The Rise and Fall of the Partnership for Peace, pt. 2

Second part of a series on post-Cold War US-EU-Russia diplomacy

This is the second part of a series on post-Cold War US-EU-Russia diplomacy. The first part can be found here.

When European communism collapsed in 1991, it removed the lid from a series of long-simmering feuds in the Balkans. The idea of a nation state uniting all Balkan Slavs had been around since the 17th century, and began to percolate among the Slavic intelligentsia as the Austro-Hungarian Empire weakened in the mid-1800s. They got their opportunity when Habsburg power was destroyed by World War I, and in 1918 the new nation of Yugoslavia was formed (Yugoslavia simply means “Land of the Southern Slavs”, though it also included a significant Muslim contingent). Although the idea enjoyed wide popular support, not everyone welcomed it. Both Hitler and Stalin took advantage of ethnic rivalries to rally different groups to their side, and Serbs, Croats, and others laid into each other with abandon in the last days of the German-Soviet War. After the Soviet conquest of Central and Eastern Europe, the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia was reconstituted into a Socialist Republic under the leadership of Marshal Josip Broz Tito. Tito was one of the only socialist leaders in Europe with the personal strength to stand up to Stalin. In 1948, Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union, and refused to join the Warsaw Pact when it was formed. Under Tito’s leadership, the regional and ethnic feuds were suppressed, but no one harbored any illusions that the wounds had healed. In fact, they began to bleed again as soon as Tito died in 1980. Slovenia, Croatia, and Kosovo demanded more autonomy within the federation, and when it became clear that no mutually-acceptable solution was possible, they began to talk of secession. By 1990, the Yugoslav Communist Party itself had split along ethnonational lines, and the federal government no longer exercised effective power over its constituent republics. I am reluctant to go into much more detail in this abbreviated format, because the history is long and complex and all sides would have valid objections to any attempt to summarize it here. One of these days I’ll do a full MartyrMade series on the Balkan Wars. For now, suffice to say that, although, in 1990, polls and surveys of the Yugoslav populations indicated little ethnic animosity, one thing led to another and by the next year general war had broken out along a number of fronts.

The Balkan Wars of the 1990s were vicious and cruel, a true civil war, fought by neighbors, not on battlefields but in alleyways and dark basements with men tied to chairs. But the conflict was only a miniature representation of what might have happened if the larger states fell into the same pattern. Czechoslovakia was set to break up along Czech and Slovak ethnic lines. Germans had formed significant majorities in the borderlands of Czechoslovakia and Poland until they were ethnically cleansed after 1945. Stalin had carved off a piece of eastern Poland for Ukraine, and compensated Poland by expanding it to the west into Germany. Poles and Ukrainians had slaughtered each other without restraint during World War 2, and the two countries barely spoke to each other during the Cold War. Ethnic Russians, who, like the Serbs of Yugoslavia, tended to be the most loyal to the old regime, found themselves in a situation similar to German Volksdeutsche after World War 1, stranded on the other side of a suddenly meaningful border, under the rule of ethnonationalist governments that viewed them as potential fifth columnists. In other words, it was not unthinkable that the entire former Warsaw Pact could follow Yugoslavia into a general conflict - except with thousands of nuclear weapons in play.