Peaceworks

April 1996 | Peaceworks No. 8

Serbian Nationalism and the Origins of the Yugoslav Crisis

Vesna Pesic

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The Breakdown of Communism: Collapse and War

By the late 1980s, the emerging democratic movements across Eastern Europe were gathering momentum. In Yugoslavia, by contrast, national movements were gearing up to establish their own states. The breakdown of the communist regime and the advent of free elections was the culmination of what had already been going on for almost a decade in Yugoslavia. Along with the process of democratization in the republics and the denial of that same process in the federal government, central state authority was becoming weaker, approaching a situation of anarchy that bore an unsettling resemblance to the collapse of the empire that used to rule the Balkans. Yugoslavia's breakup gave new meaning to the old notion of Balkanization.99

At first glance, it could be concluded that Balkanization was the predictable outcome of the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War balance of power. This allegedly "natural" state of affairs in the region, which had long suffered from unresolved national questions and old conflicts among the three founding nations of Yugoslavia (Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes), generally has been regarded as the explanation for the country's ongoing violence. Nationalist antagonisms in post-communist Yugoslavia appeared to confirm Nietzsche's "eternal return": Once again, Slovenes and Croats were fighting for their independent states, and Serbs were struggling for their own unification within one state. How could history repeat itself in such a stereotypical fashion? What hidden mechanism accounted for this repetition? Had five decades of communist rule had no effect on the "national question"? As stated at the beginning of this study, the Communist party combined two elements to create the Yugoslav state: 1) resolution of the national question, and 2) social revolution. In order to understand the most recent Balkanization of the region, both elements must be taken into account. As communism collapsed, the strategies of the political actors in each of the Yugoslav republics were determined by specific elements of the national question on the one hand, and the search for an exit from the communist system on the other.

After five decades during which Yugoslavia's Communist leaders preoccupied themselves with "external" and "internal" enemies of the regime that could threaten their privileged positions, the enemy suddenly had become real. That this enemy came from the "first socialist country," where Gorbachev granted "permission" to all the communist countries to choose their own way, was the clearest sign that communism was losing its ideological ability to maintain these leaders in power.

Various strategies for dealing with the impending downfall of communist regimes typically framed the responses to nationalist conflicts throughout the region during the 1980s, but Yugoslavia's republican elites could not agree on a joint policy for managing the mounting threats to their multinational system. At its last congress in January 1990, the Serbian Communist party, led by Milosevic and supported by the Yugoslav National Army, sought to reinforce the communist regime's role of holding Yugoslavia together; but other republican leaders, particularly in Slovenia and Croatia, did not want to continue down that path. They clearly perceived that a departure from the communist system could serve as their path away from Yugoslavia and toward the establishment of their own independent states. Thus, each of the republics was pursuing a separate policy, combining the national cause with ideological choice.

Saving the communist regime remained the one method by which conservative elites in Serbia, including the YNA, could simultaneously preserve the Yugoslav state and achieve the goal of Serbian unification within one country. After the conservatives took power in 1987, they saw little advantage in democratic change. This is unfortunate. In fact, the only way that Serbia could have successfully resolved its national question of all Serbs living within one state would have been for it to take the leading role in democratization, offering a multiparty system, a liberal federation, and a free-market economy. Such was the path taken by other republics, first by Slovenia and Croatia, and then to some extent by the other republics. The conservative Serbian elite believed it was left with few options: It defended the old regime and opposed political pluralism and economic reform.100

The dual games (national and ideological) played by all the republics to a greater or lesser extent actually precluded both of two possible paths to a resolution of the federation's crisis. The republics' leaders were unable to either reimagine Yugoslavia as a democratic and minimal state or to break away peacefully by creating new, separate, democratic states. These games led to the final stage of Yugoslavia's disintegration, which went through four phases: (1) introducing varying degrees of political pluralism, which fostered and in some cases even maximized the interests of the different republics; (2) giving precedence to national goals over economic interests and political reform; (3) establishing national states as ethnocracies, that is, differentiating citizens' rights and obligations along ethnic lines; and (4) negotiating the age-old question of Yugoslavia's political form. Taken together, these four phases amounted to a prelude to war.

