Yugoslavia is admitted via express in the EEC in 1990
- Thread starter Mario
- Start date
MarshalBraginsky
Banned
Imagine Yugoslavia undergoing the same problems as Greece IOTL if they actually entered the EEC.
No big deal, rest of EU would bail them out.
But wouldn't it be worth it? No war, no death...
Don't forget that EEC in 1990 was NOTHING like the port-Maastricht EU.
Jugoslavia MIGHT avoid her horrible fate if the Maastricht perspective was offered to her people as viable in the near future and it participated in the discussions... though I suppose that EU accession of ALL Jugo republics together as SEPARATE EU member states would have more internal popular appeal by 1992, except probably in Montenegro. A perspective that I see as extremely hard to accept to other members at the time.
So, while I hate to say that, I am afraid that early EU probably would not have saved Jugoslavia as a country not spared her conflict.
Jugoslavia MIGHT avoid her horrible fate if the Maastricht perspective was offered to her people as viable in the near future and it participated in the discussions... though I suppose that EU accession of ALL Jugo republics together as SEPARATE EU member states would have more internal popular appeal by 1992, except probably in Montenegro. A perspective that I see as extremely hard to accept to other members at the time.
So, while I hate to say that, I am afraid that early EU probably would not have saved Jugoslavia as a country not spared her conflict.
Although I think that the UK just left the organisation...No big deal, rest of EU would bail them out.
Angel Heart
Banned
I remember watching a few years ago a Serb socio-political talkshow called Ćirilica (Cyrillic) hosted by Milomir Marić. When Marić asked if Yugoslavia could have survived if she joined the EC one guest (whose name I forgot) said that the better question would be if the EC could have survived us. The Balkan peninsula has this habit of causing long and agonizing deaths of empires that tried to rule there.
IIRC one of the main, if not the main reason, was because the country was at this point an utter mess. Older people from the region might fondly remember this newsreel. Remember: By 1990 the communist party of Yugoslavia, and thus the last uniting element, was no more, the six republics were acting like states within states, the local communist parties (with the exception of Serbia and Montenegro) were kicked out by local nationalist and thus alienating the republics even more, in Croatia and Serbia respectively the Krajina Serbs and Kosovo Albanians created para-states and thus states within states within states, the only thing of Yugoslavia that was left at this point was the federal army, the jackals and hyenas were already waiting for Yugoslavia to die so they could feast on her carcass while sabotaging Ante Marković's attempt to save what could be saved and the list goes on. Milošević and his alpha bitch of the JUL is a tale of itself...
If the EC turned Yugoslavia and her republics into a client state of Bruxelles then maybe there was a chance. However Falecius made a good point that Bruxelles had much less jurisdiction back then. An early admission of Yugoslavia could also backfire horribly. Imagine the only thing the EC could do (besides of pouring billions into a black hole) is watching helplessly while Yugoslavia descends into a civil war like IOTL. This could damage if not outright kill not only the credibility and prestige of the EC but also the very idea of a "united Europe".
IIRC one of the main, if not the main reason, was because the country was at this point an utter mess. Older people from the region might fondly remember this newsreel. Remember: By 1990 the communist party of Yugoslavia, and thus the last uniting element, was no more, the six republics were acting like states within states, the local communist parties (with the exception of Serbia and Montenegro) were kicked out by local nationalist and thus alienating the republics even more, in Croatia and Serbia respectively the Krajina Serbs and Kosovo Albanians created para-states and thus states within states within states, the only thing of Yugoslavia that was left at this point was the federal army, the jackals and hyenas were already waiting for Yugoslavia to die so they could feast on her carcass while sabotaging Ante Marković's attempt to save what could be saved and the list goes on. Milošević and his alpha bitch of the JUL is a tale of itself...
