Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War

by Susan L. Woodward

" Yugoslavia was well positioned at the end of the cold war to make a successful transition to a market economy and westernization. Yet two years later, the country had ceased to exist, and devastating local wars were being waged to create new states. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the start of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in March 1992, the country moved toward disintegration at astonishing speed. The collapse of Yugoslavia into nationalist regimes led not only to horrendous cruelty and destruction, but also to a crisis of Western security regimes. Coming at the height of euphoria over the end of the cold war and the promise of a ""new world order,"" the conflict presented Western governments and the international community with an unwelcome and unexpected set of tasks. Their initial assessment that the conflict was of little strategic significance or national interest could not be sustained in light of its consequences. By 1994 the conflict had emerged as the most challenging threat to existing norms and institutions that Western leaders faced. And by the end of 1994, more than three years after the international community explicitly intervened to mediate the conflict, there had been no progress on any of the issues raised by the country's dissolution. In this book, Susan Woodward explains what happened to Yugoslavia and what can be learned from the response of outsiders to its crisis. She argues that focusing on ancient ethnic hatreds and military aggression was a way to avoid the problem and misunderstood nationalism in post-communist states. The real origin of the Yugoslav conflict, Woodward explains, is the disintegration of governmental authority and the breakdown of a political and civil order, a process that occurred over a prolonged period. The Yugoslav conflict is inseparable from international change and interdependence, and it is not confined to the Balkans but is part of a more widespread phenomenon of political disintegration. Woodward's analysis is based on her first-hand experience before the country's collapse and then during the later stages of the Bosnian war as a member of the UN operation sent to monitor cease-fires and provide humanitarian assistance. She argues that Western action not only failed to prevent the spread of violence or to negotiate peace, but actually exacerbated the conflict. Woodward attempts to explain why these challenges will not cease or the Yugoslav conflicts end until the actual causes of the conflict, the goals of combatants, and the fundamental issues they pose for international order are better understood and addressed. "

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, War, Political Science, European History, International Affairs

556 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1993

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Balkan Tragedy” is an extraordinary book that challenges widespread assumptions concerning the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the destruction of centuries of European and Islamic civilization during fighting 1991 to 2001. Susan L. Woodward shows that the Yugoslav debacle need not have happened; it was not, as is popularly thought, inevitable due to long-standing conflict among groups of people that happened to occupy adjacent areas but that hated each other and engaged in mass murder whenever possible. The collapse into barbarity in the western Balkans was not due to historical religious and ethnic hatreds held in check by the state nor was it because of the artificiality of the state itself. Rather, the real origins of the breakdown of civil and political order were the economic collapse and subsequent social chaos caused largely by the debt repayment program imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the banks the IMF so ably represented. Western creditors squeezed Yugoslavia dry. One draconian stabilization plan after another was forced on the country; unemployment rocketed, the Federal Government was undermined

As Woodward puts it, "to explain the Yugoslav crisis as a result of ethnic hatred is to turn the story upside down and begin at its end." With no political western interests to protect, the people in the statelets created from former Yugoslavia were written off as mythological, wild, dangerous Balkans who took pleasure in killing each other, little better (if that) than wild animals. The initial assessment that the conflict had no strategic significance for the West and that the rest of Europe had no national interests at stake collapsed as its consequences unfolded and word of mass killings and concentration camps hit the front pages.

Like many other horrors with seeming self-evident causes—the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda, the self-destruction of the population of Cambodia, the communal killings in India and Pakistan--the impulses behind their actions and the cast who share responsibility turn out to be immensely more complicated than is generally thought. There is a growing body of literature analyzing the dreadful results of ignoring the economics at the heart of many such conflicts while blaming impossible to understand centuries-long ethnic and religious strife. Woodward’s book is a brilliant and commanding scholarly work based not only on her mastery of the sources in several languages but also her first hand experiences before the collapse and as a member of the UN operation monitoring cease-fires in Bosnia. It is a bit of a doorstop—over 400 pages of text, more than 100 pages of notes—but essential if one would understand the post-breakup Yugoslav wars and others like them throughout the world.

[Martina · Rating 5 out of 5]

If anyone reading this has, like me, grown up with the canonization of Franjo Tudjman this is the final and exceedingly well-researched nail in the coffin of that illusion. A nuanced and highly empathic view of the war that leaves no stone unturned.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to be happily disowned.

[Jessica DeWitt · Rating 1 out of 5]

The ordeal is over! After, I think, four or five months, I put the pedal to the metal and finally finished this snoozefest. Oy. So many facts, so many names, so many ACRONYMS...and nothing stuck because it was so damn boring. Every fact stuffed into a dry as bones narrative.

If you're going to put tragedy in the title, then you better move me. There is no room for emotional connection midst the onslaught of policies and old white guys in padded rooms making decisions. Where are the people for whom this period can be called a tragedy? I know, I know, it is a poli-sci book. But nonetheless...

