A Way Out for Yugoslavia
STRAUS, MIHAJLOMIHAJLOV AND IRA
AFTER 'FACADE FEDERALISM' AWay Out for Yugoslavia BY MIHAJLO MIHAJLOV and IRA STRAUS Nationalism is the final stage of Communism. —Adam Michntk At first glance, it appears that the...
...Now that fighting has started it will be hard to stop...
...The main flashpoint for civil war is inside Croatia, where600,000 Serbs live...
...In both the USSR and Yugoslavia, what the center inspired was popular hatred, thanks to the horrors of communism...
...They fear that independence will mean another massacre...
...In short, there is a way for Yugoslavia to avoid becoming a European Lebanon...
...During World War II it was divided by the Axis powers...
...It did not work...
...The world is rightly concentrating on separating the combatants and stopping the killing...
...When the country emerged in 1918 as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (its present name was of ficially adopted in 1929), it assumed a highly unitary form of rule...
...Both were controlled extralegally by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia...
...Multiparty elections followed in four republics during the spring and summer of 1990, and finally were held in Serbia and Montenegro in the autumn...
...2. Direct, multiparty federal elections should be held after a truce is arranged, so that a legitimate federal government can be put together...
...Consequently, the 1974 Constitution gave the country a formal structure more akin to a confederation than a federation...
...All that is lacking at the moment is the will...
...no matter how often purged, they kept popping up again...
...Meanwhile, the theoretical constitutional autonomy of the republic governments provided a base of legitimacy for separatist feelings, despite the incessant Communist propaganda urging unity...
...In that year Slobodan Milosevic, a rising Serbian Communist, engineered a crackdown on the Albanian majority in Serbia's autonomous Province of Kosovo...
...Ethnic pluralism, in this case, is proving beneficial to political pluralism...
...Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Macedonia elected antiCommunist governments...
...Everywhere—except, again, in Bosnia-Hercegovina—the Communist method of governing has been retained...
...The federal government was now chosen indirectly by the republics, not directly bythepeople...
...He recently revisited Yugoslavia after 12 years of forced exile...
...In the Gorbachev era, the Communist concept itself fell into terminal disrepute...
...This would give the Kosovans a chance to live in a Balkanwide community with their fellow Albanians without having to break up Yugoslavia for this purpose...
...But secession by Croatia, the second largest republic after Serbia, would bring on full-scale communal warfare...
...Communist bosses in the republics increasingly tried to use the situation, along with the new legal powers of the republics, to buttress their personal power visà-vis the central Party bosses...
...The League of Communists, though, still pulled all the strings in the background...
...Through all of this the federal Parliament has simply continued to sit in office...
...Unfortunately, none of the multilateral organizations in Europe—NATO, the European Community, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe—is designed to carry out such a task...
...Media controls have been parceled out to the three groups, producing more press freedom...
...There have been no municipal elections...
...In the remaining republics his strategy backfired: The Communists, in self-defense, opened negotiations with the opposition...
...In Croatia, industries have even been renationalized...
...The result was, in political scientist Carl Friedrich's telling phrase, "facade federalism...
...The republics, by contrast, are exercising the muscles of their new mandates...
...Thus, while Croatia is taking up arms and threatening to secede from Yugoslavia, its Serbian population is taking up arms and threatening that it, in turn, will unite with the Serbs in Bosnia...
...But the League came apart completely at that congress: The Slovenians walked out and the meeting disbanded, never to resume...
...He succeeded in Montenegro and Serbia's second autonomous Province of Vojvodina...
...Once again the northwest— mostly Catholic, Croat, and formerly under Austro-Hungarian rule—faced off against the southeast—mostly Orthodox, Serb, and formerly under Ottoman rule...
...Neither did the central government for that matter...
...In the face of this legitimacy gap, federal authority has rapidly disintegrated...
...Mihajlo Mihajlov, a long-time contributor to The New Leader, is a senior analyst for Radio Liberty in Washington...
...Although Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and his Croatian counterpart, Franjo Tudjman, have held secret talks about redrawing the map and gathering in their peoples, their nightmare scenario would involve wholesale forcible resettlement, tearing up Bosnia-Hercegovina, and creating states with indefensible borders...
...The local governments, of course, did not have actual autonomy...
...it is a holdover from the old order, which has been thoroughly discredited...
...Nationalism soon took on greater force...
...For the root of Yugoslavia's latest nationalities crisis one needs to go back to 1987...
...Adam Michntk At first glance, it appears that the choice in Yugoslavia today is between preserving the existing union or accepting the independence of the country's six republics...
...In Serbia and Montenegro the Communists, making full use of their domination of the media, survived...
...If it goes on much longer, it could persist for a generation...
...Ironically, it is also the first chance for Yugoslavia to become a genuine federation...
...Is there a way to prevent the disintegration of Yugoslavia...
...Its one-party elections are an ineffective device for building loyalty to the federal government...
