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Former
Yugoslavia in 1990:
Why It
Had a Bad Prognosis
By
Håkan
Wiberg
TFF Board
Member
June 14, 2004
Former Yugoslavia entered a process
of dissolution many years ago, which may be far from
completed yet. It took violent forms from 1991; events in
2004 in Macedonia and Kosovo indicate that we did hardly
see the end here either. Was the dissolution unavoidable?
Was war an inescapable consequence?
I shall attempt to translate these
issues into manageable research questions, trying to make
various postdictions concerning FY around 1990. There are
no natural laws in social science, so the questions will
deal with probabilities, asking what were the prognoses
with highest likelihood at that time point. No empirical
facts are drawn on that were not available at that time;
confirmed general propositions are used even if they have
only found empirical support later than 1990.
WAS A
DISSOLUTION INESCAPABLE?
The first question is then: how
probable was a dissolution, given the characteristics of
FY and the circumstances prevailing some fifteen years
ago. There is little quantitative research on when and
how states dissolve. One relevant classical finding is
Richardson's (1960: 190f.) that the longer two groups
lived under common government, the less likely is a civil
war. This does not say anything about peaceful
dissolutions; but these are historically quite rare, so
this finding actually covers the great majority of cases.
The first problem concerning FY is to define its age:
from 1918 or from 1945? In the first case, YU of 1990 was
older than two thirds of all states; in the second case,
it still belonged to the older half. Its prognosis on the
basis of this indicator only was therefore about average,
meaning that it was definitely less likely to dissolve
than to remain. If we use qualitative analyses instead,
the first problem is disagreement: some conclude that it
was doomed for a number of reasons, others that it was
fully viable. How convincing the pro and con arguments
are is a subjective matter, or at least contains large
subjective elements. There had indeed been attempts at
dissolving it, temporarily successful in 1941-45. Small
armed Croatian groups from abroad failed to get much
support in 1968 and were quickly suppressed. The Croatian
Spring in 1971 had much more support, initially also in
the party leadership, which, however, withdrew when
public demands rapidly escalated from cultural autonomy
to economic autonomy and from there to secession
(eventually claiming large parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina);
as a bid for dissolution it failed. The Albanian
uprisings in Kosovo/a in 1968 and 1980/81 demanded
recognition as a nation and a republic of their own in
FY; after the sanguinary defeat in 1981, largely
consensual demands soon escalated to full independence. A
series of economic reforms and constitutional compromises
had led to less and less of central government; but this
is definitely not the same thing as dissolution. In fact,
some research (e.g. Galtung 1996: 67f.) indicates the
opposite: contested states are more likely to survive as
such if they provide for autonomy and confederalisation
when demanded rather than stonewalling such demands. In
any case, adding qualitative aspects to the quantitative
aspect of age gives a different picture: FY in 1990
definitely belonged to the small group of states whose
very existence had been repeatedly challenged from
within.
COULD A
DISSOLUTION BE PEACEFUL?
Did the dissolution have to be
violent if it came? The (postdictive) prognosis in this
respect depends on how much we dare extrapolate from mere
historical regularities. Peaceful dissolutions of states
are historically rare. If we look at the 20th century up
to 1990 and disregard decolonisation (where the record is
more mixed) there are very few cases where a new state
emerged out of an existing one without this being the
result of a world war, a regional war or a civil war
(Wiberg 1983) : Norway from Sweden (1905), Finland from
Russia (1917),
Singapore from Malaysia (1965) and
the dissolution of the United Arab Republic in
196..
All these cases are marginal in one
of more ways. First, the initial relationship was rather
loose. In the two first cases, there was a personal union
rather than a common state: Finland and Norway had their
own constitutions, parliaments, currencies, etc..
Malaysia was a federation and the UAR a loose association
of two republics (in an even looser association with the
feudal kingdom of Yemen).
Second, none of the associations
was very old: the unions were created by military
conquest, in 1814 and 1809, respectively. Malaysia was
two years old and UAR three, so one might see them as
failed attempts at federation rather than dissolving
states. Third, the case of Finland can be seen as a
result of WWI resulting in Russia collapsing earlier in
1917 (the Finnish revolution broke out in early 1918,
when independence was already established and
non-contested). Fourth, no independence declaration was
contested, except - to some extent - Norway´s
(Sweden eventually agreed after a couple of months of
peaceful negotiations). Lenin immediately recognised the
Finnish declaration in December 1917, Singapore was
actually invited to secede by Malaysia, and the
dissolution of the UAR was uncontested. Even after its
major constitutional compromise in 1974 (and certainly
before it), FY was a "tighter" state than either of the
above.
