The collapse of communism throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was not irrelevant to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. On the contrary, the Yugoslav disintegration may be usefully viewed as connected with trends throughout the region, in the sense that Yugoslavia shared a common ideology of equality and problems of legitimation, economic degeneration, and institutional dysfunctionality with other states in the region. Moreover, insofar as ‘self-managing socialism’ was intended to constitute a third path between the ‘state capitalism’ of the Soviet bloc and the ‘monopoly capitalism’ of the American-led bloc, and insofar as the Yugoslavs had long profited from playing one superpower against the other, the implosion and breakup not only of the Soviet bloc but also of the Soviet Union itself could not but have a direct and significant impact on the Yugoslav federation. This is not to say that, once the Soviet bloc collapsed, Yugoslavia necessarily had to break up. But it is to say that Yugoslavia would inevitably have been affected by trends unleashed by that historic process. Chapters 3–4 take up the questions of why Yugoslavia broke apart and why it slid into sanguinary war. What this chapter contributes is a discussion of the context in which Yugoslavia's disintegration took place.