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Explaining the Yugoslav meltdown, 1

“for a charm of pow'rful trouble, like
a hell‐broth boil and bubble”: theories
about the roots of the Yugoslav
troubles
Sabrina P. Ramet
Published online: 23 Jan 2007.

To cite this article: Sabrina P. Ramet (2004) Explaining the Yugoslav meltdown, 1 “for a charm
of pow'rful trouble, like a hell‐broth boil and bubble”: theories about the roots of the Yugoslav
troubles, Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 32:4, 731-763

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 Nationalities Papers, Vol. 32, No. 4, December 2004

Explaining the Yugoslav meltdown, 1

“For a charm of pow’rful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and
bubble”:1 Theories about the Roots of the Yugoslav Troubles

Sabrina P. Ramet2
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We all know why the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY)

disintegrated and why the War of Yugoslav Succession (1991–1995) broke out. It
was all because of Milošević/Tudjman/“the Slovenes”/communists/organized crime/
Western states/the Vatican–Comintern conspiracy, who planned it all by
himself/themselves in order to advance his own personal/Serbian/Slovenian/Ameri-
can/Vatican interests—your choice. Or again—it all happened because of local bad
traditions/economic problems/structural issues/system illegitimacy/legitimate
grievances/illegitimate grievances/the long shadow of the past. Or again—it really
started in 1389/1463/1878/1918/1941/1986/1987/1989/1990/1991—your pick. Of
course, we all know that both the breakup and the war were completely avoidable/in-
evitable, don’t we? And best of all, we all know that the real villain(s) in this drama
can only be Milošević/Tudjman/“the Serbs”/“the Slovenes”/“the Croats”/“the Mus-
lims”/Germany/Balkan peoples generally/the Great Powers, who must be held
(exclusively/jointly) responsible for most of the killing, though some of us also know
that all parties were equally guilty. Well, maybe we all know what caused the
Yugoslav troubles, but it seems that we “know” different things.
Part—though, of course, only part—of the reason for the lack of consensus is a
tendency, on the part of some observers, to conflate three distinct questions when
undertaking to analyze the roots of the Yugoslav troubles. These questions are: (1)
Why did the SFRY collapse? (2) Why did armed conflict erupt between the peoples
of the area in 1991? And (3) why did people who had lived together in peace for
most of 45 years take up arms against each other, in some cases with former friends
and neighbors becoming each other’s tormentors? It is, however, an open question
whether any one theory, especially a theory stressing one independent variable, can
serve to answer all three questions. On the face of it, it would seem more likely that
we shall need different solutions or a combination of theories to address each of the
three questions. We may also identify two subsidiary questions that are related to the
three central questions specified above. These are: (4) Do the Serbs, Croats, and/or
Bosniaks (Muslims) have any particular predisposition to violence, and, if so, where
does it come from? And (5) how far back can intense rivalries or conflicts involving
these three peoples be traced?

ISSN 0090-5992 print; ISSN 1465-3923 online/04/040731-33  2004 Association for the Study of Nationalities
DOI: 10.1080/0090599042000296171
 S. P. RAMET

The question of the roots of the Yugoslav troubles continues to fascinate, absorb,
and even obsess many of us who care about Yugoslavia and its successor states; but
it also has a broader significance, insofar as an analysis of the roots of the troubles
in Yugoslavia might provide some insight into understanding the ways in which a
society may slide into war. (The question of whether the War of Yugoslav Succes-
sion should be considered a civil war or an international war is a juridical question
that hinges on the importance one assigns to membership in the U.N. versus a history
of cohabitation in the same state; this question, therefore, is not one that shall hold
any interest for us in this context.)
What I propose to do in this article is to survey the chief theories which have been
offered in the endeavor to explain what made Yugoslavia “boil and bubble.” These
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will be aggregated into the following five categories, according to the explanatory
variable that receives the most stress: (1) external factors, (2) internal/remote factors,
(3) internal/proximate factors, (4) emotional factors, and (5) a combination of
factors. In the process, I hope to shed light on the nature of the debates within the
field concerning this most vital question. In the concluding section, I shall suggest
some ways in which the insights of several of these theories may be combined to
produce a stronger and more subtle theory.

External Factors
There are two versions of the approach which stresses external factors in accounting
for Yugoslav troubles—the first of which looks for conspiracies involving the Great
Powers, and the second of which argues that the resolution of the Cold War brought
an end to the situation in which a united Yugoslavia was valuable to the West. I am
unable to think of any scholarly work that advocates the conspiratorial view, though
one may, nonetheless, hear this view advocated in conversations with various people
in the Yugoslav successor states and find it represented on websites. The typical
suspects who are rounded up for such theories are Germany, Austria, and the
Vatican, sometimes adding also the United States and other European powers, who
are said to have collaborated in the effort to break up the SFRY.3 One such posting
proposes, for example, to show “how Germany and the Vatican use[d] the European
Union and NATO to achieve their historical aims in Yugoslavia.”4 This explanation
was incorporated, in the early 1990s, into a history textbook read by high school
seniors in Serbia; in the textbook’s account, it was the Vatican that bore primary
responsibility for having “launched a battle against Orthodoxy and Serbs through the
Catholic Church [in Croatia] and its allies.”5 In other Serb publications, Germany and
Austria are singled out. Not only was the demonization of Germany a theme first
developed in Serbian newspapers,6 but the threat that the war in Bosnia might ignite
World War III was itself a theme found in Serbian wartime propaganda. Not very
surprisingly, Milošević has made use of this theory in his defense at The Hague,
where he has argued that “the foreign factor was behind those demonstrations of the

732
 THE ROOTS OF THE YUGOSLAV TROUBLES

9th of March”7 and that already, in 1989, “control over the events in Yugoslavia
[was] being taken over by foreign elements as well as control of the Yugoslav
crisis.”8
A particularly extreme version of the conspiratorial approach may be found in To
Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, written by Michael Parenti, the chairman
of the U.S. section of the International Committee for the Defense of Slobodan
Milošević. As Marko Hoare puts it, “Parenti essentially argues that the destruction
of Yugoslavia was orchestrated by a conspiracy of the Western imperialist powers.”9
Among scholars, Bogdan Denitch comes perhaps the closest to attributing culpability
for igniting the war to outside powers, specifically blaming Germany and Austria for
failing “to keep a low profile in the East European countries that had been victims
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of German aggression twice within the living memory of many.”10 But Denitch’s
indictment of Germany and Austria is vague and avoids the outright factual error
committed by some diplomats and journalists who at one time, casting logic to the
wind, claimed that the “premature” recognition of Croatia and Slovenia in December
1991, promoted by Germany and Austria, was the spark that had set off the fighting
the previous June. Since none of those advocating this point of view urged anyone
to believe in the possibility of time travel, one may safely conclude that such claims
reflected either hasty and sloppy thinking, pure ignorance, or politically motivated
propaganda. Daniele Conversi offers apt criticism of the conspiratorial approach,
which he says has been “particularly evident in works by international diplomats,
who, rather than focusing on the internal events leading up to the war, give an
exaggerated importance to external factors, in which there seems to be often a
desperate apology of their profession’s mistakes.”11 It is striking that most observers
have chosen either to condemn Germany (and Austria) for acting unilaterally (or
prematurely) or to defend the German (and Austrian) approach as a reasonable
position given the political context; few, if any, scholars have been content to
criticize merely the timing of the German announcement of its impending exchange
of ambassadors with the two republics.
More typically (and more reasonably), scholars wishing to criticize the Great
Powers have blamed them, not for conspiring to break up Yugoslavia or for setting
the region ablaze, but variously for adopting policies that could only prolong the
fighting. Thus, for example, Beverly Crawford criticized the German government for
what she characterized as a “unilateral” decision to recognize Slovenia and Croatia,12
while Brendan Simms, in a widely discussed book, has criticized Her Majesty’s
Government for having “played a particularly disastrous role in the destruction of
Bosnia.”13 James Gow took aim at the American Clinton administration for refusing
to use force to impose the Vance–Owen Peace Plan on the rejectionist Bosnian
Serbs, claiming that this refusal prolonged the war by at least two years.14 For that
matter, I gave vent to my own frustrations with what I read as disregard for the fate
of the peoples of Croatia and Bosnia in an article published in early 1994, arguing
in particular that the arms embargo, imposed on U.N. member states in spite of a

733
 S. P. RAMET

guarantee in the U.N. Charter of the right of all members to self-defense, was in fact
prolonging the war.15 Lord Owen, who worked pro bono during the war years as
European Union mediator, went further, however, and not only criticized the Clinton
administration for failing to give the Vance–Owen Plan its immediate and enthusias-
tic support but also claimed that it was Western recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina
which set off the conflict in that republic in the first place.16 In Owen’s view, as in
Gow’s, the imposition of the Vance–Owen Plan could have ended the fighting
sooner.
But, as already noted, there has been a second tendency, in which external factors
are brought to bear in accounting for the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia and the
ensuing war, viz., the argument that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of
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communism elsewhere in Eastern Europe sealed Yugoslavia’s fate. In Jasna Adler’s

version of this theory, “[t]he disintegration of Yugoslavia should be seen as an
inevitable consequence of the collapse of the international communist system in
Europe … That Yugoslavia would not survive the end of communist rule in Europe
was obvious.”17 But Adler uses the reference to external factors only to answer the
first question (why the SFRY collapsed), referring the second question (why the
fighting) to “the fundamentally opposed conceptions of Serbia on the one hand and
Croatia and Slovenia on the other regarding what, if any, form a post-communist
Yugoslav state should assume.”18 Gow also considers the end of the Cold War
relevant for understanding processes in the Yugoslav region, noting that “the end of
the Cold War remove[d] the restraint which East–West conflict had imposed on a
fissiparous federation … [and] also created a particular [and unstable] environment.
Yugoslavia’s conventional strategic interest was lost, reducing international concern
for its future.”19 Gow combines this (external) factor with attention to internal
processes within Yugoslavia to account for the violent turn that developments in the
collapsing Yugoslav state took.
The chief attractions of the appeal to the conspiratorial version of the external
factors approach are the attraction of apparent parsimoniousness and its exculpation
of local actors for the problems with which Yugoslavia and its successor states have
been afflicted. The chief debility of the appeal to external factors is the risk that one
ends up downplaying the importance of internal developments in accounting for the
violent dissolution of Yugoslavia. But external factors can, at the very most, answer,
or contribute to answering, questions (1) and (5)—Why did the SFRY break up and
when did this process begin?—which is precisely why Adler and Gow, for example,
do not suggest that the end of the Cold War can constitute more than a part of the
puzzle.

