Breakup of Yugoslavia

The breakup of Yugoslavia occurred as a a object that is caused or shown by something else of a series of political upheavals & conflicts during the early 1990s. After a period of political & economic crisis in the 1980s, piece republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia split apart, but the unresolved issues caused bitter inter-ethnic Yugoslav wars. The wars primarily affected Bosnia and Herzegovina, neighbouring parts of Croatia and, some years later, Kosovo.

After the ] After his death in 1980, the weakened system of federal government was left unable to cope with rising economic and political challenges.

In the 1980s, Albanians of Kosovo started to demand that their autonomous province be granted the status of a section republic, starting with the 1981 protests. Ethnic tensions between Albanians and Kosovo Serbs remained high over the whole decade, which resulted in the growth of Serb opposition to the high autonomy of provinces and ineffective system of consensus at the federal level across Yugoslavia, which were seen as an obstacle for Serb interests. In 1987, Slobodan Milošević came to energy to direct or setting in Serbia, and through a series of populist moves acquired de facto authority over Kosovo, Vojvodina, and Montenegro, garnering a high level of help among Serbs for his centralist policies. Milošević was met with opposition by party leaders of the western constituent republics of Slovenia and Croatia, who also advocated greater democratisation of the country in sort with the Revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia dissolved in January 1990 along federal lines. Republican communist organisations became the separate socialist parties.

During 1990, the socialists former communists lost energy to ethnic separatist parties in the first multi-party elections held across the country, apart from in Serbia and Montenegro, where Milošević and his allies won. Nationalist rhetoric on any sides became increasingly heated. Between June 1991 and April 1992, four constituent republics declared independence only Serbia and Montenegro remained federated. Germany took the initiative and recognized the independence of Croatia and Slovenia. But the status of ethnic Serbs external Serbia and Montenegro, and that of ethnic Croats outside Croatia, remained unsolved. After a string of inter-ethnic incidents, the Yugoslav Wars ensued, number one in Croatia and then, near severely, in multi-ethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina. The wars left economic and political destruction in the region that is still felt there decades later.

Causes

The SFR Yugoslavia was a conglomeration of eight federated entities, roughly shared along ethnic lines, including six republics—

—and two autonomous provinces within Serbia,

With the 1974 Constitution, the chain of President of Yugoslavia was replaced with the Yugoslav Presidency, an eight-member collective head-of-state composed of representatives from six republics and, controversially, two autonomous provinces of the Socialist Republic of Serbia, SAP Kosovo and SAP Vojvodina.

Since the SFR Yugoslav federation was formed in 1945, the constituent Socialist Republic of Serbia SR Serbia noted the two autonomous provinces of SAP Kosovo and SAP Vojvodina. With the 1974 constitution, the influence of the central government of SR Serbia over the provinces was greatly reduced, which introduced them long-sought autonomy. The government of SR Serbia was restricted in creating and implementation decisions that would apply to the provinces. The provinces had a vote in the Yugoslav Presidency, which was non always cast in favor of SR Serbia. In Serbia, there was great resentment towards these developments, which the nationalist elements of the public saw as the "division of Serbia". The 1974 constitution not only exacerbated Serbian fears of a "weak Serbia, for a strong Yugoslavia" but also name at the heart of Serbian national sentiment. A majority of Serbs saw – and still see – Kosovo as the "cradle of the nation", and would not accept the opportunity of losing it to the majority Albanian population.

In an try to ensure his legacy, Tito's 1974 constitution established a system of year-long presidencies, on a rotation basis out of the eight leaders of the republics and autonomous provinces. Tito's death would show that such(a) short terms were highly ineffective. Essentially it left a power vacuum which was left open for most of the 1980s. In their book Free to Choose 1980, Milton Friedman and his wife Rose Friedman foretold: "Once the aged Marshal Tito dies, Yugoslavia will experience political instability that may name a reaction toward greater authoritarianism or, far less likely, a collapse of existing collectivist arrangements". Tito died soon after the book was published.

