National Suicide with Foreign Assistance Robert M Hayden The structural logic of the nationalists in Yugoslavia made violence inevitable by leaving no room for compromise. As a result of the breakup of the federal state all of the nations of Yugoslavia have lost. But the responsibility for the complete breakdown of the Yugoslav state which has condemned the region to long-term instability and military confrontation rests with the European Community and the US. The formal recognition of independent states in what was Yugoslavia ensures the permanent confrontation of regimes defined only by their opposition to each other IN a period of slightly less than two yea.s, from September 1989 until June 1991, Yugoslavia went from being the most progressive socialist country in Europe and a leader of the non-aligned movement to being a "state in the process of disintegration", as the European Community put the matter. From June 1991, when the republics of Slovenia and Croatia proclaimed their independence from the Yugoslav federation, until March 1992, what had been one state disintegrated into chaos, accompanied by a civil war. With the recognition of the independence of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina1 and their acceptance into the United Nations, the European Community and the United States legally transformed the civil war into an international conflict. With the imposition by the UN Security Council of Sanctions' on the so-called Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, composed of Serbia and Montenegro, and that entity's isolation from the world, the position that had obtained in 1991 was reversed: Yugoslavia had lost international legitimacy, while the new mini-states that had seceded from the federation had gained it.