Internal Factors—Remote
Even on the eve of the outbreak of open fighting, there continued to be scholars who
denied that the country would end up in war.20 Yet there had been warnings about

734
 THE ROOTS OF THE YUGOSLAV TROUBLES

the risk of breakup since 1974 at the latest, and about the risk of war for about a
decade before fighting actually broke out. These warnings were issued, in the first
place, by insiders who believed that developments in their country were moving in
a dangerous direction. Already in 1974, Milovan Djilas predicted, in the pages of
Saturday Review, that come 2024 Yugoslavia would have become “a confederation
of four states: Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Serbia, with Serbia itself being a
federative state. It is possible that those four states may later separate and become
fully independent … In any event, when these nations attain their independent
statehood, the acrimony among them will diminish and cooperation will increase.”21
Long before the appearance on the political scene of Slobodan Milošević, Djilas was
quite certain that Yugoslavia could not survive as a federation, only, at most, as a
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confederation, and believed that Bosnia would disappear—presumably through

partition. But it was only in the course of 1983 that locals began to fret that
Yugoslavia might develop a “Polish situation” (a reference to the breakdown of the
communist system during 1980–1981) or even evolve into a “second Lebanon” (a
reference to the Lebanese civil war that broke out in spring 1976).22 About the same
time, high-ranking figures in the ruling League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY)
began declaring, on repeated occasions, that the country was in deep crisis and that
drastic measures should be found to pull Yugoslavia back from the brink.23 Com-
bined with a 1984 warning that it might be “only a matter of time before another
bloodbath occurs between Serbs and Croats,”24 these early signals are sufficient to
alert us to the presence of internal problems that, at the very minimum, seemed
sufficiently serious to contemporary observers to warrant concern about the future.
But these warnings leave open the question of whether the roots of Yugoslav troubles
should be traced primarily to remote factors or rather, primarily, to more proximate
factors.
As with theories referring Yugoslav problems to external factors, theories favoring
attribution to remote factors come in two types. The older school is the “national
character” school, which in turn comes in various guises; the younger school,
associated above all with the name Robert D. Kaplan, seeks to trace the fighting, if
not the collapse of the Yugoslav state itself, to so-called “ancient hatreds,” cited by
British Prime Minister John Major as constituting an obstacle to any peaceable
agreement.25 As has been noted by various observers, to the extent that one believes
that the primary source of the Yugoslav breakup and war lies in a people’s national
character, formed over centuries, or in other factors emerging already in the remote
past, even centuries or millennia earlier, at least two things follow: first, the issues
over which Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks have disputed recently come to be seen as
mere triggers for the reactivation of the more fundamental animus that sets one
nation against another; and, second, the entire notion of international intervention in
the attempt to bring peace to the region comes to appear as the most vapid sort of
self-delusion.

735
 S. P. RAMET

National Character School/Historical Determinism

The grand-daddy of the national character school of thought, at least when it comes
to explaining the behavior of Yugoslavs, is Jovan Cvijić, who, in a work published
in 1914, traced the Serbian state’s ambitions to expand to the coast to Serbs” “love
of freedom.”26 In the English-speaking world, Dinko Tomašić’s 1948 book, Person-
ality and Culture in Eastern Europe, takes its departure from his belief that the
Balkan region has been uniquely plagued by war and strife and that this allegedly
unique degree of conflict is due to the “Dinaric” character (as Tomašić calls it).
Family organization and particularly father–son relations and sibling rivalry are said,
by Tomašić, to underlie “the remarkable lack of emotional balance which is noticed
by all students and observers of Dinaric society,”27 and to which he traces Dinaric
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bellicosity. As Tomašić tells it, “The Dinarics like to see themselves as great martyrs,
as well as great heroes. In their ballads and in their school textbooks they present
themselves as people who have been unjustly persecuted by their enemies, and who
have greatly suffered to save the world, but without being rewarded for it.”28
Emotional imbalance figures as a central explanatory variable for Tomašić, who
suggests that this factor could explain why “Dinaric warriors” allegedly make better
guerrilla fighters than regular army troops.29 But the Dinaric’s unbalanced tempera-
ment also leaves him prone “to be as excessive in violence as he is boundless in all
other expressions of self-assertion.”30 After warning that the Dinaric warrior may be
inclined to torture and mutilate his victims, Tomašić concludes that in conditions of
communist dictatorship, a “lifeless state of mind, a mass paralysis of energies, or a
mass religious man may easily develop.”31
Tomašić was not the first to articulate such views, however. Some twenty years
earlier, Sir Neville Henderson, the British ambassador in Belgrade, had sent a report
to the Foreign Office in which he described Serbs, as a people, as tending to be
warlike, disinclined to compromise, chauvinistic, despotic, corrupt, conceited, and
suspicious of members of other nationalities.32 Nor was Tomašić, two decades later,
the last adherent of this school to try to identify modal traits of Serbs and other
Yugoslavs. Two recent adherents of this school are Branislav Anzulović and Lenard
J. Cohen. Both Anzulović and Cohen believe that the Serbs developed patterns of
behavior over a period of centuries, both believe that those behavioral patterns
incline Serbs toward violence, and both believe that Serbs have a particularly highly
developed tendency to view their nation as a collective victim. But ultimately they
locate the sources of this alleged Serbian complex in different places.
For Anzulović, it is the poets and clerics who are mostly to blame for instilling in
Serbs a culture of violence. As evidence, he quotes extensively from a traditional
folk song, in which Serbian Prince Marko is described as having cut off the arm and
put out the eyes of the beautiful Rosanda, as well as from Prince Njegoš’s Mountain
Wreath, which he describes as “a call to genocide,” Vuk Drašković’s Knife, and
other materials.33 He also quotes from an appeal issued by a group of Paris-based

736
 THE ROOTS OF THE YUGOSLAV TROUBLES

Orthodox theologians and intellectuals in late 1991, who reproached Serbian Ortho-
dox bishops for having played a part in stirring up resentment over sufferings of half
a century earlier and thereby inciting Serbs to hatred.34 Anzulović wants his readers
to conclude that, because of the influence of myths, literary products, the activity of
clerics, and the culture more generally, Serbs developed a proclivity to violence. But
he says that it “would be an error to assume that the memory of the Serbian medieval
empire necessarily led to the latest war for a Greater Serbia, but equally erroneous
to deny a connection between the two.”35 The key, says Anzulović, is the use made
of these myths by elites over the years, especially by Serbian intellectuals in the
course of the 1980s.36 While Anzulović believes that the mythological baggage he
sums up with the phrase favored by Orthodox clerics—“Heavenly Serbia”—created
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ready-made discourses of self-justification to legitimate violence on the part of Serbs

against their enemies, he also writes that “[o]ne cannot explain a nation’s violent
expansionist adventure merely in terms of the psychological makeup of its mem-
bers,” and cautions that one must deal with the specific factors in a given case and
identify such “circumstances [as] may facilitate the eruption of a collective murder-
ous frenzy.”37 Toward the end of his book, he returns to the question of elite
manipulation of myths, warning that
[m]yths and lies are used to justify uninformed policies and hide the ignorance and
amorality of their makers. If the latter believe in the myths they use, as they often do,
myths become even more dangerous than if they are used cynically. Some of the
myths that have contributed to the brutal disintegration of the former Yugoslavia are
still taken for truths by many people all over the world. If unchallenged, they will lead
to new failures.38

Anzulović hopes that his theory will answer all three questions—explaining not only
the breakup of Yugoslavia and the eruption of violent conflict in the region, but also
the willingness of Serbs (he is not discussing Croats and Bosniaks) to engage in
violent behavior. But, unlike Tomašić, he makes a point of allowing for the
possibility of change in a national culture. In a key passage, he writes,
is it possible suddenly to reverse one’s attitude toward crucial historical events,
personalities, and myths cherished for a very long time, and realize that false gods
have been worshiped? Efforts to dethrone false idols and expose bitter truth as a better
foundation for the future always encounter strong resistance. However, total victory
over fateful myths, violent habits, and national traumas is not necessary. It is sufficient
to weaken them by showing that unrealistic visions of the past and expectations of the
future lead to mistakes, and that national identity can be strengthened with a
celebration of real achievements in the nation’s past. If the reexamination of deeply
entrenched ideas and attitudes gathers sufficient vigor, the direction in which a nation
has been moving can be changed.39

As already noted, Lenard Cohen traces the allegedly violent patterns of behavior
among Serbs to different sources from those identified by Anzulović. In fact, Cohen
casts his net more widely, in his Serpent in the Bosom, subsuming also the “fateful

737
 S. P. RAMET

myths” deplored by Anzulović. Indeed, Cohen describes Serbia quite explicitly as a

society in which “collectivist nationalism has historically excited the popular imagin-
ation, and is rooted in the mythic core passed from one generation to another.”40
Cohen offers fewer specifics than Anzulović, no doubt because his purpose is to
recount some of the events of the Milošević era, but he does suggest that the
centuries-long experience of being subordinate to the Ottomans may have had
dramatic effects on the Serbian “collective political personality,” emphasizing that
“the illiberal facets in the Serbian political legacy were reinforced by the long period
of Ottoman rule.”41 Like Anzulović, Cohen is worried about “historically shaped
factors” (Cohen’s phrase). Among these factors, Cohen mentions
a strong penchant for centralized modes of political control, and particularly “heroic
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leaders” who can maintain political order and preserve the “unity” of the nation; a
disinclination to accept rules-of-the-game which would allow Serbs to accept minority
status within other multinational Balkan political units dominated by other ethnic
groups; a predilection for statist collective unity in the face of a perceived external
danger to the Serb nation (including identification of nonconformists as traitors or
enemies, and a suspicion of democratic pluralism as a potential threat); and an
exaggerated emphasis on sanguinity—“Serbian blood and origins”—territorial con-
trol, and national religious myths as defining features of collective identity. This
historical experience of the Serbs—especially under the long period of Turkish
domination, and the nineteenth and twentieth century struggles with Austria-Hun-
gary’s and Germany’s intervention in the Balkans—also created a deep sense of
victimization in the Serbian political psyche and political culture.42

Cohen articulated the same theory in an earlier work,43 in which context he praised
Vladimir Dvorniković, an adherent of the national character school of political
analysis, for having “identified some of the fundamental divisions, bonds, and
behavioral characteristics that have characterized the South Slavic peoples.”44
Dvorniković, according to Cohen, believed that the “stubbornness,” “fierceness,” and
“passionate outbursts” allegedly associated with and characteristic of the “Yugoslav
psyche” serve to explain “an intensity and inconsistency in political life that went
beyond the pattern found in most countries.”45 Cohen accepted Dvorniković’s
conclusion about the “intensity” of feeling among Yugoslavs and argued, in Broken
Bonds, that “The basis for such intense feeling can be traced to the transgenerational
socialization of negative stereotypes regarding the history and behavior of other
groups.”46 This, in turn, explains “the population’s predilection for political extrem-
ism” which was shown to full view in World War II and again in the War of
Yugoslav Succession (1991–1995), according to Cohen.47 Thus, Cohen provides an
answer to question (4)—whether the people of the Yugoslav region have a
“particular predisposition to violence” and, if so, how it developed. For Cohen, the
answer is yes, and the origin lies in the aforementioned “transgenerational socializa-
tion” and patterns of behavior developed centuries ago. In fact, the national character
approach does not seem to provide the guiding principle in the narrative chapters in
Cohen’s books, which focus on the actions of contemporary figures and their

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 THE ROOTS OF THE YUGOSLAV TROUBLES

consequences. But the national character approach raises its head once more in the
closing paragraph of Broken Bonds, where Cohen expresses the utterly reasonable
worry that the residents of the region may have been “so deeply affected, alienated,
and perhaps even psychologically damaged by the appalling warfare” that those in
leadership positions will have their work cut out for them, but also voices the
pessimistic sentiment that “Lacking the will and wisdom to overcome their
difficulties, the leaders and citizens of the Balkan region will remain mired in the
current ‘frenzy of hate”, or forever chained to its roots and consequences.”48
One attraction of the national character school lies in its reassurance that, to the
extent that “they” are not like “us,” “we” shall most likely never have to deal with
problems similar to “theirs.” The approach is also attractive to those who believe that
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the remote past not only has some weight but actually is likely to have more weight
than more proximate factors. A weakness of this approach is that, once one has
established, to one’s own satisfaction, that a particular nation is apt to behave in such
and such a way, then other internal factors such as the character of the state, the state
of the economy, and the nature of personalities holding power inevitably seem to
fade into the background, even if they are explicitly mentioned. Critics of the
national character approach do not deny that different societies have different
cultural assumptions, customs, and ways of doing things, or that these differences
may be traced back in time; what they deny is that the remote past should have some
special priority over the more proximate past. Rather, critics may suggest, societies
develop ways of doing things which are revised either under the influence of external
factors (such as foreign influences) or under the pressure of necessity (when an
existing practice is shown to be dysfunctional) or incrementally as a by-product of
cultural development and creative innovation. In other words, critics of the national
character school do not need to deny the importance of the past in order to find
historical determinism objectionable.

