The Effect of Nationalist Ideology on Violence in Yugoslavia in the 1990s

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The Effect of Nationalist Ideology on Violence in Yugoslavia in the 1990s

This essay will consider how the emergence of nationalist ideology contributed towards the violence that took place in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Firstly, how changes in the geo-political landscape affected the rationale for the republics maintaining the Yugoslav Federation are discussed, along with the concomitant demands for independence and democratic rule that lead to the Federation’s demise. Secondly, the success of organic nationalists and the political potency of nationalist ideology in the free elections of the 1990s is considered; followed by the significance of nationalist ideology’s conflation of the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’ in determining public policy and the rights of individuals, and the negative implications this had for ethnic minorities who fell outside of the “imagined” ethnic-majority community. Finally, the author concludes that nationalist ideology contributed to the violence in the former Yugoslavia by politicising nationality and ethnicity and thus providing the moral, political and military impetus to ethnically cleanse areas of contested territories to create a ‘fit’ between the nation, ethnically defined, and the state.

Since WW2, Marshal Tito had held Yugoslavia’s six republics of Yugoslavia together with an “iron hand” under the communist slogan of ‘brotherhood and unity’: repressing any hints of nationalism that festered within the Yugoslav republic (The Death Of Yugoslavia: 1995). Indeed, Michael Mann refers to this suppression of nationalist-based ethnic conflict as “probably the greatest achievement of communism, unmatched by later democratising countries” (Mann 2005: 354). Yugoslavia’s formation during the settlement of WW1 was based on geo-political reasons, as in their unison the republics “formed a second-rank power able to defend its territory against any regional rival” (Mann 2005: 366). Despite the nationalist antagonisms which did fiercely temper in the inter-war period, the same geo-political logic re-emerged after 1945, and Tito, after breaking away from Stalin in 1948, was able to exploit the federation’s neutrality between the superpowers during the Cold War and maintained one of the largest armies in Europe (Mann 2005: 366). However, the fall of the Soviet Union rendered the federation’s geo-political logic redundant as it was no longer needed for defence purposes, and, moreover, the majority of the republics “disliked the form of federation they actually had – communist, militarist and somewhat Serb-dominated” (Mann 2005: 366).

The first free elections in the 1990s in each of the republics proved to be an “ethnic census”, and the demand for democracy killed off Yugoslav federalism (Snyder 2000) and fostered the “internationalisation of political space” (Bloxham & Gerwarth 2011: 126). Even in Bosnia, which had the most ethnically diverse republic – 44% Muslims, 31% Serbs, 17% Croats, and the remaining 5% consisting of Yugoslav, Jews and Roma people (Bloxham & Gerwarth 2011: 128) – the “three victorious parties were all ethnically based, one in each main community” (Mann 2005: 368). The political space nourished the eventual rise of “rule by organic nationalists committed to majoritarian ethnic democracy” (Mann 2005: 367) in the republics, whereby, with the exception of Serbia’s leader, Slobodan Milosevic, who favoured a more “compact federation” that better protected the perceived threat to Serbs within other republics and the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, each leader of the constituent nations pursued with demands for independence (Mann 2005: 369). Being that the Yugoslav constitution was a federation of nations – ethnically defined – and that nations, not republics, were the bearers of rights and had the liberty to secede and form majoritarian democracies (Hayden 1996: 787), the grounding was in place for organicist conceptions of the nation state to politically prosper. Mann defines the organicist conception of the nation state as having: “(1)a national essence, distinguishable from other national essences; (2) the… right to a state which would ultimately express this essence; (3) the… right to exclude ‘others’, with different essences, who would weaken the nation” (Mann 1999: 7). In light of this phenomena, Hayden has argued that the elections in the 1990s did not replace state socialism with democracy, instead, the transition was one from “regimes dedicated to advancing the interests of that part of the population defined constitutionally as “the working class and all working people” to regimes dedicated to advancing the interests of that part of the population defined as the ethno-national majority” (Hayden 1996: 790).

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Organic-nationalist electioneering proved politically potent in the 1990s as nationalist parties could draw on recent historical reference points and ideologically reinterpret them to fit into “the modern ideal of the nation state” (Mann 2005: 361). Indeed, as Anderson asserts, nationalism is best understood not as a self-conscious ideology that is drawn upon, but “with the large cultural system that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it (comes) into being” (Anderson 2006: 12). As recently as WW2, memories of the Serb Chetnik movement could be reinvigorated by Croatian nationalists; a Serbian movement that combined ...

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