Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia

By Bogdan Denis Denitch

Book Overview

If your neighbor cannot sleep, you will not be allowed to either: The old adage assumes an overtone of dread as the stirring, wary world witnesses the destruction of Yugoslavia. If the leaders of Serbia and Croatia can get away with tearing apart Bosnia-Herzegovina, a sovereign member of the United Nations, what is to stop military elites in other former Soviet and East European states from proposing similar solutions to their own national grievances and aspirations? And who is to say such attention would be confined to that area of the globe?

The world may well be uneasy, as Bogdan Denitch makes clear in this brilliant book about the causes and possible ramifications of the death of Yugoslavia. Ethnic Nationalism provides a cogent, comprehensive historical analysis of Yugoslavia's demise, one that clearly identifies events and trends that urgently demand the world's attention.

The role of timing in the sequence of events; the consequences of an unworkable constitutional situation; the responsibility of the West; and, above all, the self-transformation of Communist regimes that presaged undemocratic outcomes- Denitch duly considers each of these factors as he gives a detailed description of Yugoslavia's descent into interethnic wars. His discussion of the possible fate of postcommunist states is especially pertinent, and leads to a skillful account of the sources and dangers of nationalistic and ethnic extremism on what threatens to become a global scale. In this analysis, nationalism and populism can be seen as revolts against a new world system where abstract multinational financial and political institutions thwart citizens' attempts at democratic participation.

Active in Yugoslav political and intellectual life for almost thirty years, Denitch is able to imbue the developments he describes with a particular, human immediacy. His personal experiences with the emergence of nationalism and fractious ethnic politics and warfare, movingly recounted here, stand as compelling testimony to the historical drama so thoroughly and incisively detailed in this remarkable book.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816629471
• ISBN13: 9780816629473
• Release Date: August 1996
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Passionate, usparing

Despite its title, Denitch's analysis of the Yugoslav collapse is not so much a study of ethnic nationalism as such as it is a thorough, passionate and often personal look into the causes and consequences of Yugoslavia's break-up. Since he was a citizen of Yugoslavia, and also actively involved to some extent in the political events of the early 1990s, Denitch generally discards with the customary cold, academic aloofness and feigned impartiality and tells the reader squarely where he stands on issues such as nationalism, the war in Yugoslavia, the events that led to the country's destruction, etc. This makes the text all the more interesting, as he offers very fascinating, if not sometimes controversial, views and insights into recent Yugoslav history and the ethic politics which hold sway in the Yugoslav successor states. His analysis of Yugoslavia's failure to progress into a pluralist democracy, despite being THE European socialist state most likely to do so in the late 1980s, is very interesting: he notes that the fatal flaw made by Tito and the ruling communists was to decentralize the country's decision-making processes rather than democratizing its political scene. His opinion of nationalism is, needless to say, very disparaging, and his intent in this book is to warn that ethnic nationalism and identity politics in today's world are an enemy to democracy everywhere, not just in the former Yugoslavia or the formerly communist Eastern Europe, but throughout the world, including the developed, allegedly rational and post-nationalist West. Regardless of what one thinks of Denitch's standpoint, this is definitely an important book to read for a better understanding of Yugoslavia's break-up and the problems that still plague the region today.