Academic literature on the topic 'Former Yugoslav republics – Ethnic relations – Political aspects'

This article examines whether devolving responsibility for the provision of public services such as education in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia can satisfy the demands of non-majority groups for greater autonomy over their own affairs. How education systems are designed and delivered is of particular importance to minority ethnic communities since education is crucial for reproducing (and re-creating) the identity of a group. Without the transmission of the aspects of their identity through education, non-majority cultures may disappear. The review begins with the principal arguments in favour of and against devolving responsibility for the provision of education to local communities. An assessment of the Macedonian education system prior to decentralisation follows, accompanied by a discussion of the decentralisation reforms introduced in 2005. Three key theoretical arguments will then be considered within the Macedonian context: (a) whether decentralisation facilitates the provision of heterogeneous local public services; (b) decentralisation’s ability to enhance participation and transparency in decision-making regarding the delivery of services; and (c) whether decentralisation ensures a more equitable and transparent distribution of public resources. The article argues that the decentralisation of primary and secondary education to the municipal level in Macedonia has enabled local communities to more effectively meet the diverse needs of citizens. Persistent challenges, unless adequately addressed, may however undermine the benefits of reform in the longer term.

Recognition of regional features, outlining of the contours of regions, tendency to regionalize ethnic, economic, cultural and state-administrative space, and strengthening the ideology of regionalism in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that is Serbia and Montenegro, appear as a practical and political but also as a theoretical problem which includes and combines several scientific disciplines. The phenomenon of regionalism is not contradictory although it is primarily expressed through the numerous conflicts of interests rivalry and antagonisms of political subjects. The problematic side of the phenomenon of regionalism includes the result of an extremely negative and existentially tragic experience of the several years-long disintegration of the complex Yugoslav state. During the partition and disintegration of the second Yugoslavia, there also happened the disintegration of the Serbian ethnic area Growth, support and instigation of regional tendencies occurred in the historical circumstances of secession and did not stop in the post-secession period. Particularization and segmentation of political area, as well as the disintegration of the former state, did not occur in accordance with the norms of internal and international law. Legality was late and was achieved within the transformation of power reflected in the changed territorial policy of the dominant alliance of great powers. The entire past decade was characterized by an extraordinary metamorphosis of political space. Secession trend had the territorial features which included the change of borders and had been long in the focus of the global geopolitical attention. Territories were divided and made smaller. Intensive territorial dynamics within the external silhouette of the de-stated SFR of Yugoslavia resulted in the creation of several state and quasi-state political formations. Former republics became semi-sovereign states. Dispersed and displaced Serbian ethnos was configured in the three territories: in the Republic of Serbia - from which Kosovo and Metohia were amputated and placed under the UN protectorate - in the entire Republic of Montenegro and in the Republic Srpska, located in one part of the former Bosnia and Herzegovina. Demopolitical result of the geopolitical destruction of the Serbian ethnos was a great movement of the Serbian population from the west to the east, and its concentration in the territory of the Republic of Serbia this implied that the Serbs were expelled from their millennia-long abodes in Croatia, parts of Bosnia and from Kosmet. The geo-economic result of the same process was the devastation of the national economic strength west of the Drina and in the southern province. Economic regression occurred also in the national parent-land state. Balkan re-arrangement of the spheres of interest in the post-bipolar period was in 1995. fixed by the interest arrangement of the great powers known under the name Dayton Peace Agreement. Redistribution of the territories from the destroyed state occurred in the post-communist period with the expansion of west-civilization structures to the European east Westernization of the eastern part of Europe, or entire Europe as the other pole of the global West, could be characterized as a dual mega-regionality. Namely, the west is composed of Europe and America; on the other side, there is the global East or its hybrid variation Eurasia. With the disappearance of their common state and its framework, south Slavs found themselves in the seemingly independent, and actually client states. Western delimitation of the south Slavic area moved from the Yugoslav borders towards a wider Balkan demarcation. One could say that the revitalized notion of the Balkans became a new, in many aspects obligatory framework for regional thinking. The Balkan macroregion is further determined by the intentions to expand the European Union. One of the Euro-centric concepts, which is being experimentally employed precisely in the Balkans, is the establishment of the so-called Europe of regions in the peripheral areas. On the other hand, even though the process of the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation appears to be irreversible, the superordinate Euro-American factor does not give up the possibility of the mezzo-regional initiatives, cooperations, associations and integrations. This "middle" level of dealing with the specificities of the Yugoslav region is related to the states and nations from the former Yugoslavia, or the so-called West Balkans. Naturally, it is not the tendency to revive the silhouette of the previous state, but certainly there is a noticeable intention to achieve a regional linking of the related, now semi-sovereign territories which sometimes belonged to the same state framework. The fourth level deals with microregionalism, that is the relation between the different areas in the newly-created states. It is interesting that the regionalist discourse is mostly cherished exactly in the ethno-heterogeneous Serbian area, although other Yugoslav states also have or had regional tradition and mixed population, like, for example, Slovenia and Croatia Nevertheless, these former Yugo-republics are structured as mono-national states, so the regional policy and ideology of regionalism are still not in the first plane. Regionalism within the newly-formed states could be supplemented with the micron level implying specific sub-regionalism of the highest degree, within the larger regions in the same state. This could be illustrated with Backa, Banat and Srem inside Vojvodina, understood as the northern Serbian region, or Kosovo and Metohia in the south