Before 1990, there were some
demands for full independence that were shelved after
peaceful negotiations and/or referenda, such as Faroe
Islands from Denmark in 1946, Quebec from Canada and
Scotland from UK a generation ago - in neither of these
cases has the issue definitely disappeared. There is a
single case of success: Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971
- but only after India invading to stop the bloodbath of
Pakistan's army (with more than ten million temporary
refugees in India). Several attempts were crushed with
much violence (Tibet, Biafra, Katanga,....); in other
cases, fighting had continued for decades (Myanmar,
Sudan, Eritrea, East Timor, ...)
So the best prognosis in 1990 would
have been that if there were declarations of independence
in FY and if they were contested (highly probable), then
it was very probable that the result would be a war where
they would be defeated. In fact, there was war, but they
were not defeated. The most interesting post hoc question
(from an analytical point of view) is therefore why not
in spite of the heavy a priori odds against.
Adding the years since 1990 to our
data base would not change much. Apart from
Czechoslovakia and the USSR, there were two successful
independence movements. After the Indonesian invasion of
East Timor in 1974, the decades of severe repression may
have killed one third of the population; but the success
was entirely a result of international diplomatic
intervention - and threats of vast economic sanctions -
in a situation when only small tatters of the guerilla
remained. Eritrea was incorporated by Ethiopia in 1962 in
contravention of UNSC Resolution 390 (1950) prescribing
considerable autonomy in a federation. After thirty years
of bitter war, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front
agreed to assist the Tigray People´s Liberation
Front to take over power in Addis Ababa and TPFL agreed
to recognise Eritrean independence after doing so; both
promises were honoured, and were not contested in the
later war between them. Czechoslovakia's dissolution was
uncontested: when Slovakia tried to back up political
demands with threats of secession, the Czech government
was apparently happy to get rid of Slovakia. The
declarations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were
contested for about a year, until Russia declared itself
independent, thus de facto terminating the USSR. The
conclusion would remain the same: a contested unilateral
declaration of independence is very unlikely to succeed,
unless heavily supported by external
intervention.
WHAT STATISTICS
TELLS ON WAR AND FEATURES OF STATES
Let me now rephrase the second
question to asking what was the likelihood for war in
1990. This asks for a postdictive prognosis based on all
the factors that are known to be correlated with outbreak
of domestic war, making secession one (but ominous)
factor among others. The analysis will be made in three
steps: 1) What is generally known from quantitative
research on causes of wars? 2) What can be added to this
by adding aspects of the regional context? 3) What can be
further added to this by taking into account specific
features of FY?
The first question has an immediate
complication: several studies have replicated - and none
contradicted - the early finding that international wars
and domestic wars seem to be different species. A heavy
argument for this is that indicators of external conflict
and internal conflict have close to zero correlations
with each other (Tanter 1966; Finsterbusch 1974)), at
least until we introduce third variables (and even then
there is no clear pattern - Wilkenfeld 1973). Now one of
the hotly debated issues concerning the wars in FY, with
strong legal, moral and emotional overtones, is whether
they were civil wars all the time, civil war changing to
international war by recognitions (that abandoned the
traditional criteria for recognitions), international
wars from the first day of proclaimed independence, or
some other combination? This discussion (where I would
not know how to prove whatever stand I might take) can be
avoided however: we are considering the prognosis in
1990, which calls for the correlates of domestic wars. To
be on the safe side, I shall first also look at
correlates of wars in general or international
wars.
Since the pioneers (Richardson
1960; Wright 1942; Sorokin 1937), scores of quantitative
studies have to relate how frequently a state gets into
war to a great number of characteristics of states.
Sometimes this was done by "trawling", running a great
number of variables against each other and seeing what
correlations turned up. More sophisticated studies used
"casting", testing causal models by looking whether the
specific correlations they predicted were in fact there.
Results are almost entirely negative. Correlations of
single variables with war are almost all so close to zero
as to be statistically non-significant. Where they are at
least statistically significant, the correlation is
almost always so weak that it only accounts for a few per
cent of the total variation in occurrence of war, making
the variable quite weak as a predictor of war. Among the
very few that are stronger than that, even fewer have
gained more solidity by being successfully replicated.
The variables that satisfy most or all of these
desiderata and that therefore permit at least a weak
prognosis of war are essentially the following:
A1) On average, great powers go
much more to international war than other states (Wright
1942, Wallensteen 1973);
A2 ) States with many international
boundaries are on average more engaged in war than
others; if the correlation reveals some causality, it is
from boundaries to wars rather than the other way around
(Richardson 1960; Weede 1973)
A3) The balance of available
evidence speaks for the thesis that states that are
"overarmed" in the sense of having higher military
preparedness (manpower, expenditures) than is the average
for their size go more to war than others - but the
relationship is complex and there is sometimes a
chicken-and-egg problem of what causes what (Wiberg
1990).