Political pluralism

The republics witnessed the formation of a variety of new political parties during 1989-90. Since most of these parties to varying degrees advanced nationalist programs, political pluralism in Yugoslavia was strongly colored by nationalism from the very start. In April 1990, Slovenia and Croatia held their first free elections; the Communists lost in both cases. Meanwhile, Serbia's official policy remained at the level of reform rhetoric; Serbian leaders continued to advocate political pluralism without actually introducing a multiparty system. However, once all of the other governments in the region had squarely embarked on the path of political reform, Serbia had no choice but to accept multiparty elections. The League of Communists of Serbia rechristened itself the Socialist Party in July 1990. Although all of the communist parties in the various republics entered their respective multiparty elections under new names, only in Serbia and Montenegro did these renamed communist parties win, and only then with the support of the YNA. At that time, the YNA openly supported the Serbian side--or, more precisely, Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia. The three main tenets of this coalition were: 1) both partners were against liberal and democratic changes; 2) both viewed the new Yugoslavia as a vehicle for advancing Serbian and military interests; and 3) both had majority participation of Serbs. The other republics' new parties were able to push the Communists into the opposition, and in doing so the republics could assert that they had become "democracies" by virtue of having overthrown their communist predecessors. In Serbia, on the other hand, a combination of communism and nationalism won out.

The most important fact about these first free elections was that they confirmed the power of the offensive strategy of defending national interests. Bosnia-Herzegovina's first and only elections were particularly instructive when viewed from this standpoint. The Bosnians had a chance to vote for the liberal and reformist party of the then Yugoslav prime minister, Ante Markovic. Indeed, his party seemed to be the most popular in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But it turned out that the people from each of the three national communities were afraid to take the chance to vote for the civic parties, fearing that the others might vote for nationalist ones--a typical "prisoner's dilemma." Thus, the results of the elections mirrored the national census; almost all citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina voted according to their national affiliation. Nationalist parties won in all of the republics, except Macedonia.101

Maximal nationalist programs became enshrined as state policy in the main rival republics, Serbia and Croatia. In both republics, opposition parties decided to expand nationalist agendas rather than devise alternative programs that would strike some balance between nationalist and democratic goals, between extremist and moderate national policies. Some of the ultranationalist opposition parties, in cooperation with their respective state governments, set up their own armies and paramilitary formations, which eventually would be responsible for horrible crimes.

The centrality of ethnicity in Yugoslavia's political life grew as the victorious nationalist parties spread beyond their borders, serving the interests of their conationals, or "constituent peoples," who lived in other republics. Thus, Franjo Tudjman's Croatian Democratic Union opened branches for Croats living in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Vojvodina. Similarly, Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia formed local branches of the Serbian Democratic Party with guidance from Belgrade.102 The Muslim Party of Democratic Action, led by Alija Izetbegovic, originated in Bosnia-Herzegovina but soon expanded to Serbia and Montenegro to support the Muslims living in Sandzhak. Moreover, larger national minorities, such as the Albanians and Hungarians, established their own ethnic-based political parties, first in Kosovo and Macedonia and then in Vojvodina, respectively. Thus, the whole space of Yugoslavia and the republics themselves were divided up by ethnic parties with their various public and hidden agendas.

The Priority of National Over Economic Interests

At the beginning of 1990, the new Yugoslav prime minister (who would also be its last), Ante Markovic, introduced a dynamic program of economic reform, succeeding in reducing the galloping rate of inflation from an annual 2,600 percent to zero in about six months. He offered a vision of a new economic system governed by market principles and privatization, making room for a political union of a new, democratic Yugoslavia. Markovic attained considerable popularity throughout the country, even superseding in this respect the "fathers" of its dominant nations, Milosevic and Tudjman. Indeed, for a time it seemed as though a united Yugoslavia might succeed in acquiring a new lease on life. With his liberal political outlook and substantial economic success, Markovic represented a real chance for the various nations to avoid the path of war and destruction and, instead, turn toward a future based on modernization and eventual European integration. During 1990, the standard of living rose as hard-currency reserves swelled to $7.1 billion, twice their 1989 level. The country's foreign debt decreased and repayments took place on schedule.