of Serbia, in the province with the same name. In the part of Serbia outside the provinces, similar things could be said for Belgrade with its surroundings, Macva, Podrinje, Sumadija, Raska District etc. Thus, when it comes to the present FR of Yugoslavia, all five levels of regional dynamics have a principled, but insufficiently studied significance. Mega-regional level is related to the mark denoting the global belonging to the West. Macroregional level deals with the European loyalty, that is inclusion of the FR of Yugoslavia into the continental European trends. This trans-continental and continental direction of inclusion implies a historical teleology of the relative eastern belonging to the absolute West, that is Euro-America, and the entrance into the full structure of the European Union. All the mentioned problems of recognition and characterization of the regional phenomenology in the political topography of the world are motivated by the tendency to achieve as clear as possible spatial-temporal national and state orientation The direction is related to the so-called safety dilemma of the nation and the country faced with the change of size and essence of one's own state, with the different geopolitical position and redefined foreign-policy priorities. It is also the case of the changed alliance policy, and the innovated strategy of integration into the old and new global and regional political structures. On the basis of the indicated components of geopolitical context, one could say that the phenomenon of regions and their cognate correlates {regionally regionalization and regionalism) should not be understood exclusively through the legal categories of international law and the so-called constitutional solutions, that is administrative division of the state territory. Actually in the analysis of regions and regionalism in Serbia and the FR of Yugoslavia it is necessary first to discuss the pre-normative or meta-le-gal factors in the creation of the regional issue within the national and state issue, which have the form of the unsolved political problem. Meta-legality is located within the domain of the international relations and geopolitic. Meta-legal or pre-normative factors of the formation or recognition of regions and regionalisms deal with the possibility of the political constitution of the Serbian, that is Serbian / Montenegrin (still Yugoslav) society. Since the unique state area was destroyed in the four-year secession wars and there occurred significant demopolitical changes, war migrations, forceful displacements and expulsion of the population - the ethnic character of many areas was also drastically changed. At the same time, the post-secession existence of the FR of Yugoslavia could be also viewed through the optics of the state residuum. The remaining Serbia or Serbia (temporarily) without Kosovo is certainly not an equivalent for the Serbian ethnic space, nor for the entire Serbian lands. It is not even the FR of Yugoslavia, as a dual con federation of the Serbian / Montenegrin nation. Geopolitical reduction of the SFR of Yugoslavia to a residual creation of the FR of Yugoslavia was not deduced from the legality sui generis, but resulted from a conflict, the defeat of integralism and the victory of separatism, as well as from a new triumphal configuration of power. The impulse implying the statism of the collective rights from the former complex federal necessarily-multinational level was transferred to a lower mononational level. Therefore, the regionalist ideology in the post-secession reality of the residual state almost inevitably, as a tendency, nears the separatory particularism. Even the lost national state and the state entirety are openly denied within the requests for the territorization of the collective rights of various minorities. Naturally these requests do not carry the primary features of the development of democracy. On the contrary, in the majority of cases this implies the rise of parish and tribal consciousness prone to narrow-minded separation. Thus the post-secession requests for the regionalization are often just a slight rhetorical mask for real separatism. For example, they are expressed through the pseudo-national separation of Vojvodina from Serbia, as well as Montenegro from Serbia, or through the establishment of state-like entities in the territorial tissue of Serbia Alleged arguments are found in the unfinished disintegration of the SFR of Yugoslavia on the one hand, and in the prevention of the creation of the so-called Greater Serbia, even within the diminished Serbia That way, even in the post-secession, reduced Serbia one could easily recognize the tendencies of federalization and confederalization, even the amputation of its remaining state space. Additional arguments for the crawling secession and prolonged territorial destruction are found in the ideology of globalization and world trends of relativizing territorial integrity and state sovereignty. On the other hand, the idea about the principled insignificance of borders in Europe without borders, as well as Europe of regions, is emphasized. Thus, it is obvious that the new state and regional delimitations and demarcations are in contradiction with the vision of the trans-statal and trans-national integrity of the European continent. In Serbia itself, me problem of the restructuring of regions is determined by the inherited and unchanged triple division of its territory into the central part and two autonomous provinces in the north and south. Thus every idea for regionalization (expert, party, leader's, NGO and the like) faces the inherited, too narrow constitutional framework and easily slides to the federalization or confederalization of the Republic, and in extreme cases to the independence and sovereignty of ethnic, religious, linguistic and other minorities. Roughly put, the tendencies for territorial separation from the Republic of Serbia still exist in several neuralgic and unstable areas or regions. In Vojvodina, the presented tendencies have the character of a meaningless internal - Serbian autonomy, autonomism, latent separatism. Authentic Serbian autonomy lost its original character long ago and deteriorated into an internal national re-statism. On the other hand, in the furthest south of Serbia, in Kosmet, the UN protectorate is established, but the region is actually occupied and thus the status of the Province is "frozen". In the three municipalities in the south of Serbia, with the relative Albanian majority, Albanian separatism smolders within the platform of the so-called east Kosovo. In the Raska region (Sandzak) there are also strong tendencies for separateness on the religious-ecclesiastical, so-called Bosniac platform, with religious solidarity, and ethnic and territorial unity of all Bosniacs. In the meta-legal or pre-normative situation - which most often denotes political and geopolitical context implying interests, power and force - the inclinations for territorial design are faced with the conflicting ideology of regionalism. Therefore, the constitutional-legal solutions of the former, present and future regions, generated within the self-created legality which does not respect meta-legal, political and geopolitical impulses regardless of how aestheticized and "humanized" they may be - at the end face the practical impossibility of realization.