Some studies found additional
correlates (Rummel 1979), but nothing to match these
three: correlations were weak and/or a third variable was
necessary to find them and/or the study was not
replicated. Let me just give a couple of examples: 1) A
state that is in rank disequilibrium (ranking higher on
military and economic strength than on diplomatic
recognition) at one time point participates slightly more
than average in war 10-15 years later (Wallace 1975); 2)
If a democratic state has (some kinds of) external
conflict, it gets more (of some kinds of) internal
conflict than average afterwards, whereas if an
authoritarian state has (some other kinds of) internal
conflict, then it gets more than average of (some kinds
of) external conflict afterwards. (Wilkenfeld
1973).
WHAT KINDS OF
PAIRS OF STATES GET INTO WAR?
So the total picture of causes of
belligerence or peacefulness of individual states
exhibits pretty little of clear structure (Vasquez 2000).
This may be due to wars being so specific and individual
that few valid generalisations are possible - and
practically all generalisations that can be found in
literature are invalid, having no observed significant
correlations to get support from. It may be due to
looking at the wrong variables, but this is unlikely:
very many variables, including all the traditional ideas,
were tried in systematic data analysis. And it may be
that we have looked at the wrong level, since it takes
two to tango. Let us therefore look at how
characteristics of pairs of states are related to their
getting into war with each other. This was done in
several studies, but the picture they give is also
relatively hazy. The essential results mainly - but not
entirely - mirror those from the single state level
(Wiberg 2000, 2002):
B1) An average pair of great powers
used to be much more likely to have a war than an average
pair of one great power and one minor state - whose
likelihood for war in turn is much higher than for an
average pair of two small states. In the post-1945
period, however, one part of the picture changes
entirely: an average pair of great powers has no war at
all, though there is no consensus on why not. In
addition, great powers are the only ones to fight others
than neighbours; a few exceptions, such as Vietnam and
Czechoslovakia, were due to a great power dragging some
satellites along (Wallensteen 1973).
B2) In general, much trade between
two states is associated with less than average war
between them, but here is a chicken-and-egg problem
(Barbieri 2002). There is one important proviso, however:
that the trade is relatively symmetric.If it is strongly
asymmetric, i.e. a great power takes a large share of the
trade of a minor state, then the probability of war is
clearly higher than if is symmetric; and when a great
power fights a small power, the latter is very likely to
lie in the former's zone of economic influence and
furthermore to be an economic satellite of the bigger
(Wallensteen 1973).
B3) If two "overarmed" states (in
the above sense) have a militarised dispute, then it is
twice as likely to escalate into war as a pair of one
"overarmed" and one "underarmed" - whose risk is twice as
high as that of two "underarmed" states (Singer 1981).
For two "overarmed" states the risk seems to particularly
high if they have just had an arms race (Wallace 1979,
Smith 1980) but the magnitude of the risk is disputed
(Wiberg 1990).
B4) Democracy is particularly
interesting. The standard finding from several studies of
single nations is that it has no effect: democracies are
neither more peaceful, nor more warlike, than other
states.Yet when we look at pairs of states, we find a
quite different picture: several studies concur that two
stable democracies do not get into war with each other
(with at most very few and quite marginal exceptions),
the so-called double democracy hypothesis (Gleditsch
& Hegre 1997).We have already seen that this cannot
be because democracies per se are more peaceful - they
are not. Two types of explanations have been empirically
shown to contribute. One is internal: there is nothing to
gain - and something to lose - politically in a democracy
by threatening another democracy with war, whereas
fighting a war with a non-democracy may increase
political support. The other is that democracies are to
an especially high degree tied to each other in common
organizations with common norms and values. Both seem to
have some explanatory value.
FIRST STEP: WHAT
STATISTICS TELLS ON DOMESTIC WARS
So much for international wars.
Since we are asking for a prognosis of internal war in FY
in 1990, these findings are not of much relevance, unless
we make the fiction of seeing its republics as
independent states even before any declarations of
independence. Once their independence is a clear fact a
bit later, some of the findings above may of course be
used to gauge the likelihood of war among them; but this
must be left for another analysis.
Some reservations must be added.
First, we must always be cautious when drawing
conclusions from mere correlations to causal relations.
Second, there are various categorizations of wars,
usually with "internal" or "domestic" or "civil" as one
of the categories, but it is often admitted that there is
no clear and sharp line between them and international
wars: several cases can be classified as both at the same
time, or form a special, "mixed" category. Third,
"internal conflict" is not a homogeneous category: it is
sometimes subdivided into two or even three types, where
war between organized forces typifies one, a coup
d´etat of the second and riots the third. Yet,
collected statistics on wars tends to simply use the
total or annual number of casualties as the criterion for
inclusion. Fourth, the bulk of quantitative research on
correlates of wars used to be on international wars -
which for decades have become fewer and fewer in relative
terms, nowadays accounting for less than one tenth of all
wars. (Gantzel 1997, Eriksson 2003). Finally, given the
non-correlation between external and internal war, we
should not try to locate causes of the latter by using
the correlates of the former. New studies are
needed.
