The Breakup of Yugoslavia

After the fall of the Soviet Union, presidents, dictators, and average people alike wondered what life would be like in a single-superpower world. For decades, to the benefit of some and the detriment of others, no country on the face of the Earth was immune from the influence of the dueling superpowers. Suddenly, the countries and people who depended on the Soviets were orphaned, and the United States began reevaluating its strategic interests.

Despite promises of a "New World Order," in which peace, stability, and prosperity would unite the planet, conflicts new and old broke out with a ferocity that shocked even the most pessimistic cold warriors. However, one of the most surprising of these outbreaks should have been nothing of the sort. The breakup of Yugoslavia, which eventually led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and the displacement of millions, should have been expected well before it happened.

It has been said that wars between states usually arise from a "super-abundance of analytic rationality" among their participants, rather than from irrational (and therefore unpredictable) processes. There is no reason to believe that this does not also apply to intrastate wars. In fact, even the most "irrational" of wars only appear irrational to the observer due to his or her ignorance of the fact that there are many different rationalities, each of which depend on the context from which they spring. Therefore, it follows that almost any conflict can be predicted (or at the very least, understood) if enough is known about its context and that context's rationalities.

The context from which the Balkans conflict of the early 1990s sprang was complex, alarming, and easily accessible by the outside world. While the rationalities that drove other conflicts in Africa, Asia, or South America may have been more difficult for inexperienced Western minds to comprehend, Yugoslavia was a European country with a European context and European rationalities. Many underlying causes of ethnic conflict, in terms of structural factors, political factors, economic/social factors, and cultural/perceptual factors, were evident in pre-conflict Yugoslavia; more importantly, those underlying causes should have been easily identifiable and understandable by Western minds.

In context, from their own perspectives, each republic's decision to secede was completely rational. In part because of structural, political, economic, and cultural factors, each seceding republic felt that it was in its best interest to declare independence from Yugoslavia. Some scholars argue that the main trigger of the conflict was actually the internally driven elite-level factor referred to as "bad leaders," primarily alluding to Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. From this viewpoint, Milosevic created and exacerbated the conditions that led republics such as Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia to secede; again, because Milosevic believed (correctly in the short term) that his actions would keep him in power, his choices were in his own best interest as he perceived it. Either way, because the proximate causes of the conflict were completely rational within context, the conflict itself should have been predictable.