Aleksandar Pavković

Recursive Secessions in Former Yugoslavia: too Hard a Case for Theories of Secession?

The recent experience of the former Yugoslavia provides an important test case for appraising theories of secession. This article begins with an outline of the main candidate justifications for a right to secession; withdrawal of consent; remedial right only; national self-determination and hybrids of these arguments. The article then provides a survey of the experience of the various secessions in the former Yugoslavia and draws attention to the particular problem of recursive secessions – that is counter secessions by minorities within the new ‘republics’. The discussion of recursive secession provides an additional criterion for assessing the adequacy of candidate theories of justified secession.

Recursive Secession of Trapped Minorities: A Comparative Study of the Serb Krajina and Abkhazia

Recursive secessions are attempts at secession from a seceding state (or a state emerging from a secession). This article compares attempts at recursive secession of the Serb Krajina from Croatia and of Abkhazia from Georgia and the use of force and violence in these two attempts at recursive secession. While remarkable similarities are found in the political strategies of the secessionist leaders in these two cases, there are significant differences in the use of military force both by the secessionists and their host-state authorities. The difference may be explicable by the greater dependence of the Serb Krajina secessionist leadership on the military and logistic assistance of its protector state, Serbia.

Secessionism and separatism in Europe and Asia: To have a state of one's own

Secessions in Europe and Asia in a Comparative Perspective: An Introduction, Aleksandar Pavkovic and Jean-Pierre Cabestan 1. Sovereignty, National Self-Determination and Secession: Reflections on state-making and breaking in Asia and Europe, James Mayall Part I Europe 2. Paradise Lost: Autonomy and Separatism in the South Caucasus and Beyond, John Cuffe and David S. Siroky 3. Patterns of Secession and Disintegration in the USSR, Richard Sakwa 4. From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans, Radmila Nakarada 5. Host State Responses to Ethnic Rebellion: Serbia and Macedonia in Comparison, Keiichi Kubo 6. Seceding by the Force of Arms: Chechnya and Kosovo, Aleksandar Pavkovic 7. Secession and Liberal Democracy: The Case of the Basque Country, Ferran Requejo and Marc Sanjaume 8. Nationalism, Unionism and Secession in Scotland, Michael Keating Part II Asia 9. Secessionism in independent India: failed attempts, irredentism and accommodation, Jean-Luc Racine 10. Separatism in Sri Lanka, David Feith 11. Separatism, Ethnocracy, and the Future of Ethnic Politics in Burma (Myanmar), Renaud Egreteau 12. Language Practices and Protracted Conflict: The Tibet-China Dispute, Robert Barnett 13. Separatism in China: The Case of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Dru C. Gladney 14. The Case of Taiwan: Independence without Secession?, Jean Pierre Cabestan

Sacralisation of contested territory in nationalist discourse: a study of Milošević's and Putin’s public speeches

ABSTRACT Despite their differences in age, professional career and political background, Milošević and Putin share similar views on one of the main consequences of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the USSR: the involuntary dispersal of Serbs and Russians into different foreign states. This is a study of the segments of Milošević’s and Putin’s speeches referring to Kosovo and to Crimea respectively. The study analyses their rhetorical devices and thematic content, using the analytical framework and instruments for the analysis of nationalist discourses developed by the Vienna School of Critical Discourse Analysis. The speeches, it is argued here, share a topos of sacralisation of the (contested) land based on the ancestors’ holy or glorious deeds which proclaims the land to be sacred to the chosen nation. This creates a ‘national entitlement’ to the land in a depoliticised (‘sacred’) and highly personalised setting.

“Zdravljica” – toast to a cosmopolitan nation anthem quality in the Slovenian context

As with many states, in the case of Slovenia two songs principally contend for the position of national anthem. In this case an apparent ideological gulf masks perhaps a more essential temperamental divide: the bellicose army song versus the happy drinking “all together … ” number. Vacillation between “Zdravljica” (“A Toast”) and “Naprej zastava slave,” (“Forward, Flag of Glory”) might be taken as reflecting the ambivalence with regard to potentially hostile others one reads attributed to Jesus Christ in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke: whos not with me is against me/whos not against me is with me. The 1989 adoption of “Zdravljica” (lyrics courtesy of Slovenias national poet France Prešeren) is strongly suggestive of an outward looking state, one hoping for a place in a cosmopolitan Europe. “Naprej zastava slave” has remained the anthem of the Slovenian army and so is far from being discarded for the purpose of asserting Slovenian national aspirations. Perhaps retaining it in this minor role has been necessary because “Zdravljica” is a song which – at least as it is presently sung – de-emphasises national aspiration to a degree unusual for the anthem genre. In a crossroads of Europe dominated historically by the national (or imperial) aspirations of larger and more powerful political entities, “Zdravljica” is a song which tests the limits of what an anthem can be by holding out a hope of rising above the national.

Can patriotism justify killing in defense of one’s country?

