CIVILNO DRUŠTVO, RASPAD JUGOSLAVIJE I BUDUĆNOST JUGOISTOČNE EUROPE
CIVIL SOCIETY, DISSOLUTION OF YUGOSLAVIA AND THE FUTURE OF SOUTHEAST EUROPE

Author(s): Lino Veljak
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Civil Society, Governance, Transformation Period (1990 - 2010), Post-Communist Transformation, EU-Approach / EU-Accession / EU-Development
Published by: CEDET Centar za demokratsku tranziciju
Keywords: civil society; the breakup of Yugoslavia; war violence; synthesis of nationalism and conservative Bolshevism; the metaphysics of the nation; political culture; potentials of change
Summary/Abstract: In the paper, the thesis about the chronic deficit of civil society in the territory of the former Yugoslavia in relation to Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, as well as the thesis about the underdevelopment of civil society as the cause of the country's disintegration, is disputed. It refers to the different levels of development of the embryos of civil society in Yugoslavia before its disintegration, the highest level was in Slovenia, while in Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina almost no traces of civil society can be found. The former Yugoslavia was characterized by the authoritarian character of the rule of the communist nomenclature, but also by elements of autonomy in certain spheres of social life. A socially and politically relevant civil society could not be born from that autonomy due to the dominance of various forms of the metaphysics of the nation (and nationalism in general, i.e. ethnocentrism) in the autonomous spheres of social life (literature, art, science, culture, partially the economy), but they were one of the generators of the negative synthesis of traditional nationalism and conservative Bolshevism. That synthesis (symbolized primarily by Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and Franjo Tuđman in Croatia) arose as a response to the need to reconstruct the melted legitimacy. The importance of geostrategic factors in the lack of support for reforms before the breakup of Yugoslavia is also pointed out, and the responsibility of the international community for the bloody scenario of that breakup is questioned. The violent character of the country's disintegration is explained primarily by the combination of the reconstruction of the lost legitimacy of the ruling elites with an underdeveloped democratic political culture and the absence of a relevant civil society. Civil society took shape in Croatia, similarly to Serbia, only in the resistance to the war and the authoritarian regime, but it did not play a decisive role in its destruction. In conclusion, the potentials of civil society are questioned in terms of the necessary break with the ballast of the past, which are limited both by the recorded corruption of segments of civil society, and by the temptations of self-sufficient moralism.

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