It is trivial to say that the former Yugoslavia was an unstable political community. The ultimate test of stability of a political community is its ability to survive crises without internal warfare or breakdown. It would also be trivial to maintain that the former Yugoslavia was not a democratic state. Surely, former Yugoslavia was not alone in respect to these two characteristics, especially in the central and eastern part of Europe. Like others CEEC’s (Central and East European Countries), Yugoslavia had been facing a seemingly similar problem. After the long-lasting crisis and the fall of the political system of real socialism, these communities had to change their political system. They intended to replace the politically and economically unstable socialist system with the appealing alternative of liberal democracy. The task was conceived as an easy transition.

But, unforeseen difficulties have been arising. Simultaneous with the changes, they had to redefine political community. Obviously, in the structure of a collective identity the political system is not a neutral part that could be changed at will without making significant adjustments in its other parts. By means of formal prescriptions the political system defines preferable patterns of behaviour or conducting affairs in a way that could have an influence on the customs and way of thinking of people. Having ignored their own heritage and significantly changed circumstances, those countries chose to pass through the well known, nineteen-century path toward democracy. This comprises the process of democratization along with a processes of consolidation and stabilization of national states.

As a result in most CEEC’s there arose, it might be said, "the sui generis post-communist political model which is influenced by the legacy of communism and, at the same time, by both the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary Western democracy" (Caldor, M. and Vejvoda, I., 1997, p. 61); and, it must be added, by the peculiar history, culture and identity of particular nations. In the case of former Yugoslavia this process led to the breakdown of the political community, and finally to the dissolution of the state.

Although it seems that for historical reasons self-determination and national state do have a link, it can be plausibly argued that these reasons lose their significance over time (Hobsbawm, E., 1995, 1996). Apparently, the link between national identity and national state rests on misunderstandings of the difference between the two meanings of the notion of national in those two phrases. This difference is blurred through an undifferentiated use of the notion of the nation as a political community and as an anthropological community. Membership in the nation is not the same as citizenship in the state, although citizenship and nationhood may coincide.

If the nation is regarded as a socio-culturo-anthropological group with common origins then it is difficult to make a difference between its rights, and the rights of any other group with an already constituted collective identity. It is still more difficult to explain the peculiar right of that group to form a particular and separate community whose members have the right to govern themselves through their representatives assembled in legislative bodies at many levels. None of the distinctive characteristics usually employed to explain this difference is political. Still less do they represent particular moral deserts which justify their claims to a separate political community. Moreover, common origin and the biological reasons derived from it are not reasons at all; they are natural contingencies. The political claim could be justified only through reference to peculiar political reasons or reasons which could be regarded as politically significant.

Only just laws can legitimize the governance of a particular group. Otherwise the consequence would be a perpetual instability or enduring violence over a minority. Thus the adoption of this conception of the political community is a commitment to dangerous potential source of violence and instability. This is especially true if we keep in mind the fact that nations are historical products and that their relative positions are interchangeable. On the other hand, if we regard the nation as a political community then it is not clear how we can distinguish it from a group of individuals living under a common law and represented by the same legislative assembly. According to this meaning, the meaning of the notion of nation is the same as the very meaning of the notion of political community. There is no privileged pre-political collective identity which precedes the constitution of the political community.

The problem is that national state requires both kinds of loyalty — loyalty toward maintaining the identity of the particular group, and loyalty to the laws of the political community. These two kinds of loyalty may be in conflict. The emphasis is now on the attachment to the laws and legal procedures rather than to the particular group of people that lay claim on the certain territory and to governance over it. The history of attachment of people to the political community and to its just laws constitutes their common destiny, which unites them as members of the community. Once they are constituted, the political communities of this kind are usually stable. The weakness of this concept is that the process of formation of a political community depends on the favorable historical conditions or original coercion by means of which the original obedience to the law was extorted. The process of forming an enduring majority in these kind of political communities is a long and toilsome job with precarious outcomes and varying duration Ovo razdajanje u samom jezgru pojma nacionalnog (bifurcation).

