ABSTRACT
In the midst of Eastern Europe’s eruption, Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia dream of the future. Yet troubled and disintegrating Yugoslavia right is that future. As Eastern Europe decommunizes and explodes in joy with unimagined freedoms, every normal person is filled with euphoria. For Yugoslavia’s problems are remarkably similar to the ethnic and nationalist conflicts just beginning to break out across the Soviet Union, to the border conflicts that will surely begin among the East Bloc states, and even to the rebellions of various workers against the risk of change. The nasty conflicts between Serb, Albanian, Slovene et al. come at the same time that Yugoslavia is trying to create a free market and join the West. The ethnic conflicts serve to bedevil the new economic needs of the state. Little hothouse ethnocentrisms and exclusivist nationalisms could not be more direct brakes on modern economic prosperity, for they pull apart the very modern state needed for market economy.
