Economic collapse and nationalist resurgence

Although the communist Balkan states differed in many respects, there were similarities. When the regimes had settled into place, nepotism appeared in Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania: after Hoxha’s death in 1985, his widow continued to exercise considerable influence; Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov gave his daughter control of cultural affairs and, at the end of his years in power, was attempting to move his son up the party ladder; in Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife placed at least 40 relatives in prominent party and state posts.

Nationalism also came to dominate the affairs of all states. Initially, many observers thought that the advent of communist party rule had at last solved the issue of nationalism. In Romania a new autonomous region was created for the Hungarians, and in Bulgaria minorities enjoyed unprecedented freedom in education, publishing, and culture. In Yugoslavia cooperation between the constituent republics was smooth and effective, and Serb-Croat relations were never closer than immediately after the signature in 1954 of the Novi Sad agreement, by which the writers’ unions of the two republics (organizations that could not act without official approval) agreed to cooperate in literary and linguistic matters.

The new cooperation created a misleading image. Resentments and hostilities were concealed rather than removed. In Yugoslavia internal harmony flowed more from the fear of Cominform intervention than from the burying of old hatchets. In 1946 the Albanian population of Yugoslavia was designated a “national minority,” rather than one of Yugoslavia’s constituent nations. In addition, they were not granted their own republic, and they generally found themselves living in either the Autonomous Region of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Macedonia.

By the 1960s other difficulties had become apparent. For example, in the immediate postwar years the Bulgarian communists had acknowledged the existence of a Macedonian minority in their country and had even been prepared to cede parts of Bulgaria to a separate Macedonia that would be part of a broader Balkan confederation. However, after the split between Tito and Stalin, there was an immediate reversal in Sofia, so that by the early 1960s severe penalties were imposed on anyone making a public display of Macedonian identity. In 1989 approximately 300,000 Turks were forced to leave Bulgaria and settle in Turkey. Many Roma (Gypsies) left with them.

In Romania the Hungarian autonomous region was gerrymandered out of existence in 1960, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 providing Bucharest’s leaders with an excellent excuse to increase central control over this minority. For other minorities there were increasing restrictions, and they were in any case becoming more aware that official toleration had been extended to them primarily to make indoctrination more effective; Bulgarian Turks, for example, could easily obtain the works of Marx or Stalin in Turkish but not the Qurʾān.

The nationalist issue was complicated by economic factors. By the mid-1960s it was clear that the economic system was in need of reform. This was in part because the first stage of socialist construction, based on extensive development and the building of a heavy industrial base, was nearing completion. The next would be based more on technological innovation and on the satisfaction of consumer needs. In 1965 the Yugoslavs went ahead with a radical reform program that was intended to move the economy toward “market socialism” by allowing the private ownership of small businesses, abolishing many price controls, and requiring larger enterprises to compete more directly with one another and with foreign companies. Meanwhile, the Romanians sought ways to make themselves less dependent on the rest of the Soviet bloc, and the Bulgarians initiated a number of changes, only to be frightened off by the conservative climate that followed the suppression of the Prague Spring—a period of liberal social and economic reforms—in 1968. Other reform programs followed in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

The salient feature of all the major reform initiatives throughout the Balkans was that they failed. Promises of increased standards of living could not be kept, which fatally compromised the prevailing Marxist-Leninist ideology. By the mid-1960s there were few adherents to the old ideology, but the power structure remained, and those who benefited from it were determined to maintain it. Needing to find an alternative means to legitimacy, they instead chose nationalism. In foreign affairs each state emphasized its individual approach, while in domestic policy pressures on minorities were intensified—with Bulgaria forcing Roma, Pomaks (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims), and Turks to adopt Bulgarian names and the Romanian government subjecting Hungarian and German speakers to ever-greater assimilationist pressures.