What we are looking for is a link between democracy and stability. A link between the political ideal of democracy and the stability of a political community could be found in a particular kind of social unity that both of them require. The underlying idea is the idea of self-determination. If we leave it to the people to decide for themselves about their destiny, their reason would lead them toward stable forms of organization. A system of co-operation is stable if it is able to generate its own support. That is, if it is able to lead to tendencies which aim to restore the previous state of the system, particularly during periods of crisis when a community is running a risk of radical disagreement, and ultimately, of dividing or destroying itself. The underlying assumption is that the group of people, sharing the same territory and deciding about their own destiny, is reasonable enough to achieve a minimal unity. This is the consensus about non-violent and non-coercive co-operation and about non-coercive communication as a problem-solving device. We can describe this kind of unity as an attachment to union, not as appeal to social unity. The unity concerning the basic function of political community has to be achieved through the pluralism of the social resources that legitimize it.

Tendencies toward stability are based on the citizens’ willing attachment to the basic structure of the society and full compliance with long established patterns of co-operation. These tendencies do not necessarily imply commitment of individuals and groups to their own history, culture and ethnicity. Even though this commitment is a permanent feature of human social life it is not always (especially some particular forms of it) sufficiently democratic to allow mismatched or "weird", but still reasonable forms of life. This problem is particularly important when questionable life forms belong to a large minority group or of a different ethnic group. But, "long established patterns of co-operation can not be abruptly terminated to the advantage of most advantaged partners. On the other hand, partners are not bound to stay together forever — not if they are divergent groups with different moral and political cultures, who meet minimal standards of autonomy and independence." (M. Walzer, 1994, pp. 69-70). Here we are faced with the problem of the relationship of democracy and stability in its full complexity.

Multiculturalism is an attempt to mould in a democratic fashion ideas of the good life and common good through the politics of recognition of different collective identities. Individual identity is not given independently of our membership in a particular community. Our identities are partly constituted by our social context and the commitments we have as a part of the community. The self is, according to the radical communitarian thesis, a pattern of social relations. The recognition of others and our wish to be seen by others as we see ourselves are therefore a significant part of our identity.

Often by misrecognition of others . . . a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted and reduced mode of being (Taylor, Ch., 1994, p. 25).

It seems that communitarianism requires from the citizens enough (or even more than necessary) to preserve stability and more than democracy requires — attachment to social unity not just to social union. Therefore communitarianism is torn between democracy and stability. On the one hand communitarianism can secure the moral motivation necessary for the preservation of stability, but then it fails to be sufficiently democratic. On the other hand when it makes allowance to democratic political conditions it becomes unstable for two reasons. One is already mentioned above, the instability of local communities themselves. The second is the open and unrestrained possibility of radical disagreement among different communities to which citizens belong and among different comprehensive conceptions they hold.

While a well-ordered democratic society is not an association, it is not a community either, if we mean by a community a society governed by a shared comprehensive religious, philosophical or moral doctrine. . . . To think of a democracy as a community (so defined) overlooks the limited scope of its public reason founded on a political conception of justice. It mistakes the kind of unity a constitutional regime is capable of without violating the most basic democratic principles. A zeal for the whole truth tempts us to a broader and deeper unity that can not be justified by public reason. (Rawls, J., 1993, pp. 42-43).

 

Therefore the stability of a political community ultimately depends on an enduring majority whose members endorse the basic liberal democratic values as fundamental substantive political values, whatever other beliefs they hold. The liberal democratic conception has to be acceptable to citizens not just as neutral, but as the conception of justice that it is rational to endorse concerning their other beliefs. In addition, the reasons for the endorsement of this conception are not external to comprehensive conceptions that citizens hold, but are within their own framework. This is the reason why Rawls has to include the principle of preclusion. Each comprehensive conception that is taking part in political life of a society has to be reasonable. And again, the justification rests on the content of the existing political culture.

