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Anticipating the Disintegration: Nationalisms in Former Yugoslavia, 1980–1990

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Aleksandar Pavković
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Extract

In addition to rapid economic decline and the persistent political violence in the province of Kosovo, in the 1980s Yugoslavia experienced a veritable renaissance of nationalist ideologies of the “dominant nation” type. According to this kind of national ideology, its target nation is historically predetermined to be politically dominant on a given territory which is then chosen by the national ideology in question. From 1971–1972, when the Croat nationalist movement and the Serbian liberal communist elite was suppressed by Tito until the early 1980s, publication of any nationalist writings was effectively banned in all parts of Yugoslavia, except in Kosovo. While ending public polemics by national ideologues, the ban confined nationalist polemics to the closely watched realm of intellectual dissidence. At that time, intellectual dissidents aimed primarily at the delegitimisaton of the communist regime in Yugoslavia. For this purpose, nationalist—as opposed to liberal—dissidents argued that the Yugoslav communist regime not only intentionally belittled and disadvantaged their respective nations, therefore benefiting the competitor nation(s), but also that it had betrayed their respective nations’ national goals. However absurd these claims may appear when taken together, they reveal how limited the target of each national ideology was: it targeted only “its” nation, in the attempt to prove that the communist regime had failed that nation alone and should not have the right to rule over it. These “dominant nation” ideologies stood in sharp contrast to the official Yugoslav Communist Party ideology of “equal nations,” which maintained the equality of all nations and nationalities in all parts of Yugoslavia; according to the official ideology, no nation in Yugoslavia was, in theory, politically dominant in any part of Yugoslavia.

Type
Part I: The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavism
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 25 , Issue 3: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia: Inevitable or Avoidable? , September 1997 , pp. 427 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. Franjo Tudjman was born in 1922 in Veliko Trgoviste in Croatia. In 1941, he joined the communist-led Partisans where, as a political commissar, he rose to the rank of major. In 1961, with the rank of major-general, he retired from the army to become the director of a history institute in Zagreb. In 1964, with a Party reprimand for “bourgeois-nationalist deviation” his reputation as a nationalist historian was firmly established; in 1965 he earned his doctorate in history at the University of Zadar. In the late 1960s he became one of the leaders of the then nationalist organisation Matica Hrvatska (Croatian Hive), and in the purges of nationalist leaders in 1972 was sentenced to two years in prison. For his continued dissident activity, including interviews to foreign journalists, he was arrested in 1981 and sentenced to three years in prison. After his release in 1987, during his extensive travels in the U.S., Canada and Europe, he established contacts in the Croat émigré communities and organisations. In 1989 he founded the first postwar Croatian opposition party—the Croat Democratic Union—and after its electoral victory in 1990, was elected president of Croatia. He was re-elected, in direct presidential elections, in 1992 and in 1995 was proclaimed “vrhovnik” (generalissimo) of the Croatian armed forces.Google Scholar

2. Alija Izetbegovic was born in 1925 in Bosanski Samac in Bosnia-Hercegovina and joined the Young Muslims during World War II. In 1946 he was sentenced to three years in prison for his participation in this nationalist movement. After his release from prison, he completed a law degree and worked as a lawyer for state firms. In 1983 he was arrested for nationalist dissident activity (including the writing of his Islamic Declaration) and with a group of fellow Muslims sentenced, on appeal, to six years in prison (of which he served four). His Islam between East and West, 2nd edn (Indianopolis: American Trust, 1989) was originally published in Serbo-Croatian in Belgrade in 1984. In 1989 he founded the first opposition party in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the Party of Democratic Action; and, in 1990 was elected president of the presidency of Bosnia-Hercegovina.Google Scholar

3. The official number of dead was nine persons, including one policemen. Some (probably exaggerated) unofficial estimates put the number of dead up to 1,000. Cf. S. P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia 1962–1991, 2nd edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 196.Google Scholar

4. For an array of similar arguments see S. S. Juka, Kosova: The Albanians in Yugoslavia in Light of Historical Documents (New York: Waldon Press, 1984).Google Scholar

