ABSTRACT
There is a very strong tendency in the literature on the Yugoslav collapse to privilege the endogenous forces pushing towards disintegration and to treat the exogenous actors as both secondary and reactive. There is a parallel tendency to stress the uniqueness of the endogenous actors within Yugoslavia rather than setting these actors in a wider comparative framework, which enables us to grasp their real specificity by precisely grasping how they are distinctive species of larger genera. I will try to argue that a wider lens is indispensable to an understanding of Yugoslav dynamics in the 1990s and early 2000s.
