ABSTRACT
In his introduction to Milovan Djilas’ Land without Justice, William Jovanovich calls the people of Montenegro ‘Serbian by nationality, Orthodox by faith, Montenegrin by choice’.1 As Montenegro begins the twenty-first century, this assessment has perhaps never been so apt or so mistaken. Montenegro, still nominally bound to Serbia in a joint state, is a divided country and has spent much of the past several years wrestling with the prospect of its own formal independence. After elections in April 2001 returned an ambiguous majority to the Montenegrin Parliament, Serbia and the Federal administration also devoted themselves to this topic and engaged with Podgorica over whether, where and who should negotiate either a radically redefined federation or else Montenegrin independence.2 In spring 2002, Serbian, Montenegrin and Yugoslav representatives reached an EU-brokered agreement to establish the new state of ‘Serbia and Montenegro’. Thereafter, however, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) lingered on as a country without a valid constitution or a functional government, a ‘hollow edifice whose institutions hardly function except as an address for the international community’3 while Serbia’s and Monetenegro’s leaders struggled to agree on a constitutional charter for the new state. Even under the new joint-state arrangement, the locus of real power remains in the republics. Montenegro, in fact, has been not just autonomous or even sovereign, but de facto independent for several years. In many ways, therefore, the real question in recent years has not been whether there would be an independent Montenegro, but rather whether there would be a redefined Yugoslav federation.
