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The Baltic States: The National Self-Determination of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Ed. Graham Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. xii, 214 pp. Index. Figures. Tables. Hard bound.

While heaping blame on the Yugoslav leaders (political and military), the ambassador admits that, despite their warnings that recognition of the secessionist republics, especially Bosnia-Herzegovina, would lead to war, western leaders plowed right on. Yet he absolves them of significant responsibility. In the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the western European leaders did succeed, before the fighting began, in getting the Serb, Croat, and Muslim leaders to agree on a cantonal division, but the Muslim leader reneged after a visit from Zimmerman. The ambassador says that he urged Izetbegovic to abide by the agreement, but published circumstantial evidence questions that contention. Perhaps the key to Yugoslavia's fall is Tito's legacy—the 1974 Constitution that emasculated the national government—which enabled those most bent on its destruction, the Slovenes and Croats, to accomplish their goal. That, together with the failure of the west, especially the United States, to provide the reformist Yugoslav government of Ante Markovic with the help needed to privatize the economy and to democratize the political system, spelled Yugoslavia's doom. Zimmerman engages in some strange logic, as when he accuses the Yugoslav National Army of a "bid to hijack the federal presidency in mid-March 1991" (111), whereas the army was simply recommending that it be given authority to act against the Slovenes and Croats who had refused the Yugoslav government's demand that they disband their illegal militias. The national army did not get the authority, because the collective presidency was split four to four, part of Tito's legacy to his successors. Elsewhere the author points out that the Croats were caught "red-handed in an attempt to build up their military forces for the purpose of targeting the Yugoslav army" (97). Historians will be disappointed by the lack of substantial evidence to support some of the author's wide-ranging simplistic judgments, which often lack consistency. Moreover, his pursuit of the subject in the new administration seems out of place, and it fails to note that Clinton scuttled several European-United Nations peace plans for Bosnia. A disappointing book; more questions than answers.