Nineteenth-Century Sources
For the purposes of this article, I shall consider that factors dating from December
1918 or later are “proximate” and that factors dating from before December 1918 are
“remote.” What this approach suffers in terms of arbitrariness it gains in terms of
clarity. Within the latter set (the pre-1918 “remote” set), I shall consider any theory
to involve “ancient hatreds” if it connects the outbreak of the War of Yugoslav
Succession to events taking place before the fall of Rome in 476 CE or if the
observer in question specifically uses the phrase “ancient hatreds” (or some equiva-
lent) to explain the problems at hand. But a purely nominalist approach would not
suffice, by itself, to differentiate reasonable arguments from absurd speculations,
because among those now categorized as advocates of including “remote” factors in
the equation one finds the distinguished historians Ivo Banac and Ivo Goldstein. But
neither of these scholars looks any further back than the nineteenth century in the

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 S. P. RAMET

quest for the roots of more recent problems. Banac, for example, argues, in an article
for Daedalus, that in order to comprehend the conflict of the 1990s, one should
“begin with the continuity of individual South Slavic national elites and states (where
they existed), with special emphasis on national and political ideologies, not with
‘modernization” studies and research of social structures.”49 In his view, the “Greater
Serbian” idea which developed in the nineteenth century laid the groundwork “for
permanent clashes between the Serbs and their western neighbors.”50 Accordingly,
only the death of the Greater Serbian project would bring an end to the threat of
violence from Belgrade. But, for all that, the center of gravity in Banac’s argument
is the more proximate past, and, accordingly, his ideas will be discussed at greater
length in the section on proximate factors.
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Like Banac, Goldstein identifies a dreadful dynamic at work in the nineteenth

century, due to the development of national consciousness among Serbs and Croats,
the activities of religious organizations, and the role of politicians. Thus, according
to Goldstein, in spite of “the fact that the ordinary people were intermarried and had
many other contacts, differences among them always smouldered. The reasons for
this were religious intolerance, xenophobia, and the habit of people to use national
instead of economic or other reasons to explain conflicts.”51 The result was that fault
lines separating national groups began to be laid down—fault lines along which
groups could be mobilized for conflict in the future. For that matter, both Noel
Malcolm and Mitja Velikonja, in their respectively magisterial histories of Bosnia,
point to the religious rivalries that developed in Bosnia in the course of the
nineteenth century—rivalries both between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and
between the Christian community as a whole and the Islamic community.52 But
Velikonja also points out, constructively, that there was less religious conflict in
Bosnia than had been seen in many European countries ruled by Christian kings and
princes, and that the history of Bosnia is therefore characterized by religious
coexistence as well as by religious division.53
The strengths and debilities of a modest “remote factors” approach, tracing
present-day problems no further back than the nineteenth century, are, I believe, the
same as the strengths and debilities of the “proximate factors” approach, which will
be discussed in the next section.

Theories of “Ancient Hatreds”

The theories of Banac, Goldstein, Malcolm, and Velikonja, while sensitive to
developments in the nineteenth century, avoid sliding into “ancient” domains in
which the past is viewed so darkly and so out of focus as to roll all the historical
threads into a tangled ball. When Major and others claimed that the conflicts between
Serbs and Croats could be traced back to “ancient hatreds” going back thousands of
years which, in Major’s words, “reappeared” with “the collapse of the Soviet Union
and of the discipline [which] that exerted over ancient hatreds in the old

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Yugoslavia,”54 they unwittingly claimed that the conflicts had begun even before the
Slavs had arrived in the Balkans and, most certainly, long before the ancestors of
today’s Serbs and Croats had converted from their pre-Christian polytheistic religion
to Christianity. Robert Kaplan has recently been the best-known advocate of this
approach, which inspired his book, Balkan Ghosts. In an earlier contribution to the
New Republic, Kaplan offered the following short cut to understanding the violent
collapse of socialist Yugoslavia:

Tudjman, Milošević, and everyone else in Yugoslavia are victims of history. For
centuries their forebears lived in a state of poverty and illiteracy, where rumor filled
the vacuum created by the absence of books and documentation. Then came four-and-
a-half decades of Communist totalitarianism, when many, many books were pub-
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lished—all containing lies. The Serb–Croat war in Yugoslavia is the upshot of a few
million minds, all collectively disoriented, and all finally granted free expression.55

It scarcely seems worth the trouble to point out all of the errors in fact and lapses
in thinking in this bit of foolishness.
A variation on the theme of “ancient hatreds” is the “civilizational” approach
taken by Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington in his much debated national
bestseller, The Clash of Civilizations. For Huntington, the present age is character-
ized by an increase in conflict across what he calls “civilizational fault lines.” These
fault lines are defined, in the first place, by differences of religion, so that, in his
view, “people who share ethnicity and language but differ in religion may slaughter
each other, as happened in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and the [Indian]
Subcontinent.”56 In Huntington’s view, the danger of fault lines has been “most
notable” in post-communist states where, he writes, “culture replaced ideology as the
magnet of attraction and repulsion.”57 In a 1968 work, Huntington had expressed his
conviction that “Leninist” systems, as he called communist systems, had solved the
problem of political institutionalization and therefore were, in his view at that time,
likely to prove to be stable over the long term, in spite of their manifest failure to
solve the problem of system legitimation (the importance of which Huntington
downplayed).58 But if system legitimacy or illegitimacy is not a factor worth
considering in accounting for system decay, then where should one look for an
answer? In 1968, Huntington thought the answer was insufficient institutionalization
relative to political participation; nearly twenty years later, Huntington was looking
to differences in culture to explain why political order broke down and why at least
some conflicts broke out. Hence, in Clash he portrays the “fault line” between
Muslims and non-Muslims as running especially deep, so that he concludes that
“[f]ault line conflicts are particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Mus-
lims.”59 And hence, in his view, the Bosnian war, in which Bosnian Muslims fought
Christian Serbs and Croats, was an “intercivilizational” war.60 Huntington does not
say, of course, that Muslims and non-Muslims have hated each other since “ancient”
times; what he says rather is that their civilizations have evolved in such different

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directions, since long ago, that conflict (or hatred, if one likes) is far more natural
between them than understanding.
The chief attraction of the ancient hatreds approach is that it grants its supporter
license to banish all thinking, to allow oneself to slumber in comfortable contentment
in the misguided certainty that all present problems can be referred back to unknown
and unknowable mysterious events taking place deep in the past, covered by the
vapors of time. It is not by mere coincidence that Bosnian Serb leader Karadžić was
fond of urging this theory, from time to time, as proof of the irrelevance of any
Western intervention; nor is it any wonder that one may find advocates of this
approach among all three parties to the conflict. The chief debility of this theory is
that it leads its believers away from any understanding of what makes states collapse
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or former neighbors go to war with each other. Of all the theories that have been
applied to the Yugoslav case, it is perhaps the most misleading.
The chief attraction of Huntington’s civilizational thesis is its air of sophistication
and, in the post-9/11 world, the way it may be marshaled against the entire Islamic
world. Its chief debility is much the same as the ancient hatreds approach, in that
someone who traces conflicts to “intercivilizational fault lines” is unlikely to give
much emphasis to such factors of system illegitimacy, or economic decay, or the role
of human agency.

Internal Factors—Proximate
Most scholars, even if in the endeavor to explain the roots of the Yugoslav crisis they
have made some room for analyzing events in the nineteenth century, have placed
their emphasis on developments since 1918, since 1941, since 1945, or even since
1987. While scholars may differ on the dating of the beginning of the problems that
drove the Yugoslav state over the brink, one may speak of a broad consensus among
most scholars in the field that “proximate factors” are the most relevant in responding
at least to questions (1) and (2). But this “consensus,” such as it is, is superficial,
because among those who emphasize “proximate factors” are those emphasizing
economic deterioration, those who argue that the political system itself was a major
factor for all that happened, those presenting an event-driven account together with
those stressing human agency (in particular the role of specific political figures),
those looking to decisions made during the transition from communism, and those
referring causation to a multiplicity of proximate factors.

Economic Deterioration
Many scholars have noted that economic deterioration played a part in bringing
socialist Yugoslavia into crisis and that the growing sense of desperation among
many Yugoslavs, some of whom were, by the end of the 1980s, unable to afford to
heat their homes during winter, made them receptive to political mobilization. Erika

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Harris, for instance, has emphasized the importance of economic factors in pushing
Yugoslavia into crisis and toward collapse, highlighting the oil price hike of 1974 as
a critical watershed.61 But Susan Woodward has endeavored, in her Socialist
Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia 1945—1990, to represent
economic deterioration, and specifically unemployment, as the critical variable in the
equation. Unemployment, Woodward argues, impaired the political establishment’s
“capacity to enforce policy goals,” undermined “the delicate balance in constitutional
jurisdictions of the federal system,” negatively impacted “the system’s capacity to
adapt politically to the requirements of new economic and social conditions,” and
undermined “the country’s ability to manage unemployment itself.”62 For Wood-
ward, political cleavages in socialist Yugoslavia were
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defined not by nationality or liberal/conservative party factions, but by the package of

policies on credit, domestic and foreign currency, investment, and individual employ-
ment that coalesce[d] around territorial defense and commodity trade. This line of
conflict was formed before the changes of 1958—1967.63

Accordingly, for Woodward, nationalism is only an epiphenomenon of discontent

generated by unemployment, which is the heart of the problem.64 But Woodward
does not want her analysis to be read as unicausal reductionism and specifically
allows that other factors enter into the equation;65 what sets her apart from other
analysts is her decision to stress unemployment as the principal source of the decay
of the socialist Yugoslav state.

