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Elections that ‘Shook the World’ – Milošević's Election in Yugoslavia 1990
23 Plays6 days ago
Following the collapse of Communism in the Eastern Bloc, our podcast team looks at the changes in the former Yugoslavia, how it separated into its ethnic parts leading eventually to civil war in the 1990s.
Matt Davis interviews Dr. Florian Bieber, the Professor of Southeast European History and Politics at the University of Graz, concerning the changes that were brought about and how they shook the world.
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Transcript
Introduction: Yugoslavia's Historical Context
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Observation Podcast. I'm Matt Davis, the International Elections Correspondent. Today, we have another episode in our series on elections that shook the world. In this episode, we'll be discussing elections that took place in a country that no longer exists, Yugoslavia.
00:00:26
Speaker
Yugoslavia was a country that existed between 1918 and 1992. During the Cold War, it was a communist country, but one that maintained a level of distance from Moscow, remaining outside the Warsaw Pact.
00:00:38
Speaker
and citizens of Yugoslavia had ah modest consumer society and largely unrestricted travel. In 1990, the Yugoslavian Communist Party collapsed, leading to a series of multi-party elections being held.
00:00:51
Speaker
In the years following these elections, there was a series of ethnic-based wars across the former Yugoslav states.
Expert Insight with Professor Florian Bieber
00:00:57
Speaker
To talk through these elections and their impact, I'm here with Professor Florian Bieber, the director of the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz in Austria.
00:01:07
Speaker
Yes, so I'd like to thank you for ah for joining and being able to give us your insight today. Pleasure to be on the podcast. Thanks. course. Thank you very much. So just to get us started, could you explain a bit more about the context of these elections and what led up to them?
00:01:22
Speaker
Yes. I mean, so as as you mentioned, Yugoslavia was a communist country. and It had a certain degree of pluralism. It was quite decentralized. And this is, I think, critical for understanding. It was a federal state with a very weak center. So although you know, it was dictatorship, authoritarian.
00:01:40
Speaker
There was a lot of autonomy in the different republics of Yugoslavia. um There were, of course, no free and fair elections. It was a communist single party rule. The League of Communists dominated, but it was a decentralized political party as well. So it operated quite independently in the different republics of the country.
Economic Crisis and Rise of Milosevic
00:01:57
Speaker
um And the run-up to the elections really was, is to understand that in the decade preceding it, starting in the
00:02:04
Speaker
after the death of the long-term president Tito, um there were a number of crises which really weakened the state. It was an economic crisis, the country had very high debts. There was also a crisis in um southern province Kosovo, which was both a federal unit but also part of Serbia,
00:02:22
Speaker
where many Albanians felt they didn't get the same share of rights as others did in this multinational state. And that triggered a kind of nationalist competition with Albanians demanding more rights and Serbs being reluctant to do so um with a lot of public debate about that, which led to the rise of Slobodan Milosevic, who became ah Serbia's leading political figure by the end of that decade and and president um close to 1990.
00:02:52
Speaker
So he was he rose to power through the non-democratic system of the League of Communists, um but he broke with a lot of taboos within the party. He openly criticized the predominantly Kosovo-Albanian leadership in Kosovo for allegedly not protecting Serbs there.
00:03:10
Speaker
He argued for changing the way the country is organized, moving toward a more centralized structures, at least including the two provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina, more closely to Serbia.
00:03:22
Speaker
And he also instigated mass protests and facilitated them both in Kosovo, in the Serbian province of Vojvodina, and in Montenegro, another republic which had close ties to Serbia, leading to an overthrow of the local leadership there in Montenegro and Vojvodina, which basically meant that um Serbia ah took control of those two regions in Kosovo more through force than through protests and in Montenegro and Vojvodina through these orchestrated protests, which meant that in the Yugoslav state, which had six republics and two provinces, Serbia all of a sudden controlled nearly half um of the kind of power within the country.
00:04:01
Speaker
And that really um kind of challenged the balance of power in this communist
Impact of Cold War's End on Yugoslav Politics
00:04:07
Speaker
country. Now, none of that would have mattered that much If it weren't for the global context, you know, this is this is the end of the Cold War.
