History, After Tito

Tito’s death in May 1980 coincided with a deepening economic crisis. Mistaken economic policies and reforms of the system in previous years and excessive borrowing were aggravated by global economic conditions at the end of the 1970s. Tito’s collective successors were a mediocre lot who had to operate by consensus but were guided by the conflicting economic interests and priorities of their republics. Thus, they proved incapable of agreeing on countrywide remedies that the largely autonomous republics would be willing to implement. By 1985 production and living standards had plunged. Old ethnic grievances and conflicts resurfaced and intensified, aggravated by politicians who preferred to blame other Yugoslav republics rather than admit their own incompetence.

In these circumstances, acceptance of Tito’s Yugoslavia declined everywhere, but especially in Slovenia and Croatia, which were long accustomed to blaming "exploitation" by the less-developed south for their own economic problems. In 1988 Slobodan Milosevic, the president of the Serbian party and after 1989 also president of Serbia, began an aggressive campaign to reassert Serb and Communist hegemony over a recentralized Yugoslavia. His campaign made the non-Serbs anxious and uneasy. In 1988 and 1989 he engineered the ouster of Vojvodina’s and Montenegro’s party and state leaderships, stripped Kosovo and Vojvodina of their autonomy, and stepped up repression of Kosovo’s Albanian majority, who had been in a state of simmering rebellion since 1981. His actions led to fears of "yesterday Kosovo, tomorrow us" in the other republics.

The LCY finally disintegrated in January 1990. Later that year, parties with nationalist programs won multiparty elections in each Yugoslav republic. The survival of Yugoslavia became increasingly doubtful.

Frantic negotiations among the post-Communist republic leaders from December 1990 to June 1991 failed to produce a new formula to preserve some kind of Yugoslavia. In a referendum held in December 1990 the Slovenes voted for independence. With the federal government and constitution already ignored, Serb-organized crises served to immobilize and virtually extinguish the federation’s linchpin, its eight-member collective presidency. In May 1991 the Serbian, Kosovar, and Vojvodinian members blocked the routine transfer of the presidency’s chair to the Croatian representative. Four days later a majority of Croats, like the Slovenes, voted in a referendum for secession. Both Croatia and Slovenia declared independence on June 25, 1991.

The Yugoslav army made a feeble and unsuccessful ten-day attempt to stop Slovenia’s secession. Meanwhile, in Croatia a war immediately erupted, pitting Croatian Serb militias backed by the Yugoslav army against hastily armed Croatian forces. The war lasted until December 1991. A United Nations envoy negotiated an enduring cease-fire, leaving nearly one-third of Croatia under Serb control in a self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina until 1995.

In July 1991 the European Community (EC; now the European Union, or EU) tried to hold Yugoslavia together but succeeded only in delaying the formal implementation of the secession of Slovenia and Croatia. An EC commission declared Yugoslavia to be “in process of dissolution” and invited its republics to apply for recognition as independent states, subject to protection of minority rights and other conditions. In January 1992 the EC recognized Slovenia and Croatia.

Macedonia and Bosnia both had large majorities unwilling to stay in a Serb-dominated rump Yugoslavia. Those republics reluctantly also took the road to independence and applied for EC recognition by the end of 1991. In the spring of 1992, Yugoslav Macedonia’s president Kiro Gligorov negotiated the peaceful withdrawal of the Yugoslav army, making that republic the only Yugoslav successor state to achieve independence without war. Bosnia was not so lucky. A civil war erupted in Bosnia in April 1992, the same week that the United States and the EC recognized the new state. This vicious three-way conflict among ethnic Serbs, ethnic Croats, and Bosnian Muslims was marked by “ethnic cleansing” and human and material losses that shocked the world. The Bosnian war lasted until U.S. diplomats and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops imposed an uneasy peace in late 1995.

On April 27, 1992, Serbia and Montenegro declared themselves the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), thus tacitly acknowledging the independence of the four breakaway republics. The international community recognized the independence of the breakaway republics (except Yugoslav Macedonia, as a result of a dispute with Greece over its name and other issues) by mid-1992. However, international organizations refused to recognize FRY as the legal successor to the former Yugoslavia.