The former Yugoslavia and the descent into ethnic conflict

Many are familiar with the outcomes of the conflicts that consumed the republics of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s. Many thousands were killed, hundreds of thousands were displaced or made refugees, and homes, businesses and even entire towns were destroyed in the process. Yet attempting to establish a clear view of the origins of the conflicts from the present draws attention to the multitude of forces and factors that have been presented in an attempt to account for such origins. I will delve into some of the many theoretical perspectives that have been developed to understand how ethnic violence was capable in the now defunct state that took pride in its multiethnic character. One must first understand the nature of nationalism, as this is the touchstone idea that all theoretical perspectives on ethnic violence emanate from. I aim to avoid a chronology of the events, and instead I seek to provide a series of thematic debates around some of the contested views regarding the forces that contributed to ethnic violence. I will look to forces of a political, historical, social/psychological, and cultural nature and critically analyse their validity. I shall then pull together the views on certain fundamentals, such as whether the conflict was inevitable or premeditated and if it was elite or mass led, or a combination of both.

Ernest Gellner (Nations and Nationalism, 2006) defines nationalism as ‘primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.’ He goes on to say that sentiment is the feeling that is aroused when this principle is either achieved or violated, and that a nationalist movement is the sum of physical acts derived from such sentiments. Taken at face value, Socialist Yugoslavia could not be described as the realized goal of a nationalist given that numerous peoples, nationalities and ethnic groups lived within its borders. Nationalism as an all-pervasive ideology has been blamed for conflict, however, what is of more interest is how an ideology manifested itself and how it had to fit on to a culture for it to be adopted by its people, as Erwin Staub suggests (The Roots of Evil, 1989). Nationalism was not new to the region prior to the 1990’s, but neither was it as ferocious as what was later witnessed. The redefining of state boundaries in the early 1990’s along with the geographic placement of ethnic groups within them are viewed as the watershed moment for the conflict to have begun, and I will now turn to the first of several theoretical viewpoints that lead towards this point and the violence being ethnic in nature.

Rogers Brubaker (in Daedalus, Vol. 124, No. 2, Spring, 1995) provides a theory centred on the political dynamics surrounding the collapse of the Yugoslav state. His triadic nexus of national minorities, nationalizing states and external national homelands portrays a relational perspective to the Yugoslav break up between these three. Because of the ‘nationalization of political space’, since the bigger political space has now evaporated, those constituent nations now dwell in pockets in new states where another dominant nation now governs. Citizenship in one state is balanced with ethno-national affinity with another. So an individual is at the centre of the triadic relationship going on, and of two nationalisms being played out; one in the state they reside in, and one in the ‘home’ state. Conflicts arise because of new reconfigurations of the triadic nexus. Nationalizing states partake in the elite-led promotion of a homogenous nation in a heterogeneous society, where there is a large national minority who is organised yet politically alienated. This group makes demands based on real or perceived threats to their wellbeing, and are closely watched by elites in their ‘homeland’ who protest on their behalf for their rights. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia should be seen in this triadic form. Three overlapping processes consisted of nationalizing Croats both before and after independence, disaffection and nationalist mobilisation of Croatian Serbs in the borderlands, and the development of a belligerent homeland stance in the Serbian state leaning on a Serbian dominated JNA to create a Greater Serbia out of the federation. So the Croat secession wasn’t simply a response to Serb assertiveness within Yugoslavia, but a nationalizing process by Croats. The interplay between these three processes acted as catalysts for people to become involved because of their perception of and reaction to events in one of the other two processes. These were founded on representations that had to be developed from monitoring situations in the other fields, and packaged in a way for people to be mobilized. So although he believes the processes to be elite-led, they had to have support from the masses. He takes the view that after an event occurred; new perceptions or responses were triggered. So he looks at the contexts of an event in relation to what went before it that acted as a trigger. This created the conditions for an escalation of events, the catalyst being the political leaders. However he looks at the process of the break up in isolation from the processes that led to the break up.

