ABSTRACT
The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was born in civil war. The army fighting to prevent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia was defeated not on the battlefield, but at the negotiating tables of the European Community and in the oval office of the Bush administration. War is poor breeding ground for democracy whether one is talking about the American civil war, Yugoslav wars of secession, or the Rwanda genocide. With the collapse of the royal Yugoslav army’s resistance and dismemberment of the first Yugoslavia in 1941, the Yugoslav Communist Party organized the partisan resistance movement that was to become the armed forces of the second, socialist Yugoslavia. In 1990 the League of Communists of Yugoslavia gave up its monopoly of political power and died a lingering death. When Slovenia and Croatia declared “independence” at the end of June, the army’s self-perceived mission of defending Yugoslavia’s territorial integrity and preventing civil war suffered from massive internal contradictions.
