THE WORLD / YUGOSLAVIA : Was Tito’s Way the Best to Keep Peace?

After eight years of intermittent war and bloodshed in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, it seems impossible that Yugoslavia could ever have existed. Mass graves, mass rape and mass expulsions bear witness to hatreds sufficient to tear any country apart. At this point, it seems harder to explain the 45 years of peace before 1991 than the violence since then.

But there is an explanation: Marshal Tito, who held power over Yugoslavia from 1943 through 1980. The conventional wisdom is that Yugoslavs have always wanted to get at each other or get out, but under Tito, anyone who tried would be crushed by the communist regime. After his death in 1980, no leader could match his authority as founder of the state, and with the general weakening of Leninist regimes in the 1980s, the old south Slav hatreds reemerged.

There is an element of truth in this, but it can be dangerously misleading. The main problem is the premise that Yugoslavs were dying to kill each other before 1991. In fact, preventing Yugoslavs from massacring each other was never a serious problem for Tito because there were few hate-filled nationalists in his day. Much of the extreme hatred observed in the 1990s is the product of war and opportunistic political tactics, rather than their cause. Understanding how Tito’s system prevented both nationalist hatred and war sheds some light on the current morass, even if Tito’s solution to the Yugoslav jigsaw puzzle can’t be replicated.

The horrific violence of the 1990s resulted from the collapse of a complex political bargain that Tito constructed after World War II. This bargain assured economic security and political status for minorities at multiple levels of the state’s federation. When the federal bargain began to unravel in the late ‘80s, the effective government fell to the republics, which were identified with national groups but were, in fact, multiethnic, except largely homogenous Slovenia. The extreme violence that followed in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina was one part land grab by leaders of the republics who had given up on the federation; one part land grab by local ethnic minorities panicked by the prospect of second-class status in new states; and one part the work of opportunistic thugs who talked nationalism while using violence to set themselves up as local bosses.

As an analogy, imagine what would happen if the U.S. federal government suddenly collapsed. Today, no one cares about their “state identity” enough to kill for the sake of California, say, or New York or Texas--well, maybe Texas. But if, for some reason, the federal government disintegrated, the next level of government would be the states, and state politicians would then have strong incentives to whip up political support on the basis of state identities. Add ethnic “ownership” of particular states and ethnically mixed state populations, and it starts to look like Yugoslavia in 1990.

So how did Tito’s federal bargain work, and why did it come apart in the 1980s? The stability of Tito’s system had two main sources, both threatened by developments in the ‘80s.

The first was Slovenia, the fourth-largest but richest Yugoslav republic. The core of Tito’s federal bargain was a balance of power: Slovenia and Croatia offset Serbia. In a Yugoslavia without Slovenia, Croatia would inevitably be dominated by the far larger Serbia, and reactions to Serb dominance had already torn apart the interwar kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Tito’s system could not survive the exit of Slovenia.

Why would the Slovenes want to leave? Ironically, by making Europe safe and economically attractive for tiny states, European integration and free trade helped break up Yugoslavia. Through World War II, Slovenes sought a federation with other south Slavs to protect themselves from being divided among Italy and Germany or Austria. By the late 1980s, however, arguments within Slovenia for casting off its economically inefficient “south” became more plausible. Germany and Italy no longer threatened, the Cold War had begun to thaw and Western Europe seemed attractive. The roots of the Yugoslav breakup are in the failed negotiations between the Slovene leadership and Slobodan Milosevic in 1989 and 1990.

The main reason these negotiations failed was because Milosevic used Serb nationalism to increase his power within Serbia. Milosevic’s tactics overturned the second key to the stability of Tito’s system. This was an agreement among the communist elite to ruthlessly suppress any of its number who appealed to nationalist sentiment for individual political gain.

Because Yugoslavia was a federation of nationally based republics, a politician could always make local headway by arguing that his nation was being mistreated by the others. This didn’t require deep-seated ethnic hatreds, only an institutional setup that had ethnic republics competing at the federal till. The communist elite had a collective interest in suppressing such power grabs, since they undermined the very system that guaranteed its power and privilege. And that is just what Milosevic’s use of Serb nationalism did: It forced communist leaders in other republics, especially the crucial Slovenia, to repackage themselves as nationalists to maintain power.

How could Milosevic violate Tito’s taboo against nationalism and get away with it? The main problem was that after Tito’s death there was no central authority who could rule on what was an illegitimate power grab versus a legitimate attempt at “reform.” Milosevic cast himself as the defender of Yugoslavia against Albanian, Slovene and Croat separatism--which his own actions had encouraged. In addition, the self-confidence and resolve of the communist elite had begun to erode, partly due to Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s changes in the Soviet Union but also because of Yugoslavia’s own economic paralysis in the 1980s.

Though many now assert that Milosevic always sought the destruction of Yugoslavia and the creation of a greater Serbia, he merely could have seen an opportunity to grab power within Serbia in 1987 and taken it, not worrying about long-term consequences. But the manner in which he took power, and the attraction of Western Europe for Slovenia, made the negotiation of a new federal bargain a near-impossible task.

Tito’s solution to the Yugoslav puzzle obviously cannot be reconstructed. The republics are independent and Leninism is dead. But, in an odd way, the spirit of Tito’s solution lives on in the international protectorates now in place in Bosnia and Kosovo. Similar to both the Communist Party and the Ottoman Empire, these are undemocratic regimes installed by military force that can more plausibly commit to an evenhanded treatment of ethnic groups than the group’s own leaders can.

The international protectorates are, however, less effective than older systems. They are neither equipped to govern locally nor willing to bear the costs of policing intergroup relations, unusually high now because fighting has indeed produced intense hatreds. But it is no coincidence that the core idea is the same.

The only other short-run “solutions” to the nationalities problem in Yugoslavia are massive population transfers under the threat of genocide, which no international organization can condone, and the redrawing of boundaries, which threatens all states. Partition, the second solution, has the added disadvantage of rewarding violent separatists with their own states, thus encouraging more of the same elsewhere.

International protectorates basically kick the can down the road, in the hope that more cosmopolitan leaders will eventually replace the ethnic nationalists whose rule in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Kosovo depends on continued tensions. We should all hope this will come to pass. If it doesn’t, the choice will be among permanent, international protectorates, like that in Cyprus; more “ethnic cleansing”; and figuring how to impose partitions without destabilizing the international system. In a world where multiethnic countries are common and the sovereign equality of states is an indispensable fiction, the last option will be no mean feat.*