The Challenge of Democratization: An Introduction

Abstract

As the communist organizational monopoly collapsed in one country after another across Central and Southeastern Europe, the peoples of the region faced the dual challenge of constructing valued democratic institutions and invigorating or reinvigorating local economies. Nowhere in the region was this challenge harder than in the new states which emerged out of the dying Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). The war which, after touching Slovenia only briefly in summer 1991, raged across Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina for four years, like the subsequent war in Kosovo during 1998–99, resulted in casualties, the flight and displacement of refugees, the ethnic homogenization of areas which had earlier included two or three peoples, the destruction of entire villages, damage to infrastructure, and serious impact for the economy of every Yugoslav successor state without exception. This volume endeavors to make a contribution to understanding how well the seven successor states of Yugoslavia have done in meeting this dual challenge, while bearing in mind that global problems, such as the economic crash of 2008, the spread of organized crime, and severe summer and winter weather have also played some part in the economic, and thus also in the social and political, calculus.