00:04:14
Speaker
We have a situation where Yugoslavia was also kind of sheltered because it was one of the countries on the front line of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. which meant that just like Austria or Finland or Sweden, Gossabe was neutral, but it was kind of in a certain way on both sides, or you know, in very good terms with both sides um during the Cold War. So disintegrating was not really on the agenda. Crisis was not really on the agenda as long as the Cold War was going on. But as it was winding down, 1989 was, of course, the year when communist regimes were overthrown all across Central and Eastern Europe.
00:04:50
Speaker
all of a sudden Yugoslavia in 1990 was no longer the exceptional liberal place it used to be, but it was a country which was still communist run, but which was decentralized in crisis, surrounded by countries which had just overthrown communist rule and which were heading for free multi-party elections.
00:05:10
Speaker
So this is really kind of the the background against which 1990 is happening in Yugoslavia. um And then what we're having is... the the League of Communists, which is kind of the federal unit of all the parties from the different republics, meeting in January 1990. And basically ah there the crisis comes to a head. The Serbian-dominated delegates want to centralize the state, want to centralize the party.
00:05:36
Speaker
The Slovenes from the north would aspire to ready for more free elections. Slovenia had been already in the 80s a lot more, kind of there's been a lot of space for critical music. Laibach, famous band, was formed at the time.
00:05:50
Speaker
um and And there was much more media freedom already in Slovenia.
1990 Elections: Nationalism vs. Unity
00:05:54
Speaker
um There, the communists wanted to kind of open up and follow the European trend and also get more autonomy for Slovenia.
00:06:02
Speaker
While in Serbia, they wanted the opposite. They said, you know, what happened elsewhere in Eastern Europe is not relevant for us. You know, we have a different path to communism than the Soviets did. We're not under Soviet influence. We can keep our, we don't have to have multi-party elections.
00:06:15
Speaker
So that kind of really led to a breakdown of the party. The Slovenes walked out, then the Croats walked out. Then it was clear there was no longer ah Yugoslav communist party, but rather there were parties for each republic which had very different agendas.
00:06:31
Speaker
So this was in a certain way, long way coming, but this was then ratified. There was no longer a single bracket. And that meant Yugoslavia lacked the kind of critical bracket, which kept it together, which is the communist party.
00:06:42
Speaker
And then, you know, Basically, what happened is each party was then deciding on its own, let's say, interests of how to proceed.
00:06:53
Speaker
And that meant that the northern and western republics and the parties were more eager and more willing to have elections, those in the Southeast less so, but all of them realized that this was no longer an environment where you could not have multi-party elections. that The world had changed ah from you know just a few years ago, where having elections dominated and controlled by the League of Communists were no longer feasible, considering that you had elections in Romania and Bulgaria and all of the neighboring countries with the participation of opposition parties.
00:07:28
Speaker
So you mentioned, you say, a a lot about the wider context there. suppose, what are the differences with these Yugoslavian elections as opposed to some of these other elections happening in places such as Romania?
00:07:40
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, first of all, the big difference was there was never a Yugoslav election. So in fact, when we're talking about the elections, which which you know which happened in 1990, there were multiple elections run by different laws and rules with different parties.
00:07:53
Speaker
So basically, there was never, once the League of Communists fell apart, there was no actor who had a really strong interest to have Yugoslav elections. um And that meant that the leadership of Yugoslavia, which was still in place, lacked that democratic legitimacy in the crucial time in which the country was kind of teetering on the edge, which meant that the Republican leadership had the democratic legitimacy and the federal state did not because the federal parliament, for example, was not newly elected. So those were it was a single single party parliament in 1990, 1991.
00:08:28
Speaker
the government of Yugoslavia, although very popular, the last prime minister, Ante Markovic, just took office in the end of 89. He was widely popular in Yugoslavia, reformer.
00:08:39
Speaker
But, you know, you you can maybe compare him a little bit to Gorbachev in the sense that he was coming from the Communist Party, but he lacked this democratic legitimacy. And that was something which undermined him very much. So in the coming you know Throughout 1990, you have elections held in Slovenia and Croatia, in Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
00:09:02
Speaker
um But all of them were held by local rules and also with basically there were no parties any longer which ran throughout the country. So the League of Communists.
00:09:14
Speaker
renamed themselves. um you know they They'd often change their names during the elections. um In Serbia, they called themselves the Serbian Socialist Party, which is still around.
