Lessons from History - What the West should remember about Yugoslavia
Guest Article: In some ways, the 1990s was the worst decade of the second half of the 20th century
The 1990s are a decade of juxtaposition worldwide. In the US, President Clinton talked of ‘building a bridge to the 21st century,’ and there was optimism about the future. The end of the Cold War saw massive spending increases on domestic policies, and Tony Blair swept to power on a wave of hope.
And yet, in some ways, the 1990s was the worst decade of the second half of the 20th century. The end of the Cold War saw instability, rioting and the creation of oligopolies in much of the former USSR and Warsaw pact, Hong Kong’s return to China would begin the erosion of human rights in the territory, and perhaps most notably, two horrifying genocides would rock the International community.
There is an almost savage, medieval quality to the genocide in Rwanda. The mass murder of millions with little more than machetes feels in the West like something so outdated that it must come from an ancient history textbook, perhaps describing Genghis Khan’s march across Central Asia in the 13th century.
Given all this turmoil, why should you care about Yugoslavia in the 1990s? Let me kick things off with a brief history lesson. For those too young to remember, Yugoslavia was a communist federal republic of the states today known as Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and North Macedonia. The area is from the western half of the Balkan peninsula in south-eastern Europe. The Romans conquered the area, taking it from the native Illyrians in 168 BC.
The Roman occupation would last for centuries; later, control would be given to the Eastern Roman Empire. Increasingly independent local kings ruled in the region after the arrival of Christianity in the 7th century. A centuries-long campaign was waged by the Ottoman Empire to take control, culminating at the battle of Kosovo Pole in 1389, although it would take until Sultan Mohammed II in 1463 for full control to be won by the Ottomans. The Ottomans began converting local people to Islam, and along with the split in the church represented by the split of the Roman Empire, we begin to see the emergence of the three dominant religions in the region today, which approximately correspond with ethnic origins.
Ottoman rule was peaceful and fairly agnostic of religion in daily life. Christians, however, were forced to pay tithes (A tithe is a one-tenth part of something, paid as a contribution to a religious organization or compulsory tax to the government), not levied on Muslims. The Ottomans were committed to beautifying and developing the region, building the famous bridges across the Drina in Višegrad and the Neretva in Mostar. Small regions, such as the city of Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast, would run as independent city-states or under the control of Venice. As the Ottoman Empire began to crumble, and uprisings in Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia (Serbia became independent officially in 1815) in the early 19th century threatened to spread across the whole region, the Habsburg Empire was granted administrative control, and they would later annex lands making up modern-day Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The state was created as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918 by the treaty of Saint-Germain (this is a slight simplification but will suffice for our discussion) as a royalist state under the Serbian Karadjordjević dynasty.
Given the snappier name of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, it would be invaded and partially occupied by the Third Reich in the Second World War, along with Mussolini’s Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary and Albania. Most of the rest formed the Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (NDH, in English, Independent State of Croatia), which was a puppet fascist state ruled by Croats, occupying the territory of modern-day Croatia, as well as parts of modern Bosnia, Serbia and Slovenia. The NDH was a one-party state ruled by the Croatian fascists, known as the Ustaša, under their leader Ante Pavelić.
The NDH was violent from the start, claiming territory as far as the Drina River and declaring a historic border between Serbs and Croats. Within the NDH, ethnic cleansing took place on a large scale, with the Jesonovac concentration camp being set up, along with at least 21 others, to hold and exterminate Jews (~75% killed), Serbs (~17% killed), and Roma (~75% killed) in shocking acts of ethnic violence. In reprisal killings after the war, approximately 6% of the Croat and 9% of the Muslim population would be killed.
Resistance within the NDH was strong, although initially divided into two main groups. The Četniks were mostly Serb royalists and included the remnant of the royal Yugoslav army. The Partisans were communists under Josip Bros Tito. With the support of the British, they would eventually be recognised as the official resistance and form a guerrilla movement large enough to liberate their own country in 1945. This state's governance, constitution and politics bear separate discussion, but after Tito died in 1980 (having been President for life), cracks began to show and grow.