Jack Snyder (From Voting to Violence, 2000) believes democratisation played a role in this. He believes that nationalism is weak prior to democratization, and that this process actually produces nations and nationalisms. When political leaders wish to garner support, yet not to relinquish too much power to the citizen, they provide for partial democracy using nationalism to gain it. The timing and context of democratization varies the nationalism that results. Exclusionary nationalism occurs if the country is poor, the citizens lack skills to participate in democracy, and when politicians, the media and institutions are weak during the beginning of the process. This is what occurred in Serbia and Croatia. In pre-conflict Yugoslavia democratization and political decentralization led to communist elites fearing for their position, giving them an incentive for leading popular nationalist movements. Decentralization and the ethnofederal nature of Yugoslavia allowed these elites to use the institutions at their disposal for this advancement. Four factors allowed for democratization to lead to nationalism and then ethnic conflict. First, he argues that ‘Historical legacies created the conditions from which conflict could emerge…’ Secondly, the structure of the federal system, tying ethnic groups to republics, was conceived in order to deal with the nationalities question but instead it created divisions within Yugoslavia, that not only nationalists favoured but liberals also, and became represented as a debate between Slovenia and Croatia on one side, and Serbia and the Army on the other. Thirdly, challenges with the economy were in tandem with the maneuverings of political elites to gain support on the onset of a more open political system. Finally, the media were an important factor in that the ethnic republic leaders could monopolize as much as they could. Journalists and intellectuals who disseminated nationalist myths aided this. But this only fed into prejudices that were already present therefore a supply and demand scenario existed. The only downside to this argument is that it doesn’t account for the rise of Franjo Tudjman as President. His portrayal can be seen to mirror Slobodan Milosevic’s conversion during democratization, but not of an anti-communist figure that rose independently of the state structures. He was more a figure of ‘Historical legacies’ if anything. However, Snyder does provide three more political factors that I will now approach. 

Marshal Tito’s policy of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ sought to erase the competing nationalist versions of World War II history by providing a narrative that united the new Yugoslavs around a Partisan myth versus internal and external fascist enemies. The new socialist Yugoslav constitution developed a system of republics, most of which had a nation tied to them. In addition to this there was the guarantee of equality of the nations throughout the republics, for those who do not live in their ‘home’ nation. And this is where Sabrina Ramet believes Tito went wrong. In her epilogue in Balkan Bebel she argues that when Tito opted to tolerate the already present cultures based on a thin ‘Yugoslavism’ anchored in the Partisan myth, instead of creating a new Yugoslav identity, he embedded the continual resurfacing of inter-group hatred from the World War II era. Therefore the trauma of those who experienced it never went away. Anthony Oberschall (in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 23, No. 6, pp. 982-1001. November 2000) agrees with her focus on the Yugoslav constitution but for a different reason. He felt that because there was a balancing act going on to appease all the different ethnic and national stakeholders in the country, any attempts by nationalists to alter it would obviously focus on issues including the drawing of boundaries and placement of peoples. But he prescribes democratization as the antidote to nationalists employing ethnic cleavages. This is the opposite of what Snyder argues as he placed democratization first with the rise in nationalism as the consequence. I would agree with Oberschall that nationalists would try and alter the borders of the republics, but his approach is set within the context of a communist state where nationalist communists were the actors who could affect that change, and this wasn’t the case. Democratization led to the election of both a nationalist ‘communist’ in Slobodan Milosevic and an outright nationalist in Franjo Tudjman. Therefore the rules of the game changed. The borders issue became more prominent once Tudjman made the calls for secession because they would lead to international state boundaries, not internal republic borders. So the issue became a lot more contentious and therefore more open to conflict. Given that republics were tied to nations, this provided the ethnic paradigm. To add to this E. M. Despalatovic (in Halpern & Kideckel’s Neighbours at War, 2000) makes the point that when Croatia was gearing towards independence and after the HDZ had won the elections; they fired Serbian communists – not because they were Serbs but because they were communists. So the result of democratization was the removal of communists in the state bureaucracy yet presented as removal of the Serbs. This feeds into Brubaker’s argument about opportunities for political leaders to represent the other process, here the nationalization of the Croatian state. In terms of contributing to ethnic violence, economic issues pale into the background, but they do add to the factors that may have left the population frustrated and motivated to turn to nationalist politicians and be receptive of their messages.