00:09:25
Speaker
um In others, they kept the name League of Communists, but added some qualifiers. So Croatia, for example, they added the qualifier Party for Democratic Changes. But basically, these were separate parties. They had nothing to do with each other anymore. they had different programs. So they ran them independently.
00:09:43
Speaker
The only party which tried to run not everywhere in Yugoslavia, but pretty much in large parts, was the party of the last Yugoslav prime minister who left the Communist Party and founded the Reformist Movement.
00:09:56
Speaker
It was too late to run in Slovenia and Croatia, but it did run in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, where it gained respective results, but not big enough to really change the overall dynamics. So basically, you're having local competition between different parties, which are then emerging, and they're emerging very quickly. I mean,
00:10:16
Speaker
basically until you know 1989 there were no other political parties and then in 1990 within a few months so you see new parties popping up in all of the republics and all of them have usually you know very republic i mean republic-centered ideas often quite nationalist ones so the main challengers to the socialist parties or whatever they were called now was more conservative nationalist parties. um that they would know There was a wide spectrum among them. In Slovenia, you had a coalition of parties. they focused
00:10:47
Speaker
Some of them were, let's say, what you would consider to be more nationalist. Others were, let's say, more liberal. um So it was kind of a coalition of reform-minded and conservative parties. In Croatia, we have...
00:11:00
Speaker
the party which would dominate and still is today in power emerging called the Croatian Democratic Community, led by Franja Tudjman, a former general um of the Yugoslav army and a historian, pretty mediocre one at that, um who had been kind of out in the cold in Croatia for its for his nationalist position.
00:11:19
Speaker
he built up the main challenger in Croatia. In Serbia, they were more nationalist, although already the Socialist Party there in Milošević had become, you know, essentially more nationalist than a left-wing party. um So, you know, basically we start seeing, you know, dozens of political parties emerging throughout Yugoslavia, but most of them, with the exception of the reform movement, are Republican Party with a local agenda which pursues different interests of that republic vis-a-vis the larger state.
00:11:49
Speaker
So we were talking about the other federal elections and how they all took place in all of these different states. I suppose my question is, and might not be able to answer it necessarily, but what prevented Yugoslavia from developing a kind of whole national political
Struggles for National Political Culture
00:12:08
Speaker
culture?
00:12:08
Speaker
Mm-hmm. I mean, it's it's a tricky question because there are multiple causes. I mean, so one of them is certainly that um the the very decentralized nature of the state and the institution meant that the main power was vested, at least by the late 1970s, within the republics.
00:12:27
Speaker
which meant that you know if you wanted to build your political career, you did it in the republics. And then you know you would be delegated um to the federal level. So for example, there was no Yugoslav president. you know Basically, since the death of Tito, he was replaced by ah a presidency, which was basically a body, a collective body representing the different republics and provinces. And then until the late 80s, also the Communist Party, um who rotated on an annual basis. So None of them was a long established federal politician. Many of them were Republican politicians who then did this stint at the federal level, but they were not they didn't have a power base. So there was not kind of an institutional power base at the federal level, which allowed to say, let's organize elections. Let's have ah a Yugoslav let's say political project.
00:13:16
Speaker
um And then many of the grievances which were articulated in the late 1980s were national grievances. so you know While, of course, many of the challenges Yugoslavia faced were not that different from other communist countries, you know low economic productivity. i mean, unlike other countries, there was unemployment and there were workers who went on the streets for against factory closures or... the factory is not operating.
00:13:39
Speaker
you know There were these grievances which had nothing to do with nationalism as such, but it was often these Republican leaders which translated these economic grievances into national grievances. So Serbia was the prime example, which was really the first mover on all of this, which told the workers who were frustrated saying, well, the reason you're doing badly is that the Yugoslav state does not work in Serbs' favor, that you know workers are disadvantaged not because they're workers, but because they are Serbs.
00:14:05
Speaker
And that starts in Kosovo, but that continues throughout the country that Serbs in this federal state are disadvantaged. And that really then leads to a situation where nationalism becomes the main currency and the main parties then um campaign on nationalist tickets. now of course,
00:14:22
Speaker
And it's a chicken and an egg situation, because, of course, if you had Yugoslav elections, you might have had more incentives to organize a kind of Yugoslav white political party, which could not be mononational to succeed.
