Publications focusing on Yugoslavia's collapse and the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo abound. One of the key category errors committed in much of this work—and especially in the mountains of journalistic output throughout the 1990s—has been to classify Yugoslavia's wars merely as wars of rival ethnicities and nationalisms, if not ancient hatreds. Conventional wisdom has it that Yugoslavia's wars in the 1990s were typical “Balkan” wars emanating from primordial nationalisms, heavily laden with historical baggage and rich in potent myth and symbols. The easiest way to explain Yugoslavia's violent disintegration in the late twentieth century was to relapse into cliché-ridden accounts of base, primeval ethnic rivalries that hitherto had been contained by a combination of the restraints imposed by Tito's brand of communism and the exigencies of a polarized Cold War international system in which Yugoslavia inhabited a very particular space.

The Myth of Ethnic War goes a long way in providing alternative explanations for the violent fall of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. V. P. Gagnon's general position on the debunking of the myth of ethnic war as the root explanation for violence in Yugoslavia is not necessarily novel. Beginning with Susan Woodward's groundbreaking Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War (1995), there is a growing body of literature that challenges the superficial assumptions of those who pin Yugoslavia's traumas on base nationalist hatreds. But Gagnon's main target is not the general assumptions made about the role of nationalism and ethnicity in these wars. What he is more interested in analyzing is the complementary assumption that certain Yugoslav leaders, especially Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tudjman, played the ethnic card in mobilizing domestic support to fight their respective political battles: In times of weakness, they would stir up nationalist tendencies and rekindle the embers of ethnic rivalries inherent in the makeup of Yugoslavia.

The author does not underplay the role of history and ethnicity in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Nor does he necessarily accept the overexaggerated assumption of harmonious multicultural coexistence between ethnic groups in Yugoslavia up to the 1990s. He argues that in fact, Serbian and Croatian leaders and ruling elites promoted violent conflict as a means of demobilizing opposition movements, as well as vast parts of their domestic constituencies that they could no longer carry with them. At times of threat to the ruling regimes, violent conflict, rather than simply ethnic conflict, was a means by which to thwart, marginalize, and even crush reformist tendencies that posed a political threat.

Indeed, Gagnon provides much evidence for this argument. For example, when electioneering, Milošević would take up moderate positions concentrating on economics, skirting questions of nationalism, and subsequently when faced with mounting opposition, he would unleash violence to demobilize public support for that opposition. The author also makes extensive use of polls and surveys to support his argument that ruling elites created hard, divisive, ethnic identities through the promotion of violent conflict, which is a challenge to the conventional assumption that, in fact, ethnic tension led to violent conflict. In turn, he argues that this was then employed to attack the antiregime reformists and undermine their challenge to the ruling elites.

On one level—that of the general challenge to the assumption of direct causality between ethnic rivalry, war, and the disintegration of Yugoslavia—the argument is fair and convincing. It is widely accepted that in examining the country's collapse, we have to take a serious look at economic disparities within the former Yugoslavia and at external economic pressures, consider demands for democratization, and place events there in the context of dramatic changes in the international political landscape. On another level—that of the debate between mobilization and demobilization of publics by ruling elites—the argument is much more difficult. The main reason is that it assumes that the leadership both in Belgrade and Zagreb had long-term and subtle strategies mapped out, which were then operationalized in specific instances to achieve specific results. And there is no substantial body of primary evidence to support this. Nor is there yet enough convincing evidence to suggest that the wars in Croatia and Bosnia were simply run from Belgrade, which through the promotion of violence manipulated local placemen to perpetuate the myth of ethnic conflict.

In any event the issues of mobilizing publics by “playing the ethnic card” or demobilizing opposition forces by promoting violence, which solidifies support around a ruling elite—or rather disrupts opposition to the ruling elite—center on the idea that whatever the approach, what was at stake was regime survival. If that is the case, then in fact the argument that then becomes most questionable is yet another conventional assumption that the wars in Yugoslavia were the direct product of a project to create a Greater Serbia. Perhaps the most convincing aspect of this book is the idea that what was being fought out mainly in Belgrade—and to a lesser extent Zagreb—was the survival of outdated regimes and individuals clinging to power in the face of growing demands for reform.