The Rump Yugoslavia Conundrum Of The West; The Chance Of Consociational Democracy In The Post-Conflict Societies

Year 2004, Issue: 35, 61 - 81, 01.05.2004

Nazif Mandacı

https://doi.org/10.1501/Intrel_0000000099

Abstract

The Rump Yugoslavia Conundrum Of The West; The Chance Of Consociational Democracy In The Post-Conflict Societies

Abstract

The process of dismantling of Socialist Yugoslavia formed a litmus test for the Westerners' capacity to cope with the first and most serious crisis in Europe in the wake of the Cold War. The sequence of the events demonstrated that a monolithic strategy completely based on the recognition of the rights of people to secession had some debilitative outcomes and consequently, that the established borders should be preserved whatever it costed, in other words, even if they contained ethnic groups in hostilities. The West seems to have solved the problem in the latter's favor. However, the idea of protection of territorial integrity required generation of mutative political entities in the former Yugoslavia; i.e., in Bosnia, Kosovo and partly Macedonia whose chracteristics mostly recalling previously experienced consociational models of Cyprus, Lebanon and Nigeria. What makes the case problematic is the fact that the aforementioned political regimes failed, furthermore their failure considerably deluded the chance of their ethnic groups to co-exist in the future under the roof of the same state.

Keywords

Yugoslavia, Internal/External Self-Determination, Power-Sharing, Consociationalism.