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Abstract

World war destroyed the first Yugoslavia. The second Yugoslavia expired more slowly, with the waning of the last great European empire, the USSR. As the Gorbachev years ran their course, western governments no longer needed to cultivate a special relationship with Belgrade. Yugoslavia was demoted in NATO’s security priorities to its pre-1949 status in April 1989, and the destruction of the Berlin Wall in November brought competition for western attention from the post-Communist states of Central Europe. The traditional conception of Yugoslavia as straddling the fault line between east and west reasserted itself: Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were all considered more suitable candidates for inclusion in a new European order than a troubled Balkan state. The ‘velvet revolutions’ in Eastern Europe paved the way to a relatively smooth incorporation of the Catholic periphery of the Soviet empire within the ambit of the European Community and NATO, adding a new sense of urgency to the efforts of Croatia and Slovenia to ‘disassociate’ themselves from the Yugoslav federation.

Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia, edited by John Allcock, Marko Milivojević and John Horton, is an excellent reference guide to the events dealt with in this chapter. I have also made use of a number of electronic sources, among which the Institute of War & Peace Reporting (info@iwpr.net) deserves special mention.