00:14:34
Speaker
um But because you didn't have that, of course, that reinforced that trend. So it's like the federal decentralized structure which facilitated it. And, you know, you can compare it. At the same time, we have the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.
00:14:46
Speaker
They all fall apart within you know two years. Their contexts are different. you know in In Czechoslovakia, you did have free and fair elections, but still it led to ah an agreed dissolution.
00:14:59
Speaker
And the Soviet Union as well, you have in some republic's elections, but again, it's the same fate. So there is some similarity there in these socialist federal states,
00:15:09
Speaker
ah which although in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, the level of federalism was more on paper than in reality, at least until 1990. It just gave resources to elites in the republics to build their political career and to pursue that often against the center or at least in disregard of the center. And that just made it a lot more attractive, and easier to build up the following, which would then put them into conflict with the leaders of other republics, which would facilitate then the dissolution of the country.
00:15:39
Speaker
Okay, so would you say that these elections like further developed the nationalisms within these states? Yeah, they ratified them to some degree because they gave them, you know, they they basically made the nationalist politicians the elected leaders and gave them the legitimacy that they had democratic credentials.
00:16:01
Speaker
ah So, you know, in in some kind of in some republics, We have the nationalist opposition taking over, like in Slovenia or in Croatia, um in Serbia and in Montenegro. the The communists, we name themselves, but are essentially the nationalists.
00:16:16
Speaker
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, have three nationalist parties which are founded because it's a multinational republic with Bosnian Muslims at the time now known as Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs being the three large communities and each of them voting for nationalist parties.
00:16:30
Speaker
Those three parties ah get together and take over the rule of the country. And of course, they would be engulfed in a war within within a bit more than a year. But at that point, their main joint goal was to defeat the communists, as they stated.
00:16:45
Speaker
um so In Macedonia, there's a bit of a kind of a stalemate. Both the communist successors and the conservative nationalist opposition have equal number of seats and they kind of form a joint government.
00:16:56
Speaker
But, you know, basically we have the nationalists who have democratic legitimacy who pursue and then nationalist agenda. I mean, initially, um none of them advocated, you know, secession or leaving Yugoslavia altogether. This kind of gradually developed, but it developed exactly because each of their interests were very incompatible. They really didn't, you know, they didn't agree on on on anything.
00:17:19
Speaker
And that meant that all of them thought it was more beneficial to pursue their republic's independence than to come up with a compromise to make a workable Yugoslavia. And this is mostly because the republics were not mononational.
Legitimization of Nationalist Leaders
00:17:32
Speaker
I mean, with the exception of Slovenia, which was overwhelmingly populated by the Slovenian population with smaller minorities,
00:17:38
Speaker
ah In Croatia, there was a substantial Serb community. So Serbia said, well, the Serbs in Croatia, well, they you know they need to be protected. And Croatia becoming independent would threaten Serbs in there. In Bosnia, was a tri-national republic that was even more complicated.
00:17:53
Speaker
So that meant that really um that that each republic saw the other not just as you know a unit which could go their own way, but especially from the Serbian perspective and from Milosevic's perspective,
00:18:06
Speaker
was seen as threatening the Serbs. And he came to power on the the promise to recentralize Yugoslavia. And if that would fail, to at least make sure that Serbs in neighboring republics could stay in a common state with Serbia, which would then morph into these ideas of Greater Serbia and the Serbian war aims to occupy territories of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia and join it to some Serbian nation state.
00:18:34
Speaker
Obviously, the ah that the wars garnered quite a lot of international attention. ah Do you know if there was much of a strong reaction to these elections as they happened? Or was it more just there kind of the late impacts of this of these nationalisms?
00:18:52
Speaker
Well, I mean, the elections, you know, the elections seem more, let's say, quote unquote, normal from an outside perspective, even though, as we discussed, they weren't held at the federal level. At that point, there was not much international engagement. You got to keep in mind that 1990 was a year of tremendous change across the European continent. I mean,
00:19:09
Speaker
We had elections, you know, free and fair elections in Poland, um in you know Czechoslovakia, in East Germany. um You know, like there was attention was everywhere. um Much more attention was the big question of 1990 was, of course, German unification.
