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Balkan Battles: Observing the Yugoslav Imbroglio
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19772 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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3 / 1991 |
2,194 Words |
| Author
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Janusz Bugajski
Janusz Bugajski is a research associate at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He is
coauthoring a forthcoming book, East European Fault Lines:
Dissent, Opposition, and Social Activism. |
If the Balkans are once again the "powder keg" of Europe, then Yugoslavia must be the short fuse. The evaporation of communist rule throughout Eastern Europe has not heralded the dawn of democratic stability and market prosperity. In the Balkans, in particular, it has uncorked long-dormant ethnic aspirations and nationalist rivalries that threaten to destabilize relations between and within various states. The shaky Yugoslav federation epitomizes all the perils and pitfalls of postcommunism in the midst of economic uncertainty.
Yugoslavia On The Brink
The "federation of south Slavs" (Yugoslavia) has been able to survive decentralization and diversity, as long as this did not upset the interrepublican balance precariously established by Marshal Tito after World War II. But Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian self-assertion in the past few years, coupled with economic chaos, industrial unrest, and ethnic friction, has upset the applecart. The demise of the old guard Titoist partisans and the rapid disintegration of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia has been exploited by all three key republics.
The Serbian socialist authorities managed to capture substantial popular support, since late 1987, by restricting the autonomous status of Serbia's two provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina, and by claiming decades of anti-Serbian restrictions by the Titoists. Slovenia and Croatia capitalized on the political slack last spring by electing nationalist right-of-Center governments that immediately began to push toward some novel confederal status or full sovereignty and independence from Belgrade. All these developments served to undermine the federal arrangement, whose continuing existence depends on the decision-making unanimity of all six republics.
One crucial source of communist legitimacy and Yugoslav cohesiveness has been abruptly discontinued during the past year. The perennial Soviet threat that buttressed Tito and his successors ever since the 1948 split with Stalin is no longer a reality. Moscow is as likely to intervene in Yugoslavia, whether directly or through proxies, as to convert to Islam. Moreover, East Europe's democratic revolutions totally surprised the Yugoslavs. Having prided themselves for more than four decades for being the laboratory of progressive socialism and internationalism, conducting esoteric experiments in "self-management" and "non-alignment," suddenly they were pushed into the shadows, facing assignment to the European backwaters. The transformation of the Soviet bloc had a highly sobering effect on the
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