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Despite Milosevic's nationalism, few Serbs favor independence for their republic. Svetozar Stojanovic, a politics professor at the University of Belgrade, suggests that practical economics might discourage a total breakup of the federal state. He argues that the economies of the republics complement one another, an advantage that would be lost if all went their own way, and that separation would leave the question of the country's $16 billion foreign debt unresolved, discouraging any new foreign investment. Says Serbian economics professor Ljubisa Adamovic: "When they finally work out the costs of going it alone, they may be less anxious to do so."
But the tougher Milosevic gets with Kosovo, the more likely it is that Slovenia and Croatia will accelerate their moves away from the center. "Whatever happens now, Yugoslavia as we have known it since World War II is finished," says Zvonko Baletic of the Institute of Economics in Zagreb. "The best we can hope for is a confederation of basically independent states."
That solution would please Slovenia and Croatia. There is little disagreement there that these two economically advanced republics could go it alone -- though at a cost. "In the open economy in Europe of the 1990s, the number of people is not important," says Ante Cicin-Sain of the Institute of Economics. "It is just as easy, and much more acceptable politically, for us to take directions from Brussels than from Belgrade."
Yugoslavia's poorer, heavily subsidized southern republics, Macedonia and Montenegro, are far less enthusiastic about a breakup. They may yet join Serbia in resisting such a move, or enlist in a new political grouping with Belgrade as its base. Further disintegration could also lead to aggressive new moves by Serbia, which has said repeatedly that in the event of the federation's breakup, it will redraw its borders. That would probably mean an attempt to annex Kosovo and a struggle with Croatia over the future of the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where 33% of the people are Serbs.
Some 40% of Yugoslavia's 8.1 million Serbs live in other republics, making prospects for negotiated independence remote -- and the threat of violent confrontations real if change is not handled carefully. "Any unilateral attempts to break up Yugoslavia will lead to civil war," says Dusan Bilandjic, a political scientist at the University of Croatia in Zagreb. "Once it starts, it will be difficult to stop."
Historical forces are stoking nationalism in Yugoslavia. For more than a millennium, the cultures of east and west have collided in this mountainous corner of the Balkans, and each of today's conflicts exposes layers of the past. Friction between the various republics may reflect the conflict between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy, or Islam and Christianity, or Slav and Turk, or Slav and German. Yugoslavs do not even share an alphabet: Serbia uses Cyrillic script; Croatia and Slovenia, Roman. As the old British dictum went, Yugoslavia is a small country with big problems -- six republics, five nationalities, four languages, three religions, two alphabets and one political party. The only change today is a proliferation of parties as well.