Beyond "ancient hatreds": What really happened to Yugoslavia

Policy Review, Oct/Nov 1999 by Schwartz, Stephen

Empty-handed in modern times

Tito's YUGOSLAVIA, through the 1930s, '60s, and '70s, had flourshed as the beneficiary of a kind of dual international welfare. Put simply, the Yugoslavs were paid by the Russians, in hard currency, for construction and other sophisticated projects Soviet socialism had failed to master, while the U.S. subsidized the Yugoslav military on the presumption that in a war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, Yugoslavia would side with the West. Tito himself, a wily Habsburg military officer by professional training, added two policy innovations, unknown to the rest of the communist world, to the mix. He encouraged Yugoslavs in the millions to emigrate - to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, even the U.S. and Australia, and to send as much of their earnings back home as they could. In addition, he threw the country open to foreign tourists, so that families, notably on the Dalmatian coast, could collect millions of D-marks in room rentals every year.

But the real basis of Yugoslavia's seeming success was dual subsidies from West and East. After the psychological defeat of Moscow by Poland's Solidarity and the Polish pope, John Paul II, in the early 1980s, something curious happened in Eastern Europe. Soviet Russia itself continued for some time on its triumphalist path, convinced that the global correlation of forces favored socialism, and that it could make up for what it might lose in Poland by subverting the American backyard in Nicaragua, Grenada, and El Salvador, as well as by its adventures in Africa and Southeast Asia. Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the other westernmost European communist states underwent, more or less rationally, the slow and steady emergence of a non-communist civil society. Nobody in Moscow, Budapest, East Berlin, or Prague spoke openly of the end of communism, just as nobody did in Washington. But in the former cities, the intelligentsia began hoping, silently, for a closure that had long been inconceivable.

In Yugoslavia, by contrast -- particularly in Serbia - the 1980s produced the beginning of a real panic. Tito died in 1980, but few Yugoslavs felt fear, or expressed their fears if they had them, about the internal forces that might lead to the collapse of Yugoslav communism. Titoite communism was the most liberal, most open, most successful Marxist-Leninist regime. The onset of mass anxiety had little to do with immediate problems inside the country and everything to do with the awareness that, although the West had not seemed to notice it and the East would not say it aloud, Russian communism entered its death throes with the pope's survival of an assassination attempt. Bolshevism was doomed; and with the end of Bolshevism, Yugoslavia's dual international welfare payments would end as well. Russia would no longer need Yugoslavs to build factories and the U.S. would no longer need the Yugoslav Army as a bulwark against a Soviet invasion of Europe.

This realization struck the Serbs with special force because Serbia - in marked contrast to other parts of the former state - had little to bring to the table of what would eventually be called the "new world order." Slovenia, for example, would prosper even without support from Washington and Moscow; its local communist leadership had already given up Marxist economics, had integrated Slovenia with the Austrian and Italian economies, and, as previously noted, had made the country a producer of quality consumer goods for the rest of the Yugoslav market. Croatia, too, expected few problems in the absence of foreign aid; it had not only a spectacular and largely unexploited tourist potential, one whose transformation could be expected to fuel prosperity in the same way tourism remade Spain in the 1950s, but also a large diaspora that would continue to add to domestic income through D-mark (now euro) remittances. Even BosniaHerzegovina was relatively well-prepared for entry into the new world, thanks to the modernization of its agriculture and its links with the Islamic nations.