Етнификација политике у Хрватској и Босни пред ратни распад Југославије
Ethnication of politics in Croatia and Bosnia in the run-up to the violent Dissolution of Yugoslavia

Summary/Abstract: Two prominent approaches in the research on violent dissolution of Yugoslavia – instrumentalist and constructivist – are focused on the role of the political elites in the member republics in ethnification of Yugoslav politics. Due to their overstated focus on elite agency these approaches are unable to systematically explain variable ways in which the ordinary Yugoslavs acted politically in the period wither following, or opposing the elites. By focusing on tempo and different forms of ethnic mobilization in Croatia and Bosnia in the early 1990s this article offers an analytical scale for mapping different institutional, non-violent non-institutional and violent forms of political agency of the ordinary people in the period. Ethnic mobilization was only one of the ways in which ordinary people reacted to the last phase of the Yugoslav crisis, but gradually and through a complex interaction of the elites and the ordinary people it became a dominant political cleavage. Road to ethnification includes, but cannot be reduced to, top-down manipulation, nor it was always and everywhere achieved through violent methods of non-institutional contention. The article identifies some of the variations in the ethnification process that exist both between and within the Yugoslav republics, and by doing so it points out to the importance and our insufficient understanding of different local conxtexts that co-shaped mechanisms of ethnification in Yugoslav politics.

• Details
• Contents