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Yugoslavia

1918–1992 country in Southeastern Europe

Yugoslaviawas a country inSoutheastandCentral Europethat existed from 1918 to 1992. Itcame into existencein 1918 followingWorld War I,under the name of theKingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenesfrom the merger of theKingdom of Serbiawith the provisionalState of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs(which was formed from territories of the formerAustria-Hungary), and constituted the first union of South Slavic peoples as asovereign state,following centuries of foreign rule over the region under theOttoman Empireand Austria-Hungary.Peter I of Serbiawas itsfirst sovereign.The kingdom gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at theConference of AmbassadorsinParis.The official name of the state was changed toKingdom of Yugoslaviaon 3 October 1929.

The great experiment in this Slavic nation was based on a noble idea. Its proponents thought that south Slavs, that is to say people with much in common, especially their languages, who lived in a great arc of territory from the borders of Austria almost to the gates of Constantinople (now Istanbul), should unite and form one great strong south Slav state. ~Tim Judah

After an economic and political crisis in the 1980s and the rise ofnationalismandethnic tensions,Yugoslaviabroke upalong its republics' borders, at first into five countries, leading to theYugoslav Wars.From 1993 to 2017, theInternational Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslaviatried political and military leaders from the former Yugoslavia forwar crimes,genocide, and other crimes committed during those wars.

After the breakup, the republics ofMontenegroandSerbiaformed a reduced federative state, theFederal Republic of Yugoslavia(FRY), known from 2003 to 2006 asSerbia and Montenegro.This state aspired to the status of solelegal successorto the SFRY, but those claims were opposed by the other former republics. Eventually, it accepted the opinion of theBadinter Arbitration Committeeabout shared succession and in 2003 its official name was changed toSerbia and Montenegro.This statedissolvedwhenMontenegroandSerbiaeach became independent states in 2006, withKosovohaving anongoing disputeover itsdeclaration of independencein 2008.

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  • The fact thatSerbian-dominated Yugoslavia emerged as one of the victor states ofthe warseemed implicitly to vindicate theact of the man who pulled the trigger on 28 June– certainly that was the view of the Yugoslav authorities, who marked the spot where he did so with bronze footprints and a plaque celebrating theassassin’s ‘first steps into Yugoslav freedom’. In an era when thenational ideawas still full of promise, there was an intuitive sympathy withSouth Slav nationalismand little affection for the ponderousmultinationalcommonwealthof theHapsburg Empire.TheYugoslav warsof the 1990s have reminded us of the lethality ofBalkannationalism. SinceSrebrenicaand thesiege of Sarajevo,It has become harder to think ofSerbiaas the mere object or victim of great power politics and easier to conceive ofSerbian nationalismas an historical force in its own right. From the perspective of today’sEuropean Unionwe are inclined to look more sympathetically – or at least less contemptuously – than we used to on the vanished imperial patchwork ofAustria-Hungary.
  • Though they imitatedStalinin slavish ways and builtsocialismbeforeMoscowdemanded it, Yugoslavia’sCommunistsbecame the first to break with the USSR in 1948. They did so because Stalin demanded complete subordination of their national interests to those of his country. In a public speech,Josip Broz Titoreflected on his sudden heresy as aMarxist-Leninist:One can love the motherland of socialism, he said, but not love one’s own country less. He did not meanCroatiaorSerbia,SloveniaorMontenegro:Communist Yugoslavia was a second attempt to reviveLjudevit Gaj’s old program, this time as national liberation for all peoples in Yugoslavia. Tito’s Partisan movement had begun as a miniature Habsburg empire during the war, protectingSerbs,Jews,and others fromfascistgenocide,in the name of brotherhood and unity, a formula that succeeded until Tito’s death in 1980. If it had joined the newest version of the Habsburg Empire—the European Union (EU)—Yugoslavia might have survived. But fighting broke out in Croatia in 1991 before the EU had opened toward the east. TodayEastern Europe’s leaders gainpolitical capitalby claiming that the EU, despite its generous funding of national infrastructures,education,andagriculture,somehow threatens their countries’ existence. In June 2018,HungarianpresidentViktor Orbánsaid that at stake in the election of ananti-EUcandidate inSloveniawas the “survival of the Slovenian nation.”
    • John Connelly,From Peoples Into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe(2020), p. 19

