Indeterminate Claims: New Challenges to Self-Determination Doctrine in Yugoslavia

Self-Determination's Next Battleground?

Vojvodina, Serbia's ethnically diverse northern province, has received far less attention than other parts of the former Yugoslavia. Yet, although the province has been relatively calm throughout the 1990s, it mirrors the structural problems confronting Serbia and the region in important ways. The West's efforts to achieve a settlement in Kosovo will have a profound impact in areas as seemingly stable as Vojvodina, where calls for autonomy are mounting.

To achieve what they view as a positive outcome in Kosovo, Western policymakers have adopted rhetorical and legal positions that will define and limit their policy options in the future. In Vojvodina, calls for autonomy by local Serbs and ethnic Hungarians will force the international community to defend and refine the postures it has adopted in Kosovo.

What are the terms by which the international community could evaluate autonomy for Vojvodina--or for any other distinct territory or population within a state? Would it be an issue of self-determination? In the classical theory of self-determination as it developed during the period of decolonization, the multi-ethnic nature of a territory, its history, and its level of internal democratic participation ¹ did not affect a claim. It is unlikely that Vojvodina could meet the classical standard, ² but neither does Kosovo.

These elements have, however, always been implicit in self-determination thinking, challenging the comfortable convention that the right could be reduced to a rule of "salt water and brown skin." In the fluid post-Cold War environment, the classical conception sounds increasingly hollow. ³ Claims for autonomy can be asserted on many interrelated grounds, each of which is fundamentally indeterminate, yielding multiple, contradictory conclusions that can only be resolved through an act of preferential policymaking. When the period of fluidity ends, however, those preferential choices will have defined the standards for a new era in self-determination.

To the degree that the West's preferred solutions in Kosovo are grounded in international legal principles, consistent application of those principles may compel recognition of similar outcomes in Vojvodina--yet this is a result few parties desire. Apart from some local Serbs, ethnic Hungarians and other minorities in Vojvodina, and the government of Hungary, almost no significant party supports an extensive grant of autonomy or other political reconfiguration in Vojvodina, and several states have clearly expressed their oppostion. ⁴ Western leaders will have to distinguish these claims; in so doing, they will shape the course of self-determination. Vojvodina may well prove a conceptual battleground, if not a real one.

Actual conflict is not out of the question. Though a complete breakdown remains unlikely, observers speculate about the possibility of civil war. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is only 70 percent Serb, and minorities predominate in the north, south, and on both sides of the border between its constituent republics of Serbia and Montenegro. Kosovo has been effectively (though not legally) separated from Serbia, but ethnic clashes continue in the north, and renewed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) activity has been reported in ethnically Albanian areas of Serbia outside Kosovo. ⁵ Politically, there are divisions as well: Montenegro's leadership is locked in struggle with the Milosevic regime, and is moving towards independence. Within Serbia, a system consistently biased against minorities encourages their entrenchment in the political opposition. Framing this divisive environment in Vojvodina in particular is the recollection of a period of strong autonomy and a feeling of cultural separateness from Serbia south of the Danube and Sava rivers. Many outcomes are possible, but claims for autonomy or independence for various parts of Yugoslavia will continue to be made.

This article asks how the West could respond to claims for self-determination in Vojvodina consistently with its policies in Kosovo. As the case of Vojvodina shows, the defining characteristic of self-determination today is its indeterminacy, which allows policymakers to pursue a broader range of policies than...