Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T18:03:27.723Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Constitutional Nationalism in the Formerly Yugoslav Republics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Robert M. Hayden
Robert M. Hayden*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The results of the first free elections in Yugoslavia since World War II, held in 1990, set the stage for the civil war that broke out in summer and fall 1991. In those elections, strongly nationalist parties or coalitions won in each of the republics. In Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and to some extent in Macedonia, nationalists asserted anticommunism in order to bolster their appeal and their legitimacy internationally, while the new Socialist Party of Serbia (nee the League of Communists of Serbia) and the League of Communists in Montenegro effected Ceausescu-like transformations by turning nominally socialist parties into openly nationalist ones.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , Winter 1992 , pp. 654 - 673
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Support for the research on which this article is based was provided by the National Council for Soviet and East European Research and by the University of Pittsburgh. Neither of these institutions is responsible for the views expressed here. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the conference on "Nation, National Identity, Nationalism" held at the University of California at Berkeley, 10-12 Sept. 1992; at the conference on "Issues of Identity in Contemporary 'Yugoslavia': Antagonism and the Construction of Community" held at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK), 20- 23 August 1992; and at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, IL, 23 Nov. 1991.

1. Cf. Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu's Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

2. The best summary account of the 1990 elections is Dennison Rusinow, “To Be or Not To Be: Yugoslavia as Hamlet,” Field Staff Reports, no. 18 (1991). The depictions of republican results must be modified in some details, such as the victory in the Slovenian presidential election of the “reform communist” Milan Kucan, at the same time that the anti-communist, nationalist DEMOS coalition won power in the republican assembly. Here, as elsewhere, the key to success was the message of nationalism more than the label of communist, or socialist or democrat.

3. In the elections in Croatia in August 1992, this result was repeated: Tudjman's HDZ won about two-thirds of the seats in the Croatian Sabor with only 42.9% of the votes cast. The flawed nature of the electoral law is seen in the election of Sime Djodan in a constituency in which he received only 23% of the vote but in which there were six other candidates, one of whom received 19.51% of the vote (Vreme, 10 August 1992).

4. The apparently universal hostility to the label “eastern Europe” in the countries that had formerly been so called is exemplified in the title of the Daedalus (119, no. 1, 1990) volume dealing with the transition from state socialism in Europe: “Eastern Europe … Central Europe … Europe.” In Yugoslavia, hostility towards the “East” by the peoples of western Yugoslavia produced a crude political rhetoric of literal orientalism, privileging the Catholic or Protestant, formerly Habsburg, “progressive” northwestern republics over the Orthodox Christian or Muslim, formerly Ottoman, “backward” “Balkans” (see Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans': Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” Slavic Review 51, no. 1 [1992]: 1-15).

5. See Robert M. Hayden, “Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia,” in Rubie S. Watson, ed., Memory and Opposition under State Socialism (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1993).

6. “Affirmative action” is an exception meant to prove the rule, since it is based on a theory of granting preferences to individual members of disadvantaged groups in order to compensate for disabilities they have suffered by being members of those groups. In such systems the basic presupposition is that all citizens are indeed created equal but that some suffer under systemic social disadvantages and thus need special protection; and members of specific groups, defined by criteria such as race, gender or class, are given legal advantages not available to the majority which is presumed to enjoy overwhelming social or economic advantages already. Systems of “compensatory discrimination” exist in polities as divergent as the United States and India (see Marc Galanter, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984]). The difference between “constitutional nationalism” and affirmative action is that constitutional nationalism privileges the majority while affirmative action attempts to compensate for the disadvantages suffered by minorities. Thus constitutional nationalism institutionalizes and reinforces discrimination, while affirmative action is meant to combat it.

7. Stanley Tambiah, “Ethnic Conflict in the World Today,” American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 335-49.