Markovic's economic and political program ran counter to the nationalist politics pursued by the various republics. Markovic eschewed the endless discussions about Yugoslavia's future political form, insisting that the term used for such a form (i.e., federation or confederation) was not important. What mattered most to Markovic was maintaining a consensus on the usefulness of an integrated, well-functioning state that would facilitate economic reform. To consolidate political support for his ideas, Markovic founded his own political party, the Alliance of Reform Forces of Yugoslavia, in July 1990. Unfortunately, this came after the formation of the nationalist parties and the elections in Slovenia and Croatia, too late to influence developments in these two breakaway republics. Markovic founded his party in Bosnia as a symbol of Yugoslavia's ethnic diversity and as a concrete embodiment of the multiethnic idea of "living together."

Curiously, Markovic's program was both successful and popular in all the republics, including Serbia, but he was unable to convert this popularity into electoral support for his party. He failed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro, and had relatively little success in Macedonia. There was little doubt that the decisive factor in Markovic's defeat was insecurity about voting for someone who did not represent one's own ethnic community; too many people believed that voting only for their own national leaders would guarantee their safety.

Although practically none of the republican leaders (except those in Macedonia) supported him, Markovic faced an especially ruthless attack from Serbia. Slobodan Milosevic clearly intended to destroy this unpredictable obstacle to his own political plan for restructuring Yugoslavia's political space.103 When Markovic proposed constitutional changes to embrace further economic reform and to make room for federal elections, Slovenia and Croatia joined Serbia in blocking his proposals. The republics thus decisively precluded the possibility of an economic and democratic reconstruction of the federal state and a democratic dialogue about Yugoslavia's future. After the political leaders squandered this opportunity, national conflicts gained momentum. The country was swiftly moving from one crisis to yet another.

Ethnocracies and war from inside the republics

The new republican governments produced their own internal instabilities by discriminating against national minorities (or groups sharing the ethnicity of peoples from other constituent republics). This discrimination created a vicious circle: In order to realize their desire for national sovereignty, the newly elected governments developed powerful and militant nationalist movements backed by propaganda, discriminatory policies, and violations of human and civil rights. Backed by the republican political leaders, these movements produced disaffected and separatist minority groups that, in turn, posed a real "disturbance" to the republics' national sovereignty and territorial integrity. In reaction to the militant separatist behavior of these minority groups, the republics quickly acquired the highly centralized, authoritarian machinery of states that were ill suited to the heterogeneous composition of their population. The governments of Serbia and Croatia were typical of this situation, the former in relation to the Albanian minority in Kosovo and the latter in relation to its Serbian minority.

Armed conflicts first broke out in Kosovo after Serbia abolished its autonomy. Subsequent repressive measures in Kosovo then provoked fresh revolts, mass demonstrations, and the eventual, complete alienation of the Albanian minority. In January 1990, approximately forty thousand students staged demonstrations in Kosovo, demanding both an end to the extraordinary political measures and the release of Azem Vlasi, a Kosovar political leader who was on trial. By the beginning of February, Kosovo was on the brink of civil war. The Yugoslav National Army intervened against the demonstrators, killing twenty-seven ethnic Albanians and wounding many more.104 In July 1990, ethnic Albanian delegates to Kosovo's provincial assembly submitted a declaration proclaiming Kosovo a republic. A few days later, the Serbian legislature dismissed Kosovo's provincial assembly. The ethnic Albanians of Kosovo then boycotted the elections in Serbia to show that they did not recognize Serbia as their country. Finally, they created their own shadow government and held a "secret" referendum on the question of an independent Kosovo.

Croatia's failure to provide adequate minority rights guarantees fueled the fires of rebellion among Croatian Serbs, who had already been strongly supported from Belgrade and had raided local police stations to supplement their arms caches.105 The new Croatian government confronted armed resistance when it set out to take over and change the ethnic composition of the police stations in predominantly Serbian areas of the republic. The violence started in Knin in August 1990, when Croatian government officials began gathering arms from the police stations and prevented Serbs from taking them. In the largely Serb-populated Krajina region of Croatia, Serbs were preparing to hold a referendum on their political autonomy, a prospect that inflamed tempers throughout the rest of Croatia. The government in Belgrade encouraged the discontented Croatian Serbs, spreading propaganda about the inevitable repetition of the Ustashe genocide against the Serbs in World War II. With the rejuvenation of these memories, Serbia's leaders promoted the fear of a complete return to the past among Croatia's Serbs, pushing them even closer to the precipice of war.106 In mid-1991, conflicts escalated in those areas of Croatia populated by large numbers of Serbs, who were openly supported in their efforts by the Yugoslav National Army.107

