paths tonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina. to a resolution of the federation’s crisis. The vii republics’ leaders were unable to either reimagine defend itself or be defended by international mili- Yugoslavia as a democratic and minimal state or tary forces. Otherwise the result is highly unstable break away peacefully by creating new, separate situations that lead to victim-states and victimized democratic states. populations. Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union shared the In the wider context of the political transforma- same types of multinational federal institutions, tion of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet ethno-demographic mix of populations, and large Union, a more fundamental debate has been rekin- diaspora communities