But people were receiving messages from other sources, namely the media, as pointed out by Snyder. Bette Denich (in Halpern & Kideckel’s Neighbours at War, 2000) provides a compelling case on the lack of communication between the numerous elites and amongst the various ethnic populations. Denich’s argument is that there were two processes going on. First, Serb and Croatian nationalists were arguing over the overlapping nature of their claims for territory, which meant that they were only concerned with their own nationalist version of truth, and not listening to others. Second, this meant that the ordinary people weren’t listening to each other either, helped by the media’s portrayal of events. The narratives at play, victimization and threat, fed into those who weren’t ‘nationalist’ before. Only those not involved in an ethno-nationalist framework were distant from it, but they were few in number. In employing Benedict Anderson’s assertion that print capitalism played a part in the forming of commonality prior to nation-state formation, she points to mass media that was devolved to the republics, which carried narratives produced by the intelligentsia’s of the republics based on the raw materials of ethnic identity. The media in each republic therefore pushed different perspectives on the same news to different audiences who reacted differently. The portrayal of victimization by each media and of the ‘other’ as a threat, coupled with no actual response to the ‘other’ only their projection of them, led to an escalation of the perception of the ‘other’ as being a threat. Without other contrary viewpoints, these perceptions grew and became exaggerated. Therefore the media was employed as a tool to foster conditions on the ground that led to ethnic tensions being raised backed by each republics leaders and intelligentsia. To link with Brubaker’s triadic nexus argument, the communication of representations was key for the processes to interact with each other and produce different responses to events. So the media was complicit in fostering those conditions.

So what we had was a combination of political forces that interacted with each other, and played off each other, which fostered conditions for ethnic violence the former Yugoslavia. Established political elites sought to exploit the move to democracy for their attempts to cling on to, or reach, power in their home republics, using the existing structure of the Yugoslav state; and the ideology of nationalism as tool to garner mass support by communicating through republic owned media outlets. This led to the collapse of the League of Communists as an institution and the subsequent undermining of the Yugoslav state that had been created to unite the nations of the South Slavs. But solely pointing to political forces leaves out the emotional connection people at the grassroots level had and could relate to.

Historical forces are another viewpoint from which to understand the conditions that were created to lead to ethnic violence. Norman Naimark (Fires of Hatred, 2001) points to both the Serbs and Croats prior to the conflict exploiting their versions of recent ‘history’ in order to mobilize their respective ‘nations’. ‘The Serbs in Krajina mobilized around the threat of a new Jasenovac…’ and rested on past and present inflated numbers of Serb deaths there during the Ustasha state. Whereas the anti-communist Croats connected the Serbs to the communist legacy by pointing to Croat massacres under Tito at the end of World War II. These messages were relayed by the media, which was controlled by both Milosevic and Tudjman. These fed into repressed memories of those who lived through them times and were thus employed as a tool to mobilize them. He feels that the brutality displayed during the war in Croatia had ‘to do with the history of the region since 1940 and the urban social groups that fostered Serbian paramilitaries than it did with the inheritance of the distant past.’ His latter point regarding outsiders coming in to the area to stir up conflict, I will approach later. He does have a valid point about the present use of selected (and perhaps contested) historical facts to underpin nationalist rhetoric. But this argument doesn’t go far enough in the sense that there is a detachment between those who lived through the experiences of World War II and those who have grown up since; he doesn’t account for their mobilization. Aside from factors that have been mentioned up to now that could have motivated this group of people, Victor Roudometof (Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy, 2001) argues that it is necessary to take into account the educational mechanisms responsible for the production and proliferation of stereotypes. ‘As the different nationalist agendas of the Balkan nation-states gradually became enshrined in regional historical discourse, they inevitably found their way into songs, schoolbooks, and local traditions.’ Thus collective memories were acted out daily and were barriers to solving the problems of the 1990’s. Because there was no outlet to answer the ‘national question’ under communism, the 1980’s saw a revival of historical revisionism. In the 1990’s, history was ‘renationalized’ and used as a tool for ethnocentric propaganda. There are two links here; the first being Sabrina Ramet who said that communism didn’t provide a vehicle to openly discuss the traumas of World War II. But Rogers Brubaker better links the past to the present in his triadic view of the Serbs ‘as active participants in the intensifying conflict and as political subjects in their own right, construing (and misconstruing) the dangers of the present in the light of the atrocities of the past.’ This linking of the past to the present leads on to ethnosymbolism and cultural forces in general.