AbstractThe first part of the article presents different and opposing theoretical approaches and discusses their explanatory value for the disintegration of the SRFY and the following wars in the Balkans, such as primordialism vs. constructivism, liberal vs. ethnic nationalism, accommodation vs. integration, neo-realism vs. liberalism in international relations and structure- vs. action-oriented approaches in sociology. In conclusion, it will be argued that these theoretical dichotomies have to be overcome and that there is a need for complementary research strategies in order to not only 'explain', but also to 'understand' the processes of ethnic mobilization as an actor-driven process of political mobilization by 'ethnic' entrepreneurs in order to create a security dilemma for their own goals in the ongoing fight for political power. The second part of the article then develops a framework for comparative empirical studies with reference to structural settings, the situational context and actors and introduces into the following articles by Mujkic and Harzl discussing, for instance, the structural similarities between communism and nationalism and the dysfunctionality of communism and federalism as historic legacies.

Disintegration of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the creation of new ethno-national states, armed conflicts and "ethnic cleansing", mass ethnocentric migrations of the population, as well as some socio-economic factors led to significant changes in the demographic and ethnic map of Serbia. Migrations of the population, voluntary of forced represent a phenomenon which by its range, intensity and characteristics undoubtedly marked the last decade of the 20th century. Having in mind their number and national structure (mainly Serbs), refugee migrations, as a specific aspect of migration movements, caused by the political and social circumstances, dominantly influenced the change of ethnic picture of Serbia towards homogenization and majorization of the population. In addition to this factor, changes when declaring one's national affiliation, both in the case of ethnic revivalism and ethnic mimicry, significantly determined population dynamics of particular nations, that is their position in the ethnic map of Srbia. Thus the data from the last census in 2002 indicate that - precisely due to the effect of the subjective factor - there appeared the increase in the number and share of some nationalities (the Roma, the Wallachians.), that is the significant decrease in some other (the Yugoslavs, the Montenegrins.) in the total population of Serbia. As a result of the mentioned, but also of many other historical, sociocultural and political factors, Serbia today represents a multiethnic multi-confessional and multicultural state in which - beside the majority nation - there also live numerous national minorities pronouncedly differentiated according to the demographic, socio-economic, religious and cultural characteristics. Therefore, the minority issue is undoubtedly of crucial significance, because good inter-ethnic relations, that is respect of the minority rights on the one hand, but also the loyalty of national minorities to the country in which they live on the other, are necessary for stability, peace and democratic development of every state.

