The Fearful Asymmetry of War: The Causes and Consequences of Yugoslavia's Demise

Abstract

Guglielmo Ferrero finished his book on power in Swiss exile, far away from his Tuscan L’Ulivello, at the beginning of the third year of the penultimate European war. The Serbian linguistic and cultural reforms of the early nineteenth century created new difficulties. Vuk Karadzic, the principal Serbian language reformer and national ideologist, contributed to the secularization of Serbian nationhood, but in a peculiar way. The decisive moment in the political evolution of Yugoslavia during the troubled 1960s was the point when Tito joined the reformists. This happened in 1962, at the Sixth Plenum of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ) CC, when Tito stated that “it is necessary to take decentralization as our point of departure.” The removal of Rankovic and the purge of the security service signaled greater balance in nationality relations. Serbian predominance in the federal agencies was increasingly challenged, as were the strong-arm methods in dealing with the non-Serbs.

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