yugoslavias implosion

16
IntroduCtIon
researched. Post-communist societies have been, as a rule, saddled
with weak or ruined economies, dysfunctional institutions, corruption,
crime, and demoralized societies. The belief that those countries
could morph overnight into democracies proved fallacious.
Nationalism has been present in most the post-communist world
as a substitute for the failed ideology. Most post-communist societies
have been multiethnic and have had no mechanisms to deal with
tensions and conflicts generated by the newly arisen nationalism.
However, Serbian radical nationalism, which led to the break-up of
the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, was unique in the sense
that the Serbian political leadership had neither the political will
nor the skill to respect basic international standards in resolving the
Yugoslav crisis.
During the past two centuries, the development of the Serbian
nation and the Serbian state has been marked by a conflict between
patriarchy and modernity that slowed the creation of a “complete
state” 1 and made the cultural integration of Serbs into the international
community more difficult. That clash resurfaced in the final
quarter of the past century when, seeing the possibility of the emergence
of a genuinely confederal and multiethnic Yugoslav state
as a loss of identity, many Serbs embraced the revived concept of
“Greater Serbia,” a concept that drew its strength from the patriarchal,
collectivist model of state and society, from an ethnic-religious
understanding of a nation, and from an emotional reliance on the
glory of the medieval Serbian empire.
The collapse of Yugoslavia was the outcome of a long process
and its nature was determined by the combined effects of international
and domestic developments. My personal approach to those
developments reflects the insight I acquired, as a senior diplomat,
1 That term was coined by Zoran Đinđić . Emblematic of that idea is his study Yugoslavia
as an Unfinished State (Novi Sad: Književna zadruga Novog Sada, 1988); and Nenad
Dimitrijevic’s essay “Serbia as an Unfinished State,” Reč (Belgrade) 69, no . 15 (2003) .