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  • "Non-alignment" provided a way in which the leaders of "third world"states could tilt without toppling: the idea was to commit to neither side in theCold War,but to leave open the possibility of such commitment. That way, if pressure from one superpower became too great, a smaller power could defend itself by threatening to align with the other superpower. Yugoslavia—not a "third world"state—pioneered the process. Tito had not soughtStalin's condemnation in 1948: he was, and remained, a dedicated communist. But he was determined not to sacrificesovereigntyfor the sake ofideologicalsolidarity,and unlike most otherEast Europeanleaders at the time, he had no need to do so. Noting how quickly theAmericansoffered him economic assistance after his break with Stalin, Tito saw the possibility of a lifeline: would theRussiansrisk using force against the Yugoslavs if this might lead to war with theAmericans?With theUnited States Sixth Fleetoperating just off the long Yugoslav coast, there were good reasons for Stalin to think twice about attempting an invasion, and there is evidence that he did so, contenting himself instead withassassinationplots—all of them unsuccessful.

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  • Common wisdom today has it that Yugoslavia was a doomed experiment. In the 1990s, ill-informed Western journalists reporting on the Yugoslav implosion wars wrote of the “centuries-old conflict between Serbs and Croats" — when the real genesis of Serb-Croat hostility really only reached back to the rise ofnationalismin the19thand20th centuries.
    • Tomek Jankowski,Eastern Europe!: Everything You Need to Know About the History (and More) of a Region that Shaped Our World and Still Does(2013)
  • Yugoslavia resembledCzechoslovakiain that it was a miniatureempirerun by Serbs, and with considerably more brutality than theCzechsran theirs. In parts of it there had been continuous fighting since 1912, and the frontiers were not settled (if that is the word) until 1926. TheOrthodoxSerbs ran the army and the administration, but theCatholicCroatsandSlovenes,who had much higher cultural and economic standards, talked of their duty to 'Europeanize the Balkans' (i.e. the Serbs) and their fears that they themselves would be 'Balkanized.'R.W. Seton-Watson,who had been instrumental in creating the new country, was soon disillusioned by the way the Serbs ran it: 'The situation in Jugoslavia,' he wrote in 1921, 'reduces me to despair.... I have no confidence in the newconstitution,with its absurdcentralism.' The Serb officials were worse than the Habsburgs, he complained, and Serb opposition more savage than German. 'My own inclination,' he wrote in 1928, '... is to leave the Serbs and Croats to stew in their own juice! I think they are both mad and cannot see beyond the ends of their noses.' Indeed, MPs had just been blazing away at each other with pistols inparliament,theCroat Peasant Partyleader,Stepan Radic,being killed in the process. The country was held together, if at all, not so much by the Serb political police as by the smouldering hatred of itsItalian,Hungarian,Bulgarian,andAlbanianneighbors, all of whom had grievances to settle.
  • The great experiment in this Slavic nation was based on a noble idea. Its proponents thought that south Slavs, that is to say people with much in common, especially their languages, who lived in a great arc of territory from the borders ofAustriaalmost to the gates ofConstantinople (now Istanbul),should unite and form one great strong south Slav state.

