The breakup of Yugoslavia

Stephen Sxhwartz has sent an extremely long statement on the breakup if Yugoslavoa, of which I post the opening section: "On November 7, 1987, three years before the outbreak of open combat in Yugoslavia, I wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle:

For the past two years, scholars of East-West politics have noted rising tensions in Yugoslavia, and a crisis now looms with chilling parallels to another conflict that began there, World War I. Yugoslavia is exploding with what was called during the 1930s ‘the dynamite of minority nationalism.’ This is not surprising in a country that was ‘designed’ at the close of the 1914-1918. . . . The cultural gaps separating the Yugoslavian nationalities are wide and the political grudges are bitter. . . . A sinister phrase has already come into play in discussions of the region: ‘Lebanonization.’ What would ‘Lebanonization’ of Yugoslavia mean? Well, it could mean . . . war between the Serbians and Yugoslav-Albanians. The Soviet Union might very well intervene; the conventional wisdom is that NATO and the U.S. would deplore such an action, but not obstruct it--that Moscow can play a stabilizing role in such an outbreak. But what if ‘Lebanonization’ of Yugoslavia should prove, as in Beirut, unamenable to the stabilizing actions of outside powers? Might it not touch off other brushfire conflicts in the region? The possible ramifications are both many and grim. . . World War I began with a Serbian terrorist’s assassination of an Austrian prince as a protest over the failure of Serbia to gain full dominion over Bosnia. Prior to the beginning of that war in 1914, the Balkan Wars in 1912-1913 saw bloody fighting and terrorism. . . . (C)ommunism is rather a secondary issue for the various disgruntled minorities. The belief that the brotherhood of the workers would overcome national feelings and prejudices has proved a cruel hoax, for the Yugoslav nationalities no less than for the Central Asians in the Soviet Union or the Tibetans in China. The political labels grow distorted or fade away; ethnic realities remain.

The opinion page editor of the Chronicle titled the article from which this is quoted, "Birth Pangs of World War III?" Well, a third world war it wasn’t, but the breakup of Yugoslavia and the ensuing Balkan conflicts were still awful indeed. Certainly, they saw some of the worst aspects of the Second World War: ethnic atrocities, bombing of civilians, and terrorism by irregular forces. The Yugoslav wars would provoke in the West a yoked pair of political phenomena: among conservatives, a "realist" opposition to intervention in the conflict, and on the surviving ideological left, the enthusiastic defense of an otherwise fascist dictator, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. Finally, the post-Yugoslav agony would produce its most significant parallel with World War II: military action by the West, culminating in the only war NATO has ever fought.

The first question that springs to mind about this decade-long nightmare is: why was the world so blind to its approach, and then, so helpless to respond appropriately?

Until 1990, nobody in the West, except for a handful of experts and other interested parties who followed the Yugoslav media, had the slightest idea how fragile the Yugoslav state was or how rapidly and brutally its dissolution might occur. Those who spoke up in the West, alarmed at the rise of ethnic demagoguery after the 1986 "leaking" of the Serbian Academy Memorandum, a manifesto of national-Communist incitement, were either ignored or subjected to attacks from comfortably-ensconced experts in academia and think-tanks. The Yugoslav national conflicts had been resolved, it was explained; the society was fundamentally stable, and faced nothing other than the economic challenge of cooling excessive growth, spending, and inflation in its uniquely liberal form of state socialism. That form of party-state economics had, by the way, been analyzed by many Western academics, including Laura d’Andrea Tyson, who would become a leading adviser to President Bill Clinton.".

RH: I remember that during Tito's lifetime Yugoslavs told me that after his death the country would break up. It is a commonplace in the US to say that in the future nations will be multiethnic and colorblind, but I gather that Stephen Schwartz and Christopher Jones would argue that Yugoslavia proves this will not necessarily be true.

Ronald Hilton - 7/4/03