As we have seen, this project begins with the idea that pluralism is a permanent feature of the public culture, and not a mere historical condition soon to pass away. While alien individuals and group seem different from us, political liberals refuse to deal with the shock of disagreement by insulating their own group from aliens. Down this path lies increasing xenophobia and violent repression. The challenge is to join strangers in a common project of political co-operation, grounded in a mutual recognition of each individual’s right to be different (Ackerman, B., 1994, pp 379-80).

 

In spite of this overemphasized assessment by Ackerman, Rawls has to justify this shift in a conservative direction. His dealing with the "closed" society along with particular public political culture seems too narrow to face the increasing mobility of contemporary societies. A well-equipped theory of stability has to have means successfully to overcome the problems of changes or crises in particular societies. The problem is not just how to bring under a political conception the existing set of comprehensive doctrines, since each of them can also include a significant degree of a repression. "The life-scripts associated with women, homosexuals, blacks, Catholics, Jews, and various other collective identities have often been negative, creating obstacles to, rather than opportunities for, living a socially dignified life and being treated as equals by other member of their societies" (Appiah, K. A. 1995, p. 161). Such scripts are also ethnic and national identities that fit each individual story into large narratives. This is how politics of identity may be easily perverted in politics of compulsion.

However, we could also see the tension between democracy and stability in the Rawls’s conception. Insofar as he is willing to secure democracy in his conception, Rawls has to strengthen the normative side of his conception or to open the borders of public reason. This strategy sets him apart from the resources for justification, liberal democratic political culture, that is the trustee of the stability of liberal democratic societies. Inasmuch as he insists on stability, Rawls sets a very strong constraint and narrows the use of public reason. In this way he precludes some participants from public political life, although it is questionable whether preclusions should be there at all. The result is the same: Rawls is facing the dilemma of whether to strengthen or to open the borders of public reason. This has become apparent along with the discussion about comprehensive doctrines which "strengthen the ideal of public reason itself".

It is obvious that a connection between the stabilization of political community and the idea of individual and collective self-determination is very tight. It is true that each person builds his/her own identity within the boundaries of the linguistic community or linguistic communities to which he/she belongs to. For this reason it is important to spend their life within the boundaries of a stable political community or communities. The political community secures and sanctions the basic values of community that guarantee its identity. On the other hand, we can not deny citizens the right to put into question those values. However, we can not in advance assume that each person is, or that a sufficient number of them are, fully committed to the essential values of the political community once and for all. Without a successful equilibrium between these two requirements the political community could easily fall into a crisis. The best witnesses are civil wars, revolutions and breakdowns of the states. For citizens it is most important that the political community be so organized as to provide stable support for those who live in it for the realization of their life plans and common enterprises. For this reason it is necessary perpetually to make mutual adjustments between basic political norms and precepts, and the life-plans of its members as well as their different roles and identities.

The essential values of a political community must be congruent with the attitudes, practices and way of thinking of people. Inasmuch as citizens do not regard it as constitutive for their identity they would not be ready to make the sacrifice necessary for maintaining the political community. At that moment political community has begun to be unstable. Finally, a political community suffers breakdown or dissolution when institutional structures and processes fail to resolve conflicts among claims and to implement acceptable policies, and when its political system ceases to be viewed as responsive by the individuals and groups making demands on it.

There were several sources of its pre-war stability (Woodward, S., 1995, Chapter 2):

(a) Yugoslavia had a relatively significant position in the bipolar world order after the Second World War. This is the reason why with the dissolution of the international order in which the former Yugoslavia had a well-situated place, Yugoslavia has fallen into deep crisis.

(b) Another source of stability of the former Yugoslavia was the relatively complex system of the overlapping sovereignty of particular republics and the federal state. In this respect we have to acknowledge the widespread opinion, cited here from Michael Walzer‘s book, that "We would not be worrying about Croatia and its Serbs (or Bosnia and its Muslims or Serbia and its Albanians), if Yugoslavia had succeeded in imposing itself upon its constituent nations; it was, in theory at least, the very model of a neutral state" (M. Walzer, 1994, pp. 69-70).