The full story of the Yugoslav Wars has been the subject of many excellent books, documentaries and articles. The sad truth is that the brutal wars in Croatia and Bosnia were likely to happen. Elders on all sides were fanning internal flames of nationalism. Slobodan Milosević, Franco Tudjman, and Alija Izetbegović, to say nothing of the more radical local leaders like Radovan Karadžić, all deepened ethnic divides at various times and heightened the tensions. In a region where so many of the civilian population are armed (even today, Serbia ranks 5th for firearms per capita, Montenegro 6th and Bosnia 13th), this was bound to explode into violence eventually. However, the West is not absent of blame in this story.
On 2nd May 1991, Croatia held a referendum on independence from FR Yugoslavia. A large turnout (84%) was recorded, and an overwhelming majority voted for independence (93%). The results were overwhelming, but crucially, the referendum had been held against the wishes of the federal government in Belgrade, and the Serb-dominated government, which held control of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), was not prepared to grant the states independence with their current borders.
All of this was well known in European capitals, including in Berlin. Yet, despite these concerns, Helmut Kohl, chancellor of the newly re-unified Germany, pressed for formal recognition of Croatia on 4th September 1991, and his country would formally recognise both Slovenia and Croatia on 15th January 1992. The reaction to this was desperate. Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović travelled to Bonn to persuade Kohl and foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher to reverse their decision. UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar wrote urging Kohl and Genscher to do so. The decision undermined the agreed action of the European Council of Ministers, raising objections from the UK, France and the Netherlands and mocking the consensual foreign policy objectives of the European Community.
The consequences of this move for Bosnia and Herzegovina were disastrous. Izetbegović was now faced with a choice of staying in a Yugoslavia dominated and run by Milosević from Belgrade, or he would have to go for independence too. The former would be unacceptable to the Croats and Muslims (known as Bosniaks, including Izetbegović himself) living in Bosnia; such a state of affairs would make them a subjugated minority in a highly nationalistic nation dominated by Serbs. The latter would not be acceptable to the Serbs in Bosnia or Serbia. Bosnian Serbs would themselves become a minority, and Serbia (and, by extension, Yugoslavia) was not prepared to give consent for its most ethnically diverse and historically complex republic to secede peacefully. Izetbegović would go for the latter, partly because he was a Bosniak and partly because the Croats and Bosnians comprised most of the nation. The referendum followed, and similarly to Croatia, there was a 99.7% vote for independence on a 64% turnout. Kohl’s Germany would recognise the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 6th April 1992, forcing other EC countries to follow suit.
The reasons for Kohl’s swift moves, in concert with Genscher, were complex, political, economic and historical. These range from historical links with the Catholic populations of Croatia and Bosnia to the prospect of better trade relations for the newly indebted Germany (West Germany took on the crippling debt of East Germany after unification) with Zagreb and Sarajevo than with Belgrade.
Publicly and diplomatically, Genscher claimed the recognition was an attempt to prevent violence by making it clear to the JNA that Germany would consider its operations inside Croatia and later Bosnia to be a foreign war of aggression rather than a civil matter. This idea made no difference to JNA’s actions. Genscher also referred to republics which ‘desire their independence’ to be recognised. This argument becomes a little hypocritical when we learn that Macedonia had fulfilled all the same requirements laid out by Genscher and yet was not recognised under pressure from the Greeks. The dispute between Greece and Macedonia lasted until 2018 when the latter agreed to adopt the name North Macedonia to distinguish it from the Greek province of the same name.
The rapid, perhaps reckless, German action forced other Western countries, including ultimately the US, to follow suit. This created a strange position for Western nations, who appeared to have settled on post-war borders in the former Yugoslavia while the war was still ongoing. With these countries implicitly committed to post-war settlements that Serbia (or, more accurately, the rump FR Yugoslavia) did not find acceptable, this inevitably led to suspicion that the West was taking sides and prevented any of these countries from acting as an honest broker in any potential peace talks.