8. Ibid., 347.

9. Of course, one of the reasons that they remember the genocide so well is the propaganda campaign carried out by the Serbian government to remind them of it (see Hayden, “Recounting the Dead “). On the other hand, this Serbian propaganda campaign has been helped by the official Croatian position which belittles the genocide; a stance also now taken, probably not coincidentally, by some otherwise serious Croatian intellectuals (see, e.g., Boban, Ljubo, “Jasenovac and the Manipulation of History,” East European Politics and Societies 4, no. 3 [1990]: 580–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar and its discussion in Hayden, Robert M., “Balancing Discussion of Jasenovac and the Manipulation of History,” East European Politics and Societies 6, no. 4 [1992]: 207–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Boban, Ljubo, “Still More Balance on Jasenovac and the Manipulation of History,” East European Politics and Societies 6, no. 4 [1992]: 213–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

10. Whether by calculated design or simply stunning insensitivity to the sensibilities of the Serbs of Croatia, the forms of the flag and coat of arms instituted by the CDU government in June 1990 were very similar to those used by the fascist “Independent State of Croatia” during World War II, under which hundreds of thousands of Serbs were killed. The use of these symbols seemed to confirm the Belgrade media's propaganda campaign that asserted that the new Croatian regime was indeed resurrecting the fascist Croatian state of fifty years earlier, and alienated many Serbs who rejected not only the symbols but the government that would impose them and the independent state it was trying to create. While these designs were modified within a few months, the damage to relations between the new Croatian state and the Serbs of Croatia was already done.

11. See Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1992): 12-14. Of course, the fears of Croatia's Serbs were again heightened by the propaganda of the Serbian government and local Serb officials, which portrayed the actions of the Croatian government in the worst possible light in order to ensure that Serbs would rebel against it (see Hayden, “Recounting the Dead “).

12. The legally binding provisions are those in the operative text (see Jovan Djordjevic, Ustavno pravo [Belgrade: Savremena Administracija, 1982]: 129-30). I cite the dean of Yugoslav constitutional scholars but the point is generally accepted worldwide. Ironically, the heavy use of symbolic preambles in the “self-management” constitutional structures of 1974 was regarded by Yugoslav constitutional lawyers as one of the major weaknesses of those documents. Evidence of the potency of the symbolic preambles in Yugoslav constitutionalism is that the renowned “right to secession” in the 1974 Constitution was contained only in the “Introductory Part” but was treated as if it were one of the operative articles.

13. In the analysis that follows I make no reference to the Constitution of Montenegro for several reasons. First, since the “anti-bureaucratic revolution” of 1988 in which Slobodan Milosevic's supporters gained control over Montenegro, that republic has been so dominated by Serbia as to have almost no political identity of its own. Perhaps for this reason the Montenegrin Constitution was not amended between 1989 and November 1992; and the new text is not available to me as this article goes to press. But in any event, the political subordination of Montenegro renders its constitutional arrangements least interesting of all those in the Yugoslav republics.

14. See Robert M. Hayden, “The Beginning of the End of Federal Yugoslavia: The Slovenian Amendment Crisis of 1989,” Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1001 (Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 1992).

15. Vojin Dimitrijevic, “Ethnonationalism and the Constitutions: The Apotheosis of the Nation-State,” paper presented at the conference on “Issues of Identity in Contemporary ‘Yugoslavia, '” University of Kent at Canterbury, 20-23 August 1992, 3-4.

16. Borba, 17 October 1990, 4.

17. Cavoski, Kosta, Slobodan protiv slobode (Belgrade: Dosije, 1991): 107–10Google Scholar; and Nikolic, Pavle, “Institucija Predsednika Republike i promasaji i nedorecenosti Ustava Republike Srbije od 1990,” Arhiv za pravne i drustvene nauke 77 (April-September 1991): 287–95Google Scholar. Of course, in an important sense, this indicates that Serbia, unlike the other republics discussed, is almost not a constitutional state at all since a constitutional dictatorship is a contradiction in terms.

18. Jovic, Borisav, Datum za historiju: 28. mart 1989 (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1989 Google Scholar).

19. Vladimir Goad, “Politicki zivot Bosne i Hercegovine 1989-1992,” in Srdjan Bogosavlevic, Vladimir Goati, Zdravko Grebo, Jasminka Hasenbegovic, Dusan Janjic, Branislava Jojic and Paul Shoup, Bosna i Hercegovina izmedju rata i mira (Beograd and Sarajevo: Forum za etnicke odnose, 1992): 48-49.

20. The political developments in Bosnia and Herzegovina are best analyzed in the various contributions to Bosna i Hercegovina izmedju rata i mira.

21. International Conference on Former Yugoslavia, document STC/2/2, 27 October 1992. References to this document in this article are to a typescript version provided by the Geneva offices of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia.