The use of nationalism as a legitimizing factor in the communist state was possible only where that state was a true nation-state, such as in Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania. In Yugoslavia, however, attempts to create a sense of Yugoslav identity had only limited success. In all eastern European states, the communist takeovers had brought to power individuals who were not only ideologically committed but uncharacteristically young and therefore not well educated. After 20 years of communist domination, a much better-educated generation had emerged only to find that most of the rewarding and influential jobs were occupied by people who, though less qualified than they, had 20 more years to serve before retirement. In all states this was a source of tension and one more reason for the regimes to seek enhanced legitimization, but in Yugoslavia—especially Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina—tension was made worse by the fact that the first generation of rulers recruited during the Partisan struggle contained a disproportionate number of Serbs. By the 1960s the fear of Soviet pressure, which had been a unifying force in Yugoslavia immediately after the split of 1948, was no longer felt, and it was revived only momentarily in August 1968 by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Moreover, reforms in the 1960s had allowed Yugoslavs to travel abroad, and many had gone to work in western Europe. These people returned not only with German marks and American dollars but also with greater expectations of freedom, national as well as individual—expectations that could only be heightened by moves toward liberalization and decentralization in the new Yugoslav constitution of 1963. At the same time, with an increasing inflow of hard currency, the northern republics grew resentful of the obligation to lodge most of this money in the federal bank in Belgrade. Such centrifugal pressures could not go unnoticed for long, and, indeed, by 1968 the Croatian party had become dominated by nationalist communists—who were then purged by Tito.

Yugoslav devolutionists were granted concessions in the 1974 constitution, which gave the party of each constituent element of the federation much greater authority in its own area. For the most part, interference from without was prevented, and in this way the Yugoslav republics became fiefdoms ruled by native barons in much the same way that the other Balkan states were ruled by their national parties. This compartmentalization became a fundamental feature of Yugoslav stability for the next decade. It was in his rejection of this convention by revoking the autonomy of Kosovo in 1989 that the Serbian party leader Slobodan Milošević upset Yugoslavia’s already fragile peace. (By the turn of the 21st century he had definitively destroyed the idea of Yugoslavism.)

The transition from authoritarianism to democracy in the Balkans was punctuated in many areas, particularly in Yugoslavia, with civil war. By December 1990 both Croatia and Slovenia had voted for autonomy, and the Serb minority in Croatia had sought to unite with Serbia. That same month Serbians elected the fiery nationalist and ex-communist Milošević president, and he launched a campaign aimed at unifying the Serbs for the first time since the great migration into the Habsburg empire at the end of the 17th century. Croatia and Slovenia both declared their independence on June 25, 1991; the republics of Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina soon followed; and, as fighting erupted over disputed territories of mixed population, the presidents of the six republics—Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro—failed to revive the loose confederation. To stem the conflict, the United Nations (UN) dispatched some 15,000 peacekeepers (mostly British and French) and devised a plan that would have divided Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia into a crazy quilt of cantons based on local ethnic majorities. However, the plan pleased no one, and fighting escalated amid atrocities and evidence of “ethnic cleansing” by the Serbs.

By the mid-1990s Slovenia was independent and at peace, and the Republic of Macedonia, protected by a small international force, was admitted to the UN under the name the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia at the insistence of Greece, which claimed a monopoly on the use of the term Macedonia. Croatia controlled almost all its putative territory, including the Dalmatian coast. What remained of Yugoslavia included Serbia, Montenegro, and portions of Bosnia and Herzegovina inhabited or claimed by Bosnian Serbs, including a corridor stretching almost to the Adriatic Sea. The would-be state of Bosnia was strangled within this noose as the fighting between Serbs, Bosnian Serbs, Bosniaks (Muslims), and Croats shifted from Sarajevo to Goražde to Bihać. Each time a truce seemed near, fighting broke out anew, until the Dayton Accords of 1995 created a loosely federalized Bosnia and Herzegovina divided roughly between the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (a decentralized federation of Croats and Bosniaks) and the Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb Republic). In Kosovo in February 1998, widespread fighting erupted between Serbs and ethnic Albanians when Milošević ordered troops into the province to regain territory controlled by the Kosovo Liberation Army. To bring about Serbia’s withdrawal, the following year the North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched a bombing campaign against Serbia, forcing Milošević to accept a peace plan jointly sponsored by Russia, the European Union (EU), and the United States. (See Kosovo conflict.) In 2000 Milošević was defeated in presidential elections by Vojislav Koštunica and was later arrested and extradited to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes.

The new Yugoslavia, now composed of only Serbia and Montenegro, attempted to rebuild its shattered society and economy, while the independent states of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia sought closer ties with the countries of the EU. However, secessionists in Montenegro soon pushed for independence from the new Yugoslavia, against the wishes of the international community, which feared that further political instability might rekindle the destructive forces that were unleashed in the early 1990s. In 2002 the EU brokered an agreement between the leaders of Yugoslavia, Serbia, and Montenegro that called for the formation of a loose federation, called Serbia and Montenegro, which would have a single federal policy on defense, foreign affairs, and trade but would grant each republic autonomy in most other policy areas and enable either republic to hold a referendum on independence after three years. The agreement was ratified by the federal parliament and the Serbian and Montenegrin assemblies in 2003, effectively erasing Yugoslavia from the map. Three years later, after Montenegrins approved a referendum on independence, Serbia and Montenegro disbanded the federation and became independent republics.