00:19:24
Speaker
which came very rapidly in the aftermath of the the elections in 1990. So European attention was elsewhere. In the summer of 1990, Iraq invades Kuwait and in the first beginning of the first Gulf War, American attention is both on the Soviet Union and the crisis there in the Baltic states and in the Caucasus, where we have conflicts breaking out, as well as bringing together an international coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait. So at that point, ah the elections in Yugoslavia seemed like, you know, OK, a bit different than the other elections. They were not federal. They were Republican.
00:19:57
Speaker
But, you know, this was not really anything to pay particular attention to in the context of that of that year.
Elections' Role in Yugoslavia's Dissolution
00:20:03
Speaker
How have these elections impacted how these states function today?
00:20:07
Speaker
Have they impacted how these states function? Well, I mean, the first obvious impact is that they set in motion the process which led to the, mean I mean, maybe not setting it in motion, but certainly accelerated the process of dissolution of Yugoslavia. And of course, today, we still have basically the republics which, which you know,
00:20:28
Speaker
Yugoslavia disintegrated the republics which have emerged from from that disintegration. The only exception is really today um Kosovo, which was not a republic, but as a we were discussing earlier, was one of the two provinces of Serbia. So it did have a federal status, but it was also part of Serbia.
00:20:45
Speaker
And that gained independence ah considerably later, only after both the war there and international intervention. So First of all, I think we can say that the dissolution of Yugoslavia means that the countries today look very much like the republics of Yugoslavia. And this is, you know, was by no means obvious in 1990, not even among those who won the elections.
00:21:06
Speaker
The other phenomenon, I think what we can say is the parties which emerged in 1990 are in many cases the same parties which are still around today. um So despite the fact that, you know, since that election year,
00:21:19
Speaker
35 years have passed, the world has changed dramatically. um In those crucial moments, parties which emerge have a considerable staying power. In Croatia, the HDZ, the main challenger to this to the Communist Party, has ruled for most of the period since 1990, with only two periods when the Social Democrats, the successors to the Communists, returned to power for one term in office.
00:21:45
Speaker
um So that's you know quite a long track record. um In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the three nationalist parties which emerged, two of them are still the main players in politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The third one is an important, the Serb party is still important there.
00:22:02
Speaker
um In Macedonia, the main opposition party, which was founded in 1990, is in government today and has been on and off in government for the last 35 years. The Socialist Party in Serbia, which was the main a party by Milosevic is the junior part partner on the current government in Serbia. So, you know, basically the parties which emerge not in all republics equally, but the parties which emerge in 1990, many of them, in fact, I would say most of them remain the main political actors today across across those countries. And of course,
00:22:35
Speaker
The logic of transforming those republics into independent nation states is really something which became for the first time imaginable in that in that year, 1990, when the elections were held.
00:22:46
Speaker
Is there anything particular you think that people should know about these elections um just to get a better idea of some of their impacts and some of their importance? Well, um I mean, the the the the the elections, I think it's it's interesting to understand also why people voted for nationalists, because, you know, it's easy to say, well, people voted for nationalists because they were convicted convinced nationalists. But I think I can illustrate this with the example of Bosnia.
00:23:12
Speaker
Some people have argued it was kind of a prisoner's dilemma, which is, you know, the idea that you might vote not for the ideal scenario, but you do so because you don't know what the other's choices will be. And in Bosnia, you had three nationalist parties. And In opinion polls, there was always a sense that people would actually prefer the communists or the Reform Party.
00:23:31
Speaker
But why didn't they vote for them in the end or not to to a significant degree? And one of the assumptions is that people saw the other nations. So let's say a Bosniak would see a Serb and say, well, if they vote for a Serb party, then you they will have a very kind of nationalist strong party. But if I vote for the you you know for the communists or the Reform Movement, which is multinational, who is going to protect me as for my national identity so people often voted out of fear that the others would vote for nationalist parties and as a result they would not have the level of protection of their identity if they wouldn't make the same choice um and you could argue that some of that dynamic occurred throughout yugoslavia in 1990 that people you know were worried for example in croatia people
00:24:18
Speaker
Nobody expected the the nationalist HDZ to do as well as it did in the end. It was also favored by actually a last minute election law change, which gave an added bonus to the largest party. The communists thought it would benefit them, but it turned out to benefit actually their main competitor.