22. Ibid., 7. The first two parties to which reference is made are the Serbs and Croats, the third the Muslims.

23. Ibid., 6.

24. The “Proposed Constitutional Structure for Bosnia and Herzegovina” does show many similarities to the “Theses for a Model Constitution of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina” put forth by Zdravko Grebo and Branislava Jojic ( “Teze za Model Ustava Republike Bosne i Hercegovine,” in Bogosarljevic et al., Bosna i Hercegovina izmedju rata i mira, 134-49). Significantly, these authors were completely outside of the nationalist parties that could not agree on any constitutional structure and thus drove Bosnia and Herzegovina into civil war.

25. See Hayden, “The Beginning of the End of Federal Yugoslavia. “

26. This incompatibility is explored in Namier, Lewis, The Revolution of the Intellectuals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [orig. 1946]), 24-27.Google Scholar

27. My citation of Tudjman should not be taken to imply that I am focusing only on Croatian nationalism or on him as a politician. To the contrary, Tudjman is cited because as a historian he has provided a body of works that explore these issues, making explicit the concepts that seem implicitly to drive other Yugoslav politicians as well as his own actions. Of course, the fact that in 1990 he made the transition from dissident nationalist intellectual to popularly elected nationalist President of Croatia, and was re-elected in 1992, gives his ideas on nationalism special credence as formal expressions of sentiments shared more widely.

28. Franjo Tudjman, Nationalism in Contemporary Europe (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1981), 13.

29. For American anthropologists, Tudjman's formulation of “blood, linguistic and cultural kinship” sounds suspiciously familiar to Franz Boas's famous title, Race, Language and Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1940). Boas's work was aimed at refuting commonly held views that race, language and culture are related mechanically and that they can be ranked hierarchically, and cultural relativism has been the dominant presupposition of the field since then. The tenets of each Yugoslav nationalist ideology run precisely counter to this presupposition and examining them forces American anthropologists (and perhaps other intellectuals) into the frustrating and deeply disturbing position of trying to put stakes into the hearts of conceptual vampires which we had thought (or perhaps hoped) were destroyed long ago.

30. See Vreme, 11 March 1991: 30-33.

31. Borba, 30 September 1991: 11.

32. Tudjman, Nationalism in Contemporary Europe, 289.

33. Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 10.Google Scholar While the point cannot be pursued here, the history of “ethnology” in eastern Europe points to the close links between this “science” of national customs and the political need to define the true essence of the nations supporting the ethnographic establishments (.see Hammel, Eugene and Halpern, Joel, “Observations on the Intellectual History of Ethnology and Other Social Sciences in Yugoslavia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 11 [1969]: 17–26 Google Scholar).

34. In one of the many ironies of post-1989 Yugoslavia, many social democrats remain in opposition to the new rulers of the various republics. The phrase quoted, which would be heretical in official circles in Slovenia, was printed in the newspaper of the Democratic Party in Serbia, a party itself in opposition. At the same time, we should note that the number of “dissidents” in the former Yugoslavia has declined dramatically even as civil liberties have been restricted drastically by authoritarian nationalist regimes. Apparently one can be a “dissident” only against communism. A critic of a nationalist regime is, instead, a traitor.

35. Mile Setinc, “Da li je gradjanski rat u Sloveniji zavrsen?” Demokratija (Beograd) 1(10-11; 3 August 1990): 17.

36. Samardzic, Slobodan, Jugoslavia pred iskusenjem federalizma (Beograd: Strucna Knjiga, 1990).Google Scholar

37. See Szporluk, Roman, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx Versus Friedrich List (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 Google Scholar. With this in mind, anthropologists might see Yugoslav self-management federalism as fitting Levi-Strauss's definition of myth since it sought to bridge categories that cannot, in fact, be joined.

38. Samardzic, Jugoslavia pred iskusenjem federalizma, 31.

39. Gellner, Ernest, “The Dramatis Personae of History,” East European Politics and Societies 4, no. 1 (1990): 116–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. See Dumont, Louis, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977 Google Scholar; Hirschman, Albert O., The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.Google Scholar

41. Unfortunately, I have not been able to obtain drafts or texts of actually enacted citizenship laws and am thus forced to rely mainly on accounts from the news media for information in this section, along with Vojin Dimitrijevic's exceptionally helpful paper on “Ethnonationalism and the Constitutions: The Apotheosis of the Nation State.” Since the laws are in process, however, and in any event may be implemented in ways at variance with what officials say about them, these accounts are extremely useful. Connoisseurs of the Yugoslav press since 1990 will note that my sources are the independent Belgrade papers Borba and Vreme, easily the most reliable of the press media in what used to be Yugoslavia (see Robert M. Hayden, “Yugoslavia: Politics and the Media,” REE Report on Eastern Europe, 6 December 1991).

