Out of Place? Making Sense of the Mismatch between the Post-Cold War Transition and the Yugoslav State Crisis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Throughout 1990, an attempt at federal transition in Yugoslavia was intended to keep up with global and regional transformations based on the establishment of liberal democracies and the geographical expansion of US influence and neoliberalism in Central and Eastern Europe. Paradoxically, republican and interrepublican developments in Yugoslavia, which deepened the country’s crisis and halted the transition process, were adapted in a more effective way to the new international order, marked by the US pretension of global unipolar hegemony. Drawing on Robert Cox’s method of historical structures, this paper argues that the failure of Yugoslav transition was a consequence of decreasing consistency between federal reformist efforts and the emerging post-Cold War world order and discusses the pertinence of approaching Yugoslav dissolution through the neo-Gramscian approach.