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Riding The Tiger: The Dissolution Of Yugoslavia

Decent Essays

Drnovsek, Janez. "Riding the Tiger: The Dissolution of Yugoslavia." World Policy Journal 17.1 (2000): 57-63. ProQuest. Web. 5 Feb. 2016. In Drnovsek’s scholarly article he investigates how the collapse of Yugoslavia started after President Tito’s death. He analyzes that after Tito’s death central power started to dissolve and the six republics of Yugoslavia broke off and started to work independently in different directions, also the Communist party became decentralized (Drnovsek 58). He outlines the agendas of each ethnic group; Milosevic the leader of the Serbian party was trying to strengthen Serbian nationalism throughout the country whereas Slovenia and Croatia fought for democracy and independence from Serbia (Drnovsek 61). Drnovesk’s …show more content…

He talks about the political process and democracy that led to the negotiations of the split up of Czechoslovakia and why this was the main reason why the break up was peaceful (Young 9). He also notes how the breakup was a fair democratized process where they were trying to split up the distribution of power between the two countries where each received fair health care, education, equal taxation, citizenship rights, and property (Young 46-47). Young’s article provides excellent information to why the Czechoslovakia split was peaceful because of the vast political formation and democracy that allowed for a peaceful resolution. The assembly of political parties allowed the voice of the Slovaks and Czechs to be heard, and this allowed for compromise and negotiations to allow for a bloodless resolution between the two groups. The democratized political process of the Czechoslovakian split shows how different it was to the Yugoslavian separation because Yugoslavia had more of an authoritarian process where the Serbians held most of the control and the political organization of each ethnicity was very weak not allowing for much change to occur. Therefore, a major argument I will make in my essay …show more content…

Her main argument to why the two states had different methods of separation was because in Czechoslovakia they had fewer cultural, linguistic, and religious differences where there were only two ethnic groups the Slovaks and the Czechs. However, in Yugoslavia there were several ethnic groups with different opinions on the idea of the separation of Yugoslavia and this resulted in violent conflict between the ethnic groups because of there different ideas and needs (Bookman 176). Bookman also talks about the different economic factors each country faced, where Yugoslavia was faced with economic inequalities because the debt was not being split equally between the ethnic populations and this caused tensions. In Czechoslovakia the Czechs agreed to pay more debt than the Slovaks because they had more economic advantage than the Slovaks and thus these negotiations also led to the peaceful separation of Czechoslovakia. Bookman’s book is useful for my essay because it provides a great comparison to why Yugoslavia ended violently and Czechoslovakia ended peacefully. He gives excellent information as to why Yugoslavia ended violently in that they had pre existing conflicts between ethnicities that had different plans for Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia on the other hand had a less diverse population

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