Systemic Factors
Theories that trace the roots of the collapse of the Yugoslav state and the outbreak
of conflict at least in part to systemic factors may highlight the fundamental
illegitimacy of the system, its clumsiness and general dysfunctionality (acknowl-
edged by Yugoslavs themselves in the “old days” in their endless jokes about
collective leadership and the rotation of cadres), the erection of the federation along
ethnic lines with a guarantee of a right of secession, and the juridical instability
springing from the frequent constitutional changes.66 Paul Lendvai, for example,
stresses the flaws in the structural design itself, pointing to the ethnically inspired
federal system as a Pandora’s box.67 It was this design, according to Lendvai, which
gave the competition between elites at the federal and republic levels its specific
character and endowed inter-elite rows with such “explosive force.”68 Or again,
Goldstein, while noting the confluence of a number of destabilizing factors, captures
the spirit of the 1980s perfectly in noting the “state of paralysis” induced in a system
characterized by collective leadership, fixed rotational schemes, and terms of office
so short as to prevent any important plans from being implemented.69 The fate of the
long-term plans for economic and political stabilization, associated with the names
Boris Kraigher and Tihomir Vlaškalić, comes to mind.

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Reneo Lukić, George Schöpflin, John Allcock, and I have also given non-exclus-
ive stress to systemic factors, placing the emphasis on the failure of legitimation. For
Lukić, the absence of the rule of law was the single most important weakness in
socialist Yugoslavia, guaranteeing that the functioning of the state depended, up to
1980 (or more accurately, until Tito took ill in late 1979), on Tito’s personal
authority.70 But Lukić does not consider that this is the entire story, and explicitly
rejects the notion that, with the death of Tito, it was only a matter of time before the
Yugoslav federation imploded; in other words, Lukić believes that it would have
been possible to preserve a unified Yugoslav state. But if so, according to Lukić, it
would have had to take the form of “an asymmetrical federation or confederation,”
which, he argues, “would have been, by all measures, the best outcome for the
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nations and national minorities of former Yugoslavia.”71 For Lukić, the failure of
legitimation provides part (note, only part) of the answer to the question of why
socialist Yugoslavia collapsed. The rest of the answer to that question as well as the
answer to the question of why that collapse was associated with violent conflict must
be sought, says Lukić, in human agency, and in particular in the actions of Serbian
leader Slobodan Milošević.
Schöpflin made an earlier and important contribution to the analysis of the
Yugoslav crisis in an essay published in 1985, in which he warned of processes of
political decay unfolding in socialist Yugoslavia and other communist states in
Eastern Europe. Schöpflin wrote that the remedy for political decay in Eastern
Europe was pluralization, i.e., authentic democratization and “the acceptance of
autonomous sources of legitimacy for social institutions.”72 But “by reason of the
[Yugoslav] party’s unwillingness to accept the redistribution of power through
democratization, the systemic crisis accelerates and is expressed in new, and
potentially more damaging forms.”73 Allcock concurred with Schöpflin’s analysis,
noting the importance of the fact that the system was unable to legitimate itself over
the long term and characterizing Yugoslav socialism as “anti-modern,”74 even as
Steven Burg and Paul Shoup, while including other factors in the equation, pointed
to “the inadequacy of existing political arrangements [at the beginning of the 1990s]
for moderating or constraining” nationalist parties.75
Together with Lukić and Allcock, I have stressed the failure of legitimation76 and
have noted that that failure alone was not sufficient to push the country into war; an
enabler—or, in the event, a number of enablers, including not only Milošević but
various others as well77—would be needed. Together with Schöpflin, I have argued
that only authentic pluralization could have saved Yugoslavia (and that to have had
time to work, it would have needed to have been set in motion by 1985 at the very
latest).78 And, for that matter, I have also included economic deterioration79 and the
ethnically based structure of the federation80 in the equation. Yet although the
economic, structural, and legitimation factors explain the collapse of the Yugoslav
federation, they do not account for the outbreak of war—at least not by themselves.

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Here I agree fully with Lukić (and, for that matter, Sadkovich81) that one must bring
human agency into the story if one is going to understand why war broke out.
The strength of the emphasis on systemic factors lies in its ability to explain why
illegitimate systems are less able to cope with economic crisis than more legitimate
systems, while stressing the reason why politicians who do not respect the laws of
the land are able to do more damage in states where rule of law is less well
established. The systemic focus does suggest very strongly that one is misled to
believe that the peoples of the Yugoslav region have any “particular predisposition
to violence” (as per question [4]) and, by way of dating the origin of the problems
(question [5]), suggests that they should be seen as arising with system malfunction.
The weakness of theories stressing systemic factors is that such theories cannot, by
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themselves, answer questions (2) or (3). For this purpose, some additional theoretical
apparatus will be needed.

Human Agency
The works of Anzulović, Cohen, Kaplan, and Woodward, however different in other
respects, all tend in the direction of minimizing human agency. Cohen even criticizes
British historian Noel Malcolm for having allegedly traced the problems in Kosovo
to “the actions of evil leaders.”82 The scholarly consensus, however, is that human
agency must be made a part of the story, though most, if not all, scholars would
probably also agree with Roger Petersen’s commonsensical caution that “there is no
reason to assume that elites always constrain and manipulate masses rather than the
other way around.”83 Among those who have stressed human agency, one might
mention Ivo Banac,84 Jasna Dragović-Soso,85 Thomas Emmert,86 Bariša Krekić,87
Reneo Lukić,88 Branka Magaš,89 Dennison Rusinow,90 Louis Sell,91 and Vladimir
Tismaneanu.92 But, of course, agreeing that someone did it is not the same as
reaching an agreement on exactly who was the responsible party. That said, all
scholars with whose work I am familiar include Milošević among the chief malefac-
tors. Disagreement arises as soon as scholars take up the question of who else should
be thought to have contributed either to the collapse of the SFRY or to the stoking
of war. Warren Zimmermann, the former U.S. ambassador to Belgrade, begins his
memoirs with the bold assertion, “This is a story with villains,”93 and quickly
dismisses any notion that economic problems or ethnic tensions were sufficient to
dismantle the country; on the contrary, according to Zimmermann, it “was destroyed
from the top down.”94 And while he blames Milošević in the first place for the
tragedy that befell the country, Zimmermann also reproaches Tudjman for
“arrogance in declaring independence without adequate provisions for minority
rights,”95 and the Slovenes for their alleged “‘Garbo’ nationalism” (“they just wanted
to be left alone,” Zimmermann explains96). Indeed, Zimmermann considers the
Slovenian disassociation from the SFRY irresponsible, because in building their own
independent state the Slovenes, according to Zimmermann, “left the twenty-two

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million Yugoslav citizens they had abandoned twisting in the wind of impending
war.”97 The implication is that, by remaining within the Yugoslav federation, the
Slovenes could have made a decisive contribution to averting the war that Milošević
and Borisav Jović, whose term as president of the collective presidency was coming
to an end in May 1991, had been preparing since before the election of Franjo
Tudjman to the Croatian presidency.98
John Fine, Jr seems at first sight to offer the same list as Zimmermann. Milošević
is described by Fine as “a brutal authoritarian,” while Croatian President Tudjman
and Slovenian President Kučan are criticized for their alleged desire for “instant
gratification.”99 But Fine spends more of his time mounting accusations against
Tudjman than criticizing Milošević, referring at one point to “the massive death and
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destruction unleashed by the chauvinism that blots Tudjman’s record.”100 For Fine,
the declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia were “hasty” and
“irresponsible,” and these two republics deserve “the lion’s share of the responsi-
bility for the war that followed.”101 Fine mentions the illegal importation of
weaponry by the Slovenian and Croatian governments for the use of their territorial
defense forces (or police, in Croatia’s case), but he does not mention either the
equally illegal confiscation, on Milošević’s and Jović’s instructions, of the weapons
which had been assigned to those forces or the arming of Serb militias in Croatia,
both of which pre-dated the importation and, indeed, inspired it. Fine’s solution,
offered in retrospect, is to suggest that a military coup, if staged prior to 25 June
1991, might have averted the disaster that ensued.102 In fact, there were rumors of a
coup in early 1991.103
But there are problems with assigning equal blame to Tudjman and Kučan, on the
one hand, and the Belgrade regime, on the other. One problem is that many of
Milošević’s provocative actions preceded actions taken by Tudjman and Kučan, and
even preceded Tudjman’s election. Certainly, the organization of the famous mass
“meetings” in Novi Sad, Podgorica, and Priština, which drove the locally elected
governments to resign, allowing Milošević’s men to take over,104 took place before
Tudjman had been elected—and, as late as March 1990, Ivica Račan, the chief of the
reformed Communist Party in Croatia, still expected to be elected president of
Croatia.105 And again, the Milošević regime’s use of the press to radicalize Serbs
pre-dated by nearly three years any parallel process in Croatia, let alone Bosnia. In
one example, recounted by Vreme editor Miloš Vasić, “On 15 March [1991],
Milošević summoned all the mayors of Serbia to a meeting [and] outlined a strategy
for provoking ethnic conflict in Croatia … A massive media campaign convinced the
Serbs in Croatia that they were in danger of a ‘new genocide” … The initiative was
now in Milošević’s hands, and on 1 April the first fighting began at Plitvice National
Park.”106 A second problem is that Milošević’s record of unconstitutional and illegal
actions dwarfs whatever may be laid to Tudjman’s or Kučan’s account.107 A third
problem is that although Tudjman and Milošević reportedly discussed a partition of
Bosnia at Karadjordjevo in March 1991, Milošević put much more time into

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planning the war than did Tudjman and entertained greater ambitions than Tudjman.
On the other hand, both Milošević (beginning in late 1987) and Tudjman (beginning
in spring 1990) used the press to stoke up resentments about what had happened
during World War II or afterwards and to stoke up group hatred. As Vasić said on
one occasion, “You must imagine a United States with every little TV station
everywhere taking exactly the same editorial line—a line dictated by David Duke
[the Louisiana Nazi]. You too would have war in five years.”108 Both Milošević and
Tudjman also organized military actions to promote the ethnic cleansing of Muslims.
Both of them funded and backed (and, in Tudjman’s case, commanded) forces that
set up detention camps in which members of other nationality groups were abused.
Adam LeBor, author of an elegantly written biography of Milošević, casts his net
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widely, tracing the collapse of the Yugoslav federation to that state’s failure to
inculcate a sense of shared community and to the weakness of the constitutional
structure, which did not protect non-Serbs from Serb overrepresentation and domi-
nation. He also faults Tito for failing to overcome the various problems of the
socialist federation and, more concretely, for removing the Serbian liberals from
power in 1972—an event that LeBor considers a turning point in socialist
Yugoslavia’s history. But, for LeBor, to the extent that Milošević should be
considered a war criminal, so too should Tudjman.109 Indeed, at this point of
time—largely because of the Croatian Army’s involvement in fighting against the
Army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (the army loyal to the government
headed by Alija Izetbegović)—Tudjman is routinely seen as co-responsible with
Milošević and, for that matter, Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadžić and Gen.
Ratko Mladić, and others, for the loss of life in Bosnia, while Martin Špegelj’s
memoirs stand as an indictment of Tudjman for having unnecessarily prolonged the
war and for having unnecessarily delayed the reconquest of areas of Croatia under
Serb insurgent/Yugoslav Army control.110 It is when one turns to a consideration of
the years 1987–1990, the years during which Yugoslavia moved decisively toward
disaster, that the role of Milošević seems decisive. Admiral Mamula records how,
shortly after the 8th Session of the Serbian party, at which Milošević had staged his
famous coup, the Admiral, then serving as minister of defense, and his deputy,
Veljko Kadijević, held discussions with Ante Marković and Stanko Stojčević in
Croatia, with France Popit and Milan Kučan in Slovenia, and with Branko Mikulić
in Bosnia. Mamula and Kadijević felt that the coup was potentially dangerous for the
entire country; all of the figures with whom they conducted conversations agreed
with this analysis, but they were unwilling to undertake any decisive actions in
response.111 I had occasion to discuss this lack of response with Milan Kučan in
1999, hoping for some revelation; instead, the impression I obtained was that while
everyone was prepared to agree that this was a “dangerous” development, none of
them had any idea just how dangerous it was or what it could mean for the coming
years. Nonetheless, Stane Dolanc, the veteran Slovenian politician who was at one
time suspected of wanting to succeed Tito as president of Yugoslavia, approached