Meanwhile, the future status of Kosovo remained uncertain; the ethnic Albanian majority there desired independence, but Serbia emphatically opposed it. Kosovo formally seceded from Serbia in February 2008. The United States and most members of the EU supported the move, but Serbia and Russia refused to recognize Kosovar independence.

Outside Yugoslavia, secession from a large federation also brought independence, as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic became Moldova, the majority of whose inhabitants were ethnic Romanians. This did not bring union with Romania, however, which would have angered Moldova’s own minorities—particularly the Russians. In Romania itself, an ingrained fear of the security police produced a short and intense civil war. A similar development in Albania, where terror and deprivation had been as great, was only just avoided. Only in Bulgaria—where, for ethnic Bulgarians at least, the last years of communist rule had been relatively benign—was a peaceful transition achieved.

The various Balkan states thus found different paths out of socialism but faced similar problems when they emerged. The vast subsidized and hugely inefficient heavy industrial plants in which communist propagandists had taken such pride were now virtually useless. Their products, many of which had previously been sold in the “soft” Soviet and eastern European markets for “soft” currencies, were too low in quality and too high in price to survive in a competitive market. Widespread unemployment was the not-surprising consequence. Furthermore, the old communist-inspired industries left another and potentially even more dangerous legacy: environmental pollution on a prodigious scale.

In all postcommunist states except Serbia, the solutions to economic problems were expected to be found in a market economy and in eventual association with the EU. International agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund promised financial help for the new Balkan regimes but required an economic transformation, as the states were expected to privatize their industries and agriculture, remove government subsidies, and restrain public expenditure. The social costs of these adjustments were enormous. Restricting public expenditure meant limiting social security funds just when unemployment and inflation were taking their heaviest toll. In this context, constructing an open, pluralist system that tolerated minority groups was a daunting task.

There were other challenges as well. As in the past, the Balkans had little more to export than food, raw materials, and agricultural products—the very items against which the EU’s tariffs discriminated most sharply. But even less promising was the obvious alternative: membership in a Black Sea zone sponsored by Turkey. Such an association would align the Balkan states with a less-developed area; it would divide them from the rest of Europe; and, most uncomfortable of all, it would turn the peninsula back toward Istanbul. Ever since the Slavs settled in the Balkans, they had attempted to restrict the power of that great city on the Bosporus, yet no sooner had they emerged from Byzantine rule than the Ottomans appeared and reestablished Eastern domination of the peninsula. From the end of the 18th century, centrifugal forces spearheaded by Balkan Christian nationalism gained greater strength, but the weakness of this movement was its inability to resolve differences between its own different nationalities. Domination first by central European fascism and then by Russian socialism followed, and, when these powers collapsed in turn, the Balkan peoples faced the same dangers that had plagued them throughout the period they had occupied the peninsula.

At the close of the first decade of the 21st century, the prospects for peace, stability, and economic prosperity for the peoples of the Balkans had improved significantly. NATO and, more importantly, the EU expanded their influence in the area by offering membership to an increasing number of Balkan states. The successful continuation of this process holds out hope that notions of “primitive Balkan mentalities” and “age-old Balkan hatreds” would soon be consigned to the dustbin of history.

One conflict that found a resolution in the new century’s second decade was the matter of the Republic of Macedonia’s constitutional name. In the early 1990s Greece had instituted an economic blockade in an attempt to compel Macedonia to relinquish its claims to that name, but in 1995 the two countries entered into an Interim Accord that held the promise of resolving the name issue, which was submitted to UN-sponsored mediation. By 2009, however, Greece had turned up the pressure again by having blocked Macedonia’s attempts to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the EU. Still, despite ongoing protests by Greek and Macedonian nationalists, the UN-brokered bilateral talks on the “name” issue had continued. In June 2018 they bore fruit, when the prime ministers of Macedonia and Greece signed the Prespa Agreement, under which Macedonia was to be known both domestically and internationally as the Republic of North Macedonia (Macedonian: Republika Severna Makedonija). By January 2019 the Macedonian and Greek legislatures had both approved the measures necessary to pave the way for formal adoption of the new name, which was promulgated on February 12, shortly after the Greek parliament had approved the protocol for North Macedonia’s accession to NATO.