5. For an illuminating discussion of these aspects of the “Serb question” see V. Vujacic, “Dominant Nation in a Late Multinational State: Communist Federalism and the Institutional Origins of Contemporary Serbian Nationalism” (unpublished essay, Harvard Academy, Centre for International Affairs, Harvard University).Google Scholar

6. The infamous term “ethnic cleansing” (etnicko ciscenje in Serbo-Croatian) was first used in the Yugoslav press to describe the forced emigration of Kosovo Serbs from Kosovo.Google Scholar

7. This draft was leaked in 1986 to the Belgrade, Party-controlled press which proceeded to attack it as a counter-revolutionary and nationalist document. An authorised version was published in K. Mihailovic and V. Krestic, “Memorandum SANU”: odgovori na kritike (Beograd: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 1995); an authorised English translation of this work Memorandum of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts: Replies to Criticisims was published by the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995 as well. For a discussion of the document see A. Pavkovic, “Intellectual Dissidence and the Serb National Question,” in A. Pavkovic, H. Koscharsky and A. Czarnota, eds, Nationalism and Postcommunism: A Collection of Essays (Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing, 1995), pp. 128–131.Google Scholar

8 Born in Pozarevac, Serbia in 1941. Both of his parents were teachers (his father migrated from Montenegro to Serbia); and both, separately, committed suicide. He started his Party career in 1960s at Belgrade University's Law Faculty where he completed a law degree and met his future patron Ivan Stambolic, the future president of the Serbian Communist party and, later, of the presidency of Serbia. As one of the Ivan Stambolic's closest friends, Milosevic rapidly advanced in his career, serving as the director of the largest state bank in Serbia and the head of the Belgrade Party Committee. In the late 1970s he also spent some time in the U.S., ostensibly studying the U.S. financial system. In 1986 he replaced Stambolic as the president of the presidency of the Communist Party of Serbia, and in 1987 he purged the Serbian Party of Stambolić's supporters. Even before the first multiparty elections in December 1990—in which he was elected president of Serbia—he established himself as the undisputed ruler of Serbia and leader of a loosely organised pan-Serb movement in the Yugoslav federation. As in October 1994, he broke with the leaders of Bosnian Serbs and imposed an internationally monitored blockade on the Bosnian Serb territory. Thereby, he split the pan-Serb movement he had himself initiated in the late 1980s.Google Scholar

9. See A. Pavkovic, op. cit., pp. 133–134.Google Scholar

10. This philosophy of history and the example of the Jews is elaborated in F. Tudjman, Bespuca povjesne zbiljnosti (first published in 1989), in Izabrana djela Franje Tudmana (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1990), pp. 158–167.Google Scholar

11. For an example of this kind see F. Tudjman, op. cit., p. 118.Google Scholar

12. A. Purivatra, “On the National Phenomenon of the Moslems of Bosnia-Hercegovina,” Nations and Nationalities of Yugoslavia (Belgrade: Medjunarodna Politika, 1974), p. 311.Google Scholar

13. In Serbo-Croatian: Islamska deklaracija: Jedan program islamizacije Muslimana i muslimanskih naroda (Sarajevo: Bosna, 1990).Google Scholar

14. Ibid., p. 29.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., pp. 29–30.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 43.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., p. 22Google Scholar

18. Ibid., p. 30. These are some of the social ills which the Muslim Party of Democratic Action, in its program of 1990, pledged to eliminate.Google Scholar

19. In Serbo-Croatian, “preuzimanje vlasti.” This was an explicitely set goal in the Muslim party's “Resolution on the Internal Policies, Justice and Administration” (Rezolucija o unutrasnjoj politici, pravosudu i upravi), Bilten “Kongres” 1991 (Sarajevo: Stranka demokratske akcije, 1991), p. 51.Google Scholar

20. This conflict of claims was further complicated by the Serb ideologues’ claims to territories from which Serbs had been forcibly expelled in recent history—during World War II and under communist rule. These were territories in Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo-Metohija.Google Scholar

21. Izetbegović's treatise and his public statements, prior to October 1991 when the Serb political leaders rejected, in the Assembly of Bosnia-Hercegovina, his party's Memorandum of Sovereignty, did not target any nation as an enemy of the Muslims.Google Scholar

22. This article is based on Chapter 7 of the author's The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism in a Multinational State (London: Macmillan, 1996).Google Scholar