Critique of Instrumentalist and Primordialist Theories: The Case of Yugoslavia

Abstract

Beyond the mainstream conflict in former Yugoslavia, incomplete research exists on the micro-military ethnic alliances and micro-conflicts on the local and regional levels particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The article attempts to fill this knowledge gap through the examination of the theoretical frameworks, instrumentalism and primordialism as the two most frequently used frameworks in explaining the Yugoslav disintegration relying on the empirical cases of two cities: Tuzla and Vares. In terms of instrumentalism, the article expands on the oversimplification and overreaching assumptions of the elitist capacity to instrumentilize ethnic violence. Article adds to the existing literature that instrumentalism can and often does inadvertently neglect identifying instances where the elitist’s instrumentalisation of the masses towards violence, intolerance of the ‘others’ did not materialize. Conversely, primordialism proved to be and continues to be unfit framework and in regards to Yugoslav dissolution. However, the literature on primordialism fails to thoroughly diagnose the post-conflict impact or the aftermath of primordialist analysis implementation on the particular conflict. This articles aims to expand on this literature omission. In principle, the primordialism was substantially applied or utilized as an explanans particularly in the first stages of the war in Yugoslavia whereby it essentially incorrectly characterized the Yugoslav dissolution as the ‘ancient ethnic grievances coming to the surface’ in the absence of strong central government, but the literature never went further than that and this article will go beyond this basic primordialist assumption. Thus, the article confirms that primordialism, the genetically based argument cannot adequately tackle conflicts in multiethnic societies as seen in Yugoslavia however, and missed by many researchers, I theorize that the approach has an unusual and inexplicit but strong capacity to linger and spread through the pores of the society as a political and myth creation tool used by the political elites to manipulate the nationalist narratives in the post conflict period. This capacity in principle effectively protracts the conflict as we can clearly attest this in post Yugoslav region. In terms of instrumentalism, the article in principle affirms instrumentalism as a reliable theoretical framework when assessing Yugoslav dissolution however criticism is offered that the framework is predisposed with potential errors such as packaging the regional and local micro-conflicts into one macro-mainstream war, neglecting to identify and address the instances where civil societies succeeded in rejecting the instrumentalisation to ethnic violence.