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  • This 'heroic' aspect of the Partisan struggle, deeply inspiring to scholars-turned-soldiers likeDeakin,reads well on the page. But in practice of waging a politico-military campaign over the length and breadth of Yugoslavia brought untold suffering to its peoples. Their history was already one of bitter and violent rivalry, which the war had reawoken. In the northleaders of the Catholic Croatshad taken advantage ofItaliansponsorship to unleash acampaign of expulsion, forced conversion, and extermination against the Orthodox Serbs.Muslimsin Bosnia-Herzegovina took a hand in the civil war also, while in the south the Serbs ofKosovowere attacked by their Albanian neighbors. TheChetniks,for their part, contested authority in the Serb lands with the Partisans, with whom they had failed to agree a join strategy, but did not open war with theGerman occupierslest that provoke reprisals.Titohardened his heart against reprisals; indeed, he sawAxisatrocities as a spur to recruitment. He deliberately drew theGermansafter him in seven so-called 'offensives' that left thecountrysidethrough which his Partisans marched a wasteland. The villagers had either to follow the Partisans 'into the woods' (a traditional description of the whereabouts of resisters to theTurks) or stay and await reprisals. Kardelji, Tito's deputy, was emphatic about the desirability of confronting the uncommitted with such a dilemma: 'Some commanders are afraid of reprisals and that fear prevents the mobilisation of villages. I consider the reprisals will have the useful result of throwing Croatian villages on the side of Serb villages. In war we must not be frightened of the destruction of whole villages. Terror will bring about armed action.' Kardelji's analysis was correct.

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  • The state of the South Slavs—cobbled together from Serbia and the southern part of the vanished Austria-Hungary—that emerged in 1919 was the result of both accident and hasty, often desperatechoices.It was not even clear what the delegation or the new country it claimed to represent should be called. Made up of Serbia and the southern parts of the vanished Austria-Hungary, it eventually took the name Yugoslavia. ThePeace Conference,contrary to what many people believed since, did not create Yugoslavia—it was already created by the time the first diplomats arrived inParis.Seventy years later, the powers were equally unable to prevent its disintegration.
  • Yugoslavia was itself the flawed creation of the ruin of empires in 1918, dominated until the Second World War by theSerbianmonarchy yet comprisingMuslimBosniansand Kosovan Albanians,OrthodoxMontenegrins and Serbs, andCatholicCroats. Out of the brutalethnic slaughtersof the two world wars, the long-servingdictatorMarshal Josip Tito, whose Partisans had liberated Yugoslavia fromNazioccupation,had created a strong regime, using his own charismatic personality and, less well-known,terror,secret policeandconcentration camps.Yet Tito controlled the deadly ethnic feuds of theBalkansand gave his peoples almost 30 years ofpeaceand order. But the revolving presidency implemented after his death in 1980 left a stewing ethnic cauldron lacking a strong hand to control it.Miloševićfilled this vacuum with his death squads, condottiere and psychopathic warlords, coordinated and financed at his personal command.

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  • Yugoslavia is, withIran,the only country which under difficult, not to say agonising, circumstances stood up to Joseph Stalin. It was not easy to unite ethnic groups or to modernize a country like Yugoslavia, and it must be acknowledged that Marshal Tito achieved something extraordinary. May God grant that his successors be as capable as he.

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  • There was ahierarchyof material conditions in thecommunistworld. The Yugoslavs, with the closest commercial links with the West, did best in the range and quality of goods available. Next came theEast Germans,followed by theHungariansand thePoles.Citizens of the USSR trailed in after them; and, still more galling toRussiannational pride, theGeorgiansandEstoniansin the Soviet Union enjoyed better conditions than those available to theRussians.The stereotypical Georgian, in the Russian popular imagination, was a swarthy ‘Oriental’ who smuggledorangesin large suitcases from hiscollective farmto the large cities of theRSFSR.Thatfruitcould be an item of internal contraband speaks volumes aboutcommunism’s economic inefficiency.
    • Robert Service,Comrades: A History of World Communism(2009)

