The recent Yugoslavian events have been much spoken of as the last democratic revolution in Europe. Perhaps, not quite right: revolutions, including democratic ones, still have a good chance of taking place. Most probably what has happened in Yugoslavia was a logical consequence of the revolution that started 1980 in Gdansk. It was only after those events that the historic roundtable was held in Poland, Berlin Wall fell, Germany united, and the map of Europe began to look quite different.
The USSR broke up, federative Yugoslavia broke up, and all this was accompanied by wars, victims, refugees, and crises. This is also the price for starting the revolution. Moreover, each of its participants set different goals both for themselves and the revolution. Thus, the results have been, are, and will be quite different. The Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Baltic nations pressed for freedom, because they remembered very well what it is and how it can be used. The Romanians could not stand the Ceaucescu dictatorship any more. Perhaps, the only thing we shared with them at that time was the euphoria of expectations.
Yugoslavia, absorbed by the loss of itself and the collapse of its hopes to reestablish a Greater Serbia, was a little too slow. Having ceased to be a nonaligned Yugoslavia, the creation of Marshall Tito, it became on the contrary a source of the recent Balkan wars, backed one way or another by the majority of those who voted on September 24 for Vojislav Kostunica. As finally he did himself. And as long as Slobo was flying high, and the Serbs were proud of their victories over the Croats and Moslems in Bosnia, there were no problems with Milosevic’s popularity.
The events in Belgrade have hardly been a separate revolution, or the last revolution of the passing century. But it there is no doubt that had it not been for Gdansk, roundtable, and the fall of Berlin Wall, Belgrade would have seen no changes. Obviously, the Serbs simply felt ready for change. Obviously, it took living through years of sanctions and isolation, the attacks of NATO bombers, to see hundreds of Serb refugees fleeing first from Krajina to Croatia, and a few years later from Kosovo as a result of NATO’s action. And to understand that one cannot live that way.
Revolution, if we consider it as a process rather than an overturn, is ongoing. The map of Europe is redrawn. They are drawing new Curzon lines, which will obviously play their role already in the near future. How good a role is not clear. Maybe far from as good as might expect those who are now insisting on their justification and necessity. But this is exactly what can force those now being cut off from European processes, including us, to finally bet on going forward and win. The Serb scenario, which unfurled three years after the Bulgarian one, can only show that there is nothing impossible, among other things, for positive development.
