Zasady etnopolitycznej i terytorialno-politycznej organizacji Jugosławii. Geneza, ewolucja, współczesne konsekwencje

Principles of Ethnopolitical and Territorial-Political Organization of Yugoslavia: Genesis, Evolution and Contemporary ConsequencesThe article is devoted to the principles of ethnopolitical and territorial-political organization of the Yugoslavian state. The study presents the genesis and evolution of this question in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians (1918–1941) and in the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia (1945–1991). In doing so it considers one of the most important and controversial problems in Yugoslavian ethnopolitics – the relations between its ethnopolitical and territorial-political subsystems. The author emphasizes dynamic changes and a lack of consistency in Yugoslav ethnopolitics. One issue in focus is the question of territorial-political reorganization of the federation at the beginning of the 1990s. The groups engaged in the struggle over the division of Yugoslavia applied various principles of delimitation of contentious areas. Susan Woodward identifies four main principles which the antagonist groups used as arguments for their “property right” over a given territory – historical, democratic, principle of the inviolability of borders and realistic principle. After the civil war during the 1990s, the Yugoslavian federation was reorganized into sovereign states by recognizing the existing internal administrative borders between the Yugoslav republics as international ones. The author also discusses contemporary problems of the ethnopolitical and territorial-political organization of post-Yugoslav countries and close relations between state-building and nation-building processes. Major current problems in the field of ethnopolitics are considered as a direct consequence of the influence of those accumulated during the seventy-year period of existence of a common state.