Cosmopolitan liberals would be ready to fight - and to kill and be killed for the sake of restoring international justice or for the abolition of profoundly unjust political institutions. Patriots are ready to do the same for their own country. Sometimes the cosmopolitan liberals and patriots would fight on the same side and sometimes on the opposite sides of the conflict. Thus the former would join the latter in the defense of Serbia against Austria-Hungary (in 1914) but would oppose the white Southerner patriots in the American Civil War (in 1861). In this paper I argue that fighting and killing for one’s country is, in both of those cases, different from the defense of one’s own life and the lives of those who cannot defend themselves. Killing for one’s country is killing in order to fulfill a particular political preference. The same is the case with fighting for the abolition of a profoundly unjust political institution. It is not amoral or immoral to refuse to kill for any one of these two political preferences because there is no reason to believe that either political preference trumps our moral constraints against killing.

Why did Yugoslavia disintegrate? Is there a conclusive answer?

Yugoslavia, the State which Withered Away: The Rise, Crisis and Fall of Kardelj’s Yugoslavia (1974–1990), I shall argue, offers a very well-argued and coherent explanation of the political processes that led to Yugoslavia’s disintegration but not a conclusive answer to our question. The book—published in the same language both in Zagreb and in Belgrade—tells the story of a failed attempt to impose the Marxist conception of the withering away of the state to a multinational society of former Yugoslavia. According to the doctrine elaborated by Edvard Kardelj, Tito’s second in command, the state, during the socialist transition, should, in all of its non-coercive functions, be replaced by associations of workers who were referred to as ‘self-managing (or free) producers’. The two founding legal documents embodying this doctrine, the Yugoslav federal Constitution of 1974 and the Law on Associated Labour (1976) generated more than 5 million laws and regulations which were supposed to govern all aspects of public life in former Yugoslavia, both at the workplace and in the more traditional political sphere. More importantly, as Dejan Jović argues, this doctrine of socialist self-management shaped the ideological outlook of the Yugoslav communist elites well until the effective dissolution of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (the Yugoslav Communist Party), at its last and aborted extraordinary congress in January 1990. But the book offers not only a story of a failed communist experiment, but also an explanation of the disintegration of the federal Yugoslav state. Its author, in the first chapter, examines and partially rejects eight competing explanations of the disintegration each of which postulate one of the following as the dominant or decisive causal factor in the disintegration: the economic crisis, ancient hatreds among the peoples of Yugoslavia, nationalism/nationalist ideologies, cultural differences among the peoples of Yugoslavia, changes in international politics (the end of the cold war), the role of individual political

The Rise of New National Elites 1987–90

Unable to control galloping inflation and massive labour unrest, the Yugoslav state presidency in March 1989 appointed Ante Markovic, a Croat electrical engineer and a leading Croatian politician, as the federal prime minister. Circumventing the established republican Party networks he chose a cabinet of technocrats — economists, engineers and managers like himself — committed to radical economic reform and pushed through the federal parliament a package of long-term economic reforms whose ultimate aim was the introduction of a free market of goods and labour and privatisation. As the reduction of the federal budget and restrictions on federal borrowing in the first part of 1989 failed to curb hyperinflation — reaching 3000 per cent — in December 1989 Markovic implemented a ‘shock therapy’ based on an economic model partly drawn up by the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs. While introducing a price and wage freeze, Markovic’s government imposed strict monetary and credit restrictions, pegged the local currency, the dinar, to the German mark and made it convertible into foreign currency. The competition from less expensive foreign imports — allowed by Markovic — started to break up the long-established monopolies and led, as expected, to a spate of bankruptcies among the established loss-makers in most republics.

Kosovo: National Liberation Through Foreign Intervention

The presently dominant Kosovo Albanian national liberation movement, led by the Kosovo Liberation Army, claims its origins in the aftermath of the Kosovo Albanian riots of 1981 (see Chapter 6). Partly as a result of the suppression of the riots and the continuous purge of the Kosovo Albanian cadres from the province’s communist party, clandestine Kosovo Albanian organisations, committed to Kosovo’s independence, sprouted both in Kosovo and in the Kosovo Albanian diaspora in Western Europe. The official Yugoslav news agency claimed that, in the period of two years after the riots, the Yugoslav police had uncovered 72 such organisations, having more than 1000 members. Most of the clandestine organisations which came to life in the aftermath of the 1981 riots were committed to the cause of Kosovo’s independence; some engaged in terrorist attacks on Yugoslav officials in Western Europe and in smuggling arms to Kosovo, while others restricted themselves to political propaganda and organisation, thus rejecting violence.

The Loss of Legitimacy 1980–89

The politics of Yugoslavia from 1974 until Tito’s death in 1980 was marked by the continuity of the rule of his chosen coterie of functionaries as well as by a proliferation of legislation codifying increasingly arcane and complex self-managing practices. Thus in 1976 all institutions and enterprises (including the secret police) were broken up into ‘basic units of associated labour’ which were linked to other such units through self-managing agreements governing all exchanges of services, goods and money. Shielded from competition and the possibility of bankruptcy by interlocking agreements of this kind, unprofitable enterprises of all kinds were enabled to survive and even flourish. In this hierarchical world of self-management bodies all interests were to be ‘harmonised’ through discussion and agreement: the ultimate goal was harmony in a world of happy producers. The illusion of successful harmonisation was no doubt fostered by the absence of any overt friction among the republics’ leaders belonging Tito’s inner circle. Since Tito had made it quite clear, after the 1971–2 purges, that he would no longer tolerate any dissension, his obedient coterie obliged not only by avoiding disagreements among themselves but by denying any dissenting voices access to the public. In contrast to the period preceding the purges, in the 1970s contentious political views were barred from the official press.