Abstract This paper explores differences in the party system development of two former Yugoslav republics: Slovenia and Montenegro. Despite sharing a communist institutional system, after that disintegrated Slovenia had a much faster pace of democratic consolidation and economic development than Montenegro. Similarly, the nature of the party competition and party system structure are also quite different. Using a quantitative and descriptive approach applied to the period between 1990 and 2018, we outline patterns of party competition and party system development and explore how they complement the stages of democratisation. We investigate how the comparatively faster democratisation in Slovenia is reflected in the competitive party system with a focus on the ideological divide as the chief source of electoral competition. In contrast, we look at how the prolonged transition in Montenegro is reflected in the closed party system with party competition occurring mainly along ethnic lines.

The aim of this article is to analyse the TV series Black Sun/Shadows over the Balkans (Senke nad Balkanom, 2017, Dragan Bjelogrlić), understood as a reflection of the ways in which diverse imperial legacies, persisting differences and contrasting pasts shaped the (ambivalent) post-imperial traumatic history of the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918. The burden of imperial legacy – mostly manifested in ethnic, political, cultural and economic tensions among diverse nations in the new multi-ethnic state – kept brewing under the surface and came to represent a constant threat of balkanization i.e. further fragmentation of the multicultural kingdom. In this article I claim that the same danger of balkanization – traced back to the years after the Great War – continued to haunt all successor states of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (and Yugoslavias ensuing from 1943 until 1992) eventually resulting in the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in 1992. The irreconcilable differences and competing ambitions of different national, social and geopolitical identities define the structure, characters and their relations in the TV narrative, and are also reflected in the cityscape of Belgrade – the capital of the Kingdom and paradigmatic Balkan metropolis – in the late 1920s. The series is read against the theories of Dominique Moisi’s Geopolitics of Emotions (2010) and La géopolitique des séries/Geopolitics of TV Series (2016), and his assertion that TV series have become crucial in understanding our world in its many aspects – from domestic politics to geopolitics. The story of Belgrade between the two World Wars reveals the traumatic imperial legacy as determining the emergence of a ‘culture of fear, hope and humiliation’, tensions of balkanization and search for identity in the city suspended between an Ottoman casaba and a European metropolis. On the other side – in terms of narrative, genre, and visual style – the series itself is seen as the acculturated version of both the novel Der nasse Fisch (Volker Kutscher, 2007) and the TV series Babylon Berlin (2017), illustrating the rise of cultural imperialism in post-imperial times.

Дезинтеграция гигантского по численности населения и территории, полиэтничного и поликонфессионального государства, каким был Советский Союз, изначально не могла пройти безболезненно и без потерь. Национальным политическим элитам бывших советских союзных республик, в целом благодаря выдержке и политической дальновидности, удалось избежать «кровавого развода» по «югославскому сценарию». Однако полностью предотвратить жёсткий конфликт интересов, переросший, к сожалению, в военные столкновения на постсоветском пространстве, не удалось. К Нагорному Карабаху, Приднестровью, Абхазии, Южной Осетии, ставшими «точками напряжения» на территории бывшего Советского Союза ещё в 90-е гг. ХХ в., во втором десятилетии ХХI столетия прибавился Донбасс. В статье предпринята попытка проанализировать мотивы и содержание политико-дипломатических действий России по отношению к развитию грузино-абхазского конфликта в постсоветский период и их последствия для Грузии и Абхазии. Автор вскрывает перипетии внутриполитической борьбы в российской политической элите в 90-е гг. ХХ в. при выработке политики Москвы по отношению к грузино-абхазскому конфликту. Затрагивается острая проблема совместимости принципа территориальной целостности полиэтничного государства с принципом права народов на самоопределение, вплоть до полного отделения. Поддержав Абхазию в конфликте с Грузией, Москва укрепила свой авторитет среди северокавказских народов, но ценой потери добрососедских отношений с Грузией. The disintegration of a large population and territory, multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state, as the Soviet Union was, could not initially go painlessly and without loss. The national political elites of the former Soviet Union republics, in general, thanks to endurance and political foresight, managed to avoid a "bloody divorce" like the "Yugoslav scenario". However, it was not possible to completely prevent a severe conflict of interest, which, unfortunately, grew into military clashes in the post-Soviet space. In the second decade of the 21st century, Donbass was added to Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, which became "points of tension" in the territory of the former Soviet Union back in the 1990s. The paper attempts to analyze the motives and content of Russia's political and diplomatic actions in relation to the development of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict in the post-Soviet period, and their consequences for Georgia and Abkhazia. The author reveals the vicissitudes of internal political struggle in the Russian political elite in the 1990s when developing Moscow's policy towards the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict. The publication raises the urgent problem of the compatibility of the principle of the territorial integrity of a multi-ethnic State with the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination, up to and including full secession. By supporting Abkhazia in the conflict with Georgia, Moscow strengthened its authority among the North Caucasus peoples, but at the cost of losing good-neighborly relations with Georgia.