An increasing number of major
studies on domestic wars has indeed been carried out
during the last two decades, and the major results are
found below together with assessments as to how they may
contribute to the (postdictive) prognosis for FY in 1990.
Several of them have to do with economy.
1a) The poorer a state is, the
higher is the risk for civil war, with the exception that
the risk decreases slightly again for extremely poor
states (FitzGerald 2000).
1b) This relationship is strong.
1c) The position of FY used to be
in the low risk area, but the economic crisis in the
1970s and 1980s moved it in the direction of the high
risk zone.
2a) Long and deep depressions tend
to lead to political radicalism of one or more kinds;
exactly what kinds depends on the specific circumstances.
2b) The relation is indirect, since
radicalism may or may not lead to war.
2c) FY had an extreme position in
terms of both the length and depth of the crisis. In
terms of GDP per capita (admittedly a rather weak
indicator of how people actually live) the average FY
worker lost about half his real income during the 1980s
and came back to the 1960 level (Schierup
1990).
3a) Recent studies at the World
Bank and elsewhere indicate that the higher the
proportion of primary goods in the export of a state, the
higher risk for civil war (Collier & Hoefler
1998.)
3b) Whereas the finding is
relatively strong and replicated, its interpretation
(originally in terms of "greed" and "grievance") is still
under dispute and causal relations uncertain (Ross
2004).
3c) FY was not in the high risk
zone, but was moving towards it. Different parts of FY
had quite different values, with Slovenia at one extreme
and Kosovo at the other.
4a) There is some evidence that
great regional differences in wealth are associated with
a higher risk for domestic war.
4b) The evidence is not
systematically quantitative however, so the relative
weight in the prognosis may be low.
4c) FY was at the extreme end in
Europe in this respect: already the differences between
Slovenia and Serbia or Croatia were as big as the
greatest differences in Sweden.. Differences clearly grew
between the extremes (Slovenia and Kosovo), but the
picture is otherwise disputed in this respect. In
addition, FY belonged to the few "sandwich" cases (like
Spain or USSR) where some of the poorest parts would
secede on account (among other things) of being poor and
some of the richest on account (among other things) of
being rich. The situation was exacerbated by demands from
the International Monetary Fund that the development
funds going from the richer to the poorer parts of FY be
terminated.
5a) The risk of revolution seems to
get particularly high if a period of rapid improvement,
creating rising expectations, is followed by a movement
in the opposite direction. (Davies 1962).
5b) The evidence is anecdotal
rather than systematic and has been disputed, so the
weight must be rather low.
5c) Where to locate FY depends on
what time periods we look at. With some choices, it lies
in the extreme high risk group. It may be argued,
however, that the highest risk existed several years
before 1990 and that people had by then gotten used to
worsening standards of living and developed micro level
ways of trying to cope when those at the macro level
failed (Schierup 1990).
6a) It a common belief among
"federalist" thinkers on the EU that economic integration
promotes and even eventually necessitates political
integration.
6b) This is not solidly empirically
documented. Furthermore, the relation is at least
indirect, since lower political integration does not
necessarily mean war.
6c) When economic decentralization
started in the 1960s, FY went in the opposite direction
for a long time: a decreasing proportion of trade went
between the republics and an increasing part within them
and with foreign centres of economic power (especially in
northern Italy and southern Germany). Some
countermovement (by necessity rather than preference)
seems to have accompanied the deepening crisis in the
1980s however.
There is still a heated debate,
both generally and concerning FY in particular, on the
extent to which civil wars are related to ethno-national
conflicts, the extreme positions being "really not at
all" and "first and foremost", respectively. Given the
open or hidden moral and political agendas in this
debate, there is no likelihood that it will lead to any
consensus in a near future. In any case, some observed
demographic regularities are of interest:
7a) In general, the risk of civil
war seems to be slightly higher in states that are
ethnically heterogeneous, even though there is no
consensus on this. In particular, however, the difference
in risk is high in former Central/Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union (Wiberg 1996): the smaller the
biggest group in a state, the higher the empirically
observed risk for dissolution, civil war, de facto
partition or combinations of this.
7b) The relationship is fairly weak
in the general case. It is stronger in Europe, where most
of the lowest third (on size of biggest ethno-national
group) had one or more of the consequences just
mentioned, whereas none among the highest third even came
close to that.
7c) FY was extreme in Europe on the
"biggest group" indicator, with 38 per cent Serbs - and
Bosnia-Herzegovina was number 3 with 42 per cent
Moslems).
8a) If an ethnic minority group is
strongly concentrated to one geographical area and
constitutes a considerable majority there, the risk of an
outbreak of violence is reduced.
