"In short, the institutional structure of communist Yugoslavia sustained and developed particular national identifications. In the Soviet Union, as we have seen, the recognition of nationalities as the constituent elements of the union led to a policy that both fostered national development and treated some groups as enemy nations that had to be removed in toto. In Yugoslavia, a similar system led to an even more radical outcome. As one scholar writes, the federal structure based on national republics had the result that “every question was by necessity ‘nationalized.’” For some years Yugoslavia was able to muddle along. But by the late 1980s, economic decline, political paralysis, and a rapidly shifting international situation had brought the domestic situation to a crisis level. As the central government proved increasingly unable to fulfill its role as guarantor of the living standards and protector of the population, the system devolved to its constituent elements—the six republics and two autonomous regions, with the JNA sometimes referred to as the “ninth federal unit”—each of which raised its own demands. The dissolution became so dangerous in Yugoslavia because there, unlike the other communist societies in Eastern Europe, no viable, democratically minded civil society had emerged that stretched across the entire country, not just among a particular nationality. Only in Bosnia did the Muslim leadership, along with a few Croat and Serb allies, try desperately to maintain the republic’s multinational character, its stature as the “true” Yugoslavia."