AN INTERNATIONAL WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

Little of this would have mattered had the international environment not been unusually conducive to the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia. A set of unique circumstances had emerged in the early 1990s, creating a window of opportunity for the northern Yugoslav republics.^[5] Slovenian and Croatian elites skillfully took advantage of that window, maneuvering with great skill to maximize Western European support for their independence. The more republican elites pushed, the larger the international window became.

Chief among these international factors was Yugoslavia's declining geopolitical significance. During the Cold War, Western allies were committed to Yugoslavia's territorial integrity as a bulwark against Soviet expansion. This, of course, was no longer a priority after the Soviet collapse. Second, Western Europe was becoming an increasingly autonomous political actor, with special emphasis on the newly united Germany. With the United States preoccupied with the Gulf War and

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post-Soviet crises, an explicit burden-sharing agreement gave Western Europe priority over relations with Eastern Europe, and Germany was central to this effort. Thus if Slovenia and Croatia could gain allies in Germany, they would be well on their way toward securing Western support for independence.

The third change was the increased salience of two key themes in European political discourse. German unification and the later Baltic independence movements had promoted the theme of "small states liberating themselves from communist hegemonies," and Croatia and Slovenia worked hard to portray their desire for independence within that context. Their representatives argued that the non-Serbian republics were being oppressed by the Belgrade-based Serbian communists, who were unwilling to set them free. They also emphasized their commitment to nonviolence, easing Western Europe's fears of postcommunist violence. Thus when Yugoslav federal forces swung into action in Slovenia and then Croatia, they seemed to be crossing a West European red line, transforming Serbia and the Yugoslav army into perceived aggressors. Key European decision makers saw Croatia and Slovenia as oppressed states struggling to liberate themselves from violent communists, not as secessionists bent on disrupting the international legal system.

Still, neither Croatia nor Slovenia would have been able to take advantage of international conditions had they not enjoyed support from key constituencies within Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. In those countries, allies lobbied for Slovenian and Croatian liberation and in Germany, successfully pushed the government into recognizing Slovenian and Croatian independence. The politics of recognition became enmeshed in domestic German struggles, with Slovenian and Croatian independence being compared to German reunification efforts. This interpretation was boosted, in turn, by Germany's Croat émigré community, Vatican lobbying, and media support. Yugoslav dissolution had become entangled in German domestic politics, with important ramifications for all former Yugoslav republics.^[6]

Once the Bosnian fighting began, Western players and an array of international organizations protested Serbian cross-border intervention. In May 1992, the UN Security Council accepted Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia into the General Assembly as full member states, confirming earlier U.S. and European actions.^[7] The Council condemned both Croatia and Serbia for their Bosnian interference and demanded that the (by then) Serbian-controlled Yugoslav federal army be withdrawn, disbanded,

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or disarmed.^[8] Throughout April and May, however, Western intelligence services, reporters, and human rights groups amassed evidence of continued Serbian interventions, and on May 30, 1992, the Security Council ordered UN member states to cut commercial ties with Serbia and Montenegro, the only two republics left in the Yugoslav federation.^[9] The West and the UN took Bosnian sovereignty seriously enough to impose sanctions, but would not send troops to police Bosnia's new borders. Serbia was not unmoved by these measures, launching an immediate effort to publicly disengage from the Bosnian conflict even while maintaining covert links.