Civic culture In Yugoslavia

One definition of ethnicity reads as followed “identity with or membership in a particular racial, national, or cultural group and observance of that group’s customs, beliefs, or language”. Ethnicity defines many of us but a few want our definition to be “cleansed” and this is when civil conflict arises. Ethnicity is frequently cited as an explanation for conflicts in the post cold war era. Yugoslavia, a prime example of a system that encountered ethnic conflict that led to a violent civil war, consisted of six republics and two autonomous districts. The government at the time wanted control of these republics but the republics wanted to be free from government control. There was a push by several ethnic groups to form their own sovereign states. When Croatia opted to declare independence from Yugoslavia the serbs and Yugoslav troops moved in to convince Croatia to re-enter the union. Croatia was not allowed to go independent. The creation of the new state was based on ethnicity i.e. share a ethnicity and they should be in the same state. But due to the way ethnicity was defined then, which was usually language spoken by a person, different aspects of an ethnic group was ignored causing conflict between one group and another. In this essay I will argue that long standing primordialist hatred, week state nor social grievance caused civil conflict in Yugoslavia but political opportunism by political elites is what caused it. Ethnicity became the base for political power in Yugoslavia. To understand ethnicity I will analyze the conceptualization of ethnicity which fall under two fields of thoughts, Primordialism and Instrumentalism. I will also evaluate grievance, political entrepreneurial, and state capacity arguments of civil conflict as it ties into ethnicity. I finally tie these ideas to the civil conflict in Yugoslavia and how political elites used nationalism to gain control of Yugoslavia.

Primordialism and Instrumentalism
Many people have different