"Historical Roots of the Yugoslav Conflict," V.P. Gagnon, Jr.

Part 3

The Second Yugoslavia

The communist Partisans, under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, were thus faced with a nationalities question that was as much regional as it was national. It had arisen out of the political dynamics of the previous twenty-five years and had been exacerbated and given an ethnic element by the Ustashe massacres and Chetnik reprisals. The Yugoslav communists sought to resolve this question through economic growth and modernization and through repression of overt expression of narrowly chauvinistic nationalisms.

Yet national sentiment had in the past been central to political discourse, and it could not be ignored or changed overnight. Since the communist Partisan forces relied on the support of the wider population and drew its members from that population, these considerations were crucial to gaining and maintaining power. For example, given Croatia's experience in the first Yugoslavia (an experience shared to some extent also by other groups), the communists could not have gained the degree of support they did by calling for the renewal of a unitary, centralized Yugoslav state. The key challenge was to channel these national sentiments into an all-Yugoslav context.

In order to rebuild Yugoslavia, the Partisans stressed how the interests of each nation and region would be best met in a joint state, but a state radically different from the first Yugoslavia. Thus during the war, the Partisans were organized on regional lines, and each regional unit was led by local commanders [for example, see Irvine 1993]. This basically local and regional character of the Partisan movement and the need to maintain genuine support were important factors in the federal structure of the new Yugoslav state, proclaimed in November 1943. The main concern of the new regime, however, was economic development, especially since economic growth was seen as the key not only to overcoming national and regional antagonisms, but to consolidating power domestically.

The Yugoslav communists, once in power, set up an economic and political system closely modeled on the Soviet system. Its basic features were an economic model in which "social (the ruling class or group) and political (monopoly of power) considerations prevail over economic ones, forcing the economy to function according to vested social and political interests" [Brucan 1987, 91]. This system "required an enormous political edifice to provide the decision making and the push, the regulation, supervision and coordination" of the economy [Bialer 1980, 19].

The 1948 excommunication of Yugoslavia from the Soviet bloc brought greater reliance on domestic popular support, which had begun to erode with the rapid introduction of the Stalinist economic system. Although this change necessitated a modification of the model (including a new ideological justification stated in terms of "workers self-management"), the main change was not in the political nature of economic decision making but in the location of that decision making. The central government stopped making detailed local decisions, leaving them to the republic or commune level.

The Yugoslav economy enjoyed tremendous rates of economic growth throughout the 1950s, when greater inputs automatically translated into greater output. Yet just as in the rest of the socialist world, this extensive growth model had begun to reach its limits by the end of the 1950s and indeed had begun to have a negative impact on economic growth [Bilandzic 1979, 305]. The negative effects were exacerbated in the Yugoslav case by the tendency of decentralization to promote autarkic development at the republic level, a further drain on economic efficiency.

Yugoslav reformists believed these problems could by solved by shifting to economic criteria as the basis of economic decision making. If decisions were based on market signals rather than political criteria, resources would be used more efficiently, with an eye to the "profit" or return. This shift to economic criteria would also combat republic-level autarky, since market mechanisms, for example, in capital investment, would ignore political boundaries and help to integrate the entire country. In this way it would also help alleviate regional differences, which exacerbated interrepublic conflicts, and it would respond to the changing social structure of the country, with the growing number of workers with technical and other professional skills.

These policies were adopted by the party in 1964, and implementation began in 1965. But this apparent victory for reformists was actually the start of a deep-seated conflict between two visions of the Yugoslav political and economic system, which cut across national and regional boundaries--one based on the Stalinist command economy model, the other seeking to alter that model radically. This conflict, which would continue for almost thirty years, was the main cause of the destruction of the Yugoslav state. Indeed, the conservative backlash against the 1960s reforms not only exacerbated economic difficulties and worsened interrepublic relations, it also set in place structures that made reform incredibly difficult at a time when the economic environment, including the global recession of the late 1970s (which hit Yugoslavia particularly hard because of its reliance on an export strategy and its large foreign debt), made radical reform even more urgent. Four factors in particular made change quite difficult and provided conservatives with the motivation and ability to respond with violent conflict along ethnic lines.

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