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Chapter 8: Yugoslavia: Getting It Right--Sort Of (1990-2001)
- Brookings Institution Press
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Many people conceive of the various internecine conflicts within the borders of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s as a single civil war. While there were certainly aspects that sustain such a conception, it is more accurate and useful to see them as a series of interlocking civil wars, in which spillover was magnified by the uncertainty hanging over all of the countries that emerged from the wreckage of the failed Yugoslav state after 1989, coupled with the pre-existing linkages among them. It was during this long series of civil wars in the 1990s that the international community came closest to successfully“managing ”a civil war.Whether because of Yugoslavia’s proximity to Western Europe or the precedent of so many previous failed efforts, the Western powers both recognized the potential for spillover and attempted to prevent it. Eventually, they hit upon workable solutions that minimized spillover beyond the borders of the former Yugoslavia to the level of bearable (albeit hardly pleasant) problems for a number of European states, and headed off large-scale destabilization of the region. 8 Yugoslavia Getting It RIGHT—Sort Of (1990–2001) 177 1379-1 ch08 4/16/07 11:48 AM Page 177 Although this was a critical accomplishment of international intervention in the Balkans, it was hardly a rousing success. The West was slow to move and slow to do what was necessary, with the result that there were repeated humanitarian tragedies. The half-hearted and partial measures employed throughout could not prevent spillover among the former Yugoslav republics, although even here there were some successes at mitigating spillover. Finally, the critical lesson of the Yugoslav experience was that, after trying everything else, the West finally learned that only massive military intervention to end a conflict can solve the problem of spillover. Outbreak The civil war in Yugoslavia followed a similar trajectory to those already described. The critical factor was the breakdown of the Yugoslav state and the fear and lawlessness it created. In Susan L. Woodward’s pithy phrase, “There would have been no war in Bosnia and Herzegovina if Yugoslavia had not first collapsed.”329 In the late 1970s and 1980s economic conditions worsened and élites within the various republics increasingly came to blame members of Yugoslavia’s other ethnic groups—whoever the “others” happened to be.330 This seemed superficially apparent because of the wide disparities among the relatively more advanced economies of Slovenia and Croatia on the one hand, and the less developed economies in the rest of the country on the other, that appeared to suggest that the economic problems were somehow tied to ethnic factors. In Sabrina Ramet’s words, “The conclusion is inevitable: economics could not be divorced from nationality policy in multiethnic Yugoslavia. On the contrary, economic problems fuelled interethnic resentments and frictions.”331 But these resentments did not flare into conflict until Tito’s communist autocracy began to fall apart after the dictator’s death in 1980. According to Laura Silber and Allan Little,“When Tito’s health began to deteriorate, federal institutions deteriorated with him. Yugoslavia became a country composed of little more than eight regionally-based and separate Communist Parties, the secret police and the Army.”332 The first signs of fragmentation were noted by observers as early as 1983, and by the late 1980s the Yugoslav federal government had lost much of its former control 178 case study: yugoslavia 1379-1 ch08 4/16/07 11:48 AM Page 178 [34.238.138.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:11 GMT) over the country. However, the republics that had helped undermine federal Yugoslavia did not create new institutions capable of fully replacing it within their territories.333 In a further sign of the decay of the Yugoslav state, ethnic chauvinists—such as Slobodan Milosevic for the Serbs and Franjo Tudjman for the Croats—came to power by playing on the base fears and desires of their people at the expense of other ethnic groups, in direct contravention of the rules formerly applied by the Titoist regime.334 The breakdown of the Yugoslav state and the inability of most of the republics to replace its authority with their own created a security vacuum that enabled and encouraged the formation of ethnic militias. The inability of the failing state to provide protection for its citizens created fear among many Yugoslavs that violence would be used against them, while the state’s inability to provide for the basic needs of its citizens...