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By Jeffrey T. Kuhner
June 8, 2006
Yugoslavia is dead. The multinational federation,
once consisting of the republics of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro, is no more.
The last chapter in the country's break-up was written
recently when tiny Montenegro voted to secede from its union with Serbia. The
result consigns the last vestiges of former Yugoslavia to history after the
bloody wars of the 1990s had already led to Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and
Macedonia leaving the federation.
Referring to Montenegro's referendum, Macedonian Prime
Minister Vlado Buckovski said "we witnessed the end of Project Yugoslavia,
which was formed at the time with good intentions."
Mr. Buckovski is wrong about the latter point.
Yugoslavia has often been portrayed by Western diplomats and scholars as a noble
attempt in multicultural nation-building, which sought to unite all of the South
Slavs into one state.
Forged in 1918, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes (later renamed Yugoslavia in 1929) was an artificial creation of the
victorious Allied powers, especially Britain and France. In the eyes of the
West, its primary purpose was to act as a strategic buffer in the Balkans to
contain Germany and Austria. Yugoslavia was an imperialist project. It was a
Serb-dominated empire, which abrogated the rights to democracy and national
self-determination for most of its constituent peoples.
From its inception, Yugoslavia contained the seeds of
its own destruction. It was based on a massive lie: namely, that it was composed
of similar peoples who shared a common language, heritage and culture. Instead,
it consisted of an ethnic patchwork of rival national groups, who not only spoke
different languages but had radically different cultures, religions, histories
and civilizations. This was especially true of its two largest republics,
Croatia and Serbia.
For nationalist Serbs, Yugoslavia served as a mask for
achieving their goal of a "Greater Serbia," uniting all of the Serbs
in the region into one common state.
As Serbian leader and Belgrade's chief architect of the
South Slav union, Nikola Pasic, wrote in 1918: "Serbia does not want to
drown in Yugoslavia, but to have Yugoslavia drown in her." Under Belgrade's
harsh rule, the country was turned into an authoritarian, centralized police
state where non-Serbs were routinely persecuted and murdered.
During World War II, Nazi Germany's invasion led to
Yugoslavia's dismemberment. Quisling regimes were installed throughout the
region.
In Croatia, a group of fascist thugs, called the
Ustashe, erected a pseudo-independent state allied with Adolf Hitler and Benito
Mussolini. The Ustashe passed racialist laws and committed countless unspeakable
crimes, including the mass murder of more than 100,000 Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and
anti-fascist Croats.
In Serbia, a pro-Nazi government led by the odious
anti-Semite, Gen. Milan Nedic, imposed a fascist regime, whose victims were not
only Croatians, Albanians, Muslims and opposition Serbs. Its main victim was
Serbia's large Jewish community, nearly all of whom were exterminated or sent
off to concentration camps.
Yet the greatest mass murderer was Josip Broz Tito. His
communist Partisans succeeded in re-establishing Yugoslavia in 1945, however,
only as a Leninist totalitarian state built upon the corpses of hundreds of
thousands of victims -- Croatians, ethnic Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, Slovenes,
Albanians, Muslims and Montenegrins.
When communism finally began to collapse across
Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia's dissolution was not only predictable but
inevitable. It was an experiment in social engineering, in which the peoples of
the region were used as guinea pigs -- first, by the West and then by the
communists -- to test utopian theories about the virtues of multinational
nation-building and the evils of small national states.
It is remarkable that, even with the obvious failure of
multinational federations in the Balkans, the European Union has only grudgingly
come to accept Montenegro's newly won independence. Even though Serbia and
Montenegro are similar in many ways (both are Slavic, Orthodox Christian
nations), Montenegrins rightly feel they have a separate Adriatic identity and a
clearer path toward a European future. This is especially true in the wake of
the EU's recent decision to halt further entry talks with Belgrade because of
its failure to capture the fugitive Bosnian Serb war criminal, Gen. Ratko
Mladic. Having broken away from Serbia's stifling grip, Montenegro is now free
to pursue EU accession negotiations on its own.
Brussels believes microstates in the region will only
lead to further instability. In fact, the very opposite is true: Only by
allowing each national group to flourish by having its own country, history,
culture, religion and civilizational identity can there be lasting stability and
real, peaceful co-existence.
The demise of Yugoslavia -- like the demise of other
defunct multinational entities, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman
Empire, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia -- shows that the idea of forcing
national groups to live with one another in a common state against their wishes
is not only antidemocratic and illiberal but is a recipe for disaster.
Yugoslavia was the God that failed. Good riddance.Yugoslavia, rest in peace - Commentary - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper
Yugoslavia, rest in peace - Commentary - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper
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