How accurate is this French politician's account of the break-up of Yugoslavia ?

by SweetBakchich

Hello everyone ! A historical issue has been bugging me for a while. During the French presidential campaign of last year, on 30 March 2017, Jean Luc Mélenchon, a major left-wing French politician released a video as part of the series of unscripted videos he releases every week on his Youtube channel to discuss the news and his ideas. If you speak French, the video is here, and the part about Yugoslavia starts around 16:00. He spends around 2 minutes in the video discussing the break-up of Yugoslavia for his young fans (to justify one of his policies towards Russia). I would like to know to what extent is his account accurate, because what he said runs contrary to everything I've read about the issue, by either skipping Serb reprehensible behaviour, blaming the Germans for the war, or straight up switching responsibilities for starting the war between Serbia and Croatia in 1991. Back in April 2017, it prompted me to stop being a lurker and actually ask for an explanation about it on the biggest French subreddit, which seemed to lean heavily in Mélenchon's favour at that time. One user then suggested to me to ask questions here, but I never found the time to do it until today. Enough talking now, here is a translation of what he said. I tried to be as accurate as possible, but some sentences may still sound unnatural.

Yugoslavia was a country that gathered several countries that have become independent since then. When troubles started on all sides, the French presidency said "we can agree to recognize some countries as independent, the Croats, the Slovenes, etc. On one condition: each country which claims to be independent must explain how it will guarantee the rights of the minorities living in their territories." For example, how the Croats would guarantee the rights of the Serbs. Good. That's where we were.

We had this request on the table, and our German friends and neighbours did not surround themselves with such precautions and decided to recognize everyone. The recognized Croatia and Slovenia, and it turns out that those were their allies during the last two years, so they know each other well. They recognized [Croatia and Slovenia], and boom it started.

Consequently, because there was no protection set up for minorities, the Croats kicked the Serbs out of their homes, this was an abominable war. Obviously, the Serbs retaliated, a war is never clean. The only thing that is clean is the propaganda that chooses which side are the good guys and which sides are the bad guys.

I artificially created the paragraphs myself so I could address my problems with what he said more clearly. I didn't really have a problem with the first paragraph about the French presidency's position, as far as I know, the French presidency was indeed reluctant to recognize Croatia and Slovenia as independent. But it just seems odd to me to only mention those two (with a focus on Croatia) when speaking about countries that caused worries regarding their minorities. I seem to recall that a few years before the war, Milosevic had revoked Kosovo's constitutional autonomy, leading to many human-rights abuses and oppression against Albanians in Kosovo, that was still going on in 1991. So, my sub-question here would be "Were there actions of the Croat and Slovene governments that justified extra caution around them, even more than around Serbia, to the point where failing to mention Milosevic's own actions against minorities in Serbia becomes understandable?"

Then there is the part about the Germans' decision to recognize Croatia and Slovenia. I have three sub-questions about this one. First, he says that Germany recognized those two as independent and then links that recognition to how they were Germany's allies during the last two wars, and I assume he meant the two World Wars. I do know about the collaborationist Independent State of Croatia and the Ustase, but first, that does not mean that this Nazi alliance and historical affinity was the motivation behind Germany's decision. So my first sub-question here would be: "What was the motivation behind Germany's decision to recognize the independence of Croatia and Slovenia?" The second, "was Slovenia also a Nazi ally back in WW2, similar to the Independent State of Croatia?" I know absolutely nothing about the role Slovenia played in WW2, if any. And the third one would be "Is it fair to describe the German decision to recognize Croatia and Slovenia as a trigger for the war?" (he described it as "They recognized them, and boom it started"). This seems totally bogus to me, as I thought the German recognition only came in December 1991, when the war between Serbia and Slovenia took place in June-July, and the war in Croatia started in August, with the siege of Dubrovnik starting in October, and the Vukovar Massacre taking place in November, all very serious events.

And finally, the part about how the Serbs only retaliated against the Croats who were kicking them out of their homes. My question here is simple: “Can the Serbs be said to have retaliated against a Croat aggression?”. Everything I've read about the war points to the opposite being true: the Serbs attacking Croatia because they don't accept it being independent, the Serbs of Croatia declaring their independence in the Kraijna region whey they formed a majority and starting to ethnically cleanse the non-Serbs in the region, with the Croat government only claiming that region back in 1995 with Operation Storm, where hundreds of Serb civilians were killed and thousands of Serbs fled ahead of the Croat army. Am I missing things here?

I’m sorry for the length of my question, I hope it is still appropriate for this sub in terms of format. I’m really interested in the recent history of the Western Balkans, and I’ve read a few books on the topic of the Yugoslav Wars, as well as a few judgements from the ICTY, but I’m nowhere near an expert on the topic so I have many questions (especially since even though I have strong doubts about what he said, Jean Luc Mélenchon is generally considered by his peers to be anything but uneducated). Thank you very much in advance for reading all of this!

Edit: formatting issues

commiespaceinvader

Part 1/3

So, these are some huge questions to begin with. But let me start with the following: Without being overly familiar with Mélenchon's exact position on these issues, there was and is a certain strand of a European and US American hard left out there who have turned their opposition to external influences in the Yugoslavia of the early 90s and subsequent actions by various Western European and the US government within the Yugoslavian conflicts into a veneration of Slobodon Milošević, Serbia, and even actors of the Republika Srpska despite their actions in the lead-up to the war, the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and of course in the campaigns of ethnic cleansing and genocide during the war. Reddit user /u/JFVarlet has written extensively about this in various threads in the badhistory sub such as here on Ed Herman; here; here; here; and here. Their posts cover quite a lot of ground and while Herman who is mentioned frequently was one of the most outrageous cases of this phenomenon, he was far from the only one – Austrian novelist Peter Handke comes to mind – and while indeed one of the most extreme cases, still indicative for a larger trend among certain circles within the international left: Mistakenly seeing Milošević and Serbia as the continuation of a socialist, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia despite the fact that it was him who literally presided over said Yugoslavia's destruction. Again, without knowing the exact history of Mélenchon's positions on these issues, I have a rather strong suspicion that while he might not have gone full Ed Herman so to speak, he too was affected by this twisted logic of opposition against Yugoslav disintegration and Western influence in the process turning into Milošević-apologia and a rose-tinted view of the role of Milošević's Serbia in the disintegration and subsequent war.

