Yugoslav home, then, this was not because of a resurfacing of deep-rooted religious or linguistic sentiments or from a resurgence of ethnic particularism. It was because they were coming to believe that they would be a lot better off if they could manage their own affairs without having to take into account the needs and interests of underachieving Yugoslavs to their south.
Tito’s personal authority and his vigorous repression of serious criticism kept such dissenting opinion well out of public view. But after his death the situation deteriorated fast. During the Sixties and early Seventies, when the West European boom was sucking in Yugoslav labor and sending back substantial hard currency remittances, over-population and under-employment in the south posed less of a problem. From the end of the Seventies, however, the Yugoslav economy started to unravel. Like other Communist states Yugoslavia was heavily indebted to the West: but whereas the response in Warsaw or Budapest was to keep borrowing foreign cash, in Belgrade they resorted instead to printing more and more of their own. Through the course of the 1980s the country moved steadily into hyper-inflation. By 1989 the annual inflation rate was 1,240 percent and rising.
The economic mistakes were being made in the capital, Belgrade, but their consequences were felt and resented above all in Zagreb and Ljubljana. Many Croats and Slovenes, Communists and non-Communists alike, believed that they would be better off making their own economic decisions free of the corruption and nepotism of the ruling circles in the Federal capital. These sentiments were exacerbated by a growing fear that a small group of
Milosevic’s behavior was not inherently unusual for Communist leaders in these years. In the GDR the Communists, as we have seen, sought to curry favor by invoking the glories of eighteenth-century Prussia; and ‘national Communism’ had been on display for some years in neighboring Bulgaria and Romania. When Milosevic ostentatiously welcomed a patriotic Memorandum from the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986, or visited Kosovo the following year to show his sympathy for Serb complaints about Albanian ‘nationalism’, his calculations were not very different from those of other East European Communist leaders of the time. In the era of Gorbachev, with the ideological legitimacy of Communism and its ruling party waning fast, patriotism offered an alternative way of securing a hold on power.
But whereas in the rest of eastern Europe this resort to nationalism and the attendant invocation of national memories only risked arousing anxiety among
Nationalism was Milosevic’s way of securing a hold over Serbia—confirmed in May 1989 with his election to the Presidency of the Serbian republic. But to preserve and strengthen Serbia’s influence over Yugoslavia as a whole he needed to transform the federal system itself. The carefully calculated balance of influence between the various constituent republics had been fostered first by Tito’s charismatic leadership and then by a revolving presidency. In March 1989 Milosevic set out to topple this arrangement.
By forcing through an amendment to Serbia’s own constitution he ‘absorbed’ the hitherto autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina into Serbia proper—while allowing them to retain their two seats in the federal presidency. Henceforth Serbia could count on four of the eight federal votes in any dispute (Serbia, Kosovo, Vojvodina and the compliant pro-Serbian republic of Montenegro). Since Milosevic’s goal was to forge a more unitary (Serb-led) state, something that the other four republics would naturally resist, the federal system of government was effectively stalemated. From the perspective of Slovenia and Croatia especially, the course of events pointed to only one possible solution: since they could no longer expect to advance or preserve their interests through a dysfunctional federal system, their only hope was to take their distance from Belgrade, if necessary by declaring complete independence.
Why, by the end of 1989, had matters already reached this pass? Elsewhere the route out of Communism was ‘democracy’: party functionaries and bureaucrats from Russia to the Czech Republic transformed themselves in a matter of months from
But Yugoslavia was different. Just because its various populations were so very intermingled (and had not undergone the genocides and population transfers that had re-arranged places like Poland or Hungary in earlier decades), the country offered fertile opportunities for demagogues like Milosevic, or Franjo Tudjman, his Croat counterpart. In fashioning
In the Baltic states, or Ukraine, or Slovakia, post-Communist politicians could resort to national independence as a route out of the Communist past—building a new state and a new democracy all at once— without having to worry unduly about the presence of national minorities. But in Yugoslavia, the break-up of the federation into its constituent republics would in every case except Slovenia leave a significant minority or group of minorities stranded in someone else’s country. Under these circumstances, once one republic declared itself independent, others would feel bound to follow suit. In short, Yugoslavia now faced the same intractable issues that Woodrow Wilson and his colleagues had failed to resolve at Versailles seventy years earlier.
The catalyst, as many had foreseen, was Kosovo. Throughout the 1980s there had been sporadic Albanian demonstrations and protests at Belgrade’s mistreatment of them, notably in the local capital Pristina. Their institutions had been closed down, their leaders dismissed, their daily routines constrained by harsh policing and, from March 1989, by a curfew. The Serbian constitutional amendments effectively stripped the Albanians, already a depressed and deprived underclass, of any autonomy or political representation—a course of events celebrated and underscored by Milosevic’s visit to the province in June 1989 to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the ‘Battle of Kosovo’.
In a speech to a crowd estimated at nearly one million people, Milosevic reassured the local Serbs that they had once again ‘regained their state, national, and spiritual integrity…. Hitherto, thanks to their leaders and politicians and their vassal mentality [Serbs] felt guilty before themselves and others. This situation lasted for decades, it lasted for years and here we are now at the field of Kosovo to say that this is no longer the case’. A few months later, following bloody clashes between police and demonstrators with many dead and injured, Belgrade shut down the provincial Kosovo Assembly, placing the region under direct rule from Belgrade.
The course of events in the far south of the country directly affected decisions made in the northern republics. At best mildly sympathetic to the Albanians’ plight, Ljubljana and Zagreb were far more directly concerned at the rise of Serbian authoritarianism. At the Slovene elections of April 1990, although a majority of the voters still favoured remaining in Yugoslavia they gave their backing to non-Communist opposition candidates openly critical of existing federal arrangements. The following month, in neighboring Croatia, a new nationalist party won an overwhelming majority and its leader, Franjo Tudjman, took over as President of the republic.
The last straw, revealingly, came in December 1990 when—under Milosevic’s direction—the Serbian leadership in Belgrade seized without authorization 50 percent of the entire drawing rights of the Yugoslav federation to cover back pay and bonuses for federal employees and state enterprise workers. The Slovenes— whose 8 percent of the population contributed one-quarter of the federal budget—were especially incensed. The following month the Slovene Parliament announced that it was withdrawing from the federal fiscal system and proclaimed the republic’s independence, though without initiating any moves to secede. Within a month the Croat Parliament had done likewise (the Macedonian Parliament in Skopje duly followed suit).
The consequences of these developments were initially unclear. The substantial Serb minority in south- eastern Croatia—notably in a long-established frontier region of Serb settlement, the Krajina—was already clashing with Croat police and calling upon Belgrade for help against its ‘Ustashe’ repressors. But Slovenia’s distance from Belgrade, and the presence of less than 50,000 Serbs in the republic, gave grounds for hope that a