Like most of my reviews, this one is based on entertainment value. If you're doing a report on this subject or you're an expert in the field, then this book will likely prove useful because seemingly every fact, ever, about this topic is located within the folds. And I also recognize the work that must have gone into it. Just don't read it cover to cover...trust me, its not worth the merit badge.

[Boris Cesnik · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book read so far that gives you the most comprehensive description of what happened beyond (or behind) military/civilian pawns in the battlefield.

You can read facts, figures, list of events, commentaries, personal experiences etc in other books. This is THE ONE where you can find all possible socio-political, cultural, economic and historical analysis you can dream of about the war in Jugoslavia.

This the only book read so far that includes international factors as major players in the whole course of the war, not forgetting to mention the decades that have preceded the dissolution itself.

We definitely need a sequel.

[Rhuff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thirty years later and it's deja vu all over again: an East European "New Hitler" out to victimize his neighbors, with the gallant West rushing in to aid the suffering but valiant oppressed defending their homeland, in the name of democracy for all humanity. Susan L. Woodward's brick of a book is an exhaustive, in-depth analysis of the Yugoslav wars and what they meant for Europe, the world - and, though of least importance to that world - the people themselves.

Eschewing the binary color scheme of Western media and academia, she outlined how "economic reform" and national sovereignty created scarcity, pitting ethnicities against one another within republics to collate advantage in a shrinking economy (despite the opportunities advanced by neo-liberal advisors.) Western powers like Germany, Austria, and Italy pushed recognition of the western Yugoslav republics, drawing them into their market zones and re-enacting the imperial designs of a century before. The resulting "breakup" was thus not a mere replay of "ancient feuds and hatreds" per se, but a contemporary reaction to economic dislocation and political opportunism.

But nationalism - more properly, tribalism - was the chosen vehicle of expression. Here, too, Woodward remained fairly balanced while her colleagues went off into moral rabies. Nationalism was the Covid of all parties involved, not just the Serbs nor the "New Hitler" Milosevic. In minority Slovenia and Croatia this was expressed in secession; in dominant Serbia, by Federal centralism. The tragedy was identical for those involved, whether exploded on the ground or from above.

Which brings us to the role of NATO. Woodward's book ends in 1995, with the Dayton Accords ending the Bosnian phase, before NATO expansion into the "New Europe". But this first phase was instrumental in convincing Brussels and Washington that a "new security arrangement" was necessary to "bring peace to Europe; that the OSCE and the UN were no substitute for Pax Americana. This was achieved only by NATO's "humanitarian intervention" through the bombing of Belgrade and regime change, via the provocative Rambouillet Agreement designed for that purpose (within a week of NATO's first tranch of expansion). A new sheriff had arrived, the bad guys put down, and all was peace and prosperity - until a bigger and badder villain came from the East.

In retrospect, comparing Woodward's era to this, one must ask: why did it take thirty years for war to erupt between ex-Soviet republics and peoples, while in Yugoslavia this was immediate - from day one of Yugoslavia's burial? The kneejerk reaction is "Putin." Yet Putin has been around for two-thirds of that time. What was missing in Yugoslavia? Gorbachev - and those around him, whether allies or opponents. No one wanted bloodshed or civil war, whether in the Kremlin or outside in opposition, and said so openly. Not even the coup plotters of 1991, who were all reformers themselves and simply caved when they threw a coup and no one came. Conflicts were de-escalated in the Soviet Bloc and Union before reaching that tipping point, even if there were bloody blips within the republics like Nagorno-Karabakh or Chechnya.

What changed? NATO expansion, just rolling along like the Mississippi, the US just Huck Finn along for the ride. And a new generation rising in the ashes of glasnost and perestroika, fed on tribalism. The thought of armed hooligans running the streets, so common in Woodward's Yugoslavia, was unthinkable at the time in Kiev or Donetsk outside the mafia. Edouard Shevardnadze's overthrow in Georgia marked the end of the old glasnost generation and the rise of the new. And thus we've come full circle around the War on Terror, back into the Balkans, and on into the Cold War. Is a full retrograde return to world war the next reverse stop in this Twilight Zone?

