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

Part 5

Confederalization

An integral part of the 1960s reform was decentralization of federal-level functions to the republics and provinces. Although conservative forces in the army and security services, along with local-level conservatives, rallied behind Aleksandar Rankovic (Tito's second in command) and tried to sabotage the reform, these centralizing forces remained a minority, even in the Serbian party. Indeed, the outspokenly reformist leadership of the Serbian party, which had very strong support in the republic's central committee, argued just as strongly as the other republic leaderships for minimizing the role of the federal center and maximizing the power of the republics [Perovic 1991; Burg 1983, 195].

The result was the 1971 constitutional amendments, which provided the six republics and two provinces with maximum autonomy. The federal organs became in effect a committee of republican representatives, with matters of federal jurisdiction decided by consensual agreement among the eight federal units. The center's role was to ensure the conditions for a single market, including enforcement of contracts, workers' rights, money supply, credit and banking, and ownership and property rights [Burg 1983, 205]. This combination of federal-level ground rules for market relations and independent enterprises operating according to economic criteria was meant to integrate the country's republics and regions and to lessen regional disparities.

But, as seen, the purges of 1971-1972 attacked exactly this mechanism of economic integration, recreating and reempowering local-level party organizations, and lodging local decision making with them. Yet the confederalization of the country remained and was included in the new 1974 constitution. The result was eight statist autarkic units with very limited interest in creating a common economic space or cross-republic economic activity beyond trade in commodities. Since decisions at the federal level required consensus, the success and stability of the state depended entirely on the sincere willingness and desire of the various republic and province leaders to compromise in order to reach solutions. It also required a common political language about the overall goals for the country as a whole.

As long as Tito was alive, his authority was an extrasystemic factor that could force actors to accept changes that were harmful to their interests. But the economic crisis that was triggered by the global recession of the late 1970s and Yugoslavia's huge foreign debt burden ($20 billion by the early 1980s) meant that at the very time this extrasystemic factor disappeared (Tito died in May 1980), the pressures for change were greatest. Especially given the chasm between conservatives, who argued for a return to Marxist orthodoxy and centralism, and reformists, who advocated further radical reform of both economy and politics, the consensual system soon ran into problems. Since each republic or province was in effect a unitary actor at the federal level, those interests that controlled a republic's communist party determined the express interests of the republic at the federal level. And among the constituents of the republican leaderships were the local-level bureaucrats, whose attitudes toward reform were thus important in determining the balance within the leadership.

In the early 1980s reformists dominated in Slovenia and Vojvodina, which were the more developed regions, but also in Serbia, whose economy was very much split between underdeveloped regions in the south and more developed regions in the north, around Belgrade, and around other major cities in central Serbia. Conservatives dominated in underdeveloped Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina [Ramet 1987]. But conservatives from underdeveloped regions of Croatia also dominated that developed republic's party, in large part because of the 1971 purges. Although reformists and conservatives existed in all republics, the republic as unit made it much more difficult to establish federal-level cross-republic alliances between reformist forces.

The confederal system, the very deep differences between reformists and conservatives, and the extreme difficulty in forging cross-republic alliances brought about deadlock at the center. Both reformists and conservatives debated within the common discourse of socialism and workers' self-management, defining their preferred policies as the best way to ensure these goals. But the conservatives' stress on Marxist orthodoxy endeared them to very few even within the party, whereas the reformers' stress on freedom of expression, tolerance of difference, and an economy based on market principles and their explicit contrasts of the crisis of state socialism to the apparent material successes of Western capitalism provided them with a clear advantage. So the debate was shifting in the reformists' favor between 1982 and 1985.

The deadlock, however, in conjunction with the growing economic crisis, provided party conservatives in Serbia with enough time to mobilize those constituencies most threatened by reform against the reformists who dominated the Serbian party. In particular they shifted the focus of political discourse away from the issue of the economy, where their ideological position had little popular support, toward the issue of how the reform threatened the interests of "the Serbian nation." Serbian conservatives, allied with nationalist intellectuals, pointed to alleged persecution and "genocide" against Serbs in the autonomous province of Kosovo. Kosovo, with a majority ethnic Albanian population of 80 percent, had been the heart of the medieval Serbian kingdom, and was thus central to the construction of the Serbian national mythology. The image of innocent Serbs being victimized and driven out of their own ancient homeland was reinforced with mass, mob rallies of Serbs from Kosovo and workers who would be most negatively affected by reform. These rallies, held in front of the Central Committee buildings while party meetings were in progress, were used as a means of pressuring the Serbian reformists, who were attacked for wanting a negotiated settlement of the Kosovo issue. After several years of such tactics, in September 1987 the Serbian party leader, Slobodan Milosevic, managed to purge reformists and consolidate conservative control over the Serbian party.

