"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Draft: Please do not cite without author's permission

Serbia

In Serbia, the threat to elites took the form of pressures for a fundamental change in the structure of power in Serbia and in Yugoslavia as a whole.[21] This threat came from below and from outside, in the form of pressures for liberalization and then democratization politically; and in the form of pressures for radically reforming and then dismantling the socialist economic system, relying on private ownership and criteria of efficiency and profitability, and removing political criteria (ideological fitness) as a determining factor in choosing managers. The external pressures included the wave of democratizations, especially the fall of communist party regimes in the rest of Eastern Europe (in particular the fate of the Ceauçescus), which in turn reinforced the pressure at home for democratic elections. It also included the need for Yugoslavia to repay its $20 billion hard currency debt, which put further pressure on elites to restructure the economy and stress efficiency over political goals. Related to this was a domestic economic crisis, including falling living standards and increasing unemployment.

Pressures for change came from within the Serbian communist party elite itself, but also from reformists in other Yugoslav republics. Until 1990 the relevant political arena was the communist party. From 1990 onward the wider population became a key part of the political process, as well as the source of pressure for radical changes in structures of power (as in the other socialist countries).

The threat to Serbs that was constructed was first (from the early 1980s onward) that of Serbs in Kosovo being attacked, raped, driven out and killed by Albanians. From 1988 onward the threat shifted to the revival of the Ustasha movement in Croatia, and then (after April 1990) the existence of an Ustasha regime in Zagreb; and the rise of an Islamic fundamentalist movement in Bosnia. These forces were said to be slaughtering innocent Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, replaying the genocide of World War II. In Bosnia there was the added threat of Muslim fundamentalists out to force Bosnian Serbs into an Islamic state and slavery. These alleged threats dominated the mass media, especially official Serbian television.

The actual policy that was followed was to provoke violent conflict along ethnic lines first in Croatia, then in Bosnia. In Croatia this involved sabotaging attempts to reach a compromise solution between moderates in the HDZ and in the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS)[22]; and the organization of a “rebellion” of Croatian Serbs against Zagreb.[23] Part of this strategy was to initiate bloody attacks on civilians, undertaken by paramilitary forces sent from Serbia, with the cooperation of the Yugoslav army. The stated goal was to “throw Slovenia and Croatia out of Yugoslavia,” that is, to provoke them to the point that they had no other option but to secede in order to give Serbia “legitimate” control over the federal institutions.[24] The preferred option would have been to retain much of the Dalmatian coast and Eastern Slavonia (for strategic and economic reasons); but in the end this proved too costly in domestic political terms and the possibility of outside military intervention brought the specter of military defeat (and thus possible defeat of the regime itself) as well.

In Bosnia too Belgrade’s policy was one of provoking violent and bloody conflicts against non-Serb civilians as a way of creating facts on the ground. Again, this was accomplished by sending in paramilitaries to “cleanse” the regions claimed by Serbs of non-Serb population. This was accomplished within several months of the first waves of ethnic cleansing in April 1992. Until Dayton the goal of the Serbian forces was to force the outside world to recognize the Republika Srpska as an independent political entity. Only when the Bosnian Serbs faced the possibility of military defeat in the summer of 1995 did they finally agree to less.

What was the goal of these strategies? As pointed out above, they did not seek to mobilize the population in Serbia behind the regime; indeed they had the opposite effect at times. The overall goal was to prevent changes in the structure of political and economic power, changes being advocated by elites within the communist party of Serbia and of the other Yugoslav republics. The strategy until early 1990 was to recentralize the Yugoslav communist party by ousting communist party leaderships in the other federal units who opposed Milosevic's goals. The images of threat to Serbs in Kosovo, and the mass rallies, were meant to shift the center of political discourse within the communist parties away from change and reform, toward the injustice and threats to innocent Serbs in Kosovo. The goal was to restructure political space within Yugoslavia, in particular within the communist parties: to abolish the autonomy of republic-level parties and reestablish centralized control as a means of preventing radical changes in the structure of political and economic power.

From 1990 onward, when the wider population become involved in politics, the strategy shifted to reconstructing political space in a different way: to create a new definition of the political community, in "hard" terms, as that of Serbs who were threatened in Yugoslavia; to delegitimize, marginalize and silence the democratic opposition parties within Serbia, who were mobilizing large parts of the population against the regime in the spring of 1991 and again in early 1992; and to destroy the facts on the ground, in Croatia and Bosnia, that contradicted the reconstructed political community and its borders. Here they sought territorially to create a political space that corresponded to the official vision of the political community. In such a community of Serbs defined in "hard" terms a demobilizing strategy centering on threats to Serbdom could continue to dominate political discourse and thus silence those who would advocate radical change. Prior to the war, the areas claimed as “greater Serbia” contained about 50 percent Serb population. One of the goals of “ethnic cleansing” was to increase the percentage of Serbs in that territory to about 80 percent. Only with such a relatively homogeneous population would such a strategy of preventing change by appeals to threatened Serbdom continue to work. In the smaller, reduced Greater Serbia, that included only the parts of Bosnia claimed by the Bosnian Serbs plus Serbia and Montenegro, the population structure prior to the war was only slightly more favorable to Serbs, with perhaps 55 or 60 percent. With the exclusion of all non-Serbs from the Bosnian Serb republic, this percentage increased to about 75 percent; within Republika Srpska, from 50 percent to over 90 percent.

The result has been success from the perspective of the structure of power. The ruling party in Serbia has just as much if not more control over Serbia’s political, economic and communications structures than before the war. The threat to that power is minimal. Croatian Serb territories have been lost, but if we see that enlarged territory was not the main goal, then this too can be seen as a success, because it increased the number of Serbs in Serbia by about 200,000, which helps offset the fact that Serbs make up only 67 percent of Serbia’s population, while it removes the need to defend strategically vulnerable territories. While it would have been preferable to retain control of the Dalmatian coast and Eastern Slavonia, these were clearly secondary to the key goal of retaining particular structures of power within Serbia. The Bosnian Serbs have also been cut off, in part due to international pressure, but in part due to the political threat that the Bosnian Serb SDS may pose to Serbia itself, and the very real political conflict between the SPS and the Bosnian SDS. The fear is perhaps a replay of the post-WWII era, when victorian Serb partisans from rural regions of Croatia and Bosnia swept into Serbia and imposed communism on the more quiescent Serbians, who had not been very supportive of the Partisan movement. Although this fear is probably overstated, what is clear is that for external reasons alone Milosevic has no interest in including RS into Serbia.[25]

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