Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth. - book reviews

Among the 14 essays upon the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation and the politics of its successor states published in this collection, Xavier Bougival's essay upon Bosnia and Hercegovina and Susan L Woodward's essay upon the role of the West and the international organisations stand on the outside as the most original and best argued. Woodward's explanation of the disintegration (only a shortened version of the account in her Balkan Tragedy, 1995) locates its principal cause in the inability of the Yugoslav federal authorities to manage the deepening economic crisis arising, in part, from the question at issue of international debt repayment; this crisis l to a 'social upheaval of revolutionary proportions' in 1988 which, in turn round set the stage for the spread of a variety of mutually conflicting anti-communist nationalist programmes (p 162) Western rules and politicians further undermined the Yugoslav federal authorities by means of supporting the secessionist moves in Slovenia and Croatia sum of two units years before the break-up of the federation. Had the Western rules given more economic and political support to the Yugoslav federal authorities, Woodward strike one as beings to imply, the tragic and ensanguined disintegration could have been avoided. on the contrary contrary to Woodward's thesis, the spread of conflicting nationalisms which l to the disintegration predated the economic crisis and appears to be causally unrelated to it: in the drone years of 1968-71 nationalism was used to mobilise the populations of Croatia, Slovenia and Kosovo and nationalist-separatist parties won the multiparty elections in Slovenia and Croatia in 1990 in spite of the succes of Markovic's federal economic reforms in 1989 It was the next to the first wave of Kosovo Albanian nationalism in 1981 - and not an economic crisis - that triggered the revival of uncompromising nationalism first in Serbia and later in all other republics. Woodward's argument that the confused and ineffective answer of the West to the Yugoslav crisis could be explained through the unresolved conflict between the competing Helsinki principles of territorial integrity and of national self-determination (in conjunction with the true narrow views of national interests of the USA, UK France and Germany), appears a great deal of more convincing (pp. 174-175).

Xavier Bougival exhibits how the institutions of parliamentary politics in the pre-1941 era and the Partisan mobilisation of the population in 1941-45 reinforced the communitarian constitution of society in Bosnia-Hercegovina, that is, the division into three self-contained and confessionally defined clusters which had originated in the Ottoman social a whole The victory in 1990 of the three political parties based upon the tripartite communitarian structure l to the rapid division of the republic's state and police apparatus as well as its territory along the communitarian lines, a 'communitarian dismantling of the state' in which all three parties wholeheartedly participated (pp 99-101) As a come of this the three military forces created in early 1990 from party militias and territorial defending units started battling for the command of territory; in the proces each of the three communities was savagely displaced and the tripartite configuration of Bosnian society effectively pull downed Bougival concludes that the Dayton agreements not alone fall to guarantee a durable cessation of hostilities on the contrary are also likely to lead to a 'definite dismantling of Bosnian society' (p 113)

In his essay, Shkelzen Maliqui traces the rise of 'the national party' of Kosova Albanians, the Democratic League of Kosova, which alone, among a dozen parties, won 98 of 100 single-constituency seats in the Kosova shadow parliament while its leader won unopposed, 999% of the devoteds in semi-clandestine presidential elections; in spite of the nominal existence of opposition parties, this stage of single-party dominance is unparalleled in any other part of former Yugoslavia. While offering no explanation for this, Maliqui endorses, without plenteous argument, the Democratic League's claim that no political solution or the establishment of democracy are possible without the independence of Kosova from Serbia (p 134)

In the case of Croatia, as Christopher Cviic makes clear in his essay, the achievement of independence, beneath the rule of the dominant 'national party', the HDZ brought no European-style liberal democracy. Like Maliqui, he proffers no systematic explanation of by what means this party and its leader achieved and maintained its dominance, nor does he examine by what mode for this purpose, the party used traditional Croat national ideology. In contrast, Jovan Teokarevic displays how Milosevic used the Serbs' fears as well as themes from traditional Serb national ideology to create a populist motion which, in turn, enabled him win by dint of a landslide a series of referenda and multi-party elections. According to him, Milosevic skilfully used the one and the other the imposition in 1992 and then the lifting in 1995 of the international sanctions against FR Yugoslavia to retain widespread popular support. however Miloservic's skilful use of these issues fails to explain for what cause [i]or[/i] reason the urban blue-collar (as well as a certain number of white-collar) workers, in spite of their unprecedent impoverishment, kept voting for Miloservic and his party over this period.