But given the confederal structure of Yugoslavia, control over the Serbian party alone was not enough to ensure control of the federal party and thus the defeat of reformism in the country as a whole. Control of each republic and province party organization was necessary. Relying on strategies of intimidation and fear, Milosevic first turned his sights on the party organizations of other federal units where Serbs were a significant portion of the party membership. As long as control over the communist party was sufficient to gain control over the republic and its vote in the center, Serbian conservatives could conceivably gain control of the federation in this way. These tactics succeeded in Vojvodina, Montenegro, and Kosovo, and were attempted in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. (In Slovenia the plan, which was uncovered before it was implemented, was for a military crackdown and imposition of a conservative centralist party leadership by force.)

This shift of political discourse away from economic reform toward the rhetoric of injustices and threats to Serbs marked a turning point in the dynamics of confederal relations. The common language of workers' self-management, although not completely jettisoned, took second place to this language of injustices against Serbs. Since Serbs made up 50 percent of the communist party members in all of Yugoslavia, such a discourse had the potential to gain their support; but it also, if undertaken in an aggressive way, would exclude and alienate the other 50 percent of party members, as well as the 60 percent of Yugoslavia's population which was not Serb.

In reaction to this shift, reformists made gains in other republics by associating conservative positions with Milosevic's aggressive rhetoric. In March 1989 they managed to have a reformist, Ante Markovic, appointed as federal prime minister. Markovic (a Croat) sought to empower the federal government to impose radical reformist policies, and by spring 1990 he was more popular in Serbia than Milosevic. In Slovenia, already reformist, Serbia's strategy served to radicalize the party and the republic, bringing calls for a multiparty system and political independence. In Croatia, a bastion of conservatism since 1971, reformists managed to take over the party and called multiparty elections. In both Slovenia and Croatia parliamentary elections in spring 1990 were won by noncommunist parties.

An important result of the elections was that although all the ruling parties in their political rhetoric accepted the need for market reform and privatization, in reality the stated goals of the new Slovenian and Croatian leaders (building a capitalist economy and integrating into Europe) were incompatible with the stated goals of the Serbian and Montenegrin leaders (retaining a basically socialist economy and opposing integration as a form of colonialism). In addition, the republics actively moved to sabotage Markovic's reforms, which required strengthening the federal center in economic policy.

The reactions to Milosevic's strategy destroyed the organization that had held the country together, and with which the conservatives pursued recentralization: the communist party. Indeed, in a situation where legitimacy depended on electoral support from the majority of voters, the Serbian communists clearly could not succeed in taking power in all of Yugoslavia, where Serbs were only 39 percent of the population; nor would they succeed in any of the four republics they did not control (Bosnia was 33 percent Serb; Croatia 12 percent; Slovenia and Macedonia had negligible numbers of Serbs). The only option was a military intervention, but such a move would clearly create a very unstable situation.

The fall of communist parties in Eastern Europe and the growing pressure within Serbia itself for multiparty elections heightened the Serbian conservatives' dilemma. The defeat of the communist (renamed socialist) party in Serbia would give noncommunists a clear majority in the federal institutions and thus bring the real possibility of rapid and radical changes in the political and economic system. The choice facing the Serbian conservatives was thus to accept defeat and the transformation of some form of Yugoslavia along capitalist lines or to fight to keep what they could. They chose the latter course, deconstructing Tito's Yugoslavia by means of violent warfare and provocation of ethnic conflicts in order to rebuild a new Serbian-majority Yugoslavia. The result was the death of any possible common Yugoslav state, even in a confederal form.

Forward to part 6, Ethnic/National Bases of Federal Units
Back to part 4, Local Structure of Power

These pages maintained by