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General Ljubičić on his own and suggested that perhaps the party presidency, of
which the general had become a member, could discuss Milošević’s coup; Ljubičić,
a close ally of Milošević at the time, signaled his disinclination to honor Dolanc’s
request by asking if he should also submit a report about developments in Slovenia.
Several months later, Stipe Šuvar, Croatia’s representative in the party presidium,
tried to use a plenary session of the Central Committee to remove both Milošević and
Kučan, but Šuvar did not devote sufficient time to winning over the party leaderships
of Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and, for that matter, his native
Croatia, and his plan failed.112 But Milošević was building his popular support with
a rapidity that astonished his party comrades. A combined party–army move against
Milošević might have been successful if it had been undertaken quickly, according
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to Louis Sell, but by summer 1988 Milošević had grown so strong that it would have
been “unthinkable for the federal authorities to order the army or police to act against
him.”113
The memoirs of Raif Dizdarević also provide convincing documentation of the
incendiary role played by Milošević in these years. Dizdarević served as chair of the
presidential council of Bosnia-Herzegovina 1978–1982, president of the Federal
Assembly 1982–1983, foreign minister 1984–1988, and president of the SFRY state
presidency 1988–1989, and shows how, during the crucial years leading up to
Slovenian and Croatian secession, Milošević disregarded not only the laws and
established procedures of the system, but also his colleagues in the political
establishment, setting in motion actions that were generally understood to be
destabilizing. On 27 September 1988, Dizdarević recalls, he and other members of
the state presidency held talks with Petar Gračanin, then president of Serbia, and
Milošević, in order to emphasize the dangers inherent in Serbian policies and
behavior.114 Milošević listened politely but ignored the concerns of the presidency,
which were not his concerns. In Dizdarević’s account, Milošević emerges as the
mastermind behind the destabilizing “meetings” that overthrew duly elected govern-
ments in three federal units. Dizdarević understood the danger full well and told a
group of Bosnian leaders in October 1988 that “if this method [of removing office
holders] is accepted, the consequences will be catastrophic.”115 But although Diz-
darević believes that Milošević played the most important role, during the years
1987–1989,116 in pushing the country toward breakup and war, he too does not
believe that Milošević accomplished this singlehandedly. Indeed, Dizdarević shows
how the wave of Serbian nationalism which Milošević rode had emerged earlier, and
provides an account of a critical session of the LCY Central Committee held in
December 1981 at which leading figures in the Serbian party demanded a redefinition
of Serbia, granting it special status within Yugoslavia. Draža Marković, one of the
most prominent Serb communists at that time, shocked the country on that occasion
with his speech, in which he said that Yugoslavia consisted of five peoples: Slovenes,
Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, and Montenegrins. That list omitted the Bosniaks
(called “Muslims” in the official terminology of that time)—an omission that no one

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considered accidental.117 In other words, Milošević emerges in Dizdarević’s account

as simultaneously responding to a wave of Serbian nationalism which had emerged
earlier, and catering to Serb nationalist demands and feeding Serb nationalist
passions (via the Belgrade press and television) for his own purposes, and collaborat-
ing with others within the context of a vortex of nationalist passions which no one
ultimately controlled, but which many exploited (not only in Serbia but in other
republics as well). Massimo Nava, in his 1999 biography of Milošević, confirms
Dizdarević’s account, noting that Milošević did not conjure up Serb frustrations, but
rather understood the sentiments of Serbs at that time and played to them.118 Viktor
Meier, Adam LeBor, and Louis Sell would also agree with these points, I am certain.
And, for that matter, one may find a general corroboration of these points in the
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testimony of Ante Marković, who served as prime minister of the SFRY from March
1989 to December 1991, at the trial of Slobodan Milošević.119
Banac120 and Dragović-Soso121 provide the most thorough accounts of the way in
which Serbian intellectuals contributed to creating a climate in which only nationalist
discourse came to be seen as legitimate, in which hatred became a badge of
patriotism, and in which people like Milošević and Karadžić could build power. The
1986 Memorandum issued by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art figures as
a key moment in their accounts.122 Their approach reminds us that theories emphasiz-
ing human agency need not focus on the role of political leaders and may, in fact,
bring to light ways in which currents emerging from within society can influence the
political environment, revealing in the process ways in which political leaders
respond to impulses and pressures “from below.”123 But one should not forget that,
some 15 years earlier, Croatian intellectuals had played a similar role, parading out
their sundry fears and phobias and demanding constitutional changes to enhance the
status of Croats qua Croats.124 The difference is that, in 1971, the LCY had
responded with repression, while, in 1986, the already moribund LCY did little
except squawk. There was no effective response. (This is not to endorse the
repression of 1971–1972; history would prove that it was a dysfunctional response.
But the lack of response the following decade was even more short-sighted and
dangerous.)
Theories emphasizing, in whole or in part, human agency are enormously attract-
ive because, when states collapse or wars erupt, most of us want to know who is
responsible. It is one of the most basic and most natural questions. And, inevitably,
there are figures who can be found to have played crucial roles in such events. But
was Milošević, for example, the mastermind of the war, as suggested in the
indictment under which he is currently being tried, or merely, rather, “the knight-er-
rant of Serbdom,” as Rusinow has put it?125 The chief strength of theories emphasiz-
ing human agency is that they avoid the pitfall of telling the story as if there were
only impersonal forces at work—indeed, as if there were no free choice. Theories
emphasizing human agency keep free choice—and thus, human responsibility—in
focus. When used with sophistication, they avoid attributing all that goes wrong to

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a single individual. But there is no reason why theories of human agency should fail
to acknowledge the enormous support that populations have sometimes given their
leaders as they have happily marched off to self-destructive wars or the systemic
factors that make it possible for ambitious leaders to take their societies down the
road to destruction.

Democratization
It has increasingly been argued by scholars that, during the process of democratiza-
tion, states are in great danger of succumbing to nationalism or sliding into war. In
fact, Jack Snyder estimates that democratizing states are about 50% more likely than
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the “average state” to go to war.126 The mobilization of nationalism is often the

instrument that takes such states down the road to war. But why nationalism?
Snyder’s answer is that established elites in democratizing but still only semi-demo-
cratic (or even, not-yet-democratic) contexts may use nationalism in order to narrow
the range of allowable political discourse and retain power.127 But why was such a
strategy successful in Serbia at all? Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan provide an answer.
In their view, in multiethnic settings, the order of elections is critical—specifically,
the choice to hold elections first at the national (or if one prefers, all-union) level or
first at the regional level. In Spain, as they point out, the first elections were held at
the national (all-Spanish) level, with all-union parties campaigning hard in the
Catalán and Basque regions. The result was that four of the all-union parties and their
local affiliates garnered 67.7% of the vote in Catalonia and 51.4% of the vote in the
Basque country.128 The upshot was that Spain held together and democratized
successfully. In Yugoslavia, as in the Soviet Union, elections were held at the
regional (i.e., republic) level before they were held at the all-union level. The result
was that politicians vying for power made their pitch at the regional level, appealing
to local/regional concerns rather than to those of all the citizens of the state. But why
should this result in the mobilization of nationalism? Their answer is that
A key aspect of a totalitarian regime is that independent preexisting parties and labor,
business, and religious organizations have been subject to extensive campaigns of
elimination or subjugation … The landscape of civil society is very flat. All-union
independent organizations are virtually nonexistent. In all post-totalitarian polities the
relative flatness of the landscape of civil society has created problems for politicians,
because it is hard to represent amorphous groups. Even after liberalization, the
articulation of interests based on wealth, ideology, or property relations has been
strikingly less than we find in many authoritarian regimes. However, politicians are
specialists in mobilizing hopes and grievances. In the context of post-totalitarianism’s
flattened landscape, the easiest hopes and grievances for politicians to mobilize relate
to ethnicity.129

Erika Harris offers a somewhat different slant on the relationship between

nationalism and democratization, viewing the former as “an integral part of any

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democratisation process,” while noting that the relationship between the two is
“ambiguous” at best.130 Acknowledging the tension between the requirements of
liberal democracy and the spirit of nationalism, Harris writes that “civic identity
tends to lose out as soon as there is a disagreement about state-building policies.
Ethnic nationalism is as much a consequence of unsuccessful state-building as it is
its cause, for the disintegration of the state, the loss of its legitimacy, diminishes
civic affiliation and leaves the field open to ethnic mobilisation.”131
The theories presented by Snyder and by Linz and Stepan trace the breakup of
Yugoslavia and the subsequent war to the way in which the challenge of democra-
tization was confronted. But that, in turn, brings in elites, since it is elites who decide
in what order to hold elections, and it is elites who decide how to pitch their electoral
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campaigns. In the Linz/Stepan theory especially, the electorate is seen as responding

passively, even predictably, to the strategies of the elites, so that what people end up
choosing (wanting) comes to depend on the order in which choices are presented to
them. This theory is not far-fetched, since, for example, it has been widely reported
that Ante Marković was the most popular political figure throughout Yugoslavia in
1989–1990, but was, all the same, unable to get his all-Yugoslav party off the
ground. Whether the experience of fascism (in Spain) can be conflated with the
experience of communism (in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union) is another matter;
however, this question goes far beyond the concerns of this article.

