The Yugoslav Crisis and Serbian Nationalism

Abstract

The collapse of multinational communist federations and the subsequent armed conflicts that arose as a result of their transformation into independent nation-states brought the "national question", for instance, the relationship of a national or ethnic group to a state that includes multiple ethnic groups within it back to the forefront of debates about international politics, law, and theory. The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia demonstrates the international community's inability to rely on any solid legal principles, guidelines, or established mechanisms to prevent such chaos and mass suffering. The former Yugoslavia was an attempt to address three fundamental aspects of the “national question”: (1) the right of a nation, acting to establish its state by demanding national self-determination; (2) the right of a national homeland (whether a sovereign state or a republic in a federation), acting through its diaspora, either to monitor the relative situation of its citizens elsewhere or to demand national unification and the redrawing of borders; and (3) the rights of members of national minorities to resist the establishment of a new nation-state by the majority, either by seeking cultural or political autonomy or by secession to unite with their national homeland. A multinational state like Yugoslavia cannot prioritize the interests of any one ethnic group, as this would lead to the disintegration of the state. Yugoslavia was a system not only of ethnic diversity but also of balanced coexistence of this diversity. Any imbalance in this system would lead to the collapse of the federation.