...This would undoubtedly result in an authentic, albeit loose, form of federalism that would be called a "confederation," since the word "federation" has been discredited by years of Communist abuse...
...Statecontrolofthemediaremains the rule...
...So this is the last chance to avoid the ravages of an enduring bloody confrontation...
...It should have faced elections in 1990, too, yet amid the dramatic changes in the republics that necessity somehow got lost in the shuffle...
...Coauthor Ira Straus is editor of the Federator...
...The winning parties have just taken over the apparatus of one-party rule, allowing little role for the opposition...
...In these circumstances "national Communist" deviations inevitably developed in the republic Party fiefdoms...
...most of them lost the 1990 elections anyway...
...In Bosnia-Hercegovina, where the population is made upof Moslems, Serbs and Croats, thepartiesof each have joined in a coalition government headed by an authentically non-Communist Moslem...
...Their families have been there for 300 years and, as their nationalist leaders keep reminding them, they were massacred in the hundreds of thousands by the puppet Croat state during World War II...
...Serbs and Croats are intermingled in a patchwork of neighborhoods in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina...
...The Communist Party gradually split along the national-republic fault lines: Local apparatuses grew strong and independent, and the central apparatus slowly withered away...
...Next, he tried to extend his control to the other republic Communist parties and thereby re-establish the de facto unity of the Yugoslav state...
...The northernmost Republic of Slovenia and the autonomous Province of Kosovo might be able to go their separate ways without setting off a civil war because they are nearly homogeneous ethnically...
...1. Besides observers and mediators, an international peacekeeping force should be put in place to assure that any agreements reached will stick...
...Yugoslavia simply went from facade federalism to facade confederalism...
...The situation already has degenerated into a cycle of violence that is proving hard to stop...
...With Tito's death in 1980 the entire system began to unravel...
...This was closer to the dynamics of feudalism than of modern federalism: Local lords, relying on the barons to back up their control, nevertheless defended the "liberty" of "their people" against the barons.To be sure, the real political battles were fought in the Party, but the state organizations did serve as shadow-boxing grounds for the struggles...
...Indeed, the illiberal side of nationalism has always been strong in Yugoslavia...
...The action was so popular with his kinsmen that he tied his star to their fears and passions and launched an "antibureaucratic revolution" to secure his control of the Serbian Communist Party and government...
...The real choice, however, is either fashioning a new federal system or becoming a European Lebanon...
...While he continued to treat the nationalists harshly, as the Soviets had always done, he sought to assuage them by radically decentralizing Yugoslavia...
...Each comes to be viewed by the voters as "their own," with the nationwide balloting gradually building federal loyalties and phasing out the exclusivity of nationalist inclinations...
...In addition, new elections should be called in the republics, with the understanding that powersharing rather than one-party rule, freedom of the press and municipal elections are mandatory...
...instead the new ruling parties have installed their own bosses...
...Facade federalism lacks these virtues...
...The crisis, however, should persuade them of the importance of expanding their roles...
...Faced with popular resentment, Communist politicians at the republic level began appealing to nationalism, playing the people off against the center even as they depended on it for their own authority...
...Add to the scene the conflicts among the republics, and actions by their new governments insulting to ethnic minorities...
...Milosevic nonetheless hoped to prevail at a special congress of the League of Communists called in January 1990...
...But their replacements are hardly determined democrats: In every republic where the Communists lost, except Bosnia-Hercegovina, former Communists who had earlier abandoned communism for nationalism came to power...
...The move merely delayed the storm...
...Industries have not been privatized, but they have undergone a political purge of management...
...To bring Yugoslavia back from the brink of disaster the following steps must be taken...
...They have proclaimed themselves sovereign and their laws superior to federal law, they have built their police forces into militias and fledgling armies, and they have in general seized the political limelight...
...The eight-member Presidency that succeeded him led to paralysis at the center...
...Every new act of violence makes it more difficult to restore minimal conditions of trust...
...The government has come around to a non-Communist point of view under Prime Minister Ante Markovic, but without any popular or political base...
...In true federations, eachlevel of government is chosen by the citizenry in direct elections and therefore possesses a natural independence...
...Tito attempted a novel response to the problem...
...Party bosses in the republics of Yugoslavia tried to hold on by riding with the tide...
...But that is at most a stopgap approach...
...But now that Serbia and Croatia are on a collision course, everyone is nervously taking up arms...
...And nationalism certainly has turned out to be "the final stage of Communism...
...4. Finally, an effort should be made to form a Balkan confederation that includes Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and—when it makes real democratic reforms—Romania...
...3. Negotiation for a new federal constitution should be initiated, with the newly elected federal government as an equal participant...
...After the War, Marshal Josip Broz Tito introduced Soviet-style federalism to appease nationalist sentiments...
...The International Media Fund reports that the new Slovenian government—widely considered the most democratic of all—has asked the United States Information Service several times for assistance in drafting legislation "to control the media...
...They left Yugoslavia split down the middle, and the federal government hanging in midair...
Vol. 74 • July 1991 • No. 8
