Lessons from the referendums in Yugoslavia

Catherine Baker, a historian, argues that Brexit has echoes of the break-up of Yugoslavia: “The break-up of Yugoslavia took the public through a downward spiral of collapsing expectations, each dragging people into a new sphere of uncertainty and fear: from the Yugoslav system being more successful than its capitalist and Warsaw Pact neighbours, to the reverse; from it being unthinkable that the union of republics would break up, to it seeming inevitable that it would; from living an everyday working life to seeing your standard of living and the whole economy collapse beyond repair; from Communism being the ideology you learned at school, to an entire system of political power and property ownership falling apart; from moving normally around your town, to fearing for your safety on the streets, based on what others read as your ethnicity. Even if these were ill-founded – historians still debate whether or not Yugoslavia had too many long-term weaknesses to be viable when it was unified in 1918 – they were part of people’s common sense, until they could not be. When I teach courses about the break-up of Yugoslavia and the social contexts behind the 1990s wars, British students start seeing their own society differently. The issues at stake for Britain and its constituent entities have many resonances with, and important differences from, Yugoslavia – but perhaps the most troubling parallels come from how politicians and the media brought Yugoslavia to the point of collapse and co-operated to intensify fear and hatred once Slovenian and Croatian secession was inevitable.” Similarly, another historian, Fedja Buric, argues that “The Brexit referendum, like any other, was supposed to let the people speak. The trouble is, that they did not speak in unison and now the raison d’être of this multinational state has disappeared. In the early 1990s, Yugoslavs also went to their referendums to determine their willingness to stay in another federation. The result was bloodshed and the fragmentation of Yugoslavia into squabbling, dysfunctional mini nation-states. What can a dead country teach the (barely) alive one? The Yugoslav case defies the notion that democracy is an essential good in itself, that it brings stability and that it liberates people. In Yugoslavia, the 1990s began with a genuine mobilisation of grassroots engagement with the political process. New political parties sprang up overnight. People demonstrated, asking for all sorts of things. Referendums were announced. New futures were promised. The decade ended in a bloodbath, the country tearing itself apart into dysfunctional or nonfunctional nation-states.  The end tally: over 100,000 dead, more than 2 million displaced, new borders erected and a future poisoned by hate, division and nationalist-coloured corruption. If there is one lesson the UK should take from Yugoslavia it is this: referendums are terrible. These brief exercises in direct democracy not only fail to solve existential societal questions, but they bring to the fore societal divisions that had previously been channeled into civil political discourse (like in the UK) or, yes, been politically repressed (like in the case of Yugoslavia). What the Brexit debacle should teach us is that referendums are more often than not populist tools that allow demagogues to use the politics of resentment in a democratic way. Sure, referendums are democratic. But, they can also be deadly.”