Raju G C Thomas. World Affairs. Volume 160, Issue 1, Summer 1997.
Yugoslavia would not have split into parts without the active involvement of Germany and the United States. International law supports the primary government when secession possibilities arise. In the case of Yugoslavia, however, Germany and the US rushed to recognize the various Yugoslav republics as states. These decisions were based on politics internal to each country, the misreading of the historical relations among Serbs, Croatians and Bosnians, and poor predictions as to the likely consequences of the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.
The Death of a Sovereign Independent State
The coming apart of Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1992 has been referred to variously as the “fall,” the “disintegration,” the “collapse,” and the “tragedy” of Yugoslavia. In reality, Yugoslavia was dismembered through a selective and prejudicial international recognition policy of its internal “republics.” Yugoslavia’s creation and destruction were fundamentally different from those of the Soviet Union, a legacy of the czarist empire that fell apart because of Gorbachev’s liberalizing policies, specifically from the failed military coup of 1991. Yugoslavia was a state created voluntarily in 1918 by its various nationalities and destroyed in 1991-92 by the West’s ad hoc recognition policy.
Donald Horowitz, a leading American specialist on nationalism and ethnic conflict, noted appropriately that the secessions of Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Serbia followed the violent patterns of state dissolution elsewhere. He pointed out that states with no history of independence, such as Bosnia, were swiftly recognized without considering the consequences. “Led by Germany, European and American recognition of the former Yugoslav republics was accomplished in disregard of international law doctrine forbidding recognition of secessionist units whose establishment is being resisted forcibly by a central government.”
This thesis rejects the current widespread argument that Yugoslavia fell apart because of domestic struggles and militant, Milosevic-led Serbian nationalism, although these were significant contributing factors. The Tudjman-led and diaspora-supported Croatian nationalism was just as bad as, if not worse than, Serbian domestic nationalism. However, neither Serbian nor Croatian nationalism was sufficient to destroy Yugoslavia. Such domestic competing nationalisms were not unique to Yugoslavia. The dissolution of Yugoslavia had much more to do with the political intrusions of the Western powers, especially Germany and the United States, in support of their favored ethnic groups and to advance their own national policy agendas. More specifically, the key individual actors responsible were German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher and the last American ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann.
Referring to the dismemberment of Yugoslavia through international recognition policy, a foreign service officer of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs assessed the problem succinctly: “If we [India] were a small country like Yugoslavia, they [the Western powers] would probably have done it to us also.” Unilateral declarations of independence by Muslim Kashmir, Sikh Khalistan, or Hindu Assam and swift international recognition would have caused India to unravel, leading to large-scale massacres, ethnic cleansing, and nightmarish refugee flows. In 1994, when I posed the question of what India would do if the West recognized Kashmir and Khalistan (as they did with Slovenia and Croatia) against India’s objections, an Indian security analyst in New Delhi told me: “We would have one hundred nuclear bombs ready by tomorrow morning.”
Countries with secessionist problems, such as China (with Tibet), India (with Kashmir), and Indonesia (with East Timor) are big countries. These states would not tolerate such intervention and destruction of their territorial integrity. Therefore, the Western powers dare not recognize the independence of Tibet, Kashmir, and East Timor, territories that these giant Asian states consider part of their sovereign state, right or wrong. Apart from peaceful or violent decolonization movements for independence—and except for the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the violent but successful movements for independence by Bangladesh in 1971 and Eritea in 1993—virtually all secessionist movements have been prevented through massive force by central government forces or have simply dissipated over time. These include Biafra from Nigeria; Katanga from Zaire; the Kurdish areas from Turkey and Iraq; South Yemen from North Yemen (a union that had been forged only in 1990); Punjab, Assam, Nagaland, and Mizoram from India; Baluchistan and Sind from Pakistan; Tamil Ealam from Sri Lanka; Shans and Kachins from Burma; and the Moros from the Philippines. Even Abraham Lincoln chose civil war (or Yankee “aggression”) to prevent the Confederate South from seceding from the United States. Lincoln’s objective was not to abolish slavery, but to maintain the principle of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the United States. In all of the above cases, the right of self-determination and secession was rejected and the territorial integrity of the state was almost always asserted.
Why then did the United States and Germany so recklessly push for the secession of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, and Macedonia from Yugoslavia? Were issues of right and wrong, justice or injustice, greater in the former Yugoslavia than in other parts of the world? If the 1974 Helsinki Accords guaranteeing the territorial integrity of European state frontiers could be rejected in the case of Yugoslavia, why are the new international frontiers of the former internal “republics” of Yugoslavia being preserved at all costs? It is important to note that there were no killings or even human rights violations taking place in any of the “republics” of Yugoslavia when Germany, the Vatican, and Austria began to promote the secession of Slovenia and Croatia, or in Bosnia when the United States promoted the secession of that province. That there was a domestic constitutional crisis in Yugoslavia in 1990-91—a perennial Yugoslav situation-cannot be denied. However, promises of support for secession followed by formal recognition led to the tragedy of Yugoslavia.
Germany, the United States, and the Emergence of Greater Croatia
German and American actions that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia may not have been deliberate, despite a historic German and a newly formed American prejudice toward the Serbs. Wolfgang Schloer may be right when he points out that recognition of Slovenia and Croatia was not motivated by renewed ambitions arising from a newly independent Germany. “Indeed, these initiatives were not in the German national interest. In the context of overall German foreign policy and in the light of the German attitude to the continuing conflict in Yugoslavia, this policy has to be understood as a unique combination of situational factors, personal idiosyncrasies, inexperience, and misperceived domestic pressures.”
Schloer rejects Serbian allegations that Germany wanted to separate Croatia and Slovenia from Yugoslavia as part of some grand geostrategic plan to gain a foothold on the Adriatic or to guarantee access to its vacationland in Dalmatia. First, Germany felt remorse for not having supported the allied powers adequately in the Persian Gulf war to dislodge Iraq from Kuwait and believed it needed to take the leadership in the Yugoslav crisis. Second, Germany believed that the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia would stop the Yugoslav army from continuing with its destructive war operations in Croatia. Germany simply had not anticipated the tragedy that unfolded. The voice of Croatian guest workers, numbering some 500,000 of the 700,000 Yugoslavs in Germany, also produced a significant one-sided perspective and impact on German policy. However, it should be noted that the Yugoslav army’s military operations in Croatia to carve out large sections of the seceding territory began only after the unilateral declaration of independence by Croatia in June 1991, which took place with German, Austrian, and Vatican encouragement.
Beverly Crawford provides a variation of Schloer’s “domestic” explanation, indicating that it was a narrow section of the German elite that had pushed for recognition, generated mainly by leadership rivalries and domestic party politics that eventually produced a bandwagon effect in support of self-determination and recognition of Croatia and Slovenia.
It was formed neither by external forces—that is, by Germany’s new geopolitical interests in a changing international environment—nor by the internal pressure of public opinion, interest groups, or the media. Rather, elites preferred to recognize these two states because a recognition policy was most consistent with Germany’s entrenched foreign policy norms and the incentives structured by party politics…. The unilateral action was caused by a spiral of mistrust that emerged in international negotiations in the face of German domestic pressure for a policy of diplomatic recognition.
