중동부유럽

Both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia experienced two integrations and two breakups during the twentieth century. These two countries were born with the end of the First World War, experienced first disintegration of the state in the midst of the Second World War, and both countries re-started as an integrated state after the end of the Second World War. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia showed other historical similarities in that they adopted socialist system in the process of their re-start, and that their federal state disintegrated with the collapse of the socialist system in Eastern Europe in the late twentieth century. However, despite these historical similarities, these two countries showed totally different features in their second and final dissolution of socialist state. While Czechoslovakia peacefully disintegrated into Czech Republic and Slovakia in the process that is widely expressed as “velvet divorce” in their final dissolution, Yugoslavia passed through a violent process that is characterized by hostile war, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. Two big factors resulted in the difference between the peaceful and the violent breakups in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. First is the superior nation’s way of treating the inferior nation(s) within a multi-national state. While in Yugoslavia the Serbs regarded other inferior nations as a means of creating a Greater Serbia and treated as such, the relationship between the nations in Czechoslovakia was not so tensioned. Second, whether the mobilization of nationalism by political elite was violent or not was also an important factor that made such a great difference between the two cases. Even though there may exist the background condition or the system condition of national conflicts, the inferior nation’s discontents do not automatically develop into a direct political action. For this to occur, the so-called “mobilization of grievance” is needed. Milosevic’s mobilization of Serbian nationalism was quite different from that of Klaus or Meciar in Czechoslovakia.