Democracy as an ethnically closed event

Political pluralism and the disintegration of Yugoslavia

Abstract

The article describes how the system-crisis in Yugoslavia led to the first multi-party elections in the different republics and in its last consequence to the disintegration of the state. The Serbian communists around Slobodan Milosevic were the first to blame the other non-Serbian peoples for this crisis. This in turn fostered the election of nationalistic leaders in the other republics and finally resulted in war because of the incompatibility of the different national aspirations. The author also depicts the further political development in the different Yugoslav republics under the circumstances of nationalism, multi-party systems and the war. As an underlying reason for the disintegration of the multi-ethnic Yugoslav federation and the outburst of nationalist populism the author emphasizes, among other things, the existence of an atomized society, characterized by collective submissiveness during the communist and pre-communist era, the lack of urbanisation, of civil society structures and the total absence of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a coming to terms with the past, mainly concerning the wide-spread massacres between 1941 and 1945.