yugoslavias implosion

Yugoslavia as they saw it (i.e., as an extended Serbia). They argued
that Serbia’s boundaries at the time were neither national nor historical
borders, and set about reviving the Kosovo myth, which served
to rally Serbs politically, just as it did at the beginning of the nineteenth
century.
The struggle for Josip Broz Tito’s inheritance in 1980 started
amid a deep crisis to which the political and intellectual establishments
had no answers. The Serbs saw any attempt to reform Yugoslavia
in the new circumstances as a scheme to deprive them of a
state of their own. Serbian leaders at the time used the slogan “First,
the state—second, a democracy” to block democratization and prevent
the necessary pluralization of interests.
In 1986, the Serbian Academy of Sciences issued the “Memorandum,”
a document that was at once pro-Yugoslav and anti-Yugoslav
in that it suggested a transformation of the country through its
recentralization. The authors of the Memorandum argued that the
Serbian people could not look to the future serenely amid so much
uncertainty, and demanded that all the nations in Yugoslavia be
given the opportunity to state their national aspirations and intentions.
Restated, that meant that Serbia could define its own national
interest and decide its own future. In essence, the Memorandum
restated the Serbian national program advanced at the end of the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth: namely, the
“liberation and unification of the entire Serb people and the establishment
of a Serb national and state community on the whole Serb
territory.”
The period preceding the outbreak of the war was characterized
by three phases: first, attempts to preserve the old system; second,
the crystallization of two concepts for resolving the crisis; and third,
the war itself. In the first phase, shortly after Tito’s death, members
of the political and intellectual establishments strove to preserve
their positions without making much effort to resolve the crisis by
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IntroduCtIon