8b) There is clear empirical
support for the proposition. (Melander
1999:95f)
8c) For FY, this depends much on
what minorities we look at - there is a vast difference
between the close correlation between Slovenians and
Slovenia at one extreme and the leopard pattern in Bosnia
and Herzegovina at the other. Hence, the applicability of
this proposition is a complex matter; at best, it can
tell us that the risk for extensive war was lowest in
Slovenia and highest in Bosnia and
Herzegovina.
A final group of factors may be
referred to as political, if we need a common label for
them:
9a) The younger a state (since
independence), the higher risk of domestic war in it
(Hegre et al. 2001)
9b) The relationship is moderately
strong.
9c) Even if we put the birth date
of FY at 1945 (cf. above), it was in the middle risk zone
rather than the high risk zone. All the new states into
which it might be dissolved, however, would be in the
highest risk zone.
10a) Previous domestic war
increases the risk for a new war; and the more recent it
was, the higher the risk. (Hegre et al . 2001)
10b) The relationship is moderately
strong and its character disputed (Walter
2004).
10c) For FY we get two opposite
tendencies to balance. On the one hand, FY was at the
extreme end in Europe concerning the length and lethality
of previous civil war (within the context of the
international World War II), with Spain in the 1930s
coming closest; this speaks for high risk. On the other
hand, in 1990, these wars were more than 45 years ago,
which speaks for a more moderate risk. In any case, a
possible violent dissolution would mean high risk for
domestic war in all the successor states, or at least
those where other conditions made it possible (which
would really only exclude Slovenia).
11a) War has a complex relationship
with democracy and democratization. Stable democracies
run the least domestic violence and stable autocracies a
slightly higher risk, whereas states located in between
these poles run considerably higher risks. It has
furthermore been established that these higher risk
depend both on position -being in between- and on
movement, whether in the direction towards or away from
stable democracy (Hegre et al. 2001).
11b) The risk at the middle of a
democracy scale is about one and a half times as high as
at either of the opposite ends.
11c) FY - as well as its
constituent republics and autonomous provinces - was
certainly located somewhere in between the opposite ends
and therefore ran higher risks than average. In addition,
it was at that time clearly in movement, adding even more
to the risks. It would take a closer investigation to
establish whether it (and, later, its successors) were on
their way "uphill" (where more democracy would add to the
risk) or "downhill" (where further democratization would
reduce the risk of war).
The provisional summary of the
prognosis of FY in the light of generalizing quantitative
studies of possible predictors and the values of FY on
those predictors must be as follows. Several indicators
contributed to a negative prognosis: some of them by
being relatively strong predictors, some of them by FY
having extreme values on the predictor variable. At the
same time, there was hardly any indicator contributing in
the opposite direction: at best, they would imply that
the risk of FY was no higher than average. The prognosis
was therefore bad by international comparison and
probably the worst in all of Europe. Yet this should be
read with precision. It certainly does not say that war
was inescapable. In fact, it does not even say that war
was more likely than peace - it would take a lot more of
model analysis and statistical work to figure that
out.
SECOND STEP:
REGIONAL CHARACTERISTICS
Let me now move to Step 2, looking
at how postdictive (and, for that matter, present)
prognoses can be based on regional characteristics of
South Eastern Europe, including its historical legacy.
Both terms require clarification. Exactly how the region
is defined and what states to count into it depends on
the time period we study as well as on the particular
aspects we are interested in.
If we look at the geopolitical
aspect, the region has often been ascribed high strategic
significance, e.g. by the Commander in Chief Nikola
Ljubicic (1977: 249): "Territory of the SFRY is of
exceptional strategic significance not only as a Balkan
but also as a Mediterranean and Central European area".
Yet this has been varying with time, as have the reasons.
Invaders from Asia to Europe always had to pass here,
those in the opposite direction often did. With the
gradual dissolution of the Ottoman empire, the strategic
significance of the Balkans increased. European spheres
of interest collided here in "the soft underbelly of
Europe" and involved local actors in every major war. The
Cold War formula 2+2+2 indicates that Turkey is also
definitely a part of the region from this point of view,
and sometimes Turkey is seen as a buffer (or
intersection) between the European and the Middle East
security complex (Buzan 1991: 210). During the last Cold
War Peak in the early 1980s President Reagan had issued
his National Security Directive on general
destabilization of communist regimes in Europe - and FY
was not excepted. Yet 1990 was when the Cold War was in
its last moments and there are disagreements on how this
affected the region: losing significance because of that
or keeping it for new reasons?
In economic terms, the region is
differently defined. For centuries it had satellite
relations to higher developed parts of Western Europe,
whether Italian city states , single West European
states, the USSR and other parts of COMECON, or, finally,
the EU, in relation to which it is weaker than ever
before. This was so whether it was politically ruled by
the Ottoman or Habsburg empires or consisted of states
with at least nominal sovereignty. The main exception is
given by much of the Cold War period, when the old
relations was broken for a while in the Communist states,
but in different ways: dependence on the USSR (Bulgaria,
Romania, early Albania), balancing trade partners
(Yugoslavia), finding them elsewhere (middle Albania) or
attempting autarchy (later Albania). Yet in most of the
region, shifting trade patterns and dependence on IMF
re-created satellite relations to the West even before
the Cold war was over.
