"Collapse or Destruction? The Construction of the Yugoslav Wars"
Chip Gagnon

Paper presented at National Convention of AAASS, Boston, Mass., November 15, 1996

Draft: Please do not cite without author's permission

B. From Above: Ethnic entrepreneurs and mobilization

This version of the ethnic conflict story sees the wars as the logical result of ethnic mobilization. Politicians made appeals to ethnic themes in order to get support from the population. This in turn led to ethnic mobilization and, in a logical sequence, spiralled into violence along ethnic lines. That is, politicians "pushed the ethnic button" and the masses responded.

The so-called ethnic mobilizations that took place in Serbia in the mid- to late 1980s can only with difficulty be classified as true mobilizations. As mentioned, this was a time when the communist party was the locus of power, and the wider population was not directly politically relevant. Of course, as elsewhere in the socialist world people in Yugoslavia too were dissatisfied with the communist regime's repression of cultural rights. But the demonstrations in Serbia in this period that were characterized as "mobilizations" in fact were political rallies organized and orchestrated by the ruling party and its allies as a means to oust their opponents within the communist party. They were organized through the busing in of workers who were given the day off, given free food and alcohol, and through staged violence meant to put pressure on communist party leaders who disagreed with Milosevic. Such events are mobilizations only in the way that communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union staged "mobilizations" in the past. They were neither spontaneous nor directed against the regime in power.[18]

When it came time for democratic elections in Serbia, as mentioned above, the campaigns were marked not by ethnic outbidding, but rather by ethnic underbidding. The SPS did not call for violence and did not directly appeal to hatreds or ethnic divisions. In addition, despite the images on television from 1991 onward of atrocities against innocent Serb women, children and men by bloodthirsty Ustasha and Islamic hordes, young Serb men who were called up to serve in the army to defend these innocents did everything possible to avoid the draft. In Belgrade only five percent of those called up actually appeared, while elsewhere in Serbia the figure was only 20 percent. Hundreds of thousands of young men fled the country to avoid war. Those troops that did go to the front often deserted and returned to Serbia. When war moved to Bosnia, one of reasons no troops from Serbia were used is because of the unwillingness of Serbian men to take part in such wars. This reaction, as well as the lack of reaction to the fall of Krajina and NW Bosnia to Croatian and Croat-Muslim forces in 1995, puts into question the concept of ethnic solidarity as a natural and overridingly powerful interest or bond among Serbs, one so powerful that political elites could easily use it to manipulate and mobilize the population.

In Croatia, the 1991 war situation was more complex because, although some of the violence was due to provocations by HDZ extremists, the overall military attack on Croatia, including the targeting of purely civilian and cultural targets, was a purposeful policy on the part of Belgrade and the Yugoslav army. Yet even so, large numbers of young people left the country in order to avoid fighting; especially wealthier people or those with connections did everything possible to send their adult children abroad during the war.[19] The Croatian war in Bosnia also shows the limited validity of arguments about ethnic mobilization by appeals to solidarity. Despite images in the state-controlled media of innocent Croats as victims of Muslim atrocities in Bosnia, there was strong opposition among Croats in Croatia to joining Herceg-Bosna to Croatia. Rather than using images of violence and war in order to mobilize support, the Croatian regime seemed instead to be doing everything possible to prevent anti-war sentiment from being expressed. Once the public learned the true nature of the war, the HDZ's popularity plummeted and Tudjman brought the hostilities to an end (pressure from Washington was also a key factor here).

Forward to part 5, From Above

Back to part 3, From Below

These pages maintained by