I Pandora9s War: The Multi-Dimensional Nature of the Yugoslav Conflicts

This paper is an attempt to define the general nature of armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. First, is there a sin-gle, and then perhaps polycentric Yugoslav war, or several successive or concurrent wars? Second, is that war, or those wars, civil, international, eth-nic, religious, or something else-a combination of two, three, or all four of the above characteristics? Third, why did the war break out? And fourth, who was right and who was wrong in waging it? The answer to the first question de-termines the answer to the second one. If there is only one war in the former Yugoslavia, then it should be viewed as a polycentric armed conflict. That premise leads to the conclusion that we are dealing with a Yugoslav civil war fought between several antagonists, and assuming different forms in di-verse parts of that multicultural country. Such interpretation establishes the interconnectedness of the successive armed conflicts in three out of six former Yugoslav republics. It high-lights the conflict as war of all against one-predominantly Croat, Muslim and Slovene against the mostly Serb forces. At the same time, it reduces the significance of local, autochthonous factors, picturing them as derivatives of the Yugoslav federal politics. It even maintains an illusion that Yugoslavia may still exist somehow-perhaps as a commonwealth of battlefields. The Yugoslav republics were dis-tinct and even partially separate ethnic societies and states even before the outbreak of the war. The only excep-tion was Bosnia and Herzegovina, that miniature Yugoslavia which encapsu-lates the very core of the contradictions that ripped Yugoslavia apart--ethnic-ity based upon religion that produces Slobodan Drakulic is a PhD candidate in th