00:24:34
Speaker
um That they did well because people voted out of fear that the other republic, that Milosevic, would be stronger and a bigger threat and that they needed to match that threat by supporting their own nationalists.
00:24:46
Speaker
So a lot of the nationalist dynamic, which we see in 1990, was not, as sometimes is explained, born out of you know longstanding grievances or longstanding hatreds, but rather out of the kind of very dynamic fear of the others um who are who are emerging at that particular at that particular at that particular moment.
00:25:10
Speaker
I suppose that kind of comes back to some earlier points. I know in um your chapter in... the revolutions in of nineteen eighty nine of 1989, there's a mention of a series of protests where you have some people who are holding up, you know, signs like thinking of potentially heading back to earlier kind of socialist periods.
00:25:31
Speaker
Uh, seems like in general, there was a lack of a focus for a way forward. Is that really how these nationalisms came through? Yeah, it was hard to imagine a future. i mean, Yugoslavia, of course, ah you know, that's that's that's the difficulty with multinational states is that, you know, there wasn't a clear ah imagination of what this country could look like as a democracy. I mean, there was a lot of people who supported Yugoslavia. So I think it's not that Yugoslavia fell apart because people were, ah you know, in a majority against Yugoslavia as a country, but it was very hard to imagine it as a democratic state.
00:26:06
Speaker
Because it raised all kinds of questions. You know, how would you um how would you recalibrate the power between the center and the federal units? And these are issues which in a nation state, a centralized nation states are just not that relevant.
00:26:17
Speaker
um And and this is in a certain way, there was a lack of and of a vision of what a democratic Yugoslavia could look like. had been very little experience. I mean, you know, the the second Yugoslavia, as you mentioned in the introduction, came about after the end of the Second World War. There was a first kingdom of Yugoslavia at the interwar period, but it wasn't a democracy. I mean, in the first decade, it was that was somewhat democratic, but it was also plagued by mostly people supporting nationalist political parties and by a very centralized constitution that was certainly not attractive for anybody outside of
00:26:53
Speaker
maybe ah parts of the Serbian population. so So there wasn't this kind of a model you could you could just say, well, this is where we want to go back to. and the In the other countries of Eastern and Central Europe, there was this, i mean, maybe simplistic, but idea, oh, we do we just go back to our country when it was not communist.
00:27:10
Speaker
That, of course, there was no going back ever. It was always the countries that changed dramatically. But you could imagine it more easily than in Yugoslavia, where these constitutional questions, these questions of identities were very important.
Media's Role in Political Fragmentation
00:27:24
Speaker
And and there was no space really. And this is, I mean, maybe the other element.
00:27:29
Speaker
There was no there's no there wasn't a Yugoslav. space for debate or media. For example, um you know, there was no Yugoslav television. I mean, the television stations were Republican. So you had TV Belgrade, which was broadcast from from for Serbia.
00:27:46
Speaker
You had TV Zagreb, which was broadcasting from from Croatia. So you people watch each other's television. And of course, in the Yugoslav Times, you know, they weren't they weren't conflicting by any means. But, you know, you didn't have Yugoslav television, which broadcast a national and statewide message, which made it very easy for people then to capture these TV stations and then report very differently about one another or media. i mean, print media, you know, again, most of the print media, except for the party newspaper, Borba, which was the struggle, which was the party, the Communist Party's newspaper,
00:28:19
Speaker
all the other newspapers were a Republican. So their main base and their, i mean you know, their main scope and their main readership was in the Republic. So that meant there wasn't a kind of common ah public sphere where, um you know, where people could really debate on a Yugoslav way um the future of their of their they are country.
00:28:40
Speaker
Okay, that's that's an interesting point there. I hadn't realized that the media was um so separate there. But that also just leads to in general, popular culture shifting fairly quickly as soon as possible?
00:28:55
Speaker
Well, I mean, popular culture is a tricky thing because, I mean, it was um there was, of course, a very large, I mean, for example, if you look at music, I mean, music was highly integrated that people listened to similar, the same bands. I mean, you know, you knew a band was from Sarajevo, but you didn't know if the singer was a Serb or a c Croat or a Bosniak.