Another aspect is that of history
and culture, the historical legacy. We should be careful
with this term for several reasons. First, as
determinants of what happens, the perceived history or
historical myths are often more important than "objective
history". If the writing of the latter may change (by new
discoveries or interpretations), this is much more true
of the former, as exemplified by all the "invention of
history" in the last couple of decades in FY (and
elsewhere) to legitimize post-communist regimes,
nationalist movements, secessionism, etc. Second,
"determinant" is not the same as, and does not entail
"determinism". The historical legacy is only one
formative force among others, and its relative weight
relative to them is also variable. So the notion that
"since this has always been so, it is bound to remain so"
is wrong on several counts. These reservations having
been made, however, there are good grounds not to dismiss
history. To understand a conflict it is necessary to know
a long stretch of its real history and imagined
histories.
One historical legacy of the
Balkans is that of the Ottoman empire: how it was created
(brutal conquest, but also by dividing and ruling), how
it operated and how it disintegrated. Its operation was
in one way highly centralist, yet Ottoman rather than
Turkish: people from all over the area could rise to high
positions, once they were (voluntarily or forcefully)
integrated by conversion to Islam and sometimes even if
not: the Phanariote Greeks as administrators and priests,
local vassal princes (Serbian, Romanian, etc.) who
remained Christian, the monotheistic religious
institutions enjoying considerable sectoral autonomy in
the millet system. In all these cases, however, strict
loyalty to the Ottoman empire was required. This was
often interpreted as treason by the population - as for
that matter was conversion to Islam, which can be clearly
seen in the epic Gorski Vijenac by Petar Petrovic Njegos
(1948). By the millet system, religious leaders would
exert a political influence ("ethnarchos") far beyond the
purely spiritual. Originally, there were only three
millet (Christian, Judaic, Zoroastrian), which had as
little national characteristics as the Umma of Islam. Yet
during the 19th century they proliferated to seventeen,
now coming closer to defining nations, at the same time
as early Turkish nationalism increasingly undermined the
Ottoman character of the empire. The proliferation of
millet also made it easier for European great powers to
divide and rule by cultivating allies within the Ottoman
empire, which contributed to its dissolution and the
attempted slicing up of Turkey in the wake of WWI until
this was blocked by Kemal Atatürk. (Jung 2001).
Among the legacies from this process there is a tendency
to define Us/Them distinctions in religious terms, with
the ominous implications this has for an area that
combines the fault line between Christianity and Islam
with that between Catholic and Orthodox
Christianity.
This Ottoman legacy in almost all
of the region (Slovenia and - largely - Croatia excepted)
reinforced an even older Orthodox legacy: the division of
Orthodox Christianity in autocephalic churches, which
eventually became closely related to the definition of
nation - and always were to secular political rule in
some way, ranging between caesareo-papism as one extreme
and abject subordination to Communist regimes as the
other)
Another legacy is a low tolerance
for minorities not belonging to the titular nations,
whether defined in religious or linguistic terms or both.
We see manifestations of this everywhere in recent
history: Kurds, were until recently defined as "mountain
Turks" in Turkey and their (very different) language
forbidden; Macedonians and Albanians in Greece are
heavily hellenized linguistically and Turks referred to
as Moslem Greeks; Bulgaria tried to bulgarianize the
Turks there and Romania to romanianize the Hungarians.
What happed in FY after the Cold War (but also long
before it) is part of a wider pattern. The term "ethnic
cleansing" was invented by the Serb Cubrilovi_ in the
1930s and used by the Croat Ustasha during WWII, in both
cases reflecting older ideologists among their own
peoples and older processes in the area, as testified by
the Carnegie Commission on the wars in 1912-13 (Carnegie
1993). This means that the struggle between civic and
ethnic definitions of nation is far from over and can
take very violent forms. In fact, it is not over in
Western Europe either. The notions of "patrie" and
"nation" from French Enlightenment long made France look
like a paragon of a civic definition, yet the Dreyfus
process came as a nasty chock to French (and other) Jews,
and Le Pen is now rebelling against it. Post-war Germany
looked like the final triumph of civic over ethnic, but
question marks are defined by the ease with which
citizenship is acquired by people who were never in
Germany before and often do not even speak German (from
the Volga region) with the difficulties for those who are
born in Germany and speak perfect German (Turks and
others). "British" has been the civic term for several
generations, but had its limits, as demonstrated in
Northern Ireland, Scotland and even Wales. Belgium is in
a process of breaking up along ethnic lines and the same
may be true for Spain.