Whether or not Germany’s actions were derived from longer historical ties in the region, broader geostrategic interests, or more immediate domestic politics, Bonn’s policy was to put pressure on the European Union (KU) to recognize Slovenia and Croatia while threatening to move ahead on its own.
French President Francois Mitterand and British Prime Minister John Major backed by British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd had strongly opposed German pressure to recognize Slovenia and Croatia. They succeeded in preventing Hans Dietrich Genscher from having his way until December 1991, when the EU foreign ministers meeting at Maastrich’t were pressured again by Genscher. A retired American diplomat describes the meeting this way:
The vote in this gathering was 8 to 4 against recognition, but the German foreign minister insisted that he would not leave the table until the EC foreign ministers would unanimously support him. It was 10 p.m. By 4 a.m., he had his way. Would it not have been wiser if the British and the French foreign ministers had declared that the would not leave the table until Germany and its three allies agreed with the majority not to accord recognition?
If Germany was to blame for promoting the secession of Slovenia and Croatia in 1991, the United States was to blame for promoting the secession of Bosnia in March 1992. Under the Bush administration, the initial U.S. position was to maintain the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia, warning Slovenia and Croatia against secession. In testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee in 1995, former Secretary of State James Baker stated:
What I said was that if there were unilateral declarations of independence followed by the use of force that foreclosed possibilities for peaceful breakup, peaceful negotiations, as required again by the Helsinki Accord, that it would kickoff the damnedest civil war they had ever seen. And that’s exactly what happened. And the fact of the matter is that it was Slovenia and Croatia who unilaterally declared independence in the face of these kinds of warnings. They used force to seize their border posts, and that, indeed, triggered the civil conflict that we suggested was going to happen.
By spring 1992, following eight months of war in Croatia, this American position was reversed. In the United States, the Croatian diaspora had established a quick lock on the U.S government and media with their version of Yugoslav history and politics. The United States now took the lead in taking the rest of Yugoslavia apart in opposition to European preferences. In February 1992, at a meeting in Lisbon, a proposal was put together by Portuguese Foreign Minister and Secretary-General of the European Union Jose Cutileiro and the British EC representative to the former Yugoslavia, Lord Carrington, that provided for a canton system for Bosnia based on the Swiss model. This plan, often referred to as the “Cuteliero Plan” or the “Lisbon Plan,” allotted to the Serbs 44 percent of discontiguous Bosnian territory in their cantons. Bosnia was to be a loose independent confederation with only one international personality. This plan was accepted by the Muslims, Serbs, and Croats. In December 1995, Cuteleiro recounted what had happened:
After several rounds of talks our “principles for future constitutional arrangements for Bosnia and Hercegovina” were agreed by the three parties (Muslim, Serb and Croat) in Sarajevo on March 18th as the basis for future negotiations. These continued, maps and all, until the summer, when the Muslims reneged on the agreement. Had they not done so, the Bosnian question might have been settled earlier, with less loss of (mainly Muslim) life and land. To be fair, President Izetbegovic and his aides were encouraged to scupper the deal and fight for a unitary Bosnian state by well-meaning outsiders who thought they knew better.
These “well-meaning outsiders who thought they knew better” were members of the U.S. State Department, in particular, ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann. Zimmermann appeared in Sarajevo on 28 March, ten days after all sides had accepted the Lisbon Plan, and discussed the plan with Izetbegovic. Izetbegovic then backed out of the plan. Laura Silber and Allan Little claim that this episode has been misrepresented: “Zimmermann, a staunch advocate of human rights, was under instructions to support any agreement reached by the three sides. He said that he had advised Izetbegovic that if the Bosnian President had made a commitment he should uphold it.” This explanation is dubious.
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Van Evera observed: “Tragically, the Lisbon plan failed when Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic changed his mind and scuttled it. Although Warren Zimmermann, the American representative at the talks, now denies it, most reliable reports suggest that Izetbegovic acted with U.S. approval.” David Binder quotes Warren Zimmermann as saying, “Our view was that we might be able to head off a Serbian power grab by internationalizing the problem. Our hope was the Serbs would hold off and it was clear Bosnia had the recognition of Western countries.” Referring to Izetbegovic’s meeting with Zimmermann following his return from Lisbon, Binder quotes Zimmermann as saying, “He said he didn’t like it. I told him, if he didn’t like it, why sign it?” Izetbegovic publicly renounced the agreement after having talked to Zimmermann. Needless to say, Zimmermann has absolved himself completely from all blame. In his book, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and its Destroyers, Zimmermann claims:
The prime agent of Yugoslavia’s destruction was Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia. Milosevic claimed to defend Yugoslavia even as he spun plans to turn it into a Serb-dominated dictatorship. His initial objective was to establish Serbian rule over the whole country. When Slovenia and Croatia blocked this aim by deciding to secede, … [h]e would bring all of Yugoslavia’s Serbs, who lived in five of its six republics, under the authority of Serbia, that is, of himself … Franjo Tudjman, elected president of Croatia in 1990, also played a leading role in the destruction of Yugoslavia. A fanatic Croatian nationalist, Tudjman hated Yugoslavia and its multiethnic values. He wanted a Croatian state for Croatians, and he was unwilling to guarantee equal rights to the 12 percent of Croatia’s citizens who were Serbs.
Such competing nationalisms, a problem that occurs in other multiethnic states, were not sufficient to destroy Yugoslavia. The proverbial “foreign hand” made the decisive difference between the integrity of Yugoslavia and its destruction. Just as in the case of Croatia when war began with referendums to secede and unilateral declarations of independence supported by Germany, war in Bosnia followed a Serb boycotted referendum and a Muslim-Croat declaration of independence supported by the United States against the wishes of the Bosnian Serbs.
One of the basic problems of the Yugoslav crisis between 1991 and 1995 was that while Serbs were looking backward and remembering the enormous destruction of Serbian lives during World War I and World War II, Americans were looking forward and worrying about the post-cold war territorial and nationalities problems in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. From the American standpoint, allowing the Serbs to carve their Greater Serbia out of the former Yugoslavia would have meant that Russians would also have the right to carve a Greater Russia out of the former Soviet Union. A concession to the Serbs would have justified Russian nationalist demands that more than twenty-five million Russians stranded in the newly independent former Soviet republics be retained within the Russian federation through drastic territorial revisions of all the republics that seceded.
The Realities of Power in the Post-Cold War Era
The territorial outcome in the former Yugoslavia demonstrates one of the basic dictums of international politics theory, viz., that the lack of countervailing power in the world will not guarantee the sovereignty and independence of states, especially states that are small. Small states become vulnerable if the dominant powers in a unipolar world, acting in concert, seek to destroy their territorial integrity. German and American actions in the Yugoslav conflict reinforce the Machiavellian maxim that power is morality, especially in international society. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States and its newly united German partner with unrestrained power to dictate the new order in the Balkans. They have declared their actions to be morally justified.