Emotional Factors and the Effects of the Past

The theories presented so far have not offered much by way of accounting for why
people who had lived in peace for more than four decades should have suddenly
turned on each other with such brutality (question [3]). For an answer to this
question, we must turn to the writings of Marie-Janine Calic, Paolo Rumiz, and
Roger D. Petersen. Since Petersen’s theory is the most explicit, it will make the most
sense to begin with his work, even though the most recently published of the three.
Petersen’s argument is that perceived individual or collective self-interest is not
sufficient to explain why people commit brutal actions in wartime situations. He
argues that emotion plays the crucial role here and offers narratives based on four
alternative emotions—fear, hatred, rage, and resentment.132 Explicitly rejecting a
“rational choice” approach to explaining intercommunal violence,133 he concedes that
“an emotion-based account cannot explain every case” of such violence, and largely
discounts rage, which often has no stable focus, “often drives the individual toward
self-destructive actions,” and “often produces cognitive distortions that can lead to
irrelevant or counterproductive actions.”134 Among the advantages that Petersen sees
in his approach are that it avoids the pitfall of treating group preferences as stable,
that it can explain how, in a context of multiple cross-cutting identities, one
particular identity is essentialized, and that it explains how a self-defined group

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comes to feel justified in committing atrocities against the members of other

groups.135
As indicated in the subtitle to Petersen’s book, his analysis focuses on: fear, which
he sees as inspiring violence against that group which is seen as constituting the
greatest threat; hatred, which he says is directed against a group that has been the
target with similar justifications over an extended period of time; and resentment,
which is directed toward a group seen as enjoying unjustified privilege or superior
status (or as having committed atrocities against one’s own group).136 Turning to the
Yugoslav case, Petersen argues that given the multiple justifications offered by Serb
nationalists for fighting the Bosniaks in the 1990s,137 hatred cannot serve as an
explanation for Bosnian Serb atrocities against the Bosniaks. Instead, inspired in part
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by Liah Greenfeld’s work,138 he argues that the war should be understood, at least in
part, as an expression of the resentment felt by Croats toward the Croatian Serbs
because of the decades that the latter had dominated the upper ranks in the Croatian
party and the police force, and that felt by rural Bosnian Croats and Serbs toward the
urban Muslims of Sarajevo and other towns of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Moreover, both
Croats and Serbs resented and feared the prospect of Muslim dominance in an
independent Bosnian state, according to Petersen.139 In turning to an analysis of the
atrocities committed against Albanians in Kosovo, however, Petersen argues that
hatred explains the violence there better than resentment. In his view, the history of
Serb–Albanian violence, which he traces to 1912–1913, established a “schema” into
which Serbs and Albanians readily slipped.140 This analysis is implicitly Freudian,
and has some resonance with other literature.
Calic, in her Krieg und Frieden in Bosnien-Hercegovina, provides some substan-
tiation for Petersen’s suggestion that resentment was a powerful emotion motivating
violence. She cites an opinion poll from November 1991, in which nearly 60% of
Muslims and 70% of Croats reported that Serbs had the greatest influence in Bosnia,
with 52% of Serbs thinking the same about Croats, and 44% of Serbs thinking that
Bosniaks were the dominant group in Bosnia-Herzegovina.141 In other words, each
group resented what it considered the unfair dominance of at least one of the other
groups. Moreover, as she notes, nationalist politicians tried to convert resentment
into the more powerful coinage of hatred, insisting, among other things, that the
diverse peoples of Bosnia could not possibly coexist in the future.142 According to
Calic, the artillery bombardment of Bosnia’s cities was motivated, perhaps above all,
by the desire to destroy the cosmopolitanism of the cities and any possibility of the
coexistence that they had embodied.143 Finally, she provides a thorough analysis of
the motivations of the combatants themselves, mentioning not only rural resentment
of the cosmopolitan city but also the fact that some of the perpetrators had previous
histories of pathology or law breaking, and the fact that many atrocities were
perpetrated in groups, where peer pressure and conformism would be operative.144
What Rumiz adds to this discussion is an analysis of the relationship between
starosedioci (old settlers) and došljaci (newcomers), in which, as he shows, it

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emerges that there was often greater sympathy between fellow “old settlers,” whether
they might be Serbs or Croats (as in Vukovar), than between “old settlers” and
“newcomers,” even if both might be members of the same national group.145 The
“old settlers” proved to be largely immune to the overtures from nationalists during
1990–1991, and, according to Rumiz, “the destruction of Vukovar and other cities of
the former Yugoslavia was … the work of ‘outsiders”—of immigrants and agents of
nonurban culture.”146 As if to prove the point, the Serb conquerors of Vukovar, after
they had completed their conquest, spoke of rebuilding the city—not in the Habsburg
style of the now-destroyed city, but rather in the Byzantine style that they identified
as their own. Yet Rumiz does not want his readers to conclude that the war was a
spontaneous affair. “The war was … consciously orchestrated,” he emphasizes, even
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if the nationalist elites made use of available fault lines between starosedioci and
došljaci.
The emphasis on the role of emotion requires a differentiation between such
emotions as develop in the absence of elite manipulation and those emotions which
are, at least in part, the result of elite manipulation and orchestration or, perhaps,
levels of intensity which are the result of elite manipulation. Both kinds are present,
just as there may be syndromes widespread in a society which arise, as one might
say, in the course of things as well as syndromes that are fostered by conscious elite
manipulation, as I have argued in a recent work.147 In Cohen’s account, “emotions”
(in the sense in which Petersen uses the term) and syndromes emerged long ago and
have remained more or less stable over time. In the writings of Petersen, Calic, and
Rumiz, emotions and syndromes are portrayed as much more mutable, much more
subject to changing circumstances, changing relations between people (as in the
arrival of došljaci in a region), and changing elite strategies. The emphasis on the
role of emotion does not seek to explain why the SFRY collapsed, but it makes a
useful contribution to answering questions (3) and (4), providing also a basis for
answering the question about how far back conflicts should be traced (question [5]).
Of course, if one wishes to probe the subject of individual motivation in greater
depth, one should turn to the ample literature in the field of psychology. Here I am
thinking, in particular, of the work of Albert Bandura,148 Samuel Guttman,149 Herbert
Kelman,150 Roderick Kramer and David Messick,151 and Jo-Ann Tsang,152 alongside
others.153

Toward a Synthesis of Approaches

In the foregoing article, I have reviewed various approaches to explaining the
Yugoslav collapse and War of Yugoslav Succession: external factors (Great Power
conspiracy; end of the Cold War); remote internal factors (national character school;
nineteenth-century roots; “ancient hatreds”); proximate internal factors (economic
deterioration; systemic factors; human agency; democratization process); and
emotional factors. I have also suggested that some combination of these will serve

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best to address the questions at hand. All of these approaches stress the importance
of the past, though in different ways. Certainly, it is rather obvious that institutions
established in, let us say, 1945, even though subsequently reformed, modified, and
reorganized—such as the role of the communist party and its control of the
press—may have a lingering impact for some years even after the collapse of
communism. Or again, the resentments associated with memories of the interwar
years (1918–1941) may have an impact on the present generation, especially to the
extent that public figures allude to those years and stir up bad memories (“dysphoric
rumination,” as psychologists put it). Based on the foregoing, we may perhaps
conclude the following.
Question (1): Why did the SFRY collapse? From the review of theories, it seems
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apparent that systemic and economic factors must be kept at the center of focus
(while not neglecting the responsibility of those who failed to take remedial action
in sufficient time or those who subverted the constitutional order). Certainly, the
years of relative internal peace in socialist Yugoslavia, 1945–1985, were sufficient
time in which the country could, with a more wisely developed political formula,
have constructed a system capable of overcoming such economic and political storms
as would come its way. Among many citizens of the SFRY there was a genuine
commitment to building a common life—but the minimal demands which Yugoslavs
had included the chance for a better life, fairness, respect for human rights, and a
legitimate state. Had these things been achieved, collapse and war could most
certainly have been avoided. This means, of course, that democratization would have
had to be undertaken before the country’s crisis of legitimation became overwhelm-
ing.
Question (2): Why did armed conflict erupt between the peoples of the area in
1991? On the basis of the brief summary presented here, I would suggest that the
answer to this question must be sought not merely in the preparations taken by
Milošević, beginning in early 1990 at the latest, and by Tudjman, beginning in
autumn 1990 at the latest, but also in the complicity and active involvement of other
actors, in the role played by Croatian intellectuals in the late 1960s (sowing
resentments that would reawaken later) and by Serbian intellectuals in the 1980s, and
in the resentments connected with the interwar years (1918–1941) and with World
War II (1941–1945), and, for that matter, also with the massacres at Bleiburg and
Kočevje immediately after World War II.
Question (3): Why did people who had lived together in peace for most of 45
years take up arms against each other? I find that I am impressed simultaneously with
the capacity of the democratization school (Snyder, Linz and Stepan), the elite
propaganda approach, and the emotions/syndromes approach (Petersen, Calic, Ru-
miz, Kramer and Messick) to contribute to explaining how and why Serbs, Croats,
and Bosniaks went to war against each other. Certainly, the role of propaganda in
feeding people’s frenzy should not be underestimated. Where Petersen emphasized
resentment and downplayed rage, I would again emphasize resentment but give some

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room for rage, perhaps not as a stable emotion, but as instigating certain key events,
and I would also add an emotion not discussed by Petersen—desperation: in the
context of Yugoslav economic deterioration, there were plenty of desperate people
in the SFRY by the end of the 1980s, and desperate people are prepared to resort to
desperate measures, especially when there are ambitious leaders egging them on with
concrete demands.
Question (4): Do the Serbs, Croats, and/or Bosniaks have any particular predis-
position to violence, and, if so, where does it come from? Misha Glenny’s widely
read Fall of Yugoslavia,154 in a manner reminiscent of Tomašić’s theory of “Dinaric
man,” promoted the theory that the people of Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia were more
prone to violence, partly—in his view—because they grew up with weapons and
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partly because of local traditions. In so writing, Glenny drew close to the “national
character” school, one of two approaches that endeavor to answer this question. The
other approach stresses emotions and psychological syndromes. These two ap-
proaches stand in opposition to each other. Where the national character school
presents the behavioral patterns of one or another people as highly stable, developed
over history, and predictive of likely behaviors, the emotional/psychological ap-
proach stresses that behavioral patterns are subject to certain processes and vulner-
able to certain responses (resentment, hatred, fear, rage, desperation) that have
certain likely behavioral expressions but which are not necessarily stable over time;
quite the contrary, the emotional/psychological approach stresses that emotions may
be relatively short-lived (a decade or two, under some circumstances) and scarcely
constitutive of a fixed “national character.”
Question (5): How far back can intense rivalries or conflicts involving these three
peoples be traced? As we have already seen, the answers provided by the alternative
theories examined herein are quite diverse. But what do you say to someone who
insists that it “all” started in 1389? Or to someone who believes that it all started in
1987? And if these extremes do not look sensible, can one even really draw a line
somewhere? Although a case can be made for asserting that the problems began in
1878 or in 1918 or in 1928 (the assassination of Stjepan Radić) or in 1941 or in 1945,
or at any of a number of other points in time, almost any date selected would have
something of the arbitrary to it. To my mind, the least arbitrary date—indeed, the
only date which is not arbitrary—from which to date the beginning of problems
among Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs is 1918—the point at which these peoples
entered into a common national state for the first time in history. But I prefer to think
of 1918 as setting the Yugoslav peoples in a certain direction, with subsequent crises,
problematic choices, atrocities, and conflicts depositing layer after layer of memor-
ies, resentments, dangers, problems, and potential for explosion. In 1921 came the
Vidovdan constitution, widely viewed as unjust by non-Serbs; then came the
assassination of Croatian leader Stjepan Radić by a Serb in 1928 and the assassin-
ation of King Aleksandar of the Serbian Karadjordjević dynasty by a Macedonian
collaborating with the Croatian Ustaše in 1934; then came the bitter suffering of

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World War II; and so on. With each new layer of suffering, the resentments grew
deeper and the potential for mobilization for future conflict grew greater. Yugoslav
President Tito, who ruled socialist Yugoslavia from 1945 until his death in May
1980, tried to overcome the resentments and hatreds stirred up in the course of the
years 1918–1945, and made some progress. But, as the propaganda appeals of the
Serbian and Croatian press at the beginning of the 1990s showed,155 the memories of
those earlier years still had the power, half a century later, to provoke anger and
resentment and to contribute to ethnic mobilization. And this is an important point:
it has become fashionable, at least in some circles, to deny that Milošević was a
nationalist and even to deny that the War of Yugoslav Succession had an ethnic
character. These well-intentioned denials are misleading, however. Milošević used
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the propaganda apparatus at his disposal to stir up nationalist passions, and used
those nationalist passions to motivate Serbs for war. That makes him a nationalist.
Whatever he may have said to his wife and pet cat in the privacy of his living room
is completely beside the point. As for the claim that the war was not “ethnic,” one
may well ask if those making this claim believe, for example, that it was a war in
which the poor were mobilized to fight against “rich exploiters” or one in which the
Orthodox or the Catholics were mobilized to fight against non-Orthodox or non-
Catholics? In fact, even allowing for the rural–urban resentment, propaganda endeav-
ored to mobilize specifically ethnic hatreds; it was for this reason that Serbian
propaganda portrayed Croats as Ustaše and Bosniaks as “Islamic fundamentalists,”
and that Croatian propaganda portrayed Serbs as Chetniks and communists.
At the end of most films, there is a standard disclaimer that advises viewers not
to try to equate particular characters in the film with actual persons living or dead.
In the title to this article, I quoted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Perhaps I may add
here that any resemblance between the three witches whose incantation that was and
any actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental, and that any inference to that
effect which some innocent but misguided reader might infer is unintended and could
exist only in the mind of that misguided reader. Still, if a reader were to read the
witches as representing respectively systemic factors, human agency, and emotional
factors, such an interpretation would at least lead in the direction of emphasizing that
only a multi-factor analysis can really handle even merely questions (1) and (2), let
alone the entire complex of questions raised by the Yugoslav war.156 Indeed, it would
be a pity to try to answer all five questions, identified at the outset, with just one
theory—or worse, with just one factor. Nor is there any reason to do so.

