The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

Resistance to the war in former Yugoslavia
Yugoslavism as an integrative state concept
The people in former Yugoslavia never had the opportunity to learn how
to live in a democracy. When the Yugoslav state was created at the end
of the First World War from entities that had previously been separated,
and were in some cases foreign-ruled, the foundation for conflict and
disintegration was already laid. The struggle around the centralist state
constitution included shots fired in Parliament, a royal dictatorship and
finally a civil war. Yugoslavism as an integrative state concept threatened
to collapse from the outset.
During the course of the Second World War however, the Communists
seized upon this idea and expanded it into an ideology. They were successful
in winning the majority of the population to the partisan struggle,
and ending the war as victors, and then in establishing themselves as
the leading force in socialist Yugoslavia. No serious political opposition
was allowed to develop in the new state; neither did the Communist
Party want one, nor did it seem necessary under the “soft” Yugoslav
socialist system.
At the beginning of the 1960s, voices were raised in several parts of the
country complaining that they were economically disadvantaged. In the
hope of stabilizing the country politically over the long term, the leader,
Josip Broz Tito, instituted an economic reform, followed twenty years later
by a new constitution. However, the conflicts broke out anew just a year
after his death in 1980. The Serbian leadership wanted the old constitution
back, so as to regain their old dominant position. Since the other parts
of the country refused to go along with this, the acute economic prob -
lems were, as usual, transformed into a nationalistic struggle.
While the citizens of the country had never lived in a democracy, they
wanted no war – nor did they hate each other in a manner that might
have led to war. Rather, the conviction prevailed that with the end of the
Second World War, wars in that area had been ended for all time. The
formation of a Yugoslav identity also seemed irreversible. Until the first
shots were fired in 1990, most people believe that “the world” would
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