International aspects of the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Abstract

This article analyses the international conditions during the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is an outline of a broad research problem, a historical analysis from the perspective of the decades-long evolution of Yugoslavia’s international position. After its expulsion from the Eastern Bloc in 1948, the country balanced between East and West, becoming one of the founders and leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement. The author focuses on the aspect of Yugoslavia’s role in the politics of the West, especially the US and the EEC, during and at the end of the Cold War. It was the West that could, possibly, have played a role in preventing the disintegration of the country in the early 1990s, in contrast to the USSR, which had its own internal problems at that time. What factors influenced Western support for the SFRY during the Cold War? How did Yugoslavia’s position in Western politics change when the Cold War rivalry ended? The author points out the temporal connection between the disintegration of the SFRY and, among other things, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union, the democratisation process in Eastern Europe, German reunification, European integration, and the crisis in the Middle East. In the end, there was a lack of real and coherent action by Western countries to bring about a peaceful solution to the crisis in the Balkans. The consequence of this would be the disintegration of the SFRY and several years of war in the former Yugoslavia.