East European Ethnic Conflicts
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The ongoing problem in Bosnia is one that will have to be addressed by the international community, and American officials responsible for developing our policy toward Bosnia need to understand the dynamics of the issue, its history, and the consequences of their actions or their inaction. Nationalism is apparent once more in the open fighting taking place in the various sectors of what was formerly Yugoslavia. The ethnic tensions and hatreds have emerged full-blown once more and have produced bitter and vicious fighting among the different ethnic factions. The Communist era never solved the ethnic problem. It only submerged it for a time under the weight of centralized control and central planning. The tensions always existed and continued to grow as each segment saw some other segment receiving what was perceived as favorable treatment or greater power. The social integration favored by Tito was no more than an illusion in Yugoslavia. The first step toward the beginning of the war in Bosnia could be foreseen before fighting actually began: The level of ethnic violence, which has been escalating relentlessly for several years, has now pushed Yugoslavia to the brink of civil war (Burg, 1991, 5). Burg found that all East European countries faced certain common problems, but the multinational states have faced all these problems at the same time. Yugoslavia is thus not an isolated case but is only the worst case at present. The irony is that nationalism was one o
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to political control, and this combined with a tendency on the part of regional leaderships to pursue development strategies to limit the emergence of independent, cross-regional economic interests. By the mid-1980s, the result was the emergence of a highly decentralized federation, with strong tendencies toward confederalization. This system had the effect of institutionalizing ethnic identity as the basis of political legitimation in Yugoslavia while at the same time weakening the bases of regional integration. When a prolonged economic crisis set in during the 1980s, the bonds between the regions were weakened even further. By 1989, continued regional integration was dependent on the common interest of regional groups for the preservation of a common Yugoslav order:
Complete dissociation of the regions, and perhaps their democratization, might have been relatively easy to achieve under such conditions had it not been for the still-imperfect correspondence between regional boundaries and the patterns of ethnic settlement (Burg, 1991, 7).
A fourth step in the development of conditions for war is seen in the fact that most of the national groups in Yugoslavia were settled in patterns that cut across regional boundaries. T
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Communist Party, Kosovo Vojvodina, Yugoslav Complete, , East European, European Burg, Yugoslavia Serbs, Serbs Serbs, Washington Quarterly, Communists Yugoslavia, burg 1991, east european, dragnich 1989, communist party, ramet 1984, burg 1991 5, ethnic violence, conditions war, leading war, regional boundaries, regional integration, burg 1991 7,
Approximate Word count = 1517
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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