National questions in
Yugoslavia — an
indication
THE PEOPLES who today live within the borders of the present Yugoslavian state had never all belonged to the same state before the inter-war period. The south-eastern region which had been under Ottoman rule remained very economically backward until the revolution. Early industrialization of a neocolonial type occurred in the 19th century in those regions which had had the relative "luck" to be within the Austro-Hungarian empire — Croatia, Slovenia, Dalmatia, Vojvodina and, later, Bosnia. Different cultures, history, languages, religions (three main ones, Catholic in the North, Orthodox and Muslim elsewhere), alphabets (Cyrillic and Latin) formed this mosaic of peoples who had very differing levels of socio-economic development.
The first semi-industrialized and dependent Yugoslav state established after World War I, was dominated by the Serbian royalty, on the basis of the strength of its army and the internal support of foreign capital. Incapable of ensuring a real federation of the Slav and non-Slav peoples of the country, it imposed a both national (against the other peoples) and social dictatorship. The function of this first Yugoslav state was also to counter the effects of the October revolution on the peoples of the region. The Yugoslav Communist Party, which was very strong just after the war (in 1920 it won a majority in the big industrial towns) was dissolved in November 1920 and the trade
26 International Marxist Review unions it led were banned.
Today's charismatic leader of the Serbian Republic, Slobodan Milosevic, has sometimes been presented in the Western press as