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

Part 4

Local structure of power

Although resistance to change in both the 1960s and the 1980s was seen at all levels, the most vigorous opposition came from local-level party bureaucracies. The primacy of economic criteria over the previously dominant political criteria rendered many political decision makers at the local level irrelevant, especially since their main credential was often participation in the Partisan forces rather than any knowledge of economics. Indeed, reform posed such a great threat exactly because their source of power, prestige, and economic security came not from "owning" anything but rather from their position within the bureaucracy and their resultant control over resources. This threat held not only for local government and party officials but also for managers of enterprises that could not survive in a competitive market environment. Reform involved a transfer of power from elites whose power depended on political position to elites whose power rested on economic expertise. Losing the battle over reform thus meant losing everything. Those officials who had few qualifications other than ideological orthodoxy or party connections were therefore willing to fight vigorously against reforms that struck most deeply at the local structure of power.

In the 1960s the threat to conservatives was especially dangerous because the reformists who headed the republic-level communist parties were very popular among the wider party membership (and also among the wider population), and they moved to mobilize the party membership against the bureaucrats in attempts to deprive them of their institutional and ideological bases of power [Gagnon 1992, 467-474, 579-584]. In the face of this threat conservatives in the party and army successfully fought back by raising the specter of Croatian nationalism, thereby persuading Tito to crush the reformists. Despite strong resistance in all the republics' central committees, Tito purged the Croatian reformists, then the Serbian and other reformists, and reversed the very parts of the reform that were to provide the integratory mechanism: reliance on economic criteria and market forces. The result was the reentrenchment of local-level bureaucrats and the reinstatement of political criteria as the basis for economic decision making. Local commune (opstine/opcine)-level bureaucrats gained enormous power: they chose enterprise directors, approved or denied expansion and investment plans, enforced ideological decrees, and collected all taxes.

When debate over radical reform again burst into the political arena in the early 1980s, the reformists once again took aim at exactly these powers. But unlike the 1960s focus on instituting economic criteria for decision making within a state socialist system, the early 1980s focus was the introduction of capitalist features, including greater reliance on private enterprise. The political reforms, which included multicandidate secret-ballot elections for party and state positions, also resurrected the threat that reformists might oust conservatives through popular mobilization. When in 1990 multiparty elections were held, conservatives faced an even greater threat, as opposition parties and even some communist parties openly called for the full restoration of a capitalist system. Conservatives in Yugoslavia from the early 1980s onward were thus in effect threatened with the possibility of immediate extinction, and had a strong motivation to try to prevent such change. The confederal structure of the country and the "ethnic" character of the republics and provinces were the key factors that provided them with the ability to block these changes.

Forward to part 5, Confederalization
Back to part 3, The Second Yugoslavia

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