ABSTRACT
Even before the spring 1990 victory of noncommunist parties in Slovenia and Croatia challenged Yugoslavia's political unity, the country's major federal political institutions had been undergoing a process of enfeeblement. During the second half of 1990, developments in Slovenia provided the most pronounced example of the growing disparity between "life and the federal constitution." The declaration of Kosovo's sovereignty expressed the growing political self-assertion of the province's Albanian population—a phenomenon that had accelerated markedly during the previous sixteen months owing to a number of factors. Exploiting the pluralist political environment in Croatia at the beginning of 1990, Raskovic's Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) was able to mobilize significant support from the republic's Serbian community. Raskovic and his compatriots claimed they were willing to acknowledge Croatia as their "homeland," but perpetuation of the Yugoslav state with its relative Serbian majority was crucial to their "Serbianism" and their perceived security.