It is a strength for a country and
a blessing for its population if a civic definition is
generally accepted or at least (as, e.g., in Switzerland
and Finland) takes clear priority before the ethnic. Yet
getting there is not easy, ignoring strong ethnic
definitions just because of disapproving of them is
dangerous, and trying to impose them by political fiat
may be suicidal, since precisely this may be seen by the
minorities as an attempt by the titular nation to
annihilate them, no matter how much constitutions and
other documents assert the opposite - they just do not
become credible.
When Benjamin Disraeli was
referring to "ancient ethnic hatreds" in 1876 to counter
demands for British intervention against Turkey or John
Major was echoing him in 1993 for similar reasons
(Malcolm 1994:xx), there is considerable evidence can be
adduced against them. Yet, if we amend "hatreds" to
"fears", we may come closer to widespread Balkan
realities. One important point is that such fears (in
collective memory, etc.) may have fairly similar
behavioural manifestations to those of hatred, once they
are provoked; and another point that fears are more
easily provoked by the (in his own eyes innocent)
behaviour of Alter than if no such legacy
exists.
There is another widespread legacy
in the region (and a wider one): the demise of Communist
regimes (which was in full swing in 1990) and thereby
also of Marxist-Leninist legitimizations of the idea of
the state, leading to the search for others. As several
authors have pointed out, nationalist ideologies were
often strong competitors to liberal ones (sometimes even
merging with them). Yet here too we find several
different cases: Where the state itself was etnically
homogeneous and had an old and strong state tradition,
this carried no risk for civil wars, at worst for
irredentism (which, if too loudly manifested, would also
mean losing the chance to join EU one day). More
heterogeneous states with weak state traditions
constitute the opposite case, with much higher risks. In
this respect, FY had bad odds: highly heterogeneous, with
short state traditions that had already collapsed once,
when Hitler and Mussolini found loyal collaborators in
some ethnic groups - and having inside it several groups
with state traditions of their own
To put it cautiously, the bad
prognosis derived from the first step of the analysis is
not counterbalanced by the second step, but rather
reinforced by it, even if the qualitative character of
the second step makes it even more difficult to put any
figures in the prognosis or tell whether a war was more
likely than peace. In relative terms, however, the second
step reinforces the first provisional conclusion that FY
had the worst prognosis in Europe. Let us now see to what
extent this may have to be revised when the focus gets
even narrower in Step 3 towards a postdictive
prognosis.
FINAL STEP:
PARTICULARITIES OF FORMER YUGOSLAVIA
This step consists in looking at
particular features of FY to add to the prognosis based
on the two first steps, which tried to answer the
question: "What if FY had been an average state and in
addition an average Balkan state?"
1. One of the particularities can
be summed up from the data presented above: FY had
extreme or very high values on several of the variables
that are statistically associated with domestic
war.
2. Reagan´s general
destabilization policy against Communist countries made
no exception for FY. In addition, destabilization was
also attempted by the West German Bundesnachrichtendienst
in collaboration with Croatian exile organizations
(Schmidt-Eenboom 1995).
3. Whereas many European states had
occasional political disagreements on their
constitutions, FY appears unique in this respect with its
long series of them. It started already in the planning
of its creation (Banac), where Serbs wanted a state of
French type and Croats one in Swiss direction. There were
repeated constitutional crises in First Yugoslavia and a
series of constitutional changes in Second Yugoslavia.
And the issues that formally defined the conflict objects
at the very end were essentially constitutional: Serbia's
unilateral derogation of the autonomy of Kosovo, the
demands of Slovenia and Croatia for de facto and later de
jure independence, etc. There remained less and less of
central government, the efficiency of what remained was
heavily reduced by the need for consensus in important
decisions, and in addition it rapidly lost what
legitimacy it still had, in particular after the
elections in all the republics in 1990.
4. Even after the end of the Cold
War, what me may call the "Cold War Filter" for conflicts
remained in place in the West, and in particular in USA.
This filter can be described as having three axioms:
A. A conflict can have no more than
two parties ("becomes too difficult for the
readers/viewers").
B. The parties must be states or
something state-like that can be personified by
leaders.
C. There must be one Bad Guy - and
by virtue of that, the other one is a Good
Guy.