Stuart Kaufman (Modern Hatreds, 2001) argues from a ‘symbolic politics’ perspective on the cause of ethnic war. He believes that two roots to ethnic violence are mass-led or elite-led. Developments of three factors are crucial to reach this end, mass hostility, ethnic outflanking by political elites, and a security dilemma. By mass hostility he refers to an external affinity problem (i.e. a group is a majority in the state, but a minority in the region), a history of ethnic domination, or issues over ethnic symbols. A security dilemma can occur when these threaten other groups, and when outbidding by extremist leaders in power up the ante on this because of a perception of extinction on either side. So he believes that ‘If the necessary conditions for ethnic war are myths, fears, and opportunity, the timing of the war is explained by an increase in fear, opportunity, or hostility justified by the myths.’ This could be down to a rise in symbolic events or where a political opportunity presents itself, which determines whether it is elite or mass-led. Conversely, a lack of ethnic symbolism can be seen in areas where ethnic violence didn’t occur but had mixed ethnicities. His judgement is that relevantly modern hatreds, found in renewed accounts of myths and stories, inspired the killing in the former Yugoslavia, which links into the arguments set out by Ramet, Roudometof and Naimark. Events in Yugoslavia were elite-led, albeit with ethnic hostility already being present amongst the masses, which ramped up the low level hostility through fears manipulated by symbols and myths. Roudometof agrees with the power of symbols, myths and stories that were used as mobilizing tools, and he places a time on when their true potential was realized. After the independence of Croatia ‘the new ethnic symbolisms emphasized the explicit ethnic character of the proposed new state.’

Although Ramet agrees with Kaufman on the traumas of World War II being relived and that Milosevic was tapping into already present hostility because ‘He catered to them, manipulated them, and amplified them.’ She fundamentally believes that because these people were culturally diverse they weren’t going to get on. So a chasm opens up here between the idea that it was the fault of political leaders who utilized symbols and myths of the past to conjure up ethnic hatred and violence in a once stable society, to a fundamental questioning of the reason why these people were ever placed in one state. The fact that different cultures were put together in the first place almost justifies Ramets’ argument that Milosevic (and others) had a simple task to achieve their aims, and this is where I disagree with her assertion of inevitability. It had to be linked to other ongoing processes at the time or else these groups would have been in conflict before the 1990’s, and this is where Kaufman’s argument stands up to scrutiny.

However, other social or psychological factors played a role in the path to ethnic violence. The first tranche of these focus on predetermined characteristics that could account for ethnic violence. Remembering Snyder’s point that nationalism was weak prior to democratization, I return to Oberschall whose approach to ethnic violence leans on two cognitive perspectives that Yugoslavs were meant to have had when conducting relations with other ethnicities. ‘People possessed both frames in their minds: In peacetimes the crisis frame was dormant, and in crisis and war the normal frame was suppressed. Both frames were anchored in private and family experiences.’ He points to the Tito-era as a time when the normal frame was activated, but he links the events of World War II and the 1990’s as one of repetition. He draws on personal history as a force for the actions of the present, and ties this to psychological factors inherent in the people of the former Yugoslavia. But to understand his theory he places it into the context of the 1990’s conflict and uses it to answer the question of why a people who lived harmoniously for forty years began to kill each other. The crisis frame was triggered by elite manipulation in the context of a security dilemma, so here he links to Kaufman’s theory. Benjamin Valentino (Final Solutions, 2004) narrows this notion of some form of individual cognitive frame, experienced by a collectivity. His approach to the cause of ethnic violence goes back to the argument of it being elite-led. However, he believes that instead of the masses participating in a wide spread melee, the violence was conducted by a small group of people with the rest of the population as bystanders. Because only a few people are perpetrators they are selected, and can be fanatics or those manipulated by elites in certain situations. He divides perpetrators into two types, ones who are innately biased towards violence and others who are ‘ordinary’ yet are seduced into it. So psychological factors and social/situational ones motivate perpetrators to violent acts. Preexisting ideological convictions or hatred alone did not account for violence, nor can the severe brutality of some can be seen as generic to all perpetrators. Yet soldiers carry out violence as duties from the top of the hierarchy. His argument then is that all humans have the capacity to kill but it is individuals who make a choice on what they wish to do. This latter argument tied into the idea that something needs to occur for humans to kill, such as a situation or coercion, seems to be plausible, yet does run closely parallel to Oberschall’s cognitive frame idea that is somewhat rigid.

