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Draft: Please do not cite without author's permission

Notes

1.See for example John Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War,” International Security, vol.15, no.1 (Summer 1990), pp.5-56.

2.See for example Barry Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” Survival, vol.35, no.1 (Spring 1993), pp.27-47; and James Fearon, "Ethnic War as a Commitment Problem," unpublished manuscript.

3.See for example Samuel Huntington, "Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993.

4.See for example Donald Horowitz, "Democracy in Divided Societies," in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Democracy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp.35-55.

5.On Bosnia, see John Mearsheimer and Robert Pape, “The Answer: A Partition Plan for Bosnia,” The New Republic, June 14, 1993, pp. 22-28; on partition as the only answer for stability, see Chaim Kaufmann, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars,” International Security, vol.20, no.4 (Spring 1996), pp.136-175.

6.Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Milton Esman, Ethnic Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Of course this institutionalization of ethnicity merely serves to reify ethnic groups, creates institutional interests defined in ethnic terms, and thus ensures that conflicts will be described and justified in such cultural terms. In that sense, consociational “solutions” merely become a self-fulfilling prophecy about the basically ethnic nature of politics in ethnically heterogeneous polities.

7.Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

8.There was no history of violence between Serbs and Croats before the early part of this century; at that time the incidents of violence were the result of particular policies on the part of the ruling Hungarian authorities in Croatia to foment such conflict. Also, there was very close cooperation between Serb and Croat political parties--the Croat-Serb coalition--which dominated politics in the south Slav Habsburg lands from 1905 to 1914. Likewise, from 1928 until 1941 the main Serb and Croat parties in Croatia cooperated very closely against Belgrade. Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse (London: Hurst and Co., 1995), pp.27-28, 37-38; and V.P. Gagnon, Jr., “Historical Roots of the Yugoslav Conflict,” in Milton Esman and Shibley Telhami, eds., International Organizations and Ethnic Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp.179-197.

9.See V.P. Gagnon, Jr., “Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia,” International Security, vol.19, no.3, pp.132-133.

10.Of course some people with memories of WWII indeed supported such violence or saw it as inevitable; for example Croatian emigrés linked with the wartime Ustasha movement were instrumental in the policy of violent conflict in Central Bosnia between Croats and Muslims, and played an important role in the anti-Serb violence in Croatia in 1990 and 1991. Likewise emigré Chetniks played an important role in the most extremist violence in Bosnia. Significantly many of these were emigrés who'd left Yugoslavia at the end of World War II because of connections to extremist and genocidal regimes. They were a very small minority. Although they were very much represented in the subsequent violence, they can hardly be seen as expressing the sentiments and repressed longings of the majority of the population.

11.The exception is the 1992 presidential race, in which Milosevic , who as usual portrayed himself as a peacemaker and concentrated on social and economic issues as well as ethnic ones, was underbid by Milan Panic, whose campaign was explicitly anti-nationalist. The regime denied Panic access to television for political advertising--curious from the ethnic outbidding perspective since the anti-nationalist stance should have served to discredit Panic. In the end, despite enormous disadvantages, including a campaign limited to 2 weeks and being labelled a CIA agent, Panic received about 1/2 the vote according to exit polls, although the regime’s “official” figures, very clearly doctored, gave him only 35 percent. On the details of this strategy of ethnic underbidding, see V.P. Gagnon, Jr., “Ethnic Conflict as Demobilizer: The Case of Serbia,” Institute for European Studies Working Paper, no. 96.1 (Ithaca: Institute for European Studies, Cornell University, May 1996).

12.For example the SRS received 2 percent of the vote in 1990. The notable exception is in the election of 1992, when the SRS received the votes of 19 percent of the electorate; but significantly Belgrade television (controlled by the SPS) was at this time presenting the SRS as a moderate, respectable party. When the regime shifted back to portraying the SRS in its true colors in the 1993 elections, SRS support dropped to 10 percent of the vote.

13.In 1992, HSP received 7.3 percent of votes cast; and consistently in public opinion polls ranged between 5 and 10 percentage points.

14.Similarly, in the final days of the 1994 parliamentary campaign Tudjman struck a very conciliatory and moderate tone, saying that with the war over Croatia could now move to real democracy and stressing the importance of peaceful coexistence with Croatia’s Serbs. Regime propaganda also portrayed Croatian forces as merely protecting innocent Croatian civilians from the attacks and atrocities of the extremist Serb leaders in Krajina, and often portrayed Serb civilians there as victims of the extremists.

15.Although the occasional extremist newspaper columnist would call for all Serbs to “go home” to Serbia, the overall tone in the television coverage was that Croatian forces were behaving very properly; atrocities that according to international investigations did take place against civilians were denied.

16.See statements by Vojislav Šešelj, head of one of the most notorious such groups; as well as similar information on other paramilitary groups (including the Tigers and White Eagles) in Laura Silber and Allen Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York: TV Books, 1995).

17.On the fact that this war was directed from Zagreb, used extremists from Hercegovina imposed on the HDZ-BH, and purposely sought to destroy the multiethnic nature of most of Central Bosnia: personal interview with Josip Manoli , a founder of the HDZ and one of the top leaders at the time of this conflict, July 8, 1996, Zagreb; see also interview with Manoli in Nacional (Zagreb), July 5, 1996, pp.8-9. On atrocities see Helsinki Watch, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, vol. 2 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1994).

18.This is not to deny that some of the participants took part in the demonstrations because of a perception of liberation from the repression of open expression of national sentiment in the past. But the rallies were very clearly organized and staged pro-Milosevic events.

19.Estimates range up to 100,000.

20.For example Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism.

21.This section is based on Gagnon, "Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict."

22.On this see interview with Vojislav Vukcevic (former head of SDS of Eastern Slavonia and Baranja) in Srpska Rec, (date), as well as other cites in Gagnon, "Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict."

23.Borisav Jovic, close to Milosevic and Serbia’s representative on the Yugoslav presidency, in his recent memoirs, puts the term rebellion in quotation marks in his chapter about the events in Krajina. Borisav Jovic, Poslednji Dani SFRJ (Belgrade: Politika, 1995), p.178. For details on the way in which Belgrade foisted extremists onto the SDS who in turn provoked conflict, see Gagnon, "Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict."

24.Jovic, Poslednji dani SFRJ.

25.In terms of the strategy of reconstructing the political community and political space, Serbia has clearly succeeded in creating the image of a Serbian state, although one in which other national minorities do exist. But what is key is that the notion of groupness has been defined in cultural terms, with "hard" borders and a common interest. While the image of threats and injustices to Serbs is still always in the background, what is interesting is the shift over the past few years toward a focus in politics that coincides with the themes that had been stressed by the SPS during electoral campaigns: the economy, social justice, and other non-national issues. Now that political space has successfully been restructured, the political community, a Serb one, is being redefined in more ideological terms reminiscent of Yugoslav self-management ideology. The main challenge to this image of cultural groupness with ideological interests is at this point the Albanians of Kosovo, who make up over 16 percent of Serbia's population. Not only are they left out of this new redefined political community, but they have also developed structures of power outside of the state socialist system, structures that are in many ways the antithesis of the old structures since they rely on private ownership of economic production. The Albanians have been effectively excluded not only from the official vision of the political community defined in cultural terms, but also from political process itself, because of their boycott of Serbian electoral politics. But as long as Kosovo is legally part of Serbia, there always exists the theoretical possibility of a challenge; thus an important goal may be to complete the restructuring of territorial political space of Serbia by either expelling the Albanians from Kosovo, or allowed part or all of Kosovo to leave Serbia.

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