Two Paths Of State Breakup: Czechoslovakia And Yugoslavia

11 Pages 2648 Words

Nationalism, in the modern context, is founded on the principle that the state and the nation should be congruent; the presence minority nations can only result in inequality and exploitation (Meadwell). Nationalism, and its vehemence for the creation of nation-states, was the central force behind the breakups of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s. The two states emerged from Communism in similar disarray and quickly found themselves radically polarized around the issue of nationality, with each side pushing for national separation and nation-state formation. Such a scenario, in which all involved parties seem intent on a similar resolution, would seem predisposed towards a relatively peaceful and cooperative resolution. In the case of Czechoslovakia, this causality held mostly true; in a process later called the “velvet divorce” the multi-national Czechoslovakian state divided itself into relatively homogeneous nation-states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Kesselman 515). In the case of Yugoslavia?, this causality went completely haywire; in a rapidly escalating struggle, the Yugoslavian state erupted into civil war along national lines with dire human consequences. Eventually, after thousands of casualties, extreme devastation and extensive foreign intervention, Yugoslavia was divided into the independent and roughly homogenous states of Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia. The vastly different paths towards nation-state creation, in the two cases, have had dire consequences on the present political, social and economic situations of the involved nations, leading scholars to investigate the reasons behind the divergence. It is my assertion that the different paths of state breakup were the result of a coalescence of four factors, upon which the two states differed: first, their ethnic compositions; second, their historical legacies of national relations; third, their elite-level ...