Milosevic's War: The Diversionary Theory Of War

Introduction
According to Quincy Wright, war is a “necessary means to establish, maintain, or expand the power of a government, party, or class within a state.” Wright’s statement is applicable to the Yugoslav Wars during the late twentieth century. The fragmented government of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was losing its grip on legitimacy rather quickly due to the Socialist Republic collapsing fast. Wars rooted in deep internal ethnic and religious conflict propelled the Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and the Federation’s government in to a period of pseudo-legitimacy while the nations of the region struggled for autonomy, recognition, and harmony. This paper will attempt to prove how the diversionary theory of war is applicable

to the decision-making process of political leaders in the interstate conflict of the Balkans in the 1990’s.
The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was created during the Second World War and became an official communist regime at the beginning of the Cold War. After the creation of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under Josip Tito, nationalism among the various ethnic groups across the six regions of the Yugoslav Republic increased dramatically. Although he maintained a neutral stance by siding with neither East nor West, Tito’s death in 1980 prompted socialism to go on the decline and the internal structure of the Republic became disorganized and unbalanced, leaning towards the Serbian majority over the democratic structure of federal leadership. It became a war of Serbian nationalists against other ethnic minorities, who were also vying for their own nation.
During the 1980’s, the Republic’s control began to loosen while nationalists within the Federation began to seek more autonomy. Instead of seeking out means of carving out the legitimacy of a government absent of Tito and socialism, periods of ethnic cleansing, exclusivity, and authoritarianism became the forefront of the Republic. This rising tide of tension can be highlighted through the SANU Memorandum. Constructed by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Memorandum denounced Yugoslavia’s constitutional structure of government and protested Yugoslavia’s support for other groups in absence of great nationalism.
After the independence of Croatia and Slovenia, more areas of the Republic wanted to shift towards the decentralization of the autocratic, constitutional system and restructure a more democratic league.

While a pleasing prospect, this did not happen. In the late 1980’s, Slobodan Milosevic, a Serbian communism, rose to power. Milosevic was fueled by the Serbian public’s disdain of Kosovo’s autonomy to “rally” the public around the Serbian flag. He made the mistreatment of Serbs by ethnic minorities, like the Albanians, central to his campaign for presidency of Serbia. After successfully using aggressive tactics to win the election, President Milosevic continued the rallying call. Milosevic’s targeting of ethnic rivalry as scapegoats shows diversionary theory in action. Milosevic exploited the undercurrent of the public and political sphere, the growing Serbian nationalism, ethnocentrism, and discrimination, to create a nationalist agenda and solidify his centralized role as Head of Serbia and “Greater Serbia.” Levy and Thompson show that the lack of “strong central state institutions to promote an unbiased Yugoslav media encouraged the post-Tito fragmentation of popular conceptions of state identity, and contributed to the tensions precipitating the Yugoslav wars of 1992-5.” Mobilizing public opinion against the ethnic minorities present can increase the political legitimacy and power of the political

leader.