00:29:13
Speaker
Sarajevo was one of the kind of music centers of rock music ah of the time in Yugoslavia. You had, you know, Croatian bands, Serbian bands, they all traveled, communicated. So in that sense, it took a lot of effort to kind of pull this apart. And I would say even until today, people across the the countries which emerged, listen to each other's music. I mean, you know, and the and many of the bands and singers make their careers crossing borders. So that's quite quite normal. um But of course, there was also this other, you know, popular popular culture which emphasized differences, which was more nationalist.
00:29:48
Speaker
So that also emerged. So, for example, you know once the war began, you had and you know nationalist musicians who were you know kind of ah promoting these agendas and some of them are still around today.
00:30:01
Speaker
you know For example, Croatia, there's there's a singer named Thompson named after Machine Gun who began his career during the war with kind of nationalist war songs. And he, you know, he's selling out concerts, selling hundreds of thousands of tickets in Croatia today um with a similar nationalist message. So you do have this, let's say, more nationalist, more narrow-minded popular culture emerging.
00:30:26
Speaker
But that's really beginning, especially with the wars, when when then also the others were seen really as an enemy and as as a threat. Right. So initially, really, the breakdown is much more structural. Let's say, you have the lack of ah strong kind of unifying communist party and as a result nationalisms are the the the only way forward for people to protect their interests yeah i think one one could one could put it like that that that's really the the the key the key dynamic where we're having um and and again i mean they're you know they're they're counter movements i mean it's not to say that this is the only idea so you know you have as i mentioned the reformist party
00:31:08
Speaker
the the League of Communists and their successes in quite a few republics tried to have a different dynamic. And it's not that they were you know they that they had no voices whatsoever. The election results often were quite narrow. So you know in Croatia, the fact that the HDZ didn't just rule, but that it could also impose a new constitution and had a two thirds majority is not because it had such a widespread support.
00:31:32
Speaker
It was, you know, around 45% of the vote it it received, but it was because of the electoral system. So, you know, again, in Macedonia, it was a stalemate. In in in and Slovenia, the the communist candidate for the president won, but the anti-communist forces won the parliamentary elections.
00:31:51
Speaker
um So you know they they even in Bosnia where the ne three nationalist parties won, the non-nationalists did get a third of the the votes. So it's not that there wasn't any opposition to that. um Maybe in Serbia there was the least opposition, but that's also because Milosevic was the most authoritarian of all the leaders already and he as he had established himself before the election so in a certain way he was still seen as a fresh face in 1990 and could could could control the media in a way which made it nearly impossible for the opposition to run.
00:32:22
Speaker
So you could say in the other republics elections were mostly free and fair. In Serbia they were certainly not free and fair and that meant that he completely dominated But even there, there were i mean they were both more nationalist voices, people who wanted, you know, were more aggressive.
00:32:36
Speaker
But you also had liberal minded Serbian parties who actually you know wanted to pull back from the brink. So there were these countervailing forces. It's just that they were, of course, they lost elections in most republics and they were thus weakened and often pushed out from. And then, you know, then once the escalation began,
00:32:56
Speaker
They're very easily labeled as traitors or as being too soft on the others of of not understanding the threat to the nation. And then, of course, once the dynamics of war or at least of escalation increase, it's a lot harder for those voices to be um to be heard and to be not dismissed outright.
00:33:15
Speaker
So I suppose to finish us off, I've got just a few final questions. Do you think that these elections shook the world? Well, I would say, i mean, they shook the world in the sense that without those elections, um you know, with elections held in this way, let's put it like that, i.e. Republican elections, they opened the door to the dissolution of the country. And that meant, of course,
00:33:38
Speaker
ah the first major war on European soil after 1945. It meant um Europe being confronted with with the issues of how do you deal with state dissolution. It was in a certain way ah a dry run for the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
00:33:52
Speaker
um It brought with it not just ah three and a half years of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Croatia, that triggered also the process which would then lead to the war in Kosovo at the end of the decade and the independence of Kosovo another decade later.
00:34:08
Speaker
um So that sense, I would say that, you know, of course, it's not the elections themselves alone, which triggered the wars, but it was an important milestone. And, you know, let's say if those elections would have been held as federal elections in 1990, with only Republican elections to follow after that, I think the dynamics might have been quite different. You might have had multinational parties, you might have had more coalition building, you might have had more of a development of a vision how Yugoslavia could be saved.