Looking at it from a different tangent, H. Grandits and C. Promitzer (in Halpern & Kideckel’s Neighbours at War, 2000) point to a historically rooted patriarchal mentality that descended from the Military Frontier, where Catholics and Orthodox were united as soldiers. These remained up to the time of the 1990’s conflict, including the predisposition to use force and take up arms. This went in tandem with the use of symbols to act as triggers to draw out different responses by reactivating historical values. This may have some weight if it can be based less on psychological/biological foundations and more on its penetration into local rituals and customs of communities. But to tie up the debate on predetermined societal and psychological forces that led to ethnic violence, I return to E. Staub, whom I quoted earlier arguing that nationalism had to fit the already present cultures for it to succeed. His wider argument is that that ‘Certain characteristics of a culture and the structure of a society, combined with great difficulties or hardships of life and social disorganisation, are the starting point for genocide or mass killing.’ He believes that most cultures possess characteristics that have the potential for group violence and that certain circumstances that they find themselves in unleash it. This underlines Grandits and Promitzer’s argument if taken from my suggested perspective. All these theories point to the circumstances of the period in the early 1990s as the trigger for all these preordained factors to become active, so there must be validity in their claims. However, I can only agree with those claims that are rooted in a sense of cultural continuity such as Staub, and Valentino to a degree, because the triggers for the violent acts need to have a human or emotional connection for these presumptions to be valid. Staub’s example of ‘life problems’ is one such link. Another could be the lived experience of World War II.

Yet Staub also provides us with a temporally linear explanation that leads to ethnic violence, as opposed to a purely predetermined one, this being the ‘continuum of destruction’. His idea here is that small destructive actions that become more routinely used can justify the next destructive action, and so on. This idea assumes the collective nature of the actions, whether they be societal or between ethnic groups. The start of such a process can be as long as the observer or researcher wishes it to be. A primordialist of an ‘ancient hatred’ tradition would see this stretch back millennia. But more modern arguments place it within the last two centuries. Brubaker’s argument regarding the impact of education places it in the 19^th century. Roudometof’s theory of collective memory places it in the wake of the atrocities in World War II, if not before that. But what is of key importance here is that hatred had been building up over a period of time. This can explain two things. First the role of the bystander, and second the reason why mass killing didn’t occur straight away.

On the former point, Valentino argues that mass killings don’t need mass support, just indifference for it to occur. It is wrong to assume that the masses support it. Mass killings don’t just start from scratch, but the public show negative support by allowing legal measures and social attitudes to build up discrimination and hatred of vulnerable social groups. So no one opposes it. Accordingly they may support the regime but not the killing. But even if they do, he says it may be down to propaganda and mis-information to ‘cover up’ the extent of it. ‘Throughout the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, Belgrade sought to cover up its atrocities or characterize them as legitimate military actions.’ So this backs up his argument that ethnic violence is elite-led, and links to Staub’s ‘continuum of destruction’. On the latter point, the former argument backs up the common sense idea that mass killing didn’t just spontaneously erupt, but that the conditions had been building up and brewing for sometime. Yet, this still doesn’t explain how it did arrive at violence. Although the war was a conflict between Croatia and Yugoslavia backed up by the JNA, something altered to make it an ethnic conflict on the ground in multiethnic communities. Here we can place the idea of the role of ‘outsiders’ in fomenting trouble and stirring up ethnic violence. Sabrina Ramet describes the events between the JNA intervening in Croatia and the amassing of paramilitaries to fight in the war. Clashes between Croatian militia and Serb irregulars highlight the potential for rogue elements to act out; however, they would not without either insecurity underpinned by nationalist rhetoric or from official orders. The latter is most likely. Yet a result of these clashes was that Serb paramilitaries formed and struck at towns in Croatia. So one can see how non-official combatants brought the conflict in to the region. Or as Grandits and Promitzer see it ‘the influence of movements outside the region developed national consciousness in the area.’