If Serbian military power was about to determine the territorial boundaries of the new states out of a disintegrated Yugoslavia unfairly and through violent means, German and American political and military power changed those equations in favor of their proteges, especially the Croats. The new territorial order imposed in the former Yugoslavia through American military intervention, both covert (Iranian arms) and overt (bombing of the Serbs), is not morally superior by any means over that which the Serbs were about to impose in the region to their advantage. The Serbs sought what they probably could have had for the asking at the end of the First World War, a Greater Serbia. This was the historic mission of the Serbs in the nineteenth century and was no different from the uniting of Italians and Germans into the consolidated states of Greater Italy and Greater Germany in the 1860s and 1870s. If Croats and Slovenes had not agreed to join the South Slav Union, these states in 1918 would have been very small, while the “victorious Serbs would undoubtedly have succeeded in enlarging the territory of pre-war Serbia to include sections of Croatia and Bosnia where many hundreds of thousands of Serbs had lived under Austro-Hungarian rule.” Instead, the quest for a Greater Serbia out of the territories of the former Yugoslavia—not out of the bordering territories of independent states such as Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, or Albania, which would be a case of irredentism and aggression—was declared unacceptable by the United States.
Meanwhile, Croatia and Croat Bosnia have become ethnically pure regions. A unified de facto Greater Croatia, consisting of the Republic of Croatia and the Croatian Republic of Herceg-Bosna, has been in operation since 1992 with no outcry from the international community. As of mid-1996, the Muslim-Croat Federation in Bosnia remains, as before, a figment of the American imagination, although the U.S. and German governments continue to force this federation into becoming a reality in order to demonstrate their belated commitment to the territorial integrity of states. This union was first a marriage of convenience agreed to by the Bosnian Croats, and then since 1994 an American-compelled shotgun marriage. Bosnian Croats have shown no desire to be part of this Muslim-Croat federation, and indeed they voted with the Muslims in March 1992 to take Bosnia out of Yugoslavia for the sole purpose of joining their areas with Croatia into a “Greater Croatia.” If Croatia had the right to secede from Yugoslavia, then it makes sense for Bosnian Croats to want to become part of Croatia. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Van Evera point out the following reality:
The Bosnian Croats can destroy the Federation at will. Their political organization, the Republic of Herzog-Bosna, already boasts all the trappings of a state. It has its own 50,000 man army. It delivers the mail, runs the schools, and collects taxes. … It is already closely linked to its mother state: Bosnian Croats carry Croatian passports, use Croatian currency, and Croatian license plates, route their telephone calls through Croatia, and vote in Croatian elections, as they did in Croatia’s October 29, 1995, parliamentary elections.
Indeed, while accusations of “Serbian aggression” were being directed at Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs, Peter Reid, a Boston columnist, noted correctly in 1993 that “there is no dispute that 40,000 Croatian troops, including the HOS troops [a neo-Nazi Croatian militia] riding tanks, are in Bosnia.” On the other hand, as of mid-1996, a Greater Serbia has been prevented by the United States because it believed the Serbian desire to live together in the remnant Yugoslavia, as they had for seventy years, to be evil and dangerous. And if the union of rump Yugoslavia and Republika Srpska does come about eventually despite the United States, it will not include any parts of Krajina and Western Slavonia in Croatia, from which all Serbs were driven out. The exodus of all remaining Serbs in Eastern Slavonia may be expected when Croatia takes control of this region as well.
The denial of the historic goal of a Greater Serbia for the Serbs in 1991-92 and the creation of an ethnically pure Greater Croatia for the Croats in 1995 were not coincidences or accidents. It was the natural outcome of great power politics and a preponderance of power at the end of the cold war. In particular, the United States was left standing as the sole superpower. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany—a reunion that had been prevented by East and West for forty-five years because they feared for the security of Europe—gave the new Germany confidence to act forcefully in Yugoslavia—immature, inexperienced, and well-meaning as these actions may have been.
Occasional protests and resistance by Russia, Britain, and France against German and American policies and actions were feeble and futile. Russia is truncated, faced with internal ethnic secessionist wars, on the edge of bankruptcy and political chaos, and dependent on American and German economic assistance for its survival. Britain and France did not want to undermine the unity of the European Union or of NATO. So they acquiesced to the destruction of Yugoslavia and the bombing of the Serbs, their traditional allies and allies of the United States in two world wars. Far from being another “Neville Chamberlain,” Prime Minister John Major’s policies were determined by a greater sense of fairness and justice, and, above all, a sophisticated and better knowledge of European history than those of American politicians, policymakers, and the media.
The argument that Serbia was attempting to secede from Yugoslavia while carving out the boundaries of a “Greater Serbia” from the internal “republics” of Croatia and Bosnia is quite misleading. This claim is based on the pronouncements of Serbian intellectuals led by Dobrica Cosic in the late 1980s. Laura Silber and Allan Little state that the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, “an unfinished draft,” declared that Serbs were the victims of economic and political discrimination by their Croat and Slovene countrymen, although Serbs had made the greatest military contribution and suffered the most casualties over the last century.
According to Vesna Pesic, the Serb elites felt that the concept of Yugoslavia was a Serbian delusion not shared by Croats and others. They argued that there was a conspiracy to keep Serbs poor, weak, and exploited by the richer Croats and Slovenes. Serbs were exposed to hatred and Serbophobia among other ethnic groups. Pesic quotes some Serbian nationalists as follows: “After genocide [1941-45] … after the 1974 constitution, … it is difficult to understand why Serbs today do not reasonably and obstinately aspire to a state without national problems, national hatreds, and Serbophobia. Serbs must learn to live without others within their own national state.” This was an “issue of freedom and the right to exist for the Serbian ethnos as the whole of its spiritual, cultural, and historical identity, irrespective of the present-day republican boundaries and the Yugoslav Constitution. If its freedom and right are not respected, then the historical goal of the Serbian people—unification of all Serbs in one state—is not realized.” Pesic quotes Dobrica Cosic as saying that “the enemies of Serbs made Serbs Serbs.” Another nationalist is quoted as saying: “The Serbian issue was started and opened by others. They straightened us out by blows, made us sober by offenses, woke us up through injustices, brought light and united us by coalitions. They hate us because of Yugoslavia, and now it seems they do not leave her, but us.”
Silber and Little claim that “a member of the Academy, Cosic, went so far as to explain, rather unconvincingly, that the Memorandum was not `nationalist’ but `anti-Tito and pro-Yugoslav.’ In the 1970s, disgruntled intellectuals rallied around him. Cosic held clandestine monthly meetings on the need for democratic reform in Yugoslavia.” A draft by Serbian intellectuals in the late 1970s narrating Serbian grievances can hardly be considered sufficient excuse for great powers to move in and take Yugoslavia apart more than a decade later. These Serbian grievances would appear to be well founded, as later events showed. Dissident Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Macedonians chose to leave Yugoslavia. The Serbs were demonized and dehumanized through media reporting, and their united Serbian state was destroyed through the actions of a German-led Europe and the United States.
