It Doesn’t Pay to Stay Together : Yugoslavia needs peaceful way to escape past

Worse things than secessionism can befall Yugoslavia. Civil war for one, with all the attendant horrors of that country’s near-genocidal ethnic conflicts of the 1940s.

Until a few days ago the United States and most Western European countries gave primacy to maintaining Yugoslavia’s territorial unity. The consensus now, and it is soundly based, is that keeping the federation intact by force of arms is insupportable. Without openly encouraging the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, Western governments have made clear they oppose the use of armed force by the Serbian-dominated central government--or by a military that may have asserted its own independence from civilian control--to hold the wayward republics in line. The European Community has underscored its position by freezing arms sales and economic aid to Belgrade.

More effectively, foreign ministers from three EC countries have helped broker a cease-fire in Slovenia and won agreement for a cooling-off period so negotiations on a new federal structure can resume. Any restructuring that led to a more democratic Yugoslavia would of course be welcome. It would also be close to miraculous.

The “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” that was first proclaimed in 1918--it was renamed Yugoslavia in 1929--has always had only a tenuous coherence. Its fundamental problem has been the almost complete absence of that sense of a common destiny that helps define nationhood in the minds of a country’s citizens. Now, as in the beginning, the strongest loyalties among its disparate peoples remain ethnic, not national; the deepest roots are anchored in religion, region and tribal memory.

Washington and Europe initially worried--not unrealistically--that if Yugoslavia broke up, the shock waves would disturb all of Europe. They were especially concerned that Yugoslavia’s fragmentation could inspire secessionism in other multiethnic European countries; Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev especially fears a breakup for that reason. What’s become clearer to the West recently is that even more to be feared is the precedent of seeming to accept the ruthless suppression of democratic governments that are bent on self-determination.

Moral imperatives now loom larger than earlier political considerations. For if the West passively tolerates the use of tanks and planes to crush the independence movement in Slovenia, it will be in no position to object if tanks and planes are used to crush like-minded impulses in, say, the Baltic republics.

If the effort by the EC foreign ministers holds, Yugoslavia will have gained breathing room to try again to negotiate some new political arrangement. That’s imperative. Yugoslavia staggers under a uniquely heavy historical burden, different in degree from every other country west of the Soviet Union. Not every claim for autonomy or independence throughout the world is equally valid, of course, but for Yugoslavia a degree of restructuring will be the only way it can avoid collapse.