NOTES
1. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, IV, i.
2. I am grateful to Thomas Emmert, Jasna Dragović-Soso, Reneo Lukić, and Vjeran
Pavlaković for their most helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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3. This approach is discussed in the context of a review of alternative explanations of the

Yugoslav troubles in Davorin Rudolf, Rat koji nismo htjeli. Hrvatska 1991 (Zagreb:
Nakladni zavod Globus, 1999), pp. 19–35.
4. Rodney Atkinson, “Yugoslavia and Its Enemies, 1903–1998,” ⬍ www.1335.com/Ser-
bia.html ⬎ (accessed 28 August 2003), p. 1.
5. Gerard F. Powers, “Religion, Conflict and Prospects for Peace in Bosnia, Croatia and
Yugoslavia,” Religion in Eastern Europe, Vol. 16, No. 5, 1996, p. 1.
6. For documentation of this claim, see Sabrina Petra Ramet, “Yugoslavia and the Two
Germanys,” in Dirk Verheyen and Christian Søe, eds, The Germans and Their Neigh-
bors (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), p. 328.
7. Testimony of Aleksandar Vasiljević, Trial of Slobodan Milošević (TSM), International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), The Hague, 17 February
2003, p. 16263, ⬍ www.un.org/icty/transe54/030217ED.htm ⬎ (accessed 22 January
Downloaded by [University of Chicago Library] at 17:35 16 July 2013

2004).
8. Testimony of Aleksandar Vasiljević, TSM-ICTY, 18 February 2003, p. 16374,
⬍ www.un.org/icty/transe54/030218ED.htm ⬎ (accessed 22 January 2004).
9. Marko Attila Hoare, “Nothing Is left” [a review essay of six books], Bosnia Report, No.
36, 2003, p. 32.
10. Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 52.
11. Daniele Conversi, German-Bashing and the Breakup of Yugoslavia (Seattle: Henry M.
Jackson School of International Studies of the University of Washington, 1998),
p. 8.
12. Beverly Crawford, “Explaining Defection from International Cooperation: Germany”s
Unilateral Recognition of Croatia,” World Politics, Vol. 48, No. 4, 1996. For an
alternative interpretation, see Sabrina P. Ramet and Letty Coffin, “German Foreign
Policy toward the Yugoslav Successor States, 1991–1999,” Problems of Post-commu-
nism, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2001, pp. 48–64.
13. Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (London:
Penguin Books, 2001), p. xvii.
14. James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav
War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
15. Sabrina Petra Ramet, “The Yugoslav Crisis and the West: Avoiding ‘Vietnam’ and
Blundering into ‘Abyssinia,’” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1994,
pp. 189–219.
16. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (London: Victor Gollancz, 1995): re U.S. opposition to
his plan, pp. 100–109, 170, 189, 357, 366; re. recognition, p. 46.
17. Jasna Adler, “The Disintegration of Yugoslavia: Reflections on Its Causes in a Tentative
Comparison with Austria-Hungary,” in Reneo Lukić, ed., Rethinking the International
Conflict in Communist and Post-communist States: Essays in Honor of Miklós Molnár
(Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1998), p. 96, my emphasis.
18. Ibid., p. 96.
19. Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will, p. 12.
20. Three examples: Dennison Rusinow, “To Be or Not to Be? Yugoslavia as Hamlet,”
UFSI Field Staff Reports, 1990–1991, No. 18, 1991; V. P. Gagnon, Jr, “Yugoslavia:
Prospects for Stability,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 3, 1991; and Svetozar Stojanović,
interview (February 1991), published as “Optimistic about Yugoslavia: Interview with
Svetozar Stojanović,” East European Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 4, 1991. See also Dennison
Rusinow, “Yugoslavia: Balkan Breakup?” Foreign Policy, No. 83, 1991.

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21. Milovan Djilas, comments, in Milovan Djilas, Emmet John Hughes, Lord Trevelyan,
and Kei Wakaizumi, “A World Atlas for 2024,” Saturday Review—World, 24 August
1974, p. 25.
22. These early warnings were reported in Pedro Ramet, “Yugoslavia and the Threat of
Internal and External Discontents,” Orbis, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1984, p. 109. For a compari-
son of the Yugoslav war with the war in Lebanon, see Florian Bieber, Bosnien-Herze-
gowina und der Lebanon im Vergleich. Historische Entwicklung und Politisches System
vor dem Bürgerkrieg (Sinzheim, Germany: Pro Universitate Verlag, 1999).
23. See Pedro Ramet, “Apocalypse Culture and Social Change in Yugoslavia,” in Pedro
Ramet, ed., Yugoslavia in the 1980s (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), pp. 6–11, 16–20.
24. Ramet, “Yugoslavia and the Threat,” p. 114.
25. John Major, in House of Commons Hansard Debates, 20 October 1992,
⬍ www.publications.parliament.uk/cgi-bin ⬎ (accessed 29 January 2004), p. 1.
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26. Jovan Cvijić, Geografski i kulturni položaj Srbije (Sarajevo, 1914), as summarized in
Olivera Milosavljević, U tradiciji nacionalizma, ili stereotipi srpskih intelektualaca XX
veka o ‘nama’ i ‘drugima’” (Belgrade: Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2002),
p. 35.
27. Dinko Tomašić, Personality and Culture in Eastern European Politics (New York:
George W. Stewart, 1948), pp. 27–28; see also p. 10.
28. Ibid., p. 30.
29. Ibid., p. 31.
30. Ibid., p. 38.
31. Ibid., pp. 35, 218.
32. Sir Neville Henderson’s 1929 report is quoted in Arnold Suppan, “Yugoslavism versus
Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene Nationalism,” in Norman M. Naimark and Holly Case,
eds, Yugoslavism and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 128.
33. Branimir Anzulović, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (London: Hurst, 1999),
p. 67 et passim.
34. Ibid., pp. 122–123. On this point, see also Milorad Tomanić, Srpska crkva u ratu i ratovi
u njoj (Belgrade: Medijska knjižara krug, 2001), pp. 40–45, 56–59.
35. Anzulović, Heavenly Serbia, p. 2.
36. Ibid., p. 2.
37. Ibid., pp. 2–3.
38. Ibid., p. 180.
39. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
40. Lenard J. Cohen, Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan Milošević
(Boulder: Westview Press, 2001), p. 398, my emphasis.
41. Ibid., p. 82.
42. Ibid., p. 81. For a fuller discussion of Cohen’s Serpent, see Sabrina P. Ramet, “In Search
of the ‘Real” Milošević: New Books about the Rise and Fall of Serbia’s Strongman,”
Journal of Human Rightsi Vol. 2, No. 3, 2003, pp. 455–466.
43. Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia’s Disintegration and Balkan Politics in
Transition, 2nd edn (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).
44. Ibid., p. 21.
45. Ibid., p. 20.
46. Ibid., p. 246.
47. Ibid., p. 21.
48. Ibid., p. 365, my emphasis.

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49. Ivo Banac, “The Fearful Asymmetry of War: The Causes and Consequences of
Yugoslavia’s Demise,” Daedalus, Vol. 121, No. 2, 1992, p. 143.
50. Ibid., p. 144.
51. Ivo Goldstein, Croatia: A History, trans. Nikolina Jovanović (London: Hurst, 1999),
p. 93.
52. Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1994).
53. Mitja Velikonja, Religious Separation & Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
trans. Rang’ichi Ng’inja (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2003),
p. 15.
54. John Major, in House of Commons Hansard Debates, 23 June 1993,
⬍ www.publications.parliament.uk/cgi-bin ⬎ (accessed 29 January 2004), p. 10.
55. Robert D. Kaplan, “Croatianism,” New Republic, 25 November 1991, p. 18, as quoted
in Banac, “The Fearful Asymmetry,” p. 142.
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56. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 42.
57. Ibid., p. 138.
58. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1968).
59. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, p. 208.
60. Ibid., p. 260.
61. Erika Harris, Nationalism and Democratisation: Politics of Slovakia and Slovenia
(Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002), p. 146.
62. Susan L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia,
1945–1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 352, 355, 359, 364.
63. Susan L. Woodward, “Reforming a Socialist State: Ideology and Public Finance in
Yugoslavia,” World Politics, Vol. 41, No. 2, 1989, p. 304.
64. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment, p. xv.
65. Ibid., p. 339, 346–347.
66. All of these factors are mentioned by Cvijeto Job in his Yugoslavia’s Ruin:
The Bloody Lessons of Nationalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002),
pp. 62–63.
67. Paul Lendvai, “Yugoslavia without Yugoslavs: The Roots of the Crisis,” trans. Lis
Parcell, International Affairs, Vol. 67, No. 2, 1991, p. 255.
68. Paul Lendvai, “Jugoslawien ohne Jugoslawen. Die Wurzeln der Staatskrise,” in Ange-
lika Volle and Wolfgang Wagner, eds, Der Krieg auf dem Balkan. Die Hilflosigkeit der
Staatenwelt (Bonn: Verlag für Internationale Politik, 1994), pp. 30, 32.
69. Goldstein, Croatia, p. 188.
70. Reneo Lukić, The Wars of South Slavic Succession: Yugoslavia 1991–1993 (Geneva:
Graduate Institute of International Studies, Programme for Strategic & International
Security Studies, 1993), p. 8. See also Job, Yugoslavia’s Ruin, p. 61.
71. Lukić, The Wars of South Slavic Succession, p. 9.
72. George Schöpflin, “Political Decay in One-Party Systems in Eastern Europe: Yugoslav
Patterns,” in Pedro Ramet, ed., Yugoslavia in the 1980s (Boulder: Westview Press,
1985), p. 309.
73. Ibid., p. 312.
74. John B. Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000),
pp. 418–423, 428–429.
75. Steven L. Burg and Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and
International Intervention (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), p. 4.

