A Breakup Would Produce a Mess : Better to aim for autonomy than independence

It is one thing to declare independence. It’s another to find the inner resources and outside support to maintain it. Slovenia and Croatia, the two richest and most Westernized of Yugoslavia’s six republics, find themselves without international encouragement as they move to opt out of the 73-year-old federation. Neither can they count on tolerance from their federal partners that would allow them to go gently into the uncertain night of self-rule. Slovenia and Croatia have for months been acquiring light arms, fully aware that their long-planned actions could ignite a new explosion of bloodshed and turmoil in a region saturated with both. Their leaders boldly say they are ready to risk much in an effort to gain much.

Both breakaway republics have been careful to leave the door ajar to further negotiations aimed at remolding Yugoslavia into a much looser federation, one that would essentially yield them the autonomy they crave. The nominally ex-communist leaders of Serbia, the largest of the republics and Croatia’s bitter traditional enemy, reject this idea; they want to keep things as they are, with Serbia largely dominating the federation. It’s this deadlock that in recent months led Slovenians and Serbs to vote overwhelmingly for independence, and that this week led their governments to act.

But it would, of course, be wildly wrong to seek the sources of this crisis only in recent events. Its roots are ancient, its imperatives harsh and unforgiving.

The thin fabric of Yugoslav national unity began to tear in 1980, when the longtime communist dictator Josip Tito died. But in fact that fabric had been manufactured only at the end of World War II, when Tito took power and moved with brutal determination to suppress Yugoslavia’s nationalist hostilities. A police state can demand cooperation and order; what it can’t do is erase memories, and memories in Yugoslavia throb like wounds that won’t heal. Even as Yugoslavs resisted their German occupiers, Croats and Serbs were battling each other in a conflict notable for its merciless cruelties; more Yugoslavs were killed by other Yugoslavs than by Nazis. That conflict was itself a further acting out of the deep ethnic divisions that Yugoslavia’s post-World War I creation in 1918 did little to resolve. The Croats are Roman Catholic and for centuries were part of the Austrian Empire; the Serbs, Eastern Orthodox and long ruled by the Ottoman Turks.

Europe and the United States rightly worry about the consequences if Yugoslavia pulls apart, regionally because the resulting ethnic conflicts are sure to send waves of refugees into neighboring countries, internationally because disunion could inspire secession movements in other multiethnic societies where tensions run high--Czechoslovakia, for example, or the Soviet Union. The problem is that no one has yet devised a formula that would prompt Yugoslavia’s disparate groups to live together not just in imposed political unity but cooperatively under true democratic rule. No one has yet figured out how to put history to rest.