Negotiations, collapse, war

After seventy years of existence, the circle was closed: Yugoslavia found itself repeating the same historical debate about what form the Yugoslav state should take. Just as had occurred seventy years before, a number of different proposals were on the table again. Slovenia and Croatia proposed confederation, an arrangement that was to be construed as resembling the structure of the European Union. The proposed confederation would consist of sovereign and internationally recognized states that would regulate matters of joint interest, such as a common market, defense and security, human rights, and European integration.108 Serbia and Montenegro proposed a "democratic federation," which in practice would have meant the termination of the confederal elements introduced by the 1974 Yugoslav constitution.109 The proposal adumbrated a set of classical federal principles, including the sovereignty of citizens at both the federation and republican levels.110 The third and most conciliatory solution was advanced jointly by Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which envisioned Yugoslavia retaining its identity as a state and its republics as sovereign entities.111 All three proposals failed, since the protagonists--Slovenia and Croatia on the one hand, and Serbia on the other--were in no mood to compromise. The compromise solution aimed at saving Yugoslavia proposed by Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina was rejected just weeks before the war started.

Direct negotiations between the national leaders began in the spring of 1991. The talks produced no results in part because the leading republics had already decided unilaterally and in secret coalitions to follow their own particular interests. Slovenian and Serbian leaders came to an agreement that Slovenia could secede and that Serbs had a right to live in one state. Another secret agreement between Tudjman and Milosevic, created as far back as March 1991 in Karadjordjevo (Serbia), formed an alliance against Markovic and divided up Bosnia-Herzegovina between Serbia and Croatia.112 These so-called reserve alternatives were under way long before direct negotiations started. Slovenia and Croatia were preparing to gain their independence--by force, if necessary.113 The Serbian side was preparing for a war to establish a Serbian national state, but not within the existing "communist" borders.114

Finally, federal agencies started to collapse with the withdrawal from the Federal Assembly of first the Slovenian and Croatian members and then the representatives from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia. By September 1991, the Yugoslav presidency was reduced to a "rump" composed of only Serbian and Montenegrin representatives. This process paralleled the individual republics' referenda on independence (beginning with Slovenia and ending with Bosnia-Herzegovina) and their subsequent declarations of independence. Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence in June 1991. The Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Serbian Republic of Krajina declared their independence in December 1991.

War erupted in Slovenia in June 1991 when Slovenes removed federal signs along the Slovenian border and occupied the border outposts and customs offices. The Yugoslav federal government sent a unit of the YNA to replace Yugoslav border signs and return the federal customs officers to their posts. The YNA decided to fulfill this task by moving into Slovenia with tanks and carrying out their orders with force. Slovenian Territorial Defense units responded by attacking the YNA detachments, which were defeated in a few short days. The YNA then quickly withdrew from Slovenia.

Immediately thereafter, war broke out in Croatia between the rebellious Serb population and the Croatian police guard. The YNA sided with the Croatian Serbs under the pretext of protecting the Serb population from genocide and ensuring its right to self-determination. The YNA practically waged a war against Croatia, as it would do later in Bosnia-Herzegovina; the Croatian forces also joined in the latter conflict. So began the long and tragic division of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Serbs and Croats.115

Conclusions

I have confined my analysis of the Yugoslav crisis to the internal factors that led to both the collapse of the state and the onset of war. The international community has had an important influence on the crisis and a decisive impact on the dynamics of the conflict. A proper treatment of the conflict itself, important though it may be, would go beyond the framework of this study. Nevertheless, based upon my analysis of the internal factors of Yugoslavia's breakdown, I offer some recommendations in the form of conclusions that may be useful for international decision making on ways to avert such conflicts in the future. I offer these broad recommendations despite the fact that the Yugoslav case is unique, just as the factors contributing to the breakdown of all multinational federations are unique. Still, we can draw some important lessons from Yugoslavia's demise, especially with regard to the critical ethnic problems that still plague the former Soviet Union and East-Central Europe.

