ABSTRACT
At the international or systemic level, structural explanations for the war in Yugoslavia point to the power transition as the Cold War ended, and at the state level to the breakdown of the Yugoslav economy (partly attributable to shifts in systemic power relations) along with the failure to resolve the political crisis exacerbated, if not brought on, by Tito’s death in 1980. But Yugoslavia was not the only central or east European state to be affected by the combination of a systemic power shift and an internal political and economic crisis at the end of the Cold War. So while a systemic power transition does help explain uncoordinated policy responses by the Western allies (Germany in the EU), and may even make alliance defections on the question of new state recognition during the early stage of the crisis in 1990 and 1991 more comprehensible,2 a failure of international leadership coupled with an international power transition is not a sufficient explanation if our question is not simply “why war” but “why here,” and “why now” From a constructivist perspective, the end of the Cold War signaled not only a restructuring of power, but the collapse of a socially constructed social arrangement, to use Onuf’s terminology,3 an arrangement to which the term “Cold War” referred. Using the concepts suggested by Onuf, the rules mediating between social arrangements and agents may be (1) instructive-rules that indicate declarations about social reality, how things “are”; (2) directive rules that produce hierarchy and organization; or (3) rules of commit-ment-rules that produce associations, patterns, and expectations of agents’ behavior in roles and in relation to one another.
