ABSTRACT
The two multinational communist states of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia shared an important structural facet in that they both organized their basic political-administrative units along ethnic lines. More importantly, the republics, as well as the units of lower federal order, were configured in a way that they represented homelands for the titular nations. Such ethnofederal setup was even more specific in the way that it was asymmetric, with a clear distinction between the core and peripheral units. In the context of the case studies at hand, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Socialist Republic of Serbia (SRS) were the core units not only due to being the most populous and largest republics. They also served as the political, economic and military headquarters in their erstwhile states. Some scholars have argued that this left an institutional and ideological legacy that was conducive to using force against the peripheral units in the years after the disintegration of the two states (Motyl 1998; Rubin and Snyder 1998; Bunce 1999). The argument that was put forward in these analyses is that nationalist politicians, in their bid to consolidate political hold over the old imperial core, faced the option of using force in areas that proclaimed independence. However, as Snyder (2000, pp. 208-209) notes, while the availability of military and other resources created a possibility of nationalist conflict, it did not make them inevitable. In this chapter I will argue that the differences in the behaviour of Serbia, which used the remnants of the Yugoslav army against several of the former Yugoslav nations, and Russia, which has done so primarily against Chechnya, can be attributed to the distinctive sequencing pattern of ethnonationalist mobilization and political liberalization in these two republics. This chapter focuses on the key developments with respect to ethnonationalist mobilization in the two core republics, Russia and Serbia. I will first provide brief historical backgrounds for understanding the bases of mobilization in these two republics, after which I will zero in on the dynamics of ethnonationalist movements throughout the 1980s. I will emphasize the central role of sequencing of mobilization and political liberalization within the core republics, which is crucial for testing the main argument of my work. In essence, I will demonstrate that the Soviet and Yugoslav cores experienced a significantly different sequence of events, as well as the fact that ethnonationalist movements were
unalike in strength and scope. While Russia seemed to have started liberalizing before ethnonationalist mobilization took place, in Serbia ethnic mobilization was well under way when liberalization of the system commenced. I will also argue that there was a qualitative difference in the etiology of ethnonationalist mobilizations in these two republics, which stemmed from diverse factors influencing the formation of ethnic identity, incentives and capacity to mobilize. First, while Russian identity was defined within the context of being an imperial centre, Serbia identified itself through a struggle of existing on the doorsteps of different empires. Second, the incentives for Russia to secede from the Soviet Union could be interpreted as hopes for economic and related gains as it was among the richest republics, as well as breaking free from the years of repression under totalitarian regime. For Serbia, the incentives to mobilize were based on grievances about losses past and present, fear of future losses and collective disadvantages in economic and political realms. Third, in Russia the polity was much more ideologically fractured than in Serbia, rendering the emergence of a nationalist agenda as the dominant discourse all the more difficult. In that respect, the political leadership in Russia and Serbia had essentially opposite agendas, which made them respond differently to the state collapse once it became apparent. Thus, as I aim to show, the core republic’s mobilization is at the centre of understanding regional dynamics of ethnic conflicts.
