The Dissolution of Yugoslavia

In 1989, Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Montenegro. Today, the process of Yugoslavia's breakup is still not complete. Although all six former constituent republics are now independent sovereign states, it was not without serious conflict that Yugoslavia was broken up. In addition, a seventh republic, Kosovo, has been carved out of Serbia, but its future remains uncertain. Despite the tragic process of Yugoslavia's disintegration, however, some positive aspects of this process have emerged.

Like World War I, at the core of Yugoslavia's breakup was Serbian nationalism, which had been on the rise throughout the 1980s following the death of Yugoslavia's longtime communist dictator, Josip Broz Tito, who had been effective at maintaining Yugoslavia's cohesion and stifling nationalist tendencies. Following Tito's death, some Serbs increasingly began to feel that their supremacy within the federation, which had been a fact throughout Yugoslavia's existence, was being lost. Other ethnicities embraced nationalism in response. Complicating the problem was the fact that no single republic of Yugoslavia was ethnically homogeneous; rather, each republic had a mix of ethnicities, with one in sometimes only a slim majority. Serbs, in particular, existed in communities in all six republics, particularly Croatia and Bosnia. Frequent political crises and sporadic outbreaks of ethnic violence became commonplace.

The dismantling of the Soviet system and communism in Eastern Europe in general expedited Yugoslavia's dissolution. Free elections in most republics brought independence-minded parties to the fore. The first republic to break away was Slovenia, in early 1991, followed swiftly by Croatia. With Croatia's declaration of independence, Yugoslavia's army attacked. However, it was in Bosnia that the bloodiest battles were fought -- indeed, some of the bloodiest incidents in Europe since the end of World War II. When the dust settled in 1995, Bosnia was independent but itself had become a federation of a Bosnian state and a Serbian state within Bosnia, the Republika Srpska.

More complicated and extended has been the attempts of the Albanian province of Kosovo to secede from Yugoslavia and later the independent state of Serbia. First with an uprising in the 1990s that occasioned NATO intervention and UN administration and since 2008 with a declaration of independence, Kosovo has sought to separate itself from Serbia. However, unlike the constituent Yugoslav republics, Kosovo has not received universal recognition and has not been admitted to the UN, although some progress has been made toward normalizing relations with Serbia.

Sadly, ethnic tensions remain fairly high in these now six or seven independent states. However, one positive development is that the world community sought to punish war criminals who committed acts of genocide during the breakup of Yugoslavia, convening the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in 1993. The ICTY continues to prosecute war criminals and has successfully prosecuted several, including the former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. In the ICTY, the world community kept its promise in the UN Convention on Genocide to punish these crimes, which is one of the only positive results of a sad period of chaos in the Balkans.