[Andrew Baldwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read “Balkan Tragedy” twice now. In Chapter 7 on The Right to National Self-Determination Ms. Woodward lists the principles for determining national borders: historicist, democratic, Helsinki, which she might have called de jure, realist, which she might have called de facto. When I first read the book, I was still under the spell of Scott Reid’s “Canada Remapped”, a book which has not aged well, which clearly championed the democratic principle, and didn’t understand why Woodward expressed no clear preference for one principle over another. However, Reid’s book hasn’t aged well, and I can now see more clearly why Woodward was reluctant to choose.
Woodward notes that Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić suggested a fifth principle based on land ownership, claiming 64 percent of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina based on legal title to the properties in the republic. When the Dayton Accords were signed, the Bosnian Serbs settled for much less. Republika Srpska has only 48-49% of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, the principle is not illogical, and has been invoked more recently by Branislav Krstić-Brano in his proposal for a division of Kosovo between Serb-controlled and Albanian-controlled entities. (See his 2004 book Kosovo: Facing the Court of History.)
Krstić-Brano also invokes the historicist principle in his proposals for splitting Kosovo, arguing that the cathedral at Peć and the site of the battlefield of Kosovo Polje should be part of the Serbian entity. To a democratic principle zealot like Scott Reid this would seem anachronistic. However, Anglo-Americans might ask themselves how willing they would be to give up the site of the Alamo in the case of a partition of Texas, with the Hispanic part no longer belonging to the United States. Since both the cathedral and the battlefield lie in the north of Kosovo they could have remained part of Serbia following the 1999 war without many ethnic Albanians being subject to Serb rule. At the time the NATO leaders seemed to be applying Helsinki principles to the provincial borders of Kosovo which they ignored completely with respect to the republic borders of Serbia.
The realist principle “accepts the fait accompli of physical control through military force” and explains why, for example, the formerly German Königsberg is now Russian Kaliningrad. It is not a city to which Russia had any prior claim based on history or ethnicity. The YPA forces similarly sought for control of ports on the Croatian Adriatic, but were unsuccessful. While at odds with democratic norms, Woodward recognizes that any government trying to establish or maintain a viable, defensible country has to have viable, defensible borders, and that these sometimes are in conflict with the democratic principle. Even Reid, the ultra-democrat, recognized this in his proposal that a corridor between Anglo-Montreal and the Ontario border be preserved around the Trans-Canada highway, even if the mainly French-speaking population in the corridor preferred to be part of an independent Quebec.
While the democratic principle sounds wonderful in theory, Woodward argues that it can encourage savagery in practice. All sides in the Bosnian conflict engaged in ethnic cleansing, partly to ensure that referenda, if they took place in future, on boundaries, would favour their own ethnic group. Although it lay in the future when Woodward wrote her book, Croatia’s hold on its de jure territory was guaranteed by a hideous ethnic cleansing operation against the Serb minority in the Krajina in August 1995. Ethnic cleansing has, since then, become almost a specialty of NATO armed forces or forces allied to them, being used to clear Serbs out of Kosovo in 1999, Kurds out of Turkish-occupied areas of Syria starting in 2018, and Armenians out of Nagorno-Karabakh, sponsored by the Turkish government, in 2020.

[Javier Ramalleira · Rating 3 out of 5]

É un libro moi detallado e académico que explora os detalles detrás das guerras que sucederon trala disolución da Yugoslavia comunista; sen embargo, está estruturado dunha forma confusa, por temas e non seguindo unha cronoloxía clara, o que fai que se necesite ter unha idea moi clara do desarrollo da guerra e da xeografía dos Balcáns para poder seguilo. Eso, ou lelo coa Wikipedia e un mapa ao lado todo o tempo.

Pareceume curiosa a tese que defende sobre a orixe da guerra, que ve motivada pola crise constitucional entre repúblicas que se deu a finais dos 80 debido á aplicación dunha serie de medidas económicas de choque e recentralizadoras por parte do goberno federal e por encargo do FMI. Este feito, unido á caída do bloque soviético e a conseguinte restruturación da balanza de poder internacional, que deixou a Yugoslavia fóra do seu lugar estratéxico como líder de facto dos países non-alineados e pechou o seu acceso a certos mercados, causou tensións e desequilibrios entre as repúblicas que formaban o estado federal, causando que as máis ricas e mellor posicionadas internacionalmente buscasen unha independencia rápida para lograr un encaixe futuro como aliados da Europa occidental. Esto xerou baleiros de poder e escaseza de recursos, que os partidos nacionalistas aproveitaron para, mediante estratexias de medo e de “us vs. them”, facerse co poder e buscar un novo encaixe territorial, desencadenando así os enfrontamentos.

Este plantexamento choca coa explicación clásica de conflicto étnico, ou mesmo de agresión expansionista serbia, no contexto dunha zona, a dos Balcáns, que sempre se identificou co choque de culturas e o conflicto.

Tamén critica moito o desacertado das intervencións da comunidade internacional (os USA, a ONU e a UE), xa que polo descoñecemento da realidade iugoslava, os distintos acordos que se foron firmando non contribuiron a desacelerar o proceso bélico, senón en certos casos todo o contrario. Esto case se pode considerar autocrítica xa que a autora estivo involucrada nesas labores.

Outro punto negativo do libro é que saiu publicado no 1995, con partes inda do conflicto sen resolver, especialmente no caso de Kosovo, que daquela inda nin comezara o conflito armado, e que desde a miña opinión parece máis difícil de encaixar na tese da autora.

Pero como resumo: War is hell.

Gustaravos se pensades que os acordos de Brioni foron un desastre ou se queredes aprender a saltar dun libro ao móvil 50 veces nunha hora e seguir lendo.

[Seth Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A coherent and incisive history of the early post-Soviet era in the Balkans. This is a 10,000-foot survey--don't expect human interest stories--but it's a helpful guide to the tricky political, socioeconomic, and ethnic terrain of one of the world's more troubled regions. Recent events in the region make this a relevant read again.