Introduction

In their last years of existence, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) found themselves facing a similar and very grim state of affairs. The pushes for political and economic liberalization were growing stronger, secessionist movements were threatening the total collapse of these ethnofederations, and the threats to ethnic minorities within breakaway republics were becoming increasingly conspicuous. However, what followed after their disintegration was markedly different. While the former Yugoslav republics spiralled into a set of ethnic conflicts that did not leave a single one of them unscathed, in the ex-Soviet space conflicts were far more limited. To understand the main sources of divergence, it is worth to briefly travel in time. First stop, Gazimestan monument in Kosovo Polje on June 28, 1989. The President of the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Serbia Slobodan Milošević is on an eighteen meters high stage surrounded with hundreds of thousands of Serbs who have come to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. In a speech laden with references to the battle against the Ottomans, Serbian heroism and pride, Milošević utters prophetic sentences – “Six centuries later, now, we are engaged in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, although such things cannot be excluded yet” (BBC 1989). This unequivocal signal would soon become the reality as less than two years later Slovenia and Croatia would experience violent conflicts within their borders. Stepping back into the time machine, the next stop is Kazan State University in Tatarstan on August 5, 1990. Boris Yeltsin, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, is giving a speech as part of his tour of Russia’s regions. His message to the autonomous republics and smaller nations is to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow” (Chernobrovkina 1990). These words have to be placed within a context of struggle against the central Soviet government, yet they will also prove highly consequential. Over a quarter of century later, there is still a lack of consensus over the causes of collapse of the two states and violent conflicts that ensued in the successor states around the time of the disintegration. The theories of state collapse and conflict have included competing explanations ranging from the deficient

institutional system and inevitability of failure of the socialist project; economic shocks and crises; the precariousness of regime liberalization; spillover; to the ‘ancient hatreds’ and the existence of ‘bad men of history’ and their greed. Granted, each of these perspectives offers an important piece of the puzzle to understand the dynamics that contributed to the demise of the two ethnofederations. As with most explanations in the domain of social sciences, parsimony does not necessarily lead to accuracy and it is certainly not the aim of this book to offer one definitive perspective on the etiology of conflict in the Soviet and Yugoslav successor states and territories. Rather, it is to explore how operating on the intersection of comparative politics, international relations and nationalism studies can offer an explanation that takes into account the nature of institutional setup and the way it interacted with political and social developments. Namely, both the USSR and SFRY were asymmetric ethnofederations, with their respective core republics, Russia and Serbia, pitted against the rest of the republics – collectively, the periphery. This was mainly due to their size, population and asymmetric representation in state institutions. However, the two core republics vastly differed in the way in which they reacted to the institutional changes that were aimed to loosen the authoritarian rule. The advent of perestroika and glasnost in the former Soviet Union triggered the rise of liberaldemocratic movement as the dominant stream of popular mobilization in the Soviet core, Russia. On the other hand, in the years of increased political pluralism the Yugoslav core, Serbia, experienced overwhelmingly illiberal nationalist mobilization. In cases where such early and strong nationalist mobilization in the core was paired with peripheral nationalist mobilization, the conflicts were almost inevitable (such as in Croatia and Kosovo). These conflicts also had the strongest potential to spread to other republics, because of the regional security dilemma they created (Bosnia-Herzegovina). Yet, in the case of the former Soviet Union, the ethnic conflicts tended to have their epicentre in the periphery (NagornoKarabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria), making them more limited in spread than they would have been had Russia adopted an exclusively nationalist agenda initially. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the difference in state collapses and ensuing conflicts in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia by focusing on their asymmetric ethnofederal structure and the different dynamics of ethnic mobilization that the federal units experienced. It aims to approach the issue from a comparative perspective by analysing conflict occurrence in these two regions. In doing so it will combine insights from several sub-disciplines of political science. The main motivation of this work is to test whether the spatio-temporal dynamics of ethnonationalist mobilization can be a useful explanation for occurrence of conflicts in former Soviet and Yugoslav republics and provinces. At the centre of analysis is the distinction between the mobilizational dynamics in the core federal republics as opposed to the non-core, or peripheral units, as well as the effects of political liberalization in relation to the emergence of ethnonationalist mobilization.