Yugoslavia and the USSR shared the same type of multinational federal institutions, ethno-demographic mix of populations, and large diaspora communities whose status would change significantly with the dismemberment of both federal states. Both cases involved the creation of new national states in which one ethnic group became predominant. The politics of ethnic unification invites conflicts over borders (for example, Nagorno-Karabakh in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, and the Krajina region in Croatia). Secession that does not entail a change of either borders or minority-majority status (as was the case with Slovenia, a uniquely homogeneous republic in the Yugoslav federation) might still lead to an imbalance in the ethno-national composition of the rest of the multinational federation, encouraging other ethnically mixed regions or republics to claim the right to self-determination in order to avoid the potential domination of one of the remaining federal units.

Therefore, the first conclusion we can draw from the case of Yugoslavia is that the international community should treat the dismemberment of multinational states with great caution, attempting to moderate the tempo of state dissolution and thus avoid an all-or-nothing result. Otherwise, it is virtually impossible to establish procedures for peaceful decision making. Here, too, it is important for the international community to avoid spurious assumptions in deciding how it should respond to the crisis (for example, the convenient assumption that nationalism is a benign ally in the struggle against communist regimes).

Although Yugoslavia never succeeded in creating a wholly legitimate and democratic state, neither did it comprise an "empire" in which all its constituent nations had the same desire for independence from the center. As I have argued in this study, Yugoslavia was a patchwork of ethnically mixed regions, and it contained just as many "national questions" as there were approaches to resolving them. Not all of these approaches involved the kind of ethnic symmetry necessary for a successful political outcome. Some of Yugoslavia's republics, like Slovenia and Croatia, were more inclined to push for the complete devolution of the federal state. Serbia, on the other hand, played the role of the state's guardian, trying to maintain the power of the center for its own interests. The interests of Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were somewhere in between these two dominant positions. Creating independent, ethno-national states from the disintegrating federation was highly problematic from the very beginning, since the maximal solutions proposed for most of Yugoslavia's various national questions were in fundamental conflict with one another. The all-or-nothing nature of these solutions, leavened with the nationalist fervor with which Yugoslavia's republican political leaders pursued them, made war and gross violations of human rights natural accompaniments. This scenario applies throughout the region. When a maximal solution is proposed for one national question, then all other competing national claims emerge in the same extreme form. In these predictable and potentially lethal conditions, such conflicts require early preventive actions that aim at inhibiting the rise of extreme solutions and the escalation of nationalist responses.

A major problem with the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, as executed by extreme nationalist political elites, was the apparent absence of alternative solutions that would have prevented (or stopped altogether) the war and reestablished peace and security in the region. Thus, I offer as another recommendation that the international community actively work with the relevant parties to arrange a temporary status quo compromise if the dismemberment of multinational states is not preceded by both an internal consensus on the terms for creating new states, including their borders and the status of minorities, and a clear conception of future security and cooperation arrangements.

This last item gives rise to the question of whether reaching agreement on procedures that enable the conflicting parties to arrive at any sort of consensus is even feasible in such profound crises. What happens if the parties can find no common ground to work out the decision-making rules and institutions--or, short of these, compromise solutions--that will govern the dismemberment of the country? Absent such common ground, solutions typically appear as a fait accompli; and once they are under way, workable political solutions and peaceful attempts to prevent or stop violent conflicts are almost impossible to find. Thus, the Vance-Owen proposal for ending the hostilities in Bosnia-Herzegovina came too late; that is, after the Bosnian Serbs already held more than 70 percent of Bosnian territory. At the same time, the international community did not really press for acceptance of the plan, since its members could not reach a firm consensus among themselves. The United States, for example, did not express much enthusiasm for the plan, apparently because it would have required an uncertain--and undesirable--degree of U.S. military participation to bring the plan to fruition.

Because there was no internal consensus in the Yugoslav case, two messages should have been sent by the international community to Yugoslavia's republican leaders: (1) that no unilateral decisions about secession would be accepted, and (2) that the use of military force would be met with a military response. Asking the antagonists to respect human rights, democratic institutions, and international law was tantamount to doing nothing to prevent conflict. If the various leaders of Yugoslavia's warring factions observed these rights and principles in the first place, they would not have found themselves suddenly trying to vanquish one another.

To be sure, the international community's recognition of these new states was woefully insufficient to secure their peace and security. Not only must such recognition take into account the internal and external threats involved in each case, but it must be real in the sense that the new state must either be able to defend itself or be defended by international military forces. Otherwise, the international community produces highly unstable situations that lead to victim-states and victimized populations. The experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina has discredited the concept of collective security, and has severely undermined the credibility of the UN and NATO. Similarly, the conflict has weakened the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and has clouded the otherwise bright prospects for future European integration and its institutional machinery overall.

