Yugoslavia, the Former and Future: Reflections by Scholars from the Region

Editors Akhavan and Howse have compiled a collection of diverse essays that dispel myths and misconceptions about the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and shed new light on largely ignored or misinterpreted information about Yugoslavia's disintegration. Each essay deals with a specific element of disintegration, and while all of the elements are telling, the chapter by Dragomir Vojnic on economic disparity as a key to the demise of Yugoslavia is most compelling. Vojnic illustrates with population and demographic data the regional disparities that existed among Yugoslavia's different republics. It is easy to see how certain groups grew to be malcontent. Slovenia and Croatia, historically more prosperous and tied more to Western Europe, enjoyed a higher standard of living, access to the West, and superior infrastructure, and despite massive redistributive efforts on the part of the federal Yugoslav government, attempts to improve quality of life in the more southern regions of Yugoslavia were never quite successful. Indeed, equality was never achieved; Slovenia and Croatia grew tired of bankrolling failing redistribution schemes that had no results. The federal government did not implement infrastructural improvements in regions like Macedonia, Bosnia and Kosovo in order to make redistributive efforts productive, so the efforts were doomed to failure. This created a great deal of tension, which of course exacerbated the nationalist question about which Western nations hear and see so much. In fact the problem has been universally diagnosed as being a nationalist one, when fundamentally, the problem is more complex and is rooted in economic inequality.This book does an excellent job in proving this.