Word: slovenia
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Whether Milosevic manages to retain control in Serbia's parliament in upcoming elections may determine whether the Yugoslav federation shatters. With a governing bloc, he could more easily press territorial claims against Croatia and grudges against Slovenia. Disintegration was not Poland's problem, and Walesa, despite his affection for Poland's prewar dictator, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, strikes few people as a Volk-glorifying Fuhrer. But in trouncing candidate-come-lately Stanislaw Tyminski, a returned emigre who offered a form of national salvation as easy as a drug trip, Walesa himself could not quite shake off charges of pandering to emotions...
Nowhere are destabilizing and potentially disruptive forces more clearly displayed than in Yugoslavia, the fragile coalition of six republics and two semi-autonomous provinces. Over the past three months, the northern republics of Slovenia and Croatia have held elections, ejecting incumbent communist governments and staking out positions that fall just short of independence. Slovenia's new government has served notice that it will declare itself independent if the other states do not accept its demands to turn Yugoslavia into a grouping of sovereign republics...
...tougher Milosevic gets with Kosovo, the more likely it is that Slovenia and Croatia will accelerate their moves away from the center. "Whatever happens now, Yugoslavia as we have known it since World War II is finished," says Zvonko Baletic of the Institute of Economics in Zagreb. "The best we can hope for is a confederation of basically independent states...
That solution would please Slovenia and Croatia. There is little disagreement there that these two economically advanced republics could go it alone -- though at a cost. "In the open economy in Europe of the 1990s, the number of people is not important," says Ante Cicin-Sain of the Institute of Economics. "It is just as easy, and much more acceptable politically, for us to take directions from Brussels than from Belgrade...
...today's conflicts exposes layers of the past. Friction between the various republics may reflect the conflict between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy, or Islam and Christianity, or Slav and Turk, or Slav and German. Yugoslavs do not even share an alphabet: Serbia uses Cyrillic script; Croatia and Slovenia, Roman. As the old British dictum went, Yugoslavia is a small country with big problems -- six republics, five nationalities, four languages, three religions, two alphabets and one political party. The only change today is a proliferation of parties as well...