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. 2004 Nov;94(11):1894-904.
doi: 10.2105/ajph.94.11.1894.

The making and breaking of Yugoslavia and its impact on health

Stephen J Kunitz  1
Affiliations

The making and breaking of Yugoslavia and its impact on health

Stephen J Kunitz. Am J Public Health. 2004 Nov.

Abstract

The creation of nation-states in Europe has generally been assumed to be intrinsic to modernization and to be irreversible. The disintegration of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia demonstrates that the process is not irreversible. I argue that in the case of Yugoslavia, (1) disintegration was caused by the interaction between domestic policies with regard to nationalities and integration into the global economy and (2) the impact of the disintegration of the federation on health care and public health systems has been profound. Improving and converging measures of mortality before the collapse gave way to increasing disparities afterward. The lesson is that processes of individual and social modernization do not result in improvements in health and well-being that are necessarily irreversible or shared equally.

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Figures

FIGURE 1—
FIGURE 1—
Infant mortality rate (per 1000 live births) by year, Yugoslavia, 1950–1984. Source. Statistical Yearbook of Yugoslavia (Belgrade: Savezni Zavod za Statistiku, various years)
FIGURE 2—
FIGURE 2—
Per capita gross domestic product in 1995 US dollars in countries of the former Yugoslavia, 1990–2000. Source. World Bank. World Development Indicators [CD-ROM]. Washington, DC: World Bank; 2002.
FIGURE 3—
FIGURE 3—
Life expectancy at birth in countries of the former Yugoslavia, 1960–2000. Source. World Bank. World Development Indicators [CD-ROM]. Washington, DC: World Bank; 2002.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Brubaker R., Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 34.
    1. Ibid., 35.
    1. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect With a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1993). See especially the Introduction by George F. Kennan. The report provides no data on the number of civilians killed, but it may have been larger than the number of soldiers killed. There is no way to be certain.
    1. Tomasevich J., Peasants, Politics, and Economic Change in Yugoslavia (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1955), 216–217.
    1. Trouton R., Peasant Renaissance in Yugoslavia, 1900–1950 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1952); R. Bicanic, Economic Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973); S. J. Kunitz, “Health Care and Workers’ Self-Management in Yugoslavia,” International Journal of Health Services 9 (1979): 521–537. - PubMed

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