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Kosovo, 1944–1981: The Rise and the Fall of a Communist ‘Nested Homeland’

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE DEMISE OF THE three communist federations, Western scholars have engaged in a debate on the role of ethno-federal arrangements in the process of disintegration. Some, such as Snyder (2000) and Bunce (1999), argue that the communist rulers ‘created their own grave diggers’, to paraphrase Marx, by introducing ethno-federalism. Brubaker (1996) argues that an unintended consequence of Soviet ethno-federalism was the reinforcement and politicisation of ethno-national identities. Others claim that communist ethnic ‘federalism’ was a facade for the unitary organisation (‘democratic centralism’) of party-states and that suppressed national identities returned with a vengeance in the 1980s. According to this latter view, the end of communist federalism was not a failure of genuine federations, but a failure of authoritarian, unitary, and excessively centralised states. A study of the development of the Kosovo autonomy from 1944 to 1981 offers an opportunity to assess these competing explanations. Widespread disillusionment with the autonomy that satisfied neither Albanian nor Serbian national aspirations led to the mobilisation of Albanian nationalism in the early 1980s, massive Yugoslav state repression, and the creation of the political opportunity for the rise of Slobodan Milošević and the surge of Serbian nationalism in the mid-1980s. In effect, the failure to design a mutually acceptable status for Kosovo started a chain reaction that led to the unravelling of Yugoslavia. In Kosovo both ethnic groups could see themselves as ‘legitimate owners’ of Kosovo and demanded that the other accept minority status.