REQUIEM FOR YUGOSLAVIA

Srdja Trifkovic

February 9, 2003

On February 4 the Federal Assembly in Belgrade formally dissolved the state known as Yugoslavia and replaced it with a loose union of its remaining two republics, Serbia and Montenegro. The lower chamber of the Assembly voted 84-31, confirming an earlier 26-7 vote in the upper chamber. Yugoslav state institutions will continue to operate until a new parliament, president and a council of ministers are appointed in the coming weeks. The agreement is a curious mix of federal and confederal elements and provides for near-complete sovereignty for the two republics, which will be linked only by a small joint administration running defense and foreign affairs.

It remains to be seen whether this event marked the final demise of the troubled Balkan federation. The status of Kosovo remains moot. It is formally part of the new state, just as it had theoretically belonged to the old one, but it is an international protectorate under de facto rule by Albanian criminal gangs. Albanians want nothing less than full independence. They now form an overwhelming majority, as most Serbs and other non-Albanians—ethnically cleansed following the occupation of Serbia's southern province by NATO in 1999—have not been able to return. In Montenegro the separatists are in power and have no heart in the project mediated by the European Union. They already claim that at the end of the three-year trial period Serbia and Montenegro will inevitably go their separate ways.

Few tears will be shed over Yugoslavia's disappearance from the political map of Europe, except among a small group of Western diplomats and academics familiar with the country back in President Tito's heyday. They have a tendency to muse lyrical about the virtues of the old Yugoslav federation. Many of those old Balkan hands have fond memories of the place as it used to be before 1991, and tend to overlook its structural defects that had been present all along.

In reality, from the very moment of its creation, on the ruins of the old Europe at the end of the Great War, until its bloody disintegration seven decades later, Yugoslavia was and unstable entity, constantly beset by national problems. Those problems were dealt with in different ways and with different intentions. They all failed: from the triune centralism of 1919 to the Royalist integralism of 1929; from the quasi-federalism of the Serb-Croat Agreement of 1939 to the Stalinist dictatorship of 1945; and finally, from the postmodernist chaos of Tito's last period—embodied in the Constitution of 1974—to the doomed attempt of his successors to keep the show on the road, amidst the collapse of communism and the emergence of the new "benevolent global hegemony."

Those national problems proved impossible to solve, in the "first," royalist Yugoslavia (1918-1941) no less than the "second," communist one (1945-1991). Structural deficiencies of each and every "Yugoslavia"—as a state, society, and polity—were fundamental. In no incarnation could it devise a viable political system. It was not a viable entity, but an inherently flawed creation. This simple fact was the root cause of its speedy and ignominious collapse in 1941, and its final disintegration in 1991-1992.

From the outset the issue of Serb-Croat relations was at the core of the Yugoslav problem. Those relations, plagued by an ambiguous legacy of the previous century, were irreparably poisoned by the creation of a deeply flawed common state. The act of unification in 1918, and the decades that followed, drew the final wedge between the two nations "separated by the same language." Serb-Croat relations would have remained ambivalent but tractable, had the two peoples not been forced under the same roof; it is inconceivable that they would have been any worse than they are today.

Yugoslavia came into being at the end of the Great War On December 1, 1918 the deputies from Croatia's and Slovenia's assemblies in Zagreb and Ljubljana came to Belgrade with the offer of unification to Serbia's Regent Alexander Karadjordjevic. The proclamation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as the new state was initially known, caught the Allies by some surprise. They were prepared to see Serbia expanded into Hapsburg areas with large Serb populations, but until the very end they were reluctant—perhaps rightly so—to dismember Austria-Hungary. Even President Wilson's Fourteen Points originally envisaged "autonomous development" for the Dual Monarchy's nationalities, rather than sovereignty outside its framework. But his espousal of the principle of self-determination unleashed competing aspirations among the smaller nations of Central Europe and the Balkans. They not only hastened the collapse of transnational empires, but also gave rise to a host of intractable ethnic conflicts and territorial disputes that remain unresolved to this day.

Given Serbia's full century of political and cultural independence prior to Yugoslavia's birth, its contribution to the Entente in the Great War, and the Serbs' numeric plurality in the new state, some degree of Serb predominance in its power structure was to be expected. Crudely applied, however, it was often perceived as "hegemony" to the non-Serbs, creating deep resentment especially in Croatia. The Serbian political establishment did not grasp the fact that in 1918 most Croats longed for the creation of their sovereign state, just as most Serbs—had they been asked—would have preferred a strong, secure Serb state to the new amalgam that was forced upon them.