Taking into account the many forces that these scholars have attributed to the creation of conditions for ethnic violence, I seek to tie up two ideas. The first is the question of whether the ethnic violence was elite or mass-led. Many if not most of the theories point to an element of elite-led participation. Some argue that it may be as basic as a leader using the raw material of hostility, such as Ramet. Others developed a more nuanced argument that included the use of the media, state institutions, the circumstances of democratization and state collapse, along with the tapping into the already held prejudices of the population via ethnosymbolism. But one must concede that without the masses divided into two or more distinct groups (whether historically or newly fashioned) then there would have been no conflict over the placement of these people. Further to that, the build up over years, if not decades, of hostility had to have been incubated at the community level for the political rhetoric to resonate. So a combination of the two approaches is an adequate answer, but this links to the second question of whether ethnic violence was inevitable or a consequence of the series of events that came before it. This depends on the perspective of time one takes when looking at the events that took place through linear time. On one side you have Ramet who argues that Tito’s failure to solve the nationalities issue at he start of the second Yugoslavia meant it was inevitable to led to ethnic violence. However, her approach comfortably sits at the ‘end of time’ with the benefit of hindsight. Others take the view, such as Roudometof, that the build up over time of hostility couldn’t have inevitably led to violence given that they lived peacefully for forty years prior to the events in the 1990’s. Therefore, one must place the actions of the past, in motion, into the context of the time period just prior to ethnic violence occurring. And this is where Brubaker and Snyder’s views become useful. This is also where intent can be ascribed, according to some of the theorists mentioned, because of the elite-led nature of the violence.

In conclusion, the forces that led to the creation of conditions for ethnic violence to occur in the former Yugoslavia were varied, and fluctuated in importance according to the theory developed. I understand the situation as follows. Hostility was already present on the ground in the communities of the former Yugoslavia, and had been building up over time, thanks in part to educational institutions and the nurturing of cultural traditions. ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ was Tito’s policy to ensure that the nationalities’ issue was dealt with after the traumatic experiences of World War II, which were seen as ‘ethnic’ in nature. Through developments in the constitutional make up of the Yugoslav state, the republics grew as power bases for a small elites to govern, especially in regards to the media. With the onset of democratization, nationalists or reforming communist leaders sought to gain (or keep) political office. Nationalism was utilized by these leaders, using the boundaries of the republics for their new state, and communicating effective ethnosymbolic messages to the masses through the media, which resonated with some due to their lived experiences in World War II. For others, the socio-economic conditions, deteriorating since the mid-1980’s, mobilized their sense of isolation in a state that was collapsing. A continuum of destruction developed and became truncated in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, as nation-building reified distinctions of who ‘us’ and ‘them’ were, especially volatile in areas of mixed ethnicities such as eastern Croatia. A security dilemma took hold once ‘outsiders’ who used violence elsewhere in the region came into local communities coercing people to choose sides. For fear of death, those of the same ethnicity as the belligerents chose to take their side or become neutral bystanders to the violence. Therefore although one can point to the forces from history for ethnic violence, one must account for the activities of those who led the charge of utilizing such rhetoric that didn’t stop violence escalating, even actively promoting its use, in the period immediately prior to violence being committed. Ultimately, though, the participation of the masses, actively or passively, meant that the actions of the leaders could be easily justified, as they had no mass popular opposition to contend with.