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As we have seen in our presentation of various comparative approaches to
the nonviolent versus violent mode of Soviet and Yugoslav dissolution, a whole
set of more or less plausible antecedent factors have been identified in order
to explain this divergence in outcomes. Having recognized that some of these
antecedent factors played a role in the outcomes (e.g., the different institutional
effects of communist nationality policy in the two cases), the thrust of our crit-
icism was that these explanatory schemes failed to explicate the historically
rooted motivation of political action and took for granted cultural attitudes
and collective memories at best as background factors whose explanatory role
was unspecified. By contrast,
this study posits that historically rooted cultural
attitudes in Russia and Serbia toward the state and collective memories rooted
in defining historical experiences constitute necessary antecedent conditions
that, in conjunction with contextual factors, offer an “objectively probable”
explanation of different modes of Soviet and Yugoslav dissolution. For the sake
of clarity, the necessary antecedent conditions identified on the basis of coun-
terfactual reasoning (i.e., the ranking, sorting, and rejection of other historical
factors) can be explicated in the form of a series of affirmative (though in real-
ity only conditional or “probable”) propositions:
1.
The historical identification of Serbian political and cultural elites (as the
most significant social carriers of state- and national-sentiment) with the
Yugoslav state and, more generally, their attachment to the idea of the
state as the embodiment of the national purpose increased the likelihood
of Yugoslavia’s violent breakup.
Conversely, the Russian cultural elites’
historically rooted view of the imperial Russian state as an “autocracy”
alien to the true ways of the Russian “nation” or “people” (narod), and
the subsequent transposition of the image of dual Russia (state versus
people) onto Stalin’s autocracy, lowered the likelihood of Soviet-Russian
elites’ relying on coercion, and thus increased the likelihood of peaceful
dissolution.
2.
Serbia’s history as a nation-state prior to Yugoslav unification, and the
historical availability of a program of Serbian unification independent of
Yugoslavism, increased the likelihood that Serbian elites would challenge
the borders of Croatia and Bosnia. On the surface it may appear that this
proposition contradicts the first one, for how can Serbs be both fervent
Yugoslavs and strong Serbian particularists? This seeming contradiction
is resolved if we consider not only the dual statist-nationalist identity
of dominant nations in multinational polities (e.g., British-English), but
also the timing and sequencing of different strands of Serbian national-
ism in the critical period of the late 1980s, when it first took
the form
of a “restorationist” Yugoslav movement whose goal was to recentralize
the Yugoslav federation, and only subsequently – when that prospect
faced insurmountable obstacles in the form of Slovenian and Croatian
resistance – the form of a particularist program of Serbian unification in
defiance of existing republican borders.65 At this second stage, the his-
torical availability of the idea of a “Great Serbia“ (however contested
and historically contestable the term) played an important role in the
ultimate outcome.
By contrast, the historical absence of a program of
Russian national unification independent of empire or the Soviet Union
meant that such programs as belatedly surfaced (e.g., Solzhenitsyn’s pro-
posal) did not have historical precedents and thus did not have the same
potential for mass resonance. As a result, many Russians who identified
with the Soviet Union as a territorial homeland continued to cling to
the idea of a unified “post-Soviet space” in the weakened form of the
Commonwealth of Independent States.
3.
The special role of Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia in Yugoslav unifica-
tion, their shared collective memory of victimization in wartime Croatia,
and their relative overrepresentation in the Partisan movement, cemented
the connection between Serbian national identity and the Yugoslav
state (even in its communist form).
The embodiment of the legacy of
state-building and traumatic collective memory in this social carrier of
postwar Yugoslav unity (as a result of their role in the Partisan move-
ment Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia held prominent positions in the
JNA and party-state institutions in these two republics)
helps explain the
availability of a critical elite constituency for statist-nationalist mobiliza-
tion in the 1990s. To be sure, the mere presence of a constituency with a
vested interest in state preservation and potentially opposed to Croatia’s
and Bosnia’s independence was not sufficient cause for nationalist mobi-
lization, but it was certainly a necessary antecedent, for in its absence a
leader like Miloševic would not have been able to make political inroads
among the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia in the same way that he actually
did (the hypothetical versus actual course of events).
Conversely, in the
Soviet-Russian case, the shared Russian-Ukrainian memory of common
victimization by the Stalinist state in the 1930s and Nazi invader in the
1940s increased the likelihood that Russians in Ukraine would accept
and even support Ukraine’s independence from the “imperial center” as
opposed to unification with a truncated Russia (the actual versus hypo-
thetical course of events).
This is because the Soviet state was seen as
the historical victimizer of both nations. Simplifying, we can reduce this
proposition to a critical difference in collective memory and its social
carriers in the two cases.
4.
The Yugoslav communists’ endorsement of asymmetrical federalism in
which Serbia (and only Serbia) was a republic with two autonomous
provinces and their empowerment through political decentralization
in the 1970s to such an extent that the territorial integrity of Serbia
and Yugoslavia appeared to be under threat (manifested in the grow-
ing potential for Albanian separatism in Kosovo)
opened the Serbian
national question and paved the way for a “restorationist” (i.e., procen-
tralist Yugoslav) Serbian nationalism, increasing the likelihood of intense
national conflicts.
Conversely, the creation of a hypercentralized Soviet
state that partially co-opted elements of ideological Russian national-
ism while depriving “Russia” (i.e., the RSFSR) of its own institutions,
exploited its natural resources in order to subsidize the Soviet periphery, and ideologically suppressed Russian national culture (e.g., the censor-
ship of representative literary works and other artistic creations cen-
tral to the cultural self-identification of Russians as a nation) created
the institutional foundation for opposition between “Russia” and the
“Soviet center” in the early 1990s.
Thus, Soviet nationality policy unin-
tentionally increased the likelihood that Russian elites would view the
peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union as a precondition of Russia’s
own national regeneration.Taken together, these four statements specify the necessary antecedent condi-
tions of different modes of Yugoslav and Soviet dissolution insofar as they
can be shown to have exercised a causal impact on the actions of Russian
and Serbian elites. Though such statements will inevitably appear simplistic
to a historian who will rightly view these antecedent conditions as compos-
ite factors that refer to considerably more complex historical realities, such
a “one-sided accentuation” of historical reality is an essential element in the
Weberian construction of ideal types predicated on a plausible interpretation
of the meaning of the collective historical experiences of “whole nations.”
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by No Country Tue Mar 19, 2019 4:00 pm
