begged to form the state in 1918.
Nations are ‘imagined communities’,
but more basically they are collectivities
in which people tell each other a com-
mon story about who they are. By 1925,
it was clear that the stories told by Serbs
and Croats were very different. The
Yugoslav state would be ruled centrally
from Serb Belgrade for two generations,
but it never fashioned a common set of
stories to unite its peoples. What this
state could do was use the police to
suppress demands for independence.
That changed in the late 1980s when
movements arose in Serbia, then Croatia,
Slovenia and Bosnia, following the script
of the masses who ousted Ferdinand
Marcos in the Philippines. In newly
opened political arenas, nationalist fire-
brands argued that peoples should rule
themselves. No one had ever asked Cro-
ats or Slovenes if they wanted to belong
to Yugoslavia, they said, and it was time
to accord them this ‘democratic’ right.
Yugoslavia’s dissolution, unlike that
of Czechoslovakia to the north, was
very violent because the borders of the
republics did not divide the nationalities.
When Croats voted for independence
in spring 1991, the Serb areas of eastern
Croatia declared themselves independent
as a Serb republic. The following year,
Croats and Muslims in Bosnia likewise
chose independence, and Serb paramili-
taries began seizing territory and killing
and expelling non-Serb inhabitants in
a republic that was a patchwork of na-
tionalities. The phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’
entered common parlance.
The lesson the nationalists claimed
both to invoke and teach was that a
people’s life was insecure unless it held a
securely bounded nation state. Though
supporting elections, they did not em-
body liberal democracy; rather, they used
the available political space to inculcatefear. Spouted by ethnically controlled
news outlets, extreme claims became
‘facts’ to which all politicians had to
respond. Serbs were told that Muslims
planned to create an ethnically clean
Bosnia, raping their women, enslaving
their children. By 1992, supporters of
Yugoslav unity seemed to speak a lan-
guage disconnected from basic realities,
inaudible and unable to find adherents.
Among the South Slavs, stories of the
national self thus formed over genera-
tions, and had little to do with the inten-
tions of the original romantic patriots
who imagined a harmonious Yugoslavia.
Ultimately, ethnicity hardened into
national identit y in response to threats
supposedly posed by other South Slavs,
and the politicians who best representedEthnicity hardened into national
identity in response to threats
supposedly posed by other Slavs
MAP^ILLUSTRATION:PAULHEWITT- B
ATTLEFIELDDESIGN/GETTY^ IMAGES/ALAMYYugoslavia