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Fall of the Berlin Wall - ex-Yugoslavia
A republic disintegrated while the world focused elsewhere
by Sarah Elzas
Article published on the 2009-11-01 Latest update 2009-11-02 10:57 TU
Bosnian Muslim Suhra Malic prays at the Memorial Centre in Potocari after the Bosnian war
(Photo: Reuters)
In Yugoslavia, no one realised the significance of the fall of the Wall at the time, according to people who lived through the events. But soon the country had ceased to exist, and its peoples were plunged into war.
On 9 November 1989, Goran Svilanovic was 26 years old, living in Belgrade, in the Yugoslav republic of Serbia. That day, he found out about the fall of the Berlin Wall just like everyone else.
It had little immediate impact on him and those around him, he says.
“No one realised the importance of it at the time,” he says. “We didn’t have the sense of living behind an iron curtain.”
Marshall Josep Broz Tito in the 1940s
(Photo: Former Yugoslavian Armed Forces)
The fall of the Wall had less immediate impact on Yugoslavia than on the rest of eastern Europe, he says.
“Yugoslavia did not belong politically to eastern Europe,” he explains. “It was not behind the Iron Curtain. It was a country from which you could travel freely. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Yugoslav passport was one of the most sought-after because we could travel basically around the world without visas.”
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was founded after World War II, bringing together six republics under a federal government. Its leadership had fallen out with the leaders of the Soviet Union and it positioned itself between the two poles of the Cold War.
“Yugoslavia, actually, when we look back on it, was held together by its position between east and west and by the bipolar division in Europe,” explains Judy Batt, professor of central and south-east European politics at the University of Birmingham.
Yugoslavia avoided being taken over by Soviet communism, but at the same time it stayed independent from the US/western orbit.
“Yugoslavia really thrived on this interstitial position,” says Batt.
But by 1989, all was not well.
Josip Broz Tito ran the country as President-for-life until he died in 1980. Through the force of his personality, he kept together a diverse group of republics, with people from different cultures and different economic situations.
He also presided over a country that had become saddled with foreign debt, which by the mid-1980s had become impossible to repay.
“Yugoslavia followed some of the same rhythms as some of the other communist countries in term of the unsustainability of the communist
economic system,” says Batt.
The power vacuum left by Tito’s death meant that the country did not function as a federation any longer, and the fall of the Wall and the end of the Cold War pushed leaders to other ideologies, says Batt.
“When the communists in those republics looked around and thought, ‘Well, how on earth are we going to relegitimate ourselves and hold on to power?’, they turned to the nationalisms of their own republics,” she explains.
“And those nationalisms were historically directed far more against each other than they were against the outside. In Yugoslavia the big
enemies were your neighbours: Serbs and Croats, Bosniaks and Serbs, or Kosovar Albanians versus Serbs."
“Something similar had happened in the ex-Soviet Union, where you have national elites who shrouded themselves in nationalist identity: presenting themselves as defending national interests,” says Rajak.
Analysis: Judy Batt, University of Birmingham
With this background, some see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War as the last step to destabilising Yugoslavia, which disintegrated into bloody civil wars in the 1990s.
“Everyone was fighting just for their own interests for their own republics,” says Batt. “Nobody was interested in fighting to keep Yugoslavia afloat as a multinational state.”
Plus, she says, the world’s eyes were on the Soviet Union, which meant no one realised the gravity of what was happening in Yugoslavia until it was too late.
“Most people in western foreign ministries didn’t pay much attention to Yugoslavia,” says Batt. “As free elections were called, voters went to the polls and voted nationalist.
Slobodan Milosevic, the man who led Yugoslavia as it broke up
"They voted for [Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic, they voted for [Croatian President Franjo] Tuđman, politicians ready to play extreme brinksmanship and ready to push their countries into war".
"In that sort of vacuum of western attention, then a war broke out, and once war breaks out, as we all know, the whole game changes and becomes vastly more complicated and difficult to deal with.”
Svetozar Rajak is not sure the collapse of Yugoslavia was inevitable.
“I personally am one of those who does not believe that the collapse of Yugoslavia was absolutely in the cards,” he says, adding that what was needed was strong guidance from the rest of Europe to lead Yugoslavia to a peaceful resolution.
“By the end of the Cold War what the world needed were visionaries: statesmen who could look 30-40 years ahead,” he says.
“The world, as a whole - and Yugoslavia as a small part of it - had a chance to create a world that would be more fitting to people of the world. Whether we have done it or not is another question.”
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