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76. See Sabrina P. Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death
of Tito to the Fall of Milošević, 4th edn (Boulder: Westview Press, 2002), pp. 4,
375–377; and Sabrina P. Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: The Dual Challenge of
State-Building and Legitimation among the Yugoslavs, 1918–2004 (Bloomington and
Washington, DC: Indiana University Press and the Wilson Center Press, forthcoming),
especially Chapter 1.
77. Those whom I have judged to have been most co-responsible with Milošević for pushing
the country toward war are listed in my Balkan Babel, p. 71. See also pp. 7, 31.
78. Ramet, Balkan Babel, pp. 26–48.
79. Ibid., pp. 49–51.
80. Ibid., pp. 44–45.
81. James J. Sadkovich, The U.S. Media and Yugoslavia, 1991–1995 (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1998), p. 88.
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82. Cohen, Serpent in the Bosom, p. 385.

83. Roger D. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in
Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
p. 251.
84. Ivo Banac, ed., Eastern Europe in Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1992); and Ivo Banac, “The Dissolution of Yugoslav Historiography,” in Sabrina Petra
Ramet and Ljubiša S. Adamovich, eds, Beyond Yugoslavia: Politics, Economics, and
Culture in a Shattered Community (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 39–65.
85. Jasna Dragović-Soso, “Saviours of the Nation”: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and
the Revival of Nationalism (London: Hurst, 2002).
86. Thomas A. Emmert, “A Crisis of Identity: Serbia at the End of the Century,” in Norman
M. Naimark and Holly Case, eds, Yugoslavism and Its Historians: Understanding the
Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 176–177.
87. Bariša Krekić, “An Island of Peace in a Turbulent World: Old Ragusans” Statesmanship
as a Paradigm for the Modern Balkans,” in Norman M. Naimark and Holly Case, eds,
Yugoslavism and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 65.
88. Lukić, The Wars of South Slavic Succession, pp. 8, 9. See also Reneo Lukić, “Greater
Serbia: A New Reality in the Balkans,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1994,
pp. 49–70.
89. Branka Magaš, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up 1980–92 (Lon-
don: Verso, 1993), pp. xiii, 241, 261.
90. Dennison Rusinow, “The Avoidable Catastrophe,” in Sabrina Petra Ramet and Ljubiša
S. Adamovich, eds, Beyond Yugoslavia: Politics, Economics, and Culture in a Shattered
Community (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 14, 18, 32.
91. Louis Sell, Slobodan Milošević and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002).
92. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in
Post-communist Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 7.
93. Warren Zimmermann, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers, rev. ed.
(New York: Times Books, 1999), p. vii.
94. Ibid., p. vii.
95. Ibid., p. ix.
96. Ibid., p. 71.
97. Ibid., p. 146.
98. For documentation to support this claim, see Borisav Jović, Poslednji dani SFRJ. Izvodi
iz dnevnika (Belgrade: Politika, 1995), p. 131 (entry of 26 March 1990).

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99. John V. A. Fine, “Heretical Thoughts about the Postcommunist Transition in the Once
and Future Yugoslavia,” in Norman M. Naimark and Holly Case, eds, Yugoslavism and
Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003), pp. 179, 184.
100. Ibid., p. 181.
101. Ibid., p. 184.
102. Ibid., p. 259.
103. In early 1991, there were rumors flying around that Branko Mamula, the retired minister
of defense, might seek to play the role of “Yugoslav Jaruzelski.” These rumors were
fueled by statements given to Slobodna Dalmacija (published in the issue of 11
February 1991) by Tudjman’s adviser Slaven Letica and by the Croatian defense
minister, Martin Špegelj, and by an article written by Viktor Meier and published in
Frankfurter Allgemeine at the beginning of February 1991. Branko Mamula, Slučaj
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Jugoslavija (Podgorica, Montenegro: CID, 2000), p. 185.

104. Regarding the involvement of Milošević and the Serbian secret police in the planning
and organization of these “meetings,” see Adam LeBor, Milošević: A Biography
(Polmont, Scotland: Bloomsbury, 2002), p. 107.
105. Mamula, Slučaj Jugoslavija, p. 197.
106. Quoted in Mark Thompson, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, rev. edn (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1999), p. 81.
107. For a (partial) list of Milošević’s unconstitutional and illegal actions between 1989 and
1991 (never mind later), see Ramet, Balkan Babel, pp. 71–72. For further details, see
Meier, Yugoslavia, passim.
108. Quoted in Sarah A. Kent, “Writing the Yugoslav Wars: English-Language Books on
Bosnia (1992–1996) and the Challenges of Analyzing Contemporary History,” Ameri-
can Historical Review, Vol. 102, No. 4, 1997, p. 1090.
109. LeBor, Milošević, pp. 9–10, 34, 254. See also p. 144.
110. Martin Špegelj, Sjećanja vojnika, ed. Ivo Žanić, 2nd edn (Zagreb: Znanje, 2001).
111. Mamula, Slučaj Jugoslavija, p. 118.
112. Ibid., p. 165.
113. Sell, Slobodan Milošević, p. 58.
114. Raif Dizdarević, Od smrti Tita do smrti Jugoslavije: Svjedočenja (Sarajevo:
Svjedok, 1999), p. 212.
115. Ibid., p. 218, quoting himself.
116. Except for a few observations dealing with some events after that year, Dizdarević’s
account ends with 1989.
117. Ibid., p. 90.
118. Massimo Nava, Milosevic. La tragedia di un popolo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1999), pp. 43–44.
119. Testimony of Ante Marković, TSM-ICTY, 23 October 2003), ⬍ www.un.org/icty/
transe54/031023ED.htm ⬎ (accessed on 13 January 2004).
120. Ivo Banac, “The Dissolution of Yugoslav Historiography,” in Sabrina Petra Ramet and
Ljubiša S. Adamovich, eds, Beyond Yugoslavia: Politics, Economics, and Culture in a
Shattered Community (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 39–65.
121. Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation, note 84.
122. See also Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 158–160.
123. See also Svetlana Slapšak, “Serbische Alternativen. Was hat den Krieg in Jugoslawien
verursacht?” trans. Thomas Bremer, in Alida Bremer, ed., Jugoslawische (Sch)erben.
Probleme und Perspektiven (Osnabrück and Münster: fibre Verlag, 1993), pp. 165–187.

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124. See Sabrina P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962–1991, 2nd edn
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 109–115 et passim.
125. Rusinow, “The Avoidable Catastrophe,” note 89, p. 21.
126. Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 29.
127. Ibid., pp. 36, 52–55, 59–60.
128. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, “Political Identities and Electoral Sequences: Spain, the
Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia,” Daedalus, Vol. 121, No. 2, 1992, p. 126.
129. Ibid., p. 132.
130. Harris, Nationalism and Democratisation, note 60, p. 56.
131. Ibid., pp. 61–62.
132. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence, especially Chapter 1 and Introduction.
133. Ibid., pp. 32–33.
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134. Ibid., p. 19.

135. Ibid., pp. 3–4.
136. Ibid., p. 25.
137. Ibid., p. 83, citing Michael Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).
138. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992).
139. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence, p. 237.
140. Ibid., pp. 242–248.
141. Marie-Janine Calic, Krieg und Frieden in Bosnien-Hercegovina, rev. edn (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 80.
142. Ibid., p. 123.
143. Ibid., p. 131.
144. Ibid., pp. 141–146.
145. Paolo Rumiz, Masken für ein Massaker. Der manipulierte Krieg: Spurensuche auf dem
Balkan, trans. Friederike Hausmann and Gesa Schröder, rev. edn (Munich: Verlag Antje
Kunstmann, 2000), pp. 101–102.
146. Ibid., p. 111.
147. See Sabrina P. Ramet, “Under the Holy Lime Tree: The Inculcation of Neurotic &
Psychotic Syndromes as a Serbian Wartime Strategy, 1986–1995,” Polemos (Zagreb),
Vol. 5, Nos 1–2, 2002, pp. 83–97.
148. Albert Bandura, “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities,” Personal-
ity and Social Psychology Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1999, pp. 193–209.
149. Samuel A. Guttman, “Robert Waelder and the Application of Psychoanalytic Principles
to Social and Political Phenomena,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Associ-
ation, Vol. 34, 1986, pp. 835–862.
150. Herbert C. Kelman, “Violence without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumaniza-
tion of Victims and Victimizers,” Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 29, No. 4, 1973,
pp. 25–61.
151. Roderick M. Kramer and David M. Messick, “Getting by with a Little Help from Our
Enemies: Collective Paranoia and Its Role in Intergroup Relations,” in Constantine
Sedikides, John Schopfler, and Chester A. Insko, eds, Intergroup Cognition and
Intergroup Behavior (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998), pp. 233–255.
152. Jo-Ann Tsang, “Moral Rationalization and the Integration of Situational Factors and
Psychological Processes in Immoral Behavior,” Review of General Psychology, Vol. 6,
No. 1, 2002, pp. 25–50.

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153. See, inter alia, David M. Bersoff, “Why Good People Sometimes Do Bad Things:
Motivated Reasoning and Unethical Behavior,” Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1999, pp. 28–39; Mikloš Biro and Slavica Selaković-Buršić,
“Suicide, Aggression and War,” Archives of Suicide Research, Vol. 2, 1996, pp. 75–79;
Carolyn L. Hafer, “Why We Reject Innocent Victims,” in Michael Ross and Dale T.
Miller, eds, The Justice Motive in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), pp. 109–126; Hartmann Hinterhuber, Milan Stern, Thomas Ross, and
Georg Kemmler, “The Tragedy of Wars in Former Yugoslavia Seen through the Eyes
of Refugees and Emigrants,” Psychiatria Danubina, Vol. 13, Nos 1–4, 2001, pp. 3–14;
Anja Meulenbelt, “Sympathy for the Devil: Thinking about Victims and Perpetrators
after Working in Serbia,” Women & Therapy, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1999, pp. 153–160;
Richard Morrock, “The Genocidal Impulse: Why Nations Kill Other Nations,” Journal
of Psychohistory, Vol. 27, No. 2, 1999, pp. 155–164; S. P. Rathee, P. K. Pardal, and T.
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R. John, “Diagnostic Value of SIS-II among Sub-groups of Psychotic and Neurotic

Patients of Armed Forces,” SIS Journal of Projective Psychology & Mental Health, Vol.
9, No. 1, 2002, pp. 38–48; Robert J. Shoemaker, “The Phenomenon of Dehumaniza-
tion,” Pennsylvania Psychiatric Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1968, pp. 3–18; and Amoof R.
Singh, K. R. Banerjee, and Supraksh Chaudhury, “Mental Health during War: An
Experience and Lesson from the Past,” SIS Journal of Projective Psychology & Mental
Health, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2001, pp. 135–140.
154. Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (London: Penguin Books,
1992).
155. For a comprehensive study of the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian press prior to and
during the war, see Thompson, Forging War, note 105.
156. After an exhaustive review of theories emphasizing economic factors, ethnic hatreds,
nationalism, cultural differences, changes in international politics, the role of individual
leaders, the pre-modern character of the Yugoslav state, and structural–institutional
factors, Dejan Jović has argued for the advantage of a multi-factor analysis. See D.
Jović, Jugoslavija—država koja je odumrla (Zagreb: Prometej, 2003), pp. 23–102.

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