There was a significant difference between the concepts of Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia. In the decades before 1918, it was the Croatian intelligentsia that favored a broader South Slav state, and it was the Serbian intelligentsia and leaders that sought a Greater Serbia for Serbs alone. After the creation of the South Slav state in 1918, the Croatian national question was always secessionist, which required taking with it all of the territories of Dalmatia, Krajina, Slavonia, and the western part of Bosnia-Herzegovina—territories they would never have had if the South Slav union had not been accepted by the Serbs in 1918. On the other hand, the Serbian national question after 1918 was not necessarily secessionist but involved carving out the boundaries of a Greater Serbian Republic within Yugoslavia to redress their traditional grievance that these internal boundaries of the republics were not acceptable, whether historic or not. The Serbian goal was secessionist to the extent that if the international frontiers of Yugoslavia were not to survive then they would fight to obtain what they could have had in 1918, namely, a Greater Serbia encompassing the Serb territories of post-1945 Titoist Croatia in Krajina, parts of Dalmatia and Slavonia, and all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Macedonia (which before 1918 was South Serbia).
The intensity of Croatian nationalist demands after 1945 reached its height between 1967 and 1972. In 1967, demands were made that Croatian language alone be used in the republic. Barbara Jelavich writes: “The Serbs immediately countered with the request that the 700,000 of their people living in Croatia receive reciprocal rights.” In 1971, Croatian nationalists declared that Croatia was “the sovereign national state of the Croatian nation” possessing “sovereignty based on the right to self-determination, including the right to secession.” They reiterated that Croatian would be the only language that could be used in the republic. While Tito suppressed Croatian nationalism during this time, he then conceded many of the Croatian demands in the formulation of the 1974 Yugoslav constitution to the detriment of Serbian interests. Croatia was strengthened; Serbia was weakened.
In retrospect, the earlier erasure of the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina by Milosevic, which Tito had imposed unilaterally on Serbia, would appear fortuitous. If it were not for Milosevic’s actions, Kosovo and Vojvodina would also have been separated from Yugoslavia through American and German dictates on the basis that internal provinces of a sovereign state have the right to become international states based on the principle of self-determination. Indeed, in the early phase of the conflict, the United States encouraged the secession of Montenegro to complete the secession of all republics as in the case of the Soviet Union. Milosevic and the Serbian nationalists attempted to secede from Yugoslavia through force after mid-1991 only when they realized that under German pressure, Slovenia and Croatia would eventually be recognized within their prevailing internal boundaries. German and American actions in the former Yugoslavia would suggest that it is dangerous for any multiethnic state to allow decentralized federal political arrangements that provide for regional autonomy to its ethnic groups. Such states would be better advised to create strictly administrative units to downplay ethnicity and multiculturalism.
In choosing between the principle of self-determination and the principle of territorial integrity of sovereign states, the Western powers have now established the following self-contradicting and dangerous precedent and principles:
- The internal boundaries of a sovereign state will automatically become international frontiers without change if that sovereign state is taken apart through new state recognition policy
- These newly recognized international frontiers of the newly created sovereign states that have been recognized will be preserved and enforced at any price, thus contradicting the earlier decision to take the international frontiers of the pre-existing sovereign state apart based on the right of self-determination and secession
In the complex domestic situation of Yugoslavia, there were legitimate complaints on all sides. The primary Serbian complaint was that Marshal Josip Broz Tito, half Croat and half Slovene, ran Yugoslavia on the principle that “A weak Serbia makes for a strong Yugoslavia.” Thus, he created autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo but not autonomous provinces of Dalmatia, Slavonia, or Krajina. In the former Yugoslavia, Serbs constituted only 38 percent of Yugoslavia’s entire population, and even today represent only 70 percent in the “rump” Yugoslavia. Together with Macedonia, what is left of Yugoslavia constitutes one of only two multiethnic states that emerged out of the former Yugoslavia. This is in stark contrast to an ethnically pure Greater Croatia established with willing or inadvertent German and American assistance. The Croatian claim that Serbs of Krajina and Slavonia followed their nationalist leaders into Bosnia and Serbia “voluntarily” fails to explain the Serbs’ historical fears for resisting German-sponsored Croatian independent rule, or to mention the sudden terror of the American-supported military assaults on Western Slavonia and Krajina.
Cedric Thornberry, deputy head of UNPROFOR in the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1994, writes: “But one of the most puzzling features of the Yugoslav tragedy has been the comparative lack of significance the world has attached to events in the Krajina region when the Croatian army recaptured it last year … Today, through the `ethnic cleansing’ that has occurred, Croatia has become the most ‘ethnically pure’ state in the whole of the former Yugoslavia.” Andre Liebich noted: “Croatia has `solved’ its minority problem by overrunning the Serb autonomous areas whose refusal to accept a diminished constitutional role in an independent Croatia triggered war in 1991.” Croatia’s unilateral declaration of independence in June 1991 was accompanied by the denial of citizenship rights to Serbs, the dismissal of Serbs from their jobs, the expulsion of some 40,000 to 60,000 of them from Zagreb, and the requirement that Serb residents who remain sign loyalty oaths to obtain Croatian citizenship.
However, arguments continue to be made by those supporting the Croatian point of view that Serbs and Croats are different, one European and the other Asiatic, and therefore cannot live together. To be Catholic and Croat was to be more Western and enlightened; to be Orthodox and Serbian was to be more Eastern and “Byzantine,” implying backwardness. Yugoslavia was declared an artificial state where the right of self-determination had to be granted to its distinct “nationalities.” Secessions became inevitable in order to allow the more European and presumably more civilized parts to become democratic and eventually part of the European Union. Michael Libal, who was the Southeast European director of the German Foreign Ministry during the Yugoslav crisis, writes:
By showing a ruthless disdain for human rights in general and minority rights in Kosovo, Serbian nationalism posed an insuperable obstacle to the chances for a democratic and European future of Yugoslavia as a whole and by implication of the smaller republics and nations. Serbian national communism made it inevitable for these smaller entices to separate. … The alleged allurements by pro-Slovene and pro-Croat forces in Central and Western Europe played an insignificant role besides the expectations based on memory of what a restored Serbian hegemony would mean for the other Yugoslav nations.
Where in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, or Macedonia did the Serbs show “a ruthless disdain for human rights in general” before 1990? I was unable to find any report that would fit this extreme generalization during this time. How does this allegation compare with Turkish policies in its Kurdish areas, Russia in Chechnya, China in Tibet, India in Kashmir, or Indonesia in East Timor? What exactly were “the expectations based on memory of what a restored Serbian hegemony would mean for the other Yugoslav nations”? During the Second World War, some 400,000 to 700,000 Serbs were slaughtered by the Nazi-backed Croatian Ustashe. The terrible memory belongs mainly to the Serbs. Between 1945 and 1980, Yugoslavia was ruled with an iron fist by Marshall Tito, a non-Serb Communist dictator. Earlier, between 1918 and 1940, how many Croats, Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims, and Macedonians died because of Serbian repression under a Serbian monarchy? According to my inquiries, nobody seems to know—perhaps twenty in twenty-two years. The two significant killings were the assassination of Stjepan Radic, leader of the Croatian peasant party, counterbalanced by the assassination of the Serbian King Alexander in Paris in 1934.