As for your questions, there is a lot of ground to cover but one can easily be answered very quickly: "was Slovenia also a Nazi ally back in WW2, similar to the Independent State of Croatia?". The resounding answer to that is no. Slovenia was annexed in part by Italy but for the most part by Germany and became part of the Reich. It was subject to a policy of forced Germanization (in accordance with the Habsburg inspired theory that Slovenians were in part Slavic speaking Germans rather than Slavs), which in practice meant the deportation of Slovenes and Serbs living in the territory to German-occupied Serbia, massive discrimination against Slovenes, including the prohibition to speak their language to children being taken from Slovenian families in order to be raised German somewhere else in the Reich. The relationship between occupied and annexed Slovenia was nothing like the satellite-state relationship with Ustasha Croatia and to call the Slovenes "Allies" of Nazi Germany is a massive misrepresentation of history. France in form of the Vichy government was more of an ally to Nazi Germany than Slovenia was during the war.

Moving on to the issue of Slovenia and Croatia in the late 80s and first two years of the 90s and their policies surrounding the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The German doyen of historical research on the history of Yugoslavia, Holm Sundhaussen, has identified the reasons for the disintegration of the Yugoslav socialist state in a conflation of crises that were all interlocked and depended on each other but can be described as

  • the economic crisis – the economy had been in a bad state already when Tito died due to a variety of reforms instituted in the 70s not panning out;

  • the intellectual crisis – in search for a new answer to what constituted Yugoslav legitimacy in the first place and in a situation where socialism faltered around Europe, intellectual and politicians increasingly turned to nationalism;

  • the Kosovo crisis – Kosovo had experienced a massive modernization in Yugoslav times and with new wealth and education had come a generation in the 1980s that demanded Kosovo to become a full-fledged Republic within Yugoslavia triggering a question that had been to a very large degree avoided since 1945: What was the status of Kosovo within socialist Yugoslavia, which in turn did trigger nationalist sentiments especially in Serbia.

  • the political crisis: Tied with the other crises and in part due to the conflict between Republics and between reformers and old hands, reforms became increasingly impossible within a Yugoslavia where a central federated government held extremely little power compared to the Republics that formed it. This was in large parts what enabled Milošević and some others to gain power and trigger what was known in Serbia as the "anti-bureacratic revolution" of Milošević, filling important government roles with Serbian nationalists, especially in Montenegro.

While the details of how many of these crises affected Serbia in the rise of Milošević, the increasingly sharp rhetoric towards Kosovo, the beginning of the genocide discourse (Albanians in Kosovo having more children than Serbs thus "outpopulating" them and thereby commiting genocide against the Serbs), etc. pp. are well known, how these crises affected the other republics goes to the very heart of your above asked question on Slovenia and Croatia.

As Sundhaussen points out in his book Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten 1943-2011, a lot of works in the past have focused on the Serbian-Croatian antagonism as the driving force behind the disintegration of Yugoslavia but this is not warranted as in the Serbian-Croatian antagonism becoming dominant in the 90s while the driving antagonisms of the late 80s was the Serbian-Albanian (as is known) as well as the less known Serbian-Slovenian antagonism.

Slovenia and its population had initially been in massive support of the Yugoslav project. Considering their position both after the First and Second World War, Slovenian participation in the state of Yugoslavia had been seen as absolutely essential in order to protect country and population from interests of their neighbors, especially Italy and Austria. Especially in socialist Yugoslavia many Slovenian politicians had been very important for the concrete formation of the state itself and for Yugoslav socialism, among them Edvard Kardelj, Boris Krdič, Stane Dolanc etc. pp. But around 1987 this pro-Yugoslav sentiment seemed to disappear to replaced by a new Slovenian nationalism. The reasons for this are numerous but among them were that Slovenia and its population saw no more danger emanating from its immediate neighbors, that as the richest republic, they felt they had to finance poorer republics with their money, especially in a an inefficient system, and that Milošević's anti-bureacratic revolution created fear among the populous that a Serbian hegemony was in preparation within Yugoslavia.

So while with Milan Kučan taking power in Slovenia as both head of government and head of the communist party, antagonism between Serbia and Slovenia reached new heights and a much stronger discourse (in part inspired by the Slovenian expatriate community around the world) started taking place, Slovenia also was in a rather unique position that it was one of the most homogeneous republics of Yugoslavia and that a very small number of Slovenes lived in other republics. What that meant in practice was that when "Slovene" and "Yugoslavs" started becoming incompatible and when it suddenly became important again, who was a Slovene, a Serb, a Croat and so forth – I talk about the problems with this in this answer – unlike in Croatia, Serbia, etc. there wasn't suddenly a community of alleged "others" in Slovenia unlike in other republics. In this sense, the national aspirations of Slovenia gave less reason to be concerned than e.g. those of Serbia in the sense that within Slovenia there hardly was anyone to ethnically cleanse and thus such a program was simply not necessary to prepare.