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The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and L… door Sabrina Petra Ramet

http://en.internationalepolitik.de/archiv/2007/spring2007/making-sense-of-the-ba...

Sabrina Ramet has produced a weighty and scholarly contribution to the historical debate around the south Slavic territories. Her historical account of how the interwar kingdom (first the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and then Yugoslavia) was founded on a flawed constitution and proceeded to lose its way through political oppression and royal dictatorship, is comprehensive and convincing, based on archival research and a full survey of the available literature. Democracy never took root in the interwar period and it is therefore not so surprising that it has had trouble consolidating itself in Serbia and elsewhere since 2000.

Ramet’s account of World War II will be unwelcome in some quarters. She clinically dissects the relationship between the Italian and German occupiers, the horrendous Nazi puppet regime in Croatia and Bosnia, the quisling Nedic government in Serbia, and the Chetniks and Partisans, finding little in favor of any of them. In her examination of the role of Archbishop Stepinac and the Croatian Catholic Church she finds little evidence for their complicity in genocide, although they helped the regime’s leaders to flee once the war had been lost.

Her account of the communist period is again detailed and thorough, looking at the efforts of Tito and his successors to impose a socialist system on the country and to weather the requirements of economic reform and nationalist tension. She is particularly effective in describing the “Croatian Spring” of 1968-71, but does not ignore developments in the other Yugoslav republics and Kosovo in that period. And her blow-by-blow account of Milosevic’s rise to power, and of how Serbia’s leadership brought the federation to disintegration and war, is authoritative.

Unfortunately Ramet’s account loses steam in its coverage of the ten years since the end of the Bosnian war. The final chapters, one on Kosovo and the others on Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia, are almost perfunctory. Very little secondary literature has been used, the narrative appears in some sections to be drawn entirely from online news archives, and there is not enough original analysis to make up the difference. In the chapter on Kosovo, not a single Kosovo Albanian source is cited, Ramet having relied instead on Belgrade media and the international press. She is too good a scholar for this to make her account a biased one, but it is very noticeably incomplete. The strength of the book’s earlier sections, their careful examination of first-hand sources in the language formerly known as Serbo-Croat, here becomes a weakness.

Ramet has chosen a provocative framing device for the historical narrative: a discussion of state legitimacy, rooted in principles of liberal universalism. She argues that state structures can only survive if they enjoy political, moral, and economic legitimacy. It is a thought-provoking approach, and she examines each of the three Yugoslavias—the interwar kingdom, Tito’s state, and the Milosevic union from 1992—in this light and finds each of them wanting. It is, however, notable that her examination of post-Dayton Bosnia takes a different tack, comparing the international administrators to either Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk or the politicians of Weimar Germany, without the same thorough evaluation of the Dayton agreement’s legitimacy in itself.

And while this theoretical framework is on the whole convincing, it is a difficult one to apply to societies and states that are ethnically divided. At a couple of points, Ramet suggests that one of the fundamental problems was “ethnic politics,” by which she seems to mean the emergence of political parties representing single ethnic groups. Leaving aside the question of how, precisely, this development might be avoided or reversed, I am not convinced that it is so important in itself. Tito’s Yugoslavia, and King Alexander’s earlier rearrangement of the country into banovinas, failed in part precisely because they attempted to ignore or minimize the ethnic dimension. Meanwhile the neighbors of the former Yugoslavia—Romania and Bulgaria—appear to have achieved a certain level of stability despite having political parties that represent ethnic minority groups. Most ethnically heterogeneous societies need to develop a way for different ethnic groups to mobilize, and political parties are surely not to be excluded.… (meer)

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nwhyte | Apr 22, 2007 |

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