Between 1980 and 1990, how many of these national minorities died from Serbian repression (“a ruthless disdain for human rights in general” as Libal puts it)? According to my inquiries, none other than the average crime statistics. That there was intense Serb-Croat rivalry is not in dispute. Kosovo was a special case for the Serbs, not unlike the Israelis’ emotional attachment to Jerusalem, and not unlike Israeli repression in the West Bank and Gaza where Jewish “settlers” felt threatened but where they had less right to be “settled” than had the Serbs in Kosovo.
Nationalism and Secessionist Demands in Yugoslavia
Susan Woodward points out the conflicting claims between “nations” and “republics” in the former Yugoslavia.:
It was a matter of unresolved constitutional interpretation whether republics had the right to secede and, if so, whether individuals who identified with another constituent nation within these republics had to give their consent. In choosing the republican borders and the claims of the majority nation for an independent state, the EC politicians made no accommodations to this second, constitutionally equal category of rights to self-determination. They referred instead to the need to guarantee minority rights as if these assurances would be a positive contribution to peace instead of their repetition in fact of the very cause of conflict in Croatia (and eventually Bosnia-Herzegovina)—the demotion of other constituent nations to minority status in the 1990 republican constitutions and therefore their loss of political equality and of a right to self-determination.
In dealing with the various conflicting demands and rights of self-determination and territorial integrity in the former Yugoslavia, the international community embarked on a confused and contradictory set of goals and policies. Hurst Hannum writes: “Perhaps no contemporary norm of international law has been so vigorously promoted or widely accepted as the right of all peoples to self-determination. Yet the meaning and content of that right remain as vague and imprecise as when they were enunciated by President Woodrow Wilson and others at Versailles.” Is there a universally accepted international norm that “nations” have the right to “secede” from an existing sovereign state under the principle of national self-determination? There is none.
Allen Buchanan warned against confusing democratic rights with secessionist rights based on the principle of self-determination. He pointed out the need to view the two concepts and their objectives together to understand their distinctions and to avoid the likely adverse consequences of confusing the two concepts. While there is “widespread, unambivalent endorsement of the goal of democratization,” there are serious doubts about destroying the state itself through secessions in advancing this goal of democratization. “There is good reason to be apprehensive. Attempts at secession, and the efforts of states to resist them, have frequently led to severe economic dislocations and massive violations of human rights. Ethnic minorities have won their independence only to subject their own minorities to the same persecutions they themselves formerly suffered.”
Buchanan further points out the misleading parallels between democratization and secession. “Both democratization and secession, it may seem, are exercises of the right of self-determination. If democracy is popular sovereignty—participation in government by the people—then secession may be seen as the effort of various peoples to govern themselves, to be politically self-determining, in the most literal sense, by forming their own independent, fully sovereign states.” He provides two reasons for rejecting self-determination and secession as an extension of democracy. First, secessionist struggles have generated massive human rights violations, economic destruction, and deprivations. Second, “as Abraham Lincoln argued, secession can pose a lethal threat to democracy: If a discontented minority can exit the polity whenever it is outvoted by the majority on an issue it deems of great importance, then the majority does not rule. In addition, if secession is considered as a real option, then a minority group may use the threat of `exit’ as a form of `voice’ that serves as an effective veto on majority rule.”
From the standpoint of equity and fairness, two related questions may be asked. If the principle of national self-determination, meaning “the right to secede from a state,” could be granted to Slovenians, Croatians, Bosnian Muslims, and Macedonians, then why cannot the same principle be granted to the Serbs of the newly recognized states of Croatia and Bosnia? And if the Serbs demand this right, then why should not the Albanians of Kosovo demand the same right? If national self-determination extending to the right to secede is the new overriding norm of world politics today, then it surely must also be granted to new minorities created by state secessions.
Domestic political disputes, minority ethnic grievances, and armed secessionist struggles have been far more intense and prolonged elsewhere than in the former Yugoslavia. From a global comparative perspective, it is difficult to justify Slovenia and Croatia being allowed to “jump the queue” ahead of other self-proclaimed nations demanding “the right of self-determination,” which really implies the right to secede and receive international recognition as a sovereign state. In regard to the claim of Serbian domination as the basis of the right of Slovenians and Croatians to secede (Bosnian Muslims and Macedonians were not complaining about this), it is not unusual for dominant ethnic groups to insist on more centralized political arrangements that they control. Such complaints have been made in the past against the English in Britain by the Irish, Scots, and Welsh; against the English-speaking settlers in Canada by the French-speaking settlers in Quebec province; against the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) in the United States by African Americans and Hispanics; against the Punjabis in Pakistan by Bengalis, Sindhis, and Baluchis; against the Hindi-speaking Hindus of India by other linguistic and religious minorities; and against the Russians in the former Soviet Union and the new Russia by other linguistic and religious minorities. Majority versus minority nationalist politics have taken place in all of these countries.
What was different about the former Yugoslavia was that Germany, Austria, and the Vatican pushed the European Union to recognize the independence of Slovenia and Croatia; and then the United States pushed the rest of the world to recognize the independence of Bosnia. The criteria of recognition here was selective and arbitrary. All of the internal “republics” of the former Yugoslavia were then granted the right to secede, which led to the recognition of the remaining province, Macedonia. Other would-be independent secessionist nations elsewhere in the world did not receive such powerful and influential patronage.
Secession and Recognition Policy
Under what conditions should new states, such as Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia be recognized? Article I of the 1933 Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States provided a set of guidelines for the recognition of new states: “The State as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with other states.” A state possessing these qualities and recognized by other states is endowed with sovereignty. Sovereignty in its essence implies that the state controls its own internal affairs and makes its own foreign policy, although there are varying degrees of limitations on the sovereignty of all modern states. Although sometimes a requirement for recognizing new states includes the expectation that the “state’s government be established consistent with the principle of self-determination,” this principle, according to Hurst Hannum, “seems to be applicable only in the context of decolonization, such as the refusal of the world community to concede statehood to Southern Rhodesia from the time of Ian Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 to the establishment of majority rule in 1980.”
These principles were discarded in cavalier fashion by the international community, led by Germany and the United States in the case of Yugoslavia. When Bosnia was recognized in March 1992, it neither fulfilled any of the narrow criteria of an ethnic nation (race, language, culture), nor the broad criteria of a civic nation (a commitment to common political institutions, processes, and destiny). Bosnia did not fulfill the criteria of a state as defined by the 1933 Montevideo Convention. Bosnia is multiethnic, but its population of Serbs and Croats continues to resist common citizenship; therefore, there seems to be no prospect of it becoming a civic nation. In April 1994, Croatians and Muslims agreed to join together into a single Bosnian state, but their ties and commitment to the state remained nonexistent except when enforced by the United States and the European Union through the promise of rewards or the threat of punishment.
