State-building, democratization and the role of external factors in the former Yugoslavia

Abstract

Nationalism indeed featured prominently in the years leading up to the collapse of the authoritarian regime and the disintegration of the state. This created stateness problems which surfaced as the monopoly of power of the old regime began to unravel and were later inherited by the success states. Yet it would be too simplistic to ascribe these staleness problems solely to previously unreconciled ethnic cleavages. The disintegration of the Yugoslav state and the subsequent slow democratisation of its successor states may be looked at as the modern-stage of state building of the Yugoslav peoples.