If the EC turned Yugoslavia and her republics into a client state of Bruxelles then maybe there was a chance. However Falecius made a good point that Bruxelles had much less jurisdiction back then. An early admission of Yugoslavia could also backfire horribly. Imagine the only thing the EC could do (besides of pouring billions into a black hole) is watching helplessly while Yugoslavia descends into a civil war like IOTL. This could damage if not outright kill not only the credibility and prestige of the EC but also the very idea of a "united Europe".
Admission of new countries is a deliberate process. Theres no way the EEC would have admitted Yugoslavia as it was at the time. So, the EEC accepting Yugoslavia means enough stability there that the civil war might not happen.
katchen
Banned
It's ironic but Eastern Europe can be looked upon as a sort of social quasi- experiment testing the hypothesis that massive population transfers to compact contiguous nation states reduce irredentism and tension between nations, even though they were certainly never planned out that way. The Germans, Poles and Ukranians are one experiment. Greeks and Turks are another. Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Slovenes and Montenegrins within the territory of Yugoslavia are the experimental controls.
If we look at Eastern Europe in this manner, the results of this unplanned quasi experiment would appear to indicate that the experimental intervention by the USSR of forcibly removing Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and Sudetenland and resettling those lands with Poles while at the same time removing Poles from the Ukraine and resettling Poland east of Brest-Litovsk and Zamsoc with Ukrainians and Belarusians--and the mutual resettlement of Greeks and Turks from within each other's soereign nations in the 1920s appears to have greatly reduced ethnic tensions both within and between those nations compared to the control, Yugoslavia which did not experience this kind of intervention of population transfer to create compact, cintiguous nation states.
If we look at Eastern Europe in this manner, the results of this unplanned quasi experiment would appear to indicate that the experimental intervention by the USSR of forcibly removing Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and Sudetenland and resettling those lands with Poles while at the same time removing Poles from the Ukraine and resettling Poland east of Brest-Litovsk and Zamsoc with Ukrainians and Belarusians--and the mutual resettlement of Greeks and Turks from within each other's soereign nations in the 1920s appears to have greatly reduced ethnic tensions both within and between those nations compared to the control, Yugoslavia which did not experience this kind of intervention of population transfer to create compact, cintiguous nation states.
Incognito
Banned
Off topic, but I wonder if Yugoslavia could have survived if some kind of military junta took control?
IIRC population transfers are partially responsible for growing tensions between more Russophonic & Russophilic Eastern Ukraine and more "Western oriented" Western Ukraine with Western Ukranian nationalists accusing the Soviets of trying to colonieze Ukraine with Russian settlers (though to be honest I don't have the data on how widely Russian was spoken in Eastern Ukraine before Soviet times so I can not fully confirm nor deny the nationalist claims)
Angel Heart
Banned
This was actually suggested by Warmaster Veljko Kadijević and the leadership of the JNA back in March 1991. The idea was to introduce a state of emergency for a few years before letting the local populations decide in a referendum wether they want to remain in Yugoslavia or not. Problem was that the other republics saw this as an attempt by Serbia to hijack Yugoslavia. In secret Kadijević even suggested to Marković to arrest Kučan and Tuđman, which Marković at first approved but declined because the plan didn't involve arresting Milošević as the Warmaster genuinely believed that Sloba was the key in saving Yugoslavia. A military coup by the JNA (the way Marković wanted) could have gone both ways: It could have either deescalated the situation or made things even worse than IOTL.
MarshalBraginsky
Banned
So if Sloba and the Serb radicals were also arrested alongside Tudjman and his crew, would that help a bit or would the situation get worse from there?
Well, it could probably prevent people grumbling about how the whole operation was done in favour of either Serbia or Croatia in order to privatize Yugoslavia just for themselves. On the other hand, the smaller republics would still probably be paranoid about the "big two" running the show with a junta or "emergency/provisional government". With the Yugoslav economic situation of the early 1990s being what it was, even a succesful junta/provo government would have to deal with discontent among the populace about the economy going down the toilet and the increasing threat of inflation.