42. Similar citizenship laws have been or are being enacted in the Baltic republics, however: see New York Times (7 September 1991: 1) on Latvia; New York Times (10 August 1992: A6) on Estonia; and New York Times (22 November 1992: 1) on all three Balticrepublics. In the Estonian election on 20 September 1992, 40% of the country's inhabitants could not vote because they were of the wrong ethno-national background ﹛The Economist, 26 September 1992: 18, 55).

43. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991).Google Scholar

44. Borba, 2 November 1991: 9.

45. Dimitrijevic, “Ethnonationalism and the Constitutions,” 5.

46. Vreme, 3 August 1992: 17.

47. Dimitrijevic, “Ethnonationalism and the Constitutions,” 4-5.

48. Vreme, 3 August 1992: 16-17.

49. See Robert M. Hayden, “Yugoslavia: From Civil Society to Civil War,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, 21 November 1991.

50. Hayden, “Yugoslavia: Politics and the Media. “

51. Vreme, 10 August 1992. The first meeting of the new, government-appointed Council of Belgrade University was described by onceandpresent dissident Professor Zagorka Golubovic as a manifestation of the government's “preparedness to violate all rules of democratic procedure in order to forcibly impose its will on the university and extinguish its autonomy.” On the other hand, once-dissident Professor Mihailo Markovic, now Vice President of the ruling Socialist Party of Serbia, was quite satisfied with the session (both professors’ comments are in Borba, 20 November 1992: 9).

52. This “right,” which is enshrined in a number of international legal documents, is expressly limited by those same documents: the right to self-determination cannot be used to deprive minority populations of their own cultural, linguistic or other rights (see, e.g. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 99 U.N.T.S. 171, 6 I.L.M. 368 [1967], arts. 26 and 27). The basic concept of political sovereignty, however, means that these limitations cannot be enforced, a failing to which the Kurds provide excellent testimony. The term itself seems to have been misappropriated: one can hardly imagine that Woodrow Wilson envisioned self-determination as achieved by ethnic cleansing, either military or bureaucratic.

53. Tambiah, Stanley, Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986 Google Scholar.

54. Donald L. Horowitz, “A Harvest of Hostility: Ethnic Conflict and Self-Determination after the Cold War,” revised version (14 August 1992) of paper presented at the Defense Intelligence College Conference, “Ethnic Conflict: Challenge to U.S. Security?” Washington, DC, 23 June 1992.

55. Louis Dumont, “Are Cultures Living Beings? German Ideology in Interaction,” Man (n.s.) 21 (1986): 587-604.

56. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 170-78:

57. The vestiges of such non-territorial personal jurisdiction may be seen in the western world in the continued existence of ecclesiastical courts.

58. Tudjman, Franjo, Bespuca povijesne zbiljnosti (Zagreb: Nakladni Zavod Matice Hrvatske, 1990), 166.Google Scholar

59. Tudjman, Nationalism in Contemporary Europe, 289.

60. Louis Dumont, “The Totalitarian Disease,” in Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

61. Ibid., 150-51.

62. Rothschild, Joseph, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 134.Google Scholar

63. See, e.g., Ackerman, Bruce, The Future of Liberal Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992 Google Scholar. To his credit, Ackerman recognizes the threat to liberalism posed by religious fundamentalism and chauvinistic nationalism. However, he fails to see that constitutionalism itself can be antidemocratic. Thus his only reference to Yugoslavia in a book on the potential “constitutional window” in Eastern Europe is in a footnote, saying that “given the terrible war raging there now, it is premature to consider the extent to which these constitutions will contribute to a lasting peace and a legitimate order in the region” (ibid., 133 n. 19). It is more accurate to say that the republican constitutions that were passed in 1990 contributed to the civil war that broke out in 1991.

64. 18 May 1992: 1.