By Fredrik Dahl - Reuters

BELGRADE - The Yugoslav Parliament is expected this week to officially bury what remains of a threadbare federation after a decade of Balkan wars, voting to form a loose union of Serbia and Montenegro to take its place. The assembly looks set to endorse a Western-brokered deal establishing the union at a session which begins today, consigning the name Yugoslavia to history after 75 years of often turbulent existence under authoritarian rule.

But with few signs of local jubilation over its birth, some analysts and diplomats already wonder whether the union will be strong enough to stay alive or whether it is just a question of time before the last two Yugoslav republics also split up. “I think it will struggle enormously to survive,” said Gerald Knaus of the think tank European Stability Initiative.

The legislatures of Serbia and Montenegro, the only two republics still in Yugoslavia after the old six-member socialist federation collapsed in bloodshed when Slobodan Milosevic was in power in the 1990s, voted in favor of the accord last week. Their reformist leaders agreed under EU pressure in March 2002 to stay together for now in a union leaving most powers in the hands of the republics, but it took them almost a year of wrangling to finalize the deal. Montenegro’s pro-independence leadership reluctantly shelved plans for breaking away from dominant Serbia for at least three years, after which both sides have the right to go it alone.

The EU had feared that independence for the coastal republic of 650,000 people would have encouraged other breakaway movements, for example, among Albanians in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. It made clear that closer ties with the bloc would depend on the formation of the new union, which some locals jokingly call “Solania” after EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

“It is a strange country this. They make jokes about it already,” said Dragana Nikolic Solomon, an assistant editor at the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

Political analyst Ognjen Pribicevic was more upbeat about its prospects, stressing the EU wanted it to succeed. “Europe wants this union to survive so it will survive.”

The union, simply named Serbia and Montenegro, would have a president, a 126-strong Parliament and a council of ministers. It would have one army but two currencies, with Montenegro using the euro and Serbia sticking to the dinar. It would also formally include the UN-run province of Kosovo, whose majority Albanians demand independence.

Yugoslavia — the Land of Southern Slavs — became the name of the country when it was still a kingdom in 1929. Synonymous during the long reign of veteran communist dictator Josip Broz Tito with harmony between different peoples, it fell apart along ethnic lines in conflicts that killed hundreds of thousands and left many more homeless in the 1990s.

Serb reformers ousted strongman Milosevic in late 2000, ending international pariah status. While few people will mourn Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, many still fondly remember the time it was relatively well-off in communist Eastern Europe and nobody seemed to care whether they were Serb, Croat, Muslim Slav or Kosovo Albanian. “My generation had this golden time in Yugoslavia. That was a beautiful time,” said Nikolic Solomon, born in the 1960s.