The boundaries of Bosnia have been contested by both the Serbs and the Croats. Following recognition and the outbreak of civil war, Bosnia did not have a stable population, and the Bosnian government was not in control of all its territory. Yet the independence and sovereignty of the largely Muslim-led Bosnian government was recognized by the rest of the world. No doubt, the Muslim-led government had overseas diplomatic missions and was conducting its external affairs in world forums, but it had no control over its internal affairs throughout Bosnia. Meanwhile, the status of Macedonia remains uncertain. It has a government and fulfills the characteristics of a state, but has an explosive mix of ethnic “Macedonians,” Serbs, and Albanians, who could cause it to disintegrate.
Following the torrential bombing of the Serbs in September 1995, the Dayton “agreement” dictated by the United States to the warring parties established a united Bosnia consisting of two parts, the Croat-Muslim Federation and the Republika Srpska. The United States is now planning to arm Bosnian Muslims and Croats against the Bosnian Serbs in an effort to create a military balance of power within Bosnia. This is evidence that Bosnia still does not exist as a functioning state. Military balances are generated among sovereign states, not among warring or rival factions within a state. A military balance between blacks and whites in the United States, or Hindus and Muslims in India, would not be the way to maintain peace and stability in these countries. The creation of military balance between the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Republika Srpska ignores the fact that Muslims and Croats could use these weapons to fight each other even more savagely than they had during 1993-94 until the Americans came in and brokered a cease-fire. Mearsheimer and Van Evera rightly observed:
The main problem is that the Croatian-Muslim Federation is untenable. Like the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnian Croats want out of Bosnia. They accepted the Muslim-Croat Federation as an expedient, but they chafe at membership in it, and they will surely move to destroy it someday soon…. All evidence points to fierce Bosnian Croat resistance to political union with the Bosnian Muslims.
The Division and Distribution of Territory After Secession
When new states are forged through secession from an existing state, one significant principle established in two earlier cases was that the former internal boundaries of the state cannot automatically become the external boundaries of new states. Thus, when Catholic-majority Ireland seceded from Britain in 1921, the Protestant-majority areas of Northern Ireland were dislodged from Ireland and retained by Britain despite the protests of Ireland and the Catholics of Northern Ireland. When Pakistan seceded from India in 1947, Punjab and Bengal were divided between India and Pakistan despite protests by Pakistan that the majority in these two British provinces were Muslim. In the break-up of both Yugoslavia and of the Soviet Union in 1991, no such territorial and boundary changes of their former internal “republics” were allowed by the international community. The post-Soviet boundaries of Russia were particularly puzzling because the boundaries of Russia had fluctuated over the centuries. One post-disintegration analysis of the Soviet Union stated: “Because Russia became an empire before the Russians consolidated as a nation, the psychological limits of the state and of the Russian identity have always been problematic. Russia has always been a pre-modern empire with a center and a periphery.” Another analyst pointed out: “The Russian state has never existed within its current borders.” The origins of the Russian state are found in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, around the ninth century. The distinctions between the Orthodox Christian peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Beylorussia (now Belarus) are relatively minor. Certainly, the differences are much less than between those of various ethnic groups, such as Chechins and Tatars, seeking secession from Russia.
In the case of the former Soviet Union, the rationale for the emergence of independent states with its post-1991 boundaries was that there were only fifteen “republics” within the former Soviet Union. Russian-majority Crimea has been part of independent Ukraine since 1991 because Khrushchev decided to transfer Crimea to the Ukrainian republic in 1954. The reason that Armenian-majority Ngorno-Karabakh became part of independent Azerbaijan instead of Armenia is that Stalin decided to transfer it from Armenia to Azerbaijan in 1921. As long as the Soviet Union remained one state, these internal boundary questions among its “republics,” or whether there ought to be more than fifteen “republics” for the USSR’s more than one hundred nationalities, were not burning issues. But they become matters of “life and death” when the state disintegrates and historic memories of conflict or persecution exist among the new minorities.
Similar problems prevailed in the former Yugoslavia with even greater complications. On the territorial question, Susan Woodward points out the conflicting views about boundaries that existed in Yugoslavia at the time of its dissolution. These viewpoints included the following: boundaries were to be based on historical claims; on the democratic principle that allows ethnic groups to carve out states where they are in a majority; on the territorial integrity principle that declares the inviolability of international frontiers (the 1974 Helsinki Accords); on the realist principle that accepts changes to borders through a fait accompli; and on the feudal principle (as invoked by Karadzic in Bosnia) based on land ownership and occupation. Disagreements about such territorial rights and claims among Yugoslavia’s constituent nations and republics were unresolved prior to the state’s breakup. The argument is often made that when Marshall Tito drew the internal boundaries of Yugoslavia toward the end of World War II, he was merely adhering to historic boundaries. Therefore, Tito’s internal boundaries should be maintained, and Serbian claims denying such rigid and unchangeable boundaries are simply distortions intended to justify their “aggression.”
In a severe critique of Susan Woodward’s book, Balkan Tragedy, Michael Libal, former director of the German Foreign Ministry in charge of dealing with the problems of the former Yugoslavia, made the following observation: Because the frontiers of Slovenia, Croatia, and
Bosnia-Hercegovina were on the whole historical frontiers, the choice was easier to make. Nothing, therefore, is further from the mark than Woodward’s claim that “new” states were being created out of Yugoslav territory. No “new” states had to be created. Just as there is a state of Bavaria in the Federal Republic of Germany, and as there was a state of Slovakia in the Czechoslovak republic and a state of Georgia in the former USSR, there existed states in the former Yugoslavia…. And in this context, contrary to what Woodward pretends, the Serbs were granted exactly the same, albeit rather limited, right of self-determination, as all other Yugoslav nations. They were allowed to claim international recognition for their republic (Serbia) and respect for its territorial integrity, which meant denying the right to secession to the Albanians in Kosovo and the Muslims in the Sanjak.
This statement is not only wrong from the standpoint of international law and politics among sovereign states, but highly dangerous. Except for the Kingdom of Serbia before 1918, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia were never states under international law-at least not during the past five hundred years-and never possessed an international legal right to act independently. Labal’s claim that the internal “republics” of the former Yugoslavia were, in virtual reality, states under international law is patently absurd. Their status under international law was no different from that of Kosovo or Sanjak within the Serbian republic of Yugoslavia, or that of Dalmatia, Krajina, and Slavonia within the Croatian republic of Yugoslavia. Internal boundaries have no sanctity under international law and may be changed. In many cases, internal boundaries may have no political or legal justification within the state and may be the subject of intense domestic controversy, as in the case of Serbian complaints prior to 1991.