(c) Relatively high standards of living and a high level of individual and collective security were another sources of stability of former Yugoslav state. In spite of these, in its 73 year long history the Yugoslav state never gained democratic legitimization. Consequently, it never had democratic institutions for the procedural regulation of power relations. Thus it was not prepared autonomously to redefine its political identity during the long period of its political agony. The world economic crisis during the 1980s along with the breakdown of the bipolar structure of the world political order at the end of the 1980s required that the former Yugoslav state redefine its political identity on democratic grounds.

Without well-established democratic institutions and a peculiar collective identity, but with a host of other problems its citizens did not have enough space to express their will. From the very beginning it never took the risk of leaving its destiny to its citizens; even less was it prepared to act in its last crisis. The international community was the only remaining guardian of its stability. But even in this sphere the former Yugoslav state lost its (geo-political) significance. Thus we can conclude that the former Yugoslavia did not have a fair chance to survive.

1. "Overall, the legitimizing function of the new constitutions in CEECs has fostered stability and a process of consolidation. It has provided a framework in which the working of institutional rules and procedures have slowly been adapting. The constitution-makers in CEECs have demonstrated their concern for both rights and social justice, and, in spite of differences, all reveal significant preference for a communitarian concept of constitutionalism, as opposed to a rights-based concept, thus emphasizing the `nation’ as opposed to `citizen’. Contemporary debates in the field of political philosophy suggest the bifurcation between a political concept of the `right’ and the one of the `good’, or between justice and community. The new constitutions of the CEEC’s tend to express the later rather than the former, although neither rights nor justice are disregarded" (Mary Caldor and Ivan Vejvoda, 1997, p. 67).

2. In his study about the origins of nationalism Anderson makes the important point that the formation of national, ethnic and cultural groups is not based on the real sociological processes in a community, but on the collective act of imagination. As a result, members choose an imaginary community over the one in which they actually live. "It may appear paradoxical that objects of all these attachment are `imagined’ — anonymous, faceless fellow-Tagalogs (etc.). But amor patriae (love of country) does not differ in this respect from others attachments, in which there is always an element of fond imagining." Cited after Scheff, T., 1994, p. 279.

3. In his book The Distress (Misery) of East European Small States, as far back as in 1946, the Hungarian historian István Bibó predicted that the fact that historically the CEEC’s national communities were formed before their political entities would be an enduring source of instability and turmoil among the countries in the region.

4. For example, in mathematics, stability is defined as the condition in which a slight disturbance in a system does not produce too disrupting an effect on that system. In terms of the solution of a differential equation, a function f (x) is said to be stable if any other solution of the equation that starts out sufficiently close to it when x = 0 remains close to it for succeeding values of x. If the difference between the solutions approaches zero as x increases, the solution is called asymptotically stable. If a solution does not have either of these properties, it is called unstable.

5. The simplest definition of a stable political system is one that survives through crises without internal warfare. Several types of political systems have done so, including despotic monarchies, militarist regimes, and other authoritarian and totalitarian systems.

In some systems, survival does not depend on the detailed management of the society or close governmental control over social processes but, is the result of sensitive political response to the forces of change, of flexible adjustment of the structures of the system to meet the pressures of innovation, and of open political processes that allow gradual and orderly development. Much of the Western democratic world has achieved peaceful progress in this way, despite new political philosophies, population increases, industrial and technological innovations, and many other social and economic stresses.

Such evolutionary change is possible when representative institutions provide effective channels for the communication of demands and criticisms to governments that rely upon majority support. The election of legislators and executive officials, competition between political parties, constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and press, the right of petition, and many other structures and procedures perform this function in contemporary constitutional democracies. In such systems, social and economic problems are quickly transformed into issues in the open arenas of politics; governments are obliged to shape policies that reflect a variety of pressures and effect compromises among many conflicting demands.