Whereas some search may identify a
few conflicts that are not too badly represented even
after passing through this filter, this is most decidedly
not true for FY. First of all, the complex conflict
pattern consisted of sub-conflicts - and these in turn
usually had three or more parties: Serb/Croat/Slovene in
the north, Serb/Croat/Moslem in the center,
Serb/Albanian/Macedonian in the south. The important
problem with axiom A for FY is that multi-party conflicts
have a strategic logic that differs entirely from that of
two-party conflicts, with shifting coalitions as a
frequent pattern. Shifting coalitions was a pattern long
before conflicts got militarized (Ramet 1992). The main
problem with axiom B is that it focuses on (stereotyped
presentations of) the personalities etc. of single
leaders to the detriment of understanding the more
fundamental conflict dynamics, including the issue of to
what extent the leaders were actually driving or largely
drifting along with these dynamics. And the problem with
axiom C, if I permit myself to make value judgments, may
not so much be the appointment of the Bad Guy as the
amazing procession of Good Guys that were imagined by
this filter by the sole virtue of somebody having to fill
that role. Whether or not Western politicians were
sufficiently uninformed to believe in the mass media
versions, by the logic of dominant discourses they had to
speak and act as if they believed in them.
5. FY was not the only ethnically
heterogeneous state in the region, but it was by far the
most heterogeneous one by any criteria. This in itself
contributes to a bad prognosis on statistical grounds, as
shown above. In addition it is a matter of the
demographic distribution of groups. The "leopard
patterns" of ethno-national groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina
and some other areas has been shown to be associated with
higher risks of escalation to violence than when each
group is fairly concentrated to one area where it is the
big majority (Melander 1999:95f)
6. A final and fatal particularity
was that for various reasons the conflicts in FY
attracted a high degree of great power interest. In 1990,
there were many things going on at the same time while
the Cold War was being written off. EU was in the process
of adapting to the new position of the united Germany at
the same time as mass media pressure and an efficient
Croatian propaganda machine made the German government
drift helplessly drifting into stands on the FY conflicts
that made these the first demonstration of the new German
power position, but were deeply controversial in many
other states in EU (and outside it). This made FY the
arena of an internal power struggle in the EU in a
critical period. Even if Germany eventually largely won
by bribing the others in different ways, the victory
meant making demands that were unlikely to be satisfied
without a war - which Germany for historical reasons
could not fight and nobody else was willing to fight for
it.
At the same time the end of the
Cold War also created great uncertainty concerning
transatlantic relations: would the USA be in a stronger
position by its claim to have "won" the Cold War - or in
a weaker position by virtue of the weight of military
power relative to economic power going down, when the
former was in far less demand? The Soviet Union was in
its death throes, the first declarations of independence
already proclaimed. It -and later Russia- was in great
confusion concerning its future doctrine and for a while
believed that close cooperation with the West would bring
desired rewards. So the FY also became an arena of
transatlantic contradictions, where the eventual US
victory meant (concerning Bosnia-Herzegovina) demands
which were unlikely to be satisfied without a war - which
UNPROFOR refused (and did not have the resources) to
fight, USA would not put land troops into and no alliance
partner was willing to fight in their absence.
Because of all this, the actors in
FY were bent to believe that they had some bargaining
cards in terms of potential external support, but they
were no better than others in guessing who would
intervene when and how in favour of whom. Wishful
thinking actually made their guesses worse, in the
direction of greatly overestimating the values of these
cards; and this in turn made them more likely to escalate
their demands, less likely to be able to find necessary
compromises and more likely to get into a war by accident
or even by intention.
CONCLUSION
Adding Yugoslav particularities did
nothing to dispel the somber (postdictive) prognosis
based on the other sets of premises, but, once more,
rather the opposite. It is fair to say that FY had a far
worse prognosis than any European country at that time.
Let me return once more to what this means and does not
mean. It does not mean that war was inescapable, only
that the risk was high and continuously increased due to
internal dynamics and international postures. There has
been much "iffy" history written, claiming that the war
could have been avoided, if only... And there is hardly
consensus on a single "if only" clause, some of which are
proposed in other chapters of this book. When I do not
enter this debate here, it is for lack of space - it
would become a chapter in itself. It is a very important
debate, we need more of it and scholars from FY may in
many respects have more valuable contributions to make
than outsiders.
What the conclusion does mean,
however, is that any attempt to find THE cause of the
wars is likely to be futile. The situation was
over-determined, with the implication that eliminating
any single causal factor would reduce very little of the
total risk of war. Personally, I am not yet convinced by
any of the "if only" suggestions, either because they
seem insufficiently argued or because the proposal itself
calls for new "if only" clauses. A convincing "if only"
construction is likely to have to combine several things
at various levels at the same time.
CODA
This chapter has treated the
likelihood for an outbreak of war. This is far from the
whole story. To analyse the continuation of war is a
different thing. In the first book in English on the
Yugoslav wars , one of the authors (Vrcan 1993) quotes
the Lebanese sociologist Ahmed Beidoun looking back at
the experiences of his country and stating that whereas
in the beginning the war there was about something, it
eventually became war for war´s sake, since so many
actors had gotten something to gain (economically,
politically, etc.) from the war continuing. Several
scholars have followed this line of analysis - which
would also call for a chapter of its own. Let me limit
myself to the remark that in order to end a war, it may
not be enough to remove its original causes when new
causes have been added during its course.
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