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6 - Citizens, Boundaries, and Nations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Summary
As the Soviet Union started to crumble in the 1980s, Yugoslavia, too, began to dissolve. Made up of a congeries of historically hostile ethnic and religious groups, the country had been held together by the will of its resistance hero, Marshall Josip Broz Tito, and by the loosely federated constitution he created (Bunce 1999; Gagnon 2004; Glenny 1992; Kaplan 1993). On Tito's death in the 1980s, central control loosened and reformist groups began to agitate within the League of Communists for political pluralism (Gagnon: Ch. 2). Conservative groups reacted against this, turning to the nationalist card as a wall against reformism. As a result of constitutional change and political polarization, the center, as Valerie Bunce recalls, “was reduced to little more than a battleground among warring republican elites” (Bunce 1999: 88, 111–12).
Some observers, such as Robert Kaplan, were quick to see the influence of the ghosts of “ancient hatreds” as the primary cause of Yugoslav disintegration (1993). Others saw the cause as the political opportunism of leaders like Slobodan Milosevic. But it was the country's federal institutions that gave Milosevic the opportunity to emphasize ethnic loyalties in Kosovo, loyalties that he then used to win allies in conservative circles and to delegitimize reformists (Bunce 1999). And it was the hope of liberal reforms triggered by the tumult in the rest of the region that gave reformers the hope of creating a liberal democracy. While the reformers put forward a message of rebirth along liberal lines, their claims gave Milosevic the threat he could use to develop a redemptive nationalism to defeat them and whip up support for a takeover of ancient Serbian-ruled territories, as well as to begin a war of expansion in Croatia and Bosnia. As the federation began to disintegrate, the military – the one surviving central institution in Yugoslavia – became the key player in a game that was ever more violent (Bunce 1999: 92–5; 117–20). We know the end of the story: civil war, irredentism, and – in the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina – genocide.
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- The Language of ContentionRevolutions in Words, 1688–2012, pp. 138 - 164Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013