The Yugoslav Drama

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

Mihailo Crnobrnja was Yugoslav Ambassador to the European Community at
the time his country dissolved into chaos. He then came to Canada,
finding work as a consultant and McGill University professor; this book,
now in its second edition, offers his reflections on what happened and
why. A personal account rather than a scholarly work, an unreferenced
study published by a university press, this book tells a compelling
story tracing the unfolding of Yugoslav history from the country’s
origins after the Great War to Josip Broz Tito’s iron rule. Tito’s
western-oriented and independent-minded communism was vicious in its own
way, to be sure, but once he died, Yugoslavia began to fragment along
ethno-religious lines. To the author, it is too simplistic to point only
to the vicious nationalisms that still scar the former Yugoslavia; more
to the point, to

him, were the political failures that permitted partition and war to
occur and that resulted in killings unparalleled in Western Europe for
half a century.

Crnobrnja’s account traces the story down to the Dayton accords that
brought a kind of peace to the area. He sounds a cautiously optimistic
note about the prospects for a durable peace, and readers can only hope
that he may yet prove to be correct.