Runaway Nation-Building: The International Logic of (De)centralization for the Outbreak of Conflict in Yugoslavia and the USSR

This article reevaluates the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) into civil war from the perspective of the republic's internal decentralization. In contrast to charitable views emphasizing the exogenous shock of Nationalist mobilization as the primary cause behind the outbreak of armed conflict, I place the institutional arrangements of the SFRY front and center as that cause. While pessimistic perspectives on this mass outbreak of political violence typically focus on the republic's multi-national character, the perspective outlined here rejects the ontologizing of nations as explicitly real entities possessing a capacity for unitary or collectively conscious action. Instead of positing the SFRY's national groups (and their political elites throughout the dissolution) as in fundamental conflict with the ethnoterritorial federalist design of the SFRY, I posit that it is precisely this basic design of the republic that framed the conditions of possibility for its violent dissolution while attributing this design to the specific security circumstances of the SFRY within the bipolar system of the Cold War. There stands no better mechanism to support this hypothesis than the decentralization of its coercive apparatuses under the Territorial Defense doctrine. Invoking the USSR, the first ethnoterritorial federalist and socialist state with a clear national majority (Russians in the USSR vs. Serbs in the SFRY) as a comparative case with no interstate war upon dissolution, I find that decentralizing coercive power along each of the SFRY's national sub-republics allowed such conflict to emerge. Given how long the shadow of the Yugoslav story has loomed over the literature on Nationalism and ethnic conflict as well as its scholars, revisiting this key case is far from trivial. The implications of my Institutionalist perspective for interpreting contemporary Eastern European security issues and for International Relations theory, especially on nationalism, are explored.