. . .

The representative mechanisms that have produced evolutionary change in Western constitutional democracies are themselves subject to a continuous process of adjustment and mutation. Indeed, representative institutions must develop in ways that reflect social and economic developments in the society or they will lose their legitimacy in the minds of the people. . . . This process of dynamic adjustment is crucial, for institutions that remain static in a changing society are unable to serve as agencies of evolutionary change.

 

"Political Systems, Stable political systems", Britannica, CD. Version 97. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1997.

6. The exception is conservatism, which has been defensive in some degree during the twentieth century. Conservatism as a political theory, although it has had different implications in varying historical and geographical contexts, is best understood to denote a preference for institutions and practices that have evolved historically and that are thus, in spite of theirs imperfections, manifestations of continuity and stability. N. O’Sullivan, 1976, T. Honderich, Conservatism, 1990. Rawls, probably does not bear in mind conservative tradition when he writes that

. . . the problem of stability has played very little role in the history of moral philosophy, so it may seem odd that an inconsistency of this kind should turn out to force such extensive revisions. Yet the problem of stability is fundamental to political philosophy and an inconsistency there is bound to require basic readjustments (Rawls, J., 1993, p. xvii).

 

8. "Justice as fairness aims at uncovering a public basis of justification on questions of political justice given the fact of reasonable pluralism. Since justification is addressed to others, it proceeds from what is, or can be, held in common; and so we begin with shared fundamental ideas implicit in the public political culture in the hope of developing from them a political conception that can gain free and reasoned agreement in judgement. . . . These conditions suffice for the reasonable political conception of justice" (PL, pp. 100-101).

10. "This unity yields stability for the right reason, explained as follows:

a) The basic structure of society is effectively regulated by the most reasonable political conception of justice.

b) This political conception of justice is endorsed by an overlapping consensus comprised of all the reasonable comprehensive doctrines in society and these are in an enduring majority with respect to those rejecting that conception.

c) Public political discussion, when constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice are at stake, are always (or nearly always) reasonably decidable on the basis of the reasons specified by the most reasonable political conception of justice, or by a reasonable family of such conceptions" (Rawls, 1995, pp. 146-7).

11. Public reason includes a political culture and political practice of liberal institutions. "The sources of this culture are quite limited, . . . comprising the political institutions of a constitutional regime and the public tradition of their interpretation (including those of the judiciary), as well as historic texts and documents that are common knowledge." (Rawls, J., 1993, p. 14.)

12. This is what precisely is meant by the entire conception being freestanding and the whole argument being a political one: the entire conception relies as much as possible on the shared ideas and avoids reliance on any comprehensive moral doctrine. Justice as fairness as a political conception could be chosen by all despite their other beliefs. "Rather, justice as fairness if not reasonable in the first place in a suitable way can win support by addressing each citizen’s reason, as explained within its own framework" (Rawls, J., 1993, 143).

13. "Moreover, and this may be one of the sobering messages of political liberalism, liberal institutions founded on the sort of reasons just mentioned are bound to be precarious until a society has lived under them long enough to develop a tradition of tolerance. . . . These things are resources that may help stabilize liberal institutions by making an overlapping consensus on liberal values and principles possible" (S. Scheffler, 1994, p. 22).

14. These kind of political communities Rawls named well-ordered hierarchical societies. "The three necessary conditions for a well ordered regime — that it respect the principles of peace and not be expansionistic, that its system of law meet the essentials of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, and that it honor basic human rights — are proposed as the answer as to where the limits lie. These conditions indicate the bedrock beyond which we cannot go" (Rawls, J., 1993b, p. 79).

15. Although Rawls recognizes that his conception of political liberalism is not a theory that can secure stability once and for all and everywhere, but that it is limited to the cases where there is an enduring majority, he seems to fail to appreciate all the consequences of this fact (Rawls, J., 1993b).