The Serbian establishment erred by default rather than design. Challenges of nation building demanded a new thinking and a departure from the established prewar patterns of political action. And yet it was the old approaches, received political wisdom, and confusion of wishful thinking and reality that prevailed, on all sides, in the first ten years of the new state. The legacy of different cultural, political and religious traditions—most obvious in the case of Serbia and Croatia—was underestimated. This legacy, coupled with uneven economic development and different aspirations of the three "tribes" of the newly-promulgated "nation" could not be overcome by a centralist constitution and unitarist slogans. The Yugoslav dilemma was, in essence, a clash between the Jacobin etatisme, represented by the predominantly French-educated Serbian political establishment, and the old Hapsburg constitutional complexity of historic units.

Separatist tendencies, present most notably in Croatia throughout Yugoslavia' existence, proved enduring because they were rooted in its mainstream political tradition. This tradition gave rise to an ideology that rested on the axiomatic claim of insurmountable differences—political, cultural, and even racial—between Serbs and Croats, and that produced an unabashedly violent brand of Balkan chauvinism. This ideology had found its radical expression, in the first half of the twentieth century, in the Ustasa ("insurgent") movement founded by Ante Pavelic between the two world wars. During the Nazi occupation Pavelic and his followers were brought to power and soon embarked on an orgy of genocidal violence against the Serbs who composed a third of the population of the "Independent State of Croatia." They also killed all Jews and Gypsies they could lay their hands on.

After the Second World War the victorious Communist regime attempted to sweep the bloody legacy of World War II under the carpet, in the name of (Croat) Marshal Tito's policy of obligatory 'brotherhood and unity.' In the ensuing 45 years the wounds remained unhealed, merely concealed. Tito's "federalism" was but a misnomer for a grand game of divide et impera, in which the salient objective was to carve up the Serbs, over 40 percent of the population, into as many different units as possible. The Montenegrin and Macedonian "nations" were hastily invented in 1945, and—absurdly—the Muslims of Bosnia were also proclaimed to be a "nation" 15 years later. Tito's raving voluntarism created a chaotic cauldron that depended on Tito himself as the ultimate arbiter. The communist Yugoslav federation existed as a permanent mechanism of keeping old passions and animosities on the slow burner, and thus providing the ruling clique with legitimacy. "Were it not for us, you'd be at each others' throats." When the ruling clique disintegrated, in the absence of the dictator who died in 1980, the threat turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The most pernicious, and—as it turned out—the most permanent legacy of Tito's system concerned the boundaries among the federal units. By recognizing the secessionist republics within those boundaries, the "international community" became a de facto combatant in the war of Yugoslav Secession. It "mediators" accepted a role that was not only subordinate, but also squalid. Lord David Owen, for one, conceded that Tito's boundaries were arbitrary and should have been redrawn at the time of Yugoslavia's disintegration. "It is true that there could not have been a total accommodation of Serb demands," he wrote, "but to rule out any discussion or opportunity for compromise in order to head off war was an extraordinary decision." He concluded: "to have stuck unyieldingly to the internal boundaries of the six republics within the former Yugoslavia as being the boundaries for independent states, was a folly far greater than that of premature recognition itself." By intervening in Yugoslavia "Europe" turned a dispute into a catastrophe.

The real European catastrophe occurred well before the nightmare of 1939-45, and even before the fatal year of 1914. It took place in the decades when science and progress and the loss of faith left a gaping hole that the nice, civilized bourgeois society could not fill. The birth of Yugoslavia, a by-product of the Great War, although effected by bourgeois politicians rather than Bolshevik conspirators, was indicative of a similar malaise. It rested on 19th century notions of South Slav unity, which fitted rather uneasily into the realities of 20th century Europe. The unification of the South Slavs occurred fifty years too late: the differences had developed too highly for an exercise in Gleichschaltung from above to be successful. The rushed and improvised unification was based on an ad hoc deal between unrepresentative elites. The resulting edifice had remained fundamentally unhappy and inherently unstable throughout the 83 turbulent years of its existence.

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