Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-19T06:31:10.999Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Citizens, Boundaries, and Nations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Sidney Tarrow
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Language of Contention
Revolutions in Words, 1688–2012
, pp. 138 - 164
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Balkin's, Jack Constitutional Redemption (2011)
Tilly, Charles and Tarrow, Sidney, Contentious Politics (2007: Ch. 4)
Rials, Stephane, ed., Textes Constitutionnels français (1982)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×