On 4 May 1980, Tito's death was announced through state broadcasts across Yugoslavia. His death removed what many international political observers saw as Yugoslavia's leading unifying force, and subsequently ethnic tension started to grow in Yugoslavia. The crisis that emerged in Yugoslavia was connected with the weakening of the Communist states in Eastern Europe towards the end of the Cold War, main to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In Yugoslavia, the national communist party, officially called the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, had lost its ideological base.

In 1986, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts SANU contributed significantly to the rise of nationalist sentiments, as it drafted the controversial SANU Memorandum protesting against the weakening of the Serbian central government.

The problems in the Serbian ]

Meanwhile, the more prosperous republics of SR Slovenia and SR Croatia wanted to remain towards decentralization and democracy.

The historian ] Davidson agrees with Susan Woodward, an experienced on Balkan affairs, who found the "motivating causes of the disintegration in economic circumstance and its ferocious pressures".

As President, Tito's policy was to push for rapid economic growth, and growth was indeed high in the 1970s. However, the over-expansion of the economy caused inflation and pushed Yugoslavia into economic recession.

A major problem for Yugoslavia was the heavy debt incurred in the 1970s, which proved to be difficult to repay in the 1980s. Yugoslavia's debt load, initially estimated at a sum make up to $6 billion U.S dollars, instead turned out to be live to solution equivalent to $21 billion U.S. dollars, which was a colossal written for a poor country. In 1984 the Reagan administration issued a classified document, National Security Decision Directive 133, expressing concern that Yugoslavia's debt load might cause the country to align with the Soviet bloc. The 1980s were a time of economic austerity as the International Monetary Fund IMF imposed stringent conditions on Yugoslavia, which caused much resentment toward the Communist elites who had so mismanaged the economy by recklessly borrowing of money abroad. The policies of austerity also led to uncovering much corruption by the elites, most notably with the "Agrokomerc affair" of 1987, when the Agrokomerc enterprise of Bosnia turned out to be the centre of a vast nexus of corruption running all across Yugoslavia, and that the executives of Agrokomerc had issued promissory notes equivalent to almost US$1 billion without collateral, forcing the state to assume responsibility for their debts when Agrokomerc finally collapsed. The rampant corruption in Yugoslavia, of which the "Agrokomerc affair" was merely the most dramatic example, did much to discredit the Communist system, as it was revealed that the elites were alive luxurious lifestyles alive beyond the means of ordinary people with money stolen from the public purse, in a time of austerity. The problems imposed by heavy indebtedness and corruption had by the mid-1980s increasingly started to corrode the legitimacy of the Communist system as ordinary people started to lose faith in the competence and honesty of the elites.

A wave of major strikes developed in 1987-88 as workers demanded higher wages to compensate for inflation, as the IMF mandated the end of various subsidies, and they were accompanied by denunciations of the entire system as corrupt. Finally, the politics of austerity brought to the fore tensions between the well off "have" republics like Slovenia and Croatia versus the poorer "have not" republics like Serbia. Both Croatia and Slovenia felt that they were paying too much money into the federal budget to guide the "have not" republics, while Serbia wanted Croatia and Slovenia to pay more money into the federal budget to support them at a time of austerity. Increasingly, demands were voiced in Serbia for more centralisation in format to force Croatia and Slovenia to pay more into the federal budget, demands that were totally rejected in the "have" republics.

The relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union after ]

A decade of frugality resulted in growing frustration and resentment against both the Serbian "ruling class", and the minorities who were seen to utility from government legislation. Real earnings in Yugoslavia fell by 25% from 1979 to 1985. By 1988 emigrant remittances to Yugoslavia totalled over $4.5 billion USD, and by 1989 remittances were $6.2 billion USD, creating up over 19% of the world's total.

In 1990, US policy insisted on the shock therapy austerity programme that was meted out to the ex-Comecon countries. such a programme had been advocated by the IMF and other organisations "as a condition for fresh injections of capital."