CIVIL SOCIETY, THE DISSOLUTION OF YUGOSLAVIA AND THE FUTURE OF SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE
CIVIL SOCIETY, THE DISSOLUTION OF YUGOSLAVIA AND THE FUTURE OF SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE

Author(s): Lino Veljak
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Politics, Political Sciences, Civil Society, Governance, Wars in Jugoslavia
Published by: CEDET Centar za demokratsku tranziciju
Keywords: civil society; breakup of Yugoslavia; war violence; synthesis of nationalism and conservative bolshevism; metaphysics ofthe na­ tion; political culture; potentials for change
Summary/Abstract: The introductory part of the paper refutes the thesis on the chronic deficit of civil society in former Yugoslavia as compared to Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, as well as the thesis on the underdeveloped civil society as the cause for the dissolution ol the country. It also takes into consideration different levels of development of civil society rudiments in Yugoslavia before it disintegrated, the highest level being in Slovenia, whilst in Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina traces of civil society are nearly impossible to find. The former Yugoslavia was characterized by the authoritarian rule of the communist nomen­ clature but also by elements of autonomy of certain spheres of social life. Such autonomy could not generate a socially and politically relevant civil society due to the domination of various forms of metaphysics of nation (and of nationalism in general, i.e. ethnocentrism) in the autonomous spheres of social life (literature, art, science, culture, partially economy), but they were one of the generators of the negative synthesis between traditional nationalism and conservative bolshe­vism. This synthesis (symbolized primarily by Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and by Franjo Tuđman in Croatia) came about as an answer to the necessity to reconstruct a dwindling legitimacy. The paper also points out the importance of geostrategic factors in the failure to support the reforms in the period immediately before the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and also questions the responsibility of the international community for the bloody scenario that marked the dissolution. The violent nature of the country's dissolution is explained primarily as a combination of the reconstruction of lost legitimacy of the ruling elites with the underdeve­loped democratic political culture and the lack of a relevant civil society. The civil society took shape in Croatia, just as it did in Serbia, in the resistance to war and the authoritarian regime, but it had not played a decisive role in the downfall of the regime. In conclusion, the potentials of civil society in the break-up with the burden of the past are questioned, in view of the limits set by both the evidently corruptive segments of civil society, and the temptations of self-satisfied moralism.

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