In the wider context of the political transformation of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, a more fundamental debate has been rekindled: the right to national self-determination and how this vague principle might be reconsidered and clarified in order to make it a workable concept in international law. The abuse of this right in the Yugoslav case points up the need for such an examination, as the right to self-determination came to be equated with the right of ethnically defined nations/republics to secede from the federation, regardless of the mass violence such an act would surely entail. The republics' unilateral acts of secession were in turn met with internal acts of secession by minority ethno-national communities, invoking the same principle of self-determination. The international community, meanwhile, did very little to clarify the situation. In fact, its actions during the early stages of Yugoslavia's dissolution probably contributed more than any other factor to dashing the prospects of the multinational federation's giving birth to sovereign, independent states in a peaceful fashion, as its recognition of the new states was based more on strategic calculations and risk-aversion than on an established international legal principle. The failure to develop guidelines for the application of this principle only served to exacerbate conflicts and provide the justification for nationalist pathologies, such as so-called ethnic cleansing, and the violent eruption of emerging mini-states.

This is not the place to develop either a new concept of self-determination or the criteria for the recognition of this right by the international community. Rather, a more practicable endeavor would be simply to suggest that the international community discourage claims to collective rights that infringe upon the enjoyment of individual ones, especially in East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, whose citizens are still making democracy's requisite psychological transition from collective to individual rights and the observance of civil liberties. Future discussions about the notion of self-determination should start from an investigation of the specific characteristics of new cases emerging in the postcommunist era. Drawing on the arguments elaborated in this study, I would suggest that a minimal precondition for the international community's support of a nation's claims to the right of self-determination be a viable political community in which the full rights of citizenship do not depend upon membership in the dominant ethno-national group and whose democratically expressed will for independence transcends the ethnic base of the state.

As preconditions for the peaceful application of the right to self-determination, one other factor should be present when invoking this right: the respect of both territorial integrity and minority rights. This does not mean that the boundaries between states are immutable. It does mean, however, that they cannot be changed by force or without consideration of the consequences that the redrawing of international borders would have for other members of the state. Above all, there should be some international mechanism that provides for the renegotiation of borders and that encourages all sides to recognize the consequences of newly drawn international borders for all relevant parties.

The right to self-determination ought not be exercised at the expense of the rights of others, particularly those who will become minorities in the new states. This means that plebiscites, referenda, and ethno-national coalitions--which, by their very nature, exclude the voices of newly created minorities--are not adequate foundations for the formation and recognition of new states. Indeed, in the case of Yugoslavia, they became a treacherous road to war. Various new forms of national self-expression, autonomy, and political representation must be developed to fit the new situations arising in complex, multiethnic states today. But none of these variations should be so encumbered by collective national ideologies as to override the liberal ideal of individual liberties and civil rights.

I have described here a typical case of ethno-nationalism, which is characterized by a rigid ideology and the aggressive politicization of national identities. Another important conclusion that can be derived from this case is that the interpretation of both national membership (i.e., citizenship) and the nation itself plays a key role in shaping policies conducive to the establishment of a democratic nation-state. Human collectivities that define themselves in organic terms, as "superfamilies" in which myths about blood ties provide the predominant image of communal identity, find it difficult to establish universal, democratic rules of governance. Their goal of creating a state for "their people" will always be out of reach, as other people "get in the way" and must be removed--by force, if necessary. It is impossible in this part of the world to create a stable state on the basis of the sovereignty of one particular ethnically defined group.

This outcome was particularly likely in multinational Yugoslavia, which suffered from undemocratic regimes, economic backwardness, and overlapping national goals. The old regime's more conservative element grabbed the chance to achieve Serbian unification and preserve itself in power at the same time. In Croatia, new elements of the authoritarian regime were added to the old in the service of defending a "young democracy" and creating a new nation-state. In order to establish a permanent peace and to reconstruct the region in economic, political, and cultural terms, the current elites will have to be replaced by new democratic leaders capable of introducing innovative ideas and visions that will foster the development of each of these countries and of the region as a whole. Such a perspective is necessary as the only way to eliminate the conditions that produce unitary national identities and their destructive political manipulation.

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