A series of extremely bloody wars would follow, in which horrifying crimes would be committed that would lead to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to be set up at the Hague to investigate, charge, prosecute and try war criminals. A fragile peace was ultimately negotiated at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio. The Dayton Accords, as they became known, recognised the borders of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina but created an internal division in Bosnia.
The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which largely represents the Bosnian-Croat population of ethnic Croats in Bosnia and the Bosnian population of ethnically Bosnian Muslims, was created. The Federation controls a slim majority of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Most of the rest are administered by Republika Srpska, who represent ethnically Serb Bosnian residents. The border is not exact, and massacres, ancient migration patterns, and hours of tense negotiations forge its history.
The great achievement of Dayton was to preserve a sense of Serb identity for the Bosnian Serbs who were forced to live outside of Serbia and to preserve their links. The same was achieved for Bosnian Croats, and despite all predictions to the contrary, the Dayton Accords hold to this day. One quirk of this is that Bosnia-Herzegovina is the only country where the head of state must not be a citizen; the UN appoints the UN High Representative to oversee the political structures of Bosnia-Herzegovina and ensure fairness.
So why is this relevant today? Well, once again, the political situation in the Balkans is divided, and the West has taken action to exacerbate these divisions. The issue in the 21st century is not recognising borders but rather EU accession. On 1 May 2004, Slovenia became the first former Yugoslav republic to join the EU. Croatia joined on 1 July 2013. No other former Yugoslav republic has been admitted despite being official candidate countries.
Furthermore, on 1st January 2023, Croatia joined the Eurozone, replacing the Kuna with the euro as its official currency. Meanwhile, neighbouring Serbia’s chances of becoming an EU member in my lifetime look slim. Official negotiations have stalled, with only 3 of the 32 chapters closed, and popular support for the EU within Serbia continues to fall steadily.
All of this leaves Bosnia in a perilous position. The magic of the Dayton Accords was to balance the nationalities to give rights to Serbs and Croats living in Bosnia to move and trade with their ‘home countries.’ After years of Brexit debates, I hardly need to tell you that this will not be possible if Bosnia joins the EU and Serbs in Republika Srpska will be cut off from Serbia. Similarly, if Croats in the Federation are denied any hope of joining the EU alongside Croatia, they too will be unable to enjoy the freedoms Dayton promised.
It is too simplistic to pretend that the Balkans have not changed since the Dayton Accords or that EU barriers will inevitably lead Bosnia to tear itself apart again. A comprehensive trade deal and free movement zone would undoubtedly serve to placate most fears. Such an undertaking may not prove necessary; after nearly three decades, nationalist fires have cooled, notably in Croatia.
However, secession is openly discussed in Republika Srpska, and potentially, union to form a greater Serbia. Such a proposition would leave the rump Bosnia-Herzegovina vulnerable, much smaller than its neighbours, and with significant Croatian political influence. Would such a state survive? Would it be absorbed into a greater Croatia?
This solution has always proved intractable historically because Bosniaks desire to live in their own state and because of Bosnia-Herzegovina's complex ethnic mix, caused by millennia in which borders, ethnicity, and religion were not primary concerns. Yet, the EU still pursues negotiations with Bosnia-Herzegovina for membership. Once again, the West (in this case, the EU) has drawn dividing lines across the Balkan peninsula; once again, the world waits to see the consequence.
Sources:
Finlan, A., 2022. The collapse of Yugoslavia: 1991–99. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Glenny, M., 1996. The fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War. Penguin.
Carmichael, C., 2015. A concise history of Bosnia. Cambridge University Press.
Mazower, M., 2007. The Balkans: a short history (Vol. 3). Modern Library.
Power, S., 2019. The education of an idealist. London: William Collins.
The Death of Yugoslavia, (1995). BBC2 Television. 3 Sep.
A place so breathtakingly beautiful was turned ugly due to human folly. While sad, it seems that history keeps rewriting itself in many places and many forms. Here’s to a future of peaceful coexistence.
Thanks for the nice post. Do you plan to make it a series? This has a lof of nice info to unpack.