If Libal’s statement represents the German position, then it is clear that Germany invented an arbitrary international rule of convenience to advance the secessionist cause of its favored ethnic units, Slovenia and Croatia. Given Michael Libal’s official position in the German Foreign Ministry dealing with the crisis in Yugoslavia, his views are an indication that Germany was responsible for the destruction of Yugoslavia if it acted on such erroneous beliefs. Libal should also note that the numbers of Albanians in Kosovo and Muslims in Sanjak within the Serbian republic continue to increase—whatever their fears—compared to the depopulation of all Serbs of Krajina and Slavonia in the Croatian republic—whatever their excuse.
There are two other major problems with Libal’s argument. First, the current political status and the boundaries of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina did not exist for centuries. Until their emergence as independent states in 1991 and 1992 (with the exception of the Nazi puppet “Independent State of Croatia” between 1941 and 1945), they were subjugated provinces. Within the Austro-Hungarian empire, Dalmatia in particular, Krajina, and Slavonia were not always integral parts of Croatia, which was concentrated mainly around Zagreb. Bosnia-Hercegovina was switched from the Ottoman empire to the Austrian empire in 1878. Bosnia was not recognized as a separate province in the unitary state of Yugoslavia under the Serbian monarchy during the inter-war years. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) recognized three nationalities and no more, and did not demarcate their constituent territories. Much of the territory of current Bosnia and Croatia was collapsed into the Ustashe Croatian state during the Second World War under the Nazis. Macedonia and Montenegro were considered part of the Serb nation in the inter-war years. Macedonia used to be South Serbia. Much of Vojvodina was under the Austro-Hungarian empire, which later became part of Serbia.
While Croatian American historians and their supporters may claim that Tito followed historical boundaries of provinces that existed within the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, Yugoslav specialists such as David Martin claim that Yugoslavia’s internal borders were essentially the “recent inventions of a Communist dictator [Tito] and have no historical validity.” Similarly, British author Nora Beloff noted: “The internal borders, which we treat as permanent features of Yugoslavia, were in reality drawn up secretly by Tito’s men in 1943 and were designed as administrative boundaries, within a centrally planned Stalinist state.”
There are few states in the world today whose “historic” boundaries have been constant. In the past, many had no boundaries of any kind. No ethnic logic prevails in the boundaries of African states, except the colonial legacy. This was the argument made by the Catholic Ibos of Biafra who had declared independence from Nigeria and were crushed by Muslim federal forces in a brutal civil war between 1967 and 1970. At the time of British India’s independence, there existed several large British Indian provinces proper and over 580 autonomous Indian princely states ruled by maharajahs and nawabs. After independence, the new Indian government changed all of the internal boundaries so that virtually none of the old historic boundaries remained. The important question is whether, when provinces secede from a sovereign state, internal boundaries should automatically become external boundaries. From the standpoint of equity and justice, this should not be allowed to happen. No government of India of any political party or persuasion would tolerate Michael Libal’s argument that internal provinces, whether they are called states or republics, have the right to become independent states within those borders. Indeed, as far as India is concerned, they have no right to become independent states whatever their borders. And by implication, unilateral declarations of independence are considered acts of war, which India will prevent by all possible means. This resolve is no different elsewhere in the world, including the United States, as evident in the civil war that it fought in the last century. Yugoslavia was prevented from exercising this right of preserving its territorial integrity by the Western powers.
Libal is wrong even about the territorial status of some of the “virtual reality” republics of the Soviet Union. The boundaries of Tajikstan and Uzbekistan were drawn by Stalin to keep Tajiks and Uzbeks weak. Much of historical Tajikstan, which included Tashkent and Samarkand, was deliberately given to Uzbekistan, and the Uzbek population was divided between the two republics. Nations and international boundaries of these two states did not coincide after they became independent, which did not matter when both Tajikstan and Uzbekistan were part of the Soviet Union. And exactly how historic is “historic” for internal provinces to claim that they are “virtual reality” independent states waiting to break free and be recognized instantly as in the case of Slovenia and Croatia?
Second, internal boundaries, whether historic or not, cannot justify the perpetuation of those internal borders when provinces secede. Territories must be renegotiated. There are some real dangers in accepting the territorial principles applied in allowing various internal republics of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia to secede without changes to their boundaries. The central governments of states, dominated by an ethnic majority, will be motivated to set up highly centralized political systems in the future based purely on administrative district boundaries, thus preventing autonomous self-government for provinces. That would aggravate ethnic dissatisfaction, secessionist pressures, and internal conflict. Alternatively, there could be an escalation in conflict between ethnic majorities and minorities for the creation of more internal “states” or “republics” along ethnic lines in case the multiethnic state disintegrates in the future.
There was logic behind the U.S. encouragement of the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia to secede against the wishes of the Serbs of Bosnia. Bosnia’s secession was necessary to prevent the remnant Yugoslavia from claiming the right to retain all territories seized from the seceding republic of Croatia. Serb Krajina’s declaration of independence from Croatia and the right to remain within Yugoslavia—as they had for seventy years—was simultaneous with Croatia’s unilateral declaration of independence from Yugoslavia. The claims and actions of Croats and Krajina Serbs were identical. If the United States had not pushed for the secession of Bosnia from Yugoslavia, the Serb territories carved out of the Croatian republic would have been more naturally contiguous with the remnant Yugoslavia. That would have made Croatia’s claims to the areas of Krajina and Western and Eastern Slavonia—seized by the Serbs of these regions with the help of the Yugoslav army—difficult to uphold under international law. Thus, the secession of Bosnia from Yugoslavia became critical for Croatia to reinforce their own claims to Serb-held territory in their republic. The Bosnian Croats’ alliance with the Bosnian Muslims in the March 1992 referendum to secede from Yugoslavia may be viewed as tactical and temporary. It was part of a two-step process to join with Croatia. Had Bosnia remained within Yugoslavia, Macedonia would have remained within Yugoslavia, and the remnant Yugoslavia would have been the indisputable successor state to the old Yugoslavia.
Assuming that the principle of territorial integrity of existing states is to be abandoned, and that such new state boundaries must be renegotiated, then the question is whether territory should be parceled out according to population proportions. In Bosnia, the international community was outraged that the Serbs had seized 70 percent of the territory when they constituted only 33 percent of the population. However, the Serbs, who are mainly peasants and farmers, had historically owned or occupied much of the land while the richer Muslims occupied the more valuable cities. This is one reason the Muslims should have been discouraged from seceding from Yugoslavia if the Bosnian Serbs wished to remain within. Serbs claim that they constituted the pluralistic majority in Bosnia-Herzegovina before 1940, as demonstrated in the 1910 Austrian census, which showed that the Orthodox Serbs constituted 43.5 percent of the population and 74 percent of “Servile Tenures” (land occupation and tenancy). The comparable figures for Muslims were 32.4 percent and 4.6 percent, and for Catholic Croats, 22.8 percent and 21.4 percent.
This land-to-people proportionality principle hardly made any more sense than allowing internal republics to secede with their prevailing boundaries. The density of population in Pakistan is only half that of India. This supports some of the arguments of the extreme Hindu nationalists that all of the 120 million Muslims living in India should be pushed into Pakistan, thus creating equal proportions of land to people. The more appropriate criteria for territorial renegotiation would be to examine the location, quality of land occupied or to be received by the various sides, and claims of historical residence that may have been usurped by others in more recent times.