00:34:36
Speaker
Maybe some kind republics would have left, like Slovenia, but maybe Yugoslavia could could have survived or at least could have dissolved in a more peaceful manner.
Post-Dissolution Challenges and EU Integration
00:34:47
Speaker
These elections, which really you know kind of reinforced the nationalist dynamics and also legitimized the leaders, I mean, again, Slobodan Milosevic was one of the few leaders who came to power before 89 in a communist country to survive the rupture of 1990 or 1989-1990 to rule for another decade and his junior partner in montenegro ruled until 2020 so another 20 years so this is an extreme longevity considering the rupture of 1990 across the european continent so you know if things would have played out differently the dynamics of war in the subsequent decade in the region would have been
00:35:27
Speaker
very different. i mean, Yugoslavia or its successors might have joined the European Union at a point in time when today, um you know, most of those countries have not yet joined the European Union. It's only Croatia and Slovenia which joined in 2004, 2013, respectively. So, you know, yes, I do think those were were were very critical elections, in and particular in the way they were organized and in which framework they were organized.
00:35:52
Speaker
I do have um one question, i suppose, on their impact like again. You did mention that a lot of the parties are still the same. Are a lot of the issues being fought in elections in these countries today similar like similarly fought on national lines as opposed to, say, economic or cultural?
00:36:12
Speaker
It depends a lot on which part of what used to be Yugoslavia we're talking about, because in some countries, like in Slovenia, I would say um the dissolution ended very quickly. The war ended after 10 days um and Slovenia kind of, let's say, quote unquote, moved on. It had little other issues with the rest of Yugoslavia.
00:36:29
Speaker
All of the other republics, of course, had a much longer lasting legacy of the Yugoslavia issues, mutual relations, which, of course, shaped also the debates. Croatia ended the war in 1995 with the diplomatic the the you know with most with many Serbs either fleeing or being expelled, so that threat of Serbs seen by the nationalist side in Croatia disappeared.
00:36:52
Speaker
So in that sense of creation, the debates moved on. um But you still have this. What you still do have is the debate between the communists and the anti-communists, which you have in many Central East European countries as well, where especially conservative and nationalist parties use their claim that they're the anti-communists to paint the specter of communist legacies or networks um as a way to justify often their illiberal and anti-democratic policies.
00:37:19
Speaker
So we find something similar in in in parts of Yugoslavia. And then we have, you know, if we look at a place like um like Bosnia, those issues remain very relevant because Bosnia remains a contested state. It's...
00:37:33
Speaker
30 years since the Dayton Peace Accord was signed, which ended the war, but the political contestation over the state remains. Many Serbs and their political parties do not want to have a Bosnian state, just like the those who won the elections in 1990 didn't, or they said yugola only within Yugoslavia.
00:37:52
Speaker
ah Many Croats either aspire to have closer ties to Croatia, um and many Bosniaks, being the largest community in the country, ah you know, would rather like to have a more centralized state where they would be the largest group rather than this highly decentralized state we have today. So Bosnia would say the debates have moved the least since 1990 because of the domestic political dynamics, while let's say in a country like Slovenia, they've moved the most. So even if some of the parties survive, the issues are very different.
00:38:22
Speaker
Those legacies of the 1990s are really way past and they're more maybe in the question of how do you commemorate the past rather than that they that they really shape the present.
00:38:32
Speaker
um But of course, issues of democracy and lack of democracy remain on the agenda and other ah parts. So, you know in Serbia, for example, we having an authoritarian government in power. which draws ideologically on the extreme nationalism of the 1990s.
00:38:48
Speaker
And so in that sense, there is a lot of ideological continuity there, but also these issues of democracy remain on the agenda in in in some of the countries which emerge out of Yugoslavia.
00:39:00
Speaker
yes I think that's a a very good note to finish on, um where we have a decent understanding of what the impacts have specifically had um and a little rundown of where the countries are today as a result of these elections.
00:39:13
Speaker
So I'd just like to thank you again for joining me on this podcast today, and I'd like to thank the listeners for listening to today's episode. Thank you. Thanks.
00:39:32
Speaker
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00:39:45
Speaker
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