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Draft: Please do not cite without author's permission

Conclusion

Of course both the Serbian and Croatian strategies have also been seriously impacted by the involvement of the outside world. The imposition of the Washington Accord in 1994, which ended the Croat-Muslim war and set up a Federation of cantons, was imposed by the US. Although the agreement itself and the idea of the federation were the product of moderate Bosnian Croats, the hard liners have remained in power to oversee its implementation--the result has been total non-implementation. Likewise the Dayton accord has made the local actors less able to achieve their main goals. But political space has been restructured in Serbia, Croatia, and all parts of Bosnia. Violence and atrocities have created new realities on the ground, realities that correspond to the idea of hard, real ethnic political communities with objective and identifiable interests, determined by the purveyors of conflict.

These conflicts have clearly been purposely constructed; far from collapsing, certain political forces went to great lengths to ensure Yugoslavia's destruction. These policies of violence were not responses to demands from the ethnic masses, nor were they attempts to mobilize those masses. Rather, they were strategies of certain parts of the political, economic and military elites in the various Yugoslav republics to prevent or hinder deep changes in the structures of power of their respective republics. In order to neutralize the danger of challenger elites who sought to mobilize the population against the status quo, threatened elites had to redefine political community, creating a hard, apparently clearly bounded community defined in ethnic terms, with clear, objective interests. While creating the image and idea of such a community, they also had to create a corresponding territorial reality on the ground, which meant also destroying existing realities on the ground. This restructuring of political space took the form of expulsion, killing, genocide. And the strategists of destruction, while inflicting enormous suffering on the people of Yugoslavia, have proved enormously successful in realizing their main goals: preserving authoritarian, anti-democratic structures of political and economic power within their respective republics, and repositioning themselves in a way such that they can successfully deal with the challenge of pressures for change from within society as well as from the international environment.

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