Land allotted at the time of secession must encompass as much of the population of the seceding ethnic group, or conversely, retain in the old state as much of the population of the old majority ethnic groups that do not wish to be part of the new state. Territorial carve-ups must also ensure territorial contiguity for single resident ethnic groups, something that the 1993 Vance-Owen Plan failed to do. Likewise, vast acres of agricultural or barren land cannot be equated with small territories of resource-rich or industrialized land. Sarajevo alone is worth much more than all of the 49 percent of the land allotted to the Serbs, which is mainly mountain and lacks industries or power plants. Peter Brock, for instance, points out why the Bosnian Serb leadership rejected the Vance-Owen Plan. The Bosnian Serbs would receive only $6.1 billion of the total $31.5 billion identified assets in Bosnia; none of the known deposits of bauxite, lead, zinc, salt, or iron; none of the ten hydroelectric plants; 160 of the 960 kilometers of railroad lines; 200 kilometers of the improved roadways; and the loss of 24 percent of the land that they had held for generations.
The Denial of Yugoslavia’s Territorial Integrity
The above demonstrates that—in retrospect—Yugoslavia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty should have been preserved, at least until a viable method can be devised that will avoid armed conflicts and human tragedies. It is one thing to encroach upon the sovereignty of an existing state where there are massive human rights violations taking place, but it is quite another to do so in anticipation of such alleged violations. There were no mass killings in Yugoslavia before the unilateral declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia and their subsequent recognition by Germany and the Vatican followed by the rest of Europe and the United States. There were no mass killings taking place in Bosnia before the United States pushed for the recognition of Bosnia.
Preserving the old Yugoslav state may have proved to be the least of all evils. Problems began when recognition or pressures to recognize occurred. The former Yugoslavia had committed no “aggression” on neighboring states such as Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, or Rumania. Surely then, the real “aggression” in Yugoslavia began with the Western recognition of Slovenia and Croatia. The territorial integrity of a state that was voluntarily created and that had existed since December 1918 was swept aside. In 1991, a new state recognition policy proved to be an inventive method of destroying longstanding sovereign independent states. When several rich and powerful states decide to take a sovereign independent state apart through the policy of recognition, how is this state supposed to defend itself? There can be no deterrence or defense against such state destruction.
Military preponderance of the U.S.-led West added to the instability and conflict in the former Yugoslavia. The weakness of the USSR by the late 1980s, and its sudden collapse in 1991, leading to the preponderance of military and economic power in the West, enabled the United States and Europe to act swiftly in taking apart the former Yugoslavia. Germany wanted Slovenia and Croatia to achieve independence from Yugoslavia and this was granted. The United States wanted Bosnia to separate from Yugoslavia and that too was granted. Disintegration and war in the former Yugoslavia were caused mainly by the hasty and reckless Western policy of recognizing new states from an existing longstanding state. Indeed, the Western powers dismembered Yugoslavia through a new method of aggression: diplomatic recognition. No doubt, the United States and Germany could argue that Serbian nationalism was to blame for the collapse of Yugoslavia and they were merely recognizing the reality of a disintegrating Yugoslavia.(50) But this does not explain why these two states were unwilling to recognize the reality that Bosnia had fallen apart before it came into existence as a functioning state, or to recognize the de facto reality of Serbian republics in Krajina and Bosnia, and the Croatian republic of Herzeg-Bosna.
The blurring between civil war and aggression is clear in the case of the former Yugoslavia. War in the former Yugoslavia would appear to be a “civil war” that suddenly became a “war of aggression” following Western recognition of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Thus, while the military suppression of secessionist forces by federal forces within one of the provinces of an independent sovereign state would classify as a “civil war,” the recognition of that province attempting to secede as an independent state by the international community would instantly reclassify it as a “war of aggression” by what was once federal forces attempting to crush or reverse that secession. It is illogical to claim that Serbs “seized” large parts of Croatia and Bosnia—territories that were part of Yugoslavia—where they have lived for hundreds of years. If Serbs “illegally” seized Croatia and Bosnia, it would be logical to say that before that happened, Slovenians, Croatians, Bosnian Muslims, and Macedonians had illegally “seized” large parts of the former Yugoslavia.
The crucial dividing line between civil war and aggression in the Balkan conflict was the recognition of new states. For instance, the hypothetical international recognition of Tibet or Kashmir as independent states would make China’s and India’s efforts to suppress Tibetan and Kashmiri secessionist movements (from the point of recognition onward) wars of aggression. The recognition of an independent consolidated Kurdistan, incorporating the Kurdish areas of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria, would instantly generate Iraqi, Turkish, Iranian, and Syrian aggression, provided their federal forces are still involved in crushing the various Kurdish separatist movements. If an independent Palestine state on the West Bank and Gaza had been recognized soon after Israel occupied these territories following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, then Israeli security operations there over the last twenty-five years would have constituted a war of aggression against an independent Palestine state. Indeed, the Israeli acceptance of Palestinian autonomy in 1994 would imply that all Israeli military operations on the West Bank and Gaza would constitute quasi-aggression.
The United States and Germany are not going to attribute blame to themselves for the killing and destruction that occurred in the former Yugoslavia. However, the “internal” explanation that Milosevic-led Serbian nationalism was the primary cause is inadequate. The underlying causes of bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia may be found in policies and actions that occurred beyond the boundaries of the former Yugoslavia. In choosing between the territorial integrity of the state and the right to self-determination, the Western powers, pushed by Germany on Slovenia and Croatia and then by the United States on Bosnia, supported the latter principle. This was inconsistent with policies adopted elsewhere in the world.
There were several inconsistencies in the West’s policies. It made no sense to take Yugoslavia’s international frontiers apart and then to insist that the former internal boundaries of Yugoslavia be preserved at any price. Similarly, it made no sense to claim that Serbs, Croats, and Muslims could not live together in a larger Yugoslavia but that the same group would want to live in a smaller Bosnia. When intense conflict occurs and suspicion and distrust prevail, it becomes difficult to make different peoples continue to live together if they refuse to do so. Ironically, all the ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia did live together peacefully for several decades with little death and destruction, even after the horrendous experience during the Second World War.
Perhaps peace will prevail in the former Yugoslavia in the decades ahead, but then peace did prevail before Germany and then the United States intervened with their new state recognition policies. There could have been peace without war and human tragedy if Yugoslavia’s territorial integrity had been preserved. Before we moan the impending disintegration of multiethnic but stillborn Bosnia, either through renewed war or through the Dayton-sponsored elections that have provided legitimacy to the Serbian and Croatian separatists, let us first weep for the destruction of multiethnic Yugoslavia, a seventy-year-old state that was voluntary created in 1918 and destroyed through international recognition policy in 1991-92. Suffice it to say that assessments of a particular crisis are often subject to revision at a later stage when the dust of battle and the emotions that accompanied it have settled, and when the broader and long-term picture of the conflict and the responsibilities of the various leaders and groups begin to emerge.