ABSTRACT
In the post-Cold War period, international society, buttressed by new global8 and regional
documents such as the Charter of Paris (1990) and the Copenhagen Document (1990),9
continued to preclude unilateral secessionist claims of self-determination as a legitimate
way of altering existing state territories. It, in fact, extended the settled practice of the pre-
vious three decades into new geographical areas. The break-ups of the Soviet Union in
1991 and Czechoslovakia in 1992 might have commenced as separatist bids by some of
their constituent units, but foreign recognition of the successor states came only once
the respective central governments had agreed to the dissolution of the unions. During
the initial phase of the Yugoslav collapse, which also started as a series of secessionist
undertakings by its constituent republics, foreign authorities publicly supported the terri-
torial integrity of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). That position
changed only after a majority of Yugoslav republics had ceased to be represented in the
highest federal institution, the presidency, under highly contentious circumstances in
early October 1991. The withdrawal of the majority of the population and territory
from a federal state was a historically unprecedented occurrence, but one to which third
states as well as relevant international organizations found a speedy solution that no
public actor besides Serbia and Montenegro opposed: they came to regard what was occur-
ring in the SFRY as a case of dissolution legally equivalent to the consensual dissolution of
the USSR or Czechoslovakia.10 Only after this judgement did the individual republics
become eligible for recognition (Fabry, 2010, p. 193).