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  • No country ofpeople's democracyhas so manynationalitiesas this country has... The reason why we were able to settle the nationalities question so thoroughly is to be found in the fact that it had begun to be settled in a revolutionary way in the course of theLiberation War,in which all thenationalitiesin the country participated, in which every national group made its contribution to the general effort ofliberationfrom the occupier according to its capabilities. Neither theMacedoniansnor any other national group which until then had been oppressed obtained their national liberation by decree. They fought for their national liberation with rifle in hand. The role of theCommunist Partylay in the first place in the fact that it led that struggle, which was a guarantee that after the war the national question would be settled decisively in the way the communists had conceived long before the war and during the war. The role of the Communist Party in this respect today, in the phase of building socialism, lies in making the positive national factors a stimulus to, not a brake on, the development of socialism in our country. The role of the Communist Party today lies in the necessity for keeping a sharp lookout to see that national chauvinism does not appear and develop among any of the nationalities. The Communist Party must always endeavour, and does endeavour, to ensure that all the negative phenomena of nationalism disappear and that people are educated in the spirit ofinternationalism.
  • None of our republics would be anything if we weren't all together, but we have to create our history — our Yugoslavian socialist history, that is unique, in the future — that is our path; not touching the national rights of the some republics to preserve their own traditions, not at the expense of, but in the interest of the whole community, to mutually complete each other. That is what we want, and not the destruction of our unity.
  • The peoples of Yugoslavia do not wantFascism.They do not want atotalitarianregime, they do not want to become slaves of theGermanandItalianfinancialoligarchyas they never wanted to become reconciled to the semi-colonial dependence imposed on them by the so-called Western democracies after the firstimperialistwar.
    • Josip Broz Tito,as quoted inTito: A Biography(Constable and Company Ltd., 1994) by Jasper Ridley, p. 155.
  • Think well about this, dear brothers and sisters, and you will see that we should have been in a state of terrible chaos, in a fratricidal war, in a country which would no longer be Yugoslavia, but be only a group of petty little states fighting among themselves and destroying each other. But our people do not want that to happen.
    • Josip Broz Tito,as quoted inTito: A Biography(Constable and Company Ltd., 1994) by Jasper Ridley, p. 263.

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  • In comparison with otherEastern Europeancountries, Yugoslavia in the1960sand1970sseemed like a model of prosperity. A visitor in the 1970s and very early1980scould see well-stocked shops and markets and many houses in varying states of construction, the labor provided by the owners themselves on weekends and vacations, the money accumulated from the marks they had earned as workers inGermany.But the oil shocks of the 1970s led to severeinflation.Indebtedness spiraled upward, greatly burdening the economy, whileunemploymentrose into the double digits. In some areas, like Kosovo, close to one-quarter of the workforce was unemployed by the early 1980s, also because West Germany, long an outlet for surplus Yugoslav labor, began to limit and even repatriate foreign workers.
    • Eric D. Weitz,A Century of Genocide(2018), p. 208
  • The Yugoslav system of combinedcentral planningand self-management at the enterprise level had worked well enough in the early stages ofeconomic developmentin the 1950s and 1960s, but not in the more intensely competitive international situation of the 1980s. As in the other Europeansocialiststates, real living standards began to stagnate and then decline. According to some calculations, real personal income declined by one-quarter over the period from 1979 to 1985, by one-third in the decade from 1979 to 1988. To the extent that the Yugoslav regime had staked its legitimacy on providing ever higher standards of living for the population, stagnation and decline had nearly immediate political consequences.
    • Eric D. Weitz,A Century of Genocide(2018), p. 208
  • In short, the institutional structure of communist Yugoslavia sustained and developed particular national identifications. In theSoviet Union,as we have seen, the recognition of nationalities as the constituent elements of the union led to a policy that both fostered national development and treated some groups as enemy nations that had to be removed in toto. In Yugoslavia, a similar system led to an even more radical outcome. As one scholar writes, thefederal structurebased on national republics had the result that “every question was by necessity ‘nationalized.’” For some years Yugoslavia was able to muddle along. But by the late 1980s, economic decline, political paralysis, and a rapidly shifting international situation had brought the domestic situation to a crisis level. As the central government proved increasingly unable to fulfill its role as guarantor of the living standards and protector of the population, the system devolved to its constituent elements—the six republics and two autonomous regions, with theJNAsometimes referred to as the “ninth federal unit” —each of which raised its own demands. The dissolution became so dangerous in Yugoslavia because there, unlike the other communist societies in Eastern Europe, no viable, democratically mindedcivil societyhad emerged that stretched across the entire country, not just among a particularnationality.Only inBosniadid theMuslimleadership, along with a few Croat and Serb allies, try desperately to maintain the republic’s multinational character, its stature as the “true” Yugoslavia.
    • Eric D. Weitz,A Century of Genocide(2018), p. 208

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