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The Rise of Nationalism After Tito’s death in 1980, there was no clear successor to his rule. Yugoslavia slipped into a five-year vacuum of power during which its federal presidency grappled with the challenge of transforming itself from a rubber stamp into an executive. Inevitable struggles over the transition were compounded by the Kosovo Albanians’ demand for republican status rather than autonomy in 1981.
The federal presidency met this demand with a carrot and a stick: they cut off contacts between Albania and Kosovo, and instructed the Kosovo branch of the communist party, which was under Albanian leadership, to stifle nationalist voices. But the demand set off alarm bells in Serbia as well as in Macedonia, which had a large Albanian minority in districts bordering Albania and Kosovo. The rapidly worsening Yugoslav economy exacerbated federal tensions. Under mounting foreign debt, increasing amounts of Yugoslavia’s GDP were swallowed by debt servicing. And there was an abrupt fall in Western aid after Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev began overtures to the U.S. and Western Europe. Chafing at the high federal contributions that were asked of them in order to subsidize the poorer republics, the relatively rich republics of Slovenia and Croatia campaigned to decentralize executive authority, including over the economy. Domestically, each republic pointed to superior economic performance as evidence of a more productive culture, and Slovene and Croatian economic nationalism both contained a strong current of racism. There was, however, one crucial difference. Slovenia’s overwhelmingly homogenous population meant that the relatively small numbers of guest workers were the chief targets of racism. But Croatia had a multiethnic population with a large Serb minority, and Croatian nationalists quickly moved from a primarily economic focus to a religious and racist targeting of Serbs that used symbols of the 1941 Croatian alliance with the Nazis - and was later expanded to include the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serbia met Albanian minority nationalism, and Slovene and Croat economic nationalism, with initial suspicion and mounting aggression. Though the Serbian communist party routinely denounced nationalism, a 1986 nationalist manifesto by leading Serbian academics rapidly gained the support of Serbia’s new communist party president, Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic merged the Serbian communist party with the powerful Serbian trade unions to form the Serbian Democratic Party in the mid-1980s, and his variant of Serb nationalism was closer to the German national-socialism of the early 1930s. Croatian nationalism more closely resembled full-fledged German fascism of the late 30s and early 40s. In 1987, Milosevic flagged off Serbian national-socialism with a demonstration in Kosovo at the site of Serbia’s defeat by the Ottomans at the battle of Kosovo in 1389. The speech opened with an emotive reference to the defeat, and closed with chants of “Serbia Has Arisen!” He spent the next year consolidating his hold over the communist parties of Vojvodina, Montenegro and Kosovo, and through them over the security and intelligence forces. By 1989 he had acquired enough authority to get the Serbian assembly to revoke the autonomy of Vojvodina and Kosovo, and declare a state of emergency in the latter.
These steps gave Milosevic effective control over four of the eight federal presidency votes, and heightened a rising sense of threat in Slovenia and Croatia, accelerating secessionist movements in the two republics. It was already becoming clear that Slovenia’s secession might be achieved relatively peacefully. The republic’s demographic homogeneity and its geographic location at the western tip of Yugoslavia, bordering Austria and Italy, meant that separation would lead neither to the displacement of large minorities nor necessarily to the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. By contrast, the separation of Croatia could create conflict for the large Serb minority there, and the conflict was likely to spill over into Bosnia-Herzegovina, with its three large communities of Muslims, Serbs and Croats. This potential threat loomed large on the Yugoslav horizon, and sharpened chauvinism among majorities and minorities alike in the two republics, but especially in Croatia, where Milosevic began to covertly arm irredentist paramilitary groups in the Serb enclaves bordering Bosnia. By the late 1980s, there were armed clashes in Knin (see map above), the frontier town of Croatia’s Serb-settled border (Krajina), between Croatian armed police belonging to the Ministry of Interior and Serb paramilitary. In the 1990 elections, ethnic nationalists won in republican elections across the federation, with the exception of Macedonia. Serbia elected Milosevic’s Serbian Democratic Party, and Croatia elected the ultra-nationalist Croatian Democratic Union, led by Franjo Tudjman. In Bosnia, Serbs and Croats voted for regional branches of the Serbian Democratic Party and the Croatian Democratic Union, while most Muslims voted for the Muslim Party for Democratic Rights, led by Alija Izetbegovic. The three parties formed a coalition government under the presidency of Izetbegovic.
Though there were intensive negotiations to decentralize the Yugoslav federation, they were now led by the poorer multiethnic republics of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, and received little more than lip support from Slovenia and Croatia. In a last ditch effort to stave off the Slovene and Croat declarations of independence, the European Community president Jacques Delors, and the Luxembourg prime minister Jacques Santer, rushed to Belgrade with a promise of $4.5 billion in aid. The aid was tied to economic reforms aimed at turning Yugoslavia into a market economy, and political reforms aimed at maintaining its territorial unity through decentralization. The offer was too much too late: the market reforms would have had to build on failed structural adjustment programs and depended on financial centralization, while negotiations for decentralization had already been overtaken by the pace of events. Relations within the federation slid, and it looked as if Yugoslavia was poised on the brink of war. | |
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Text written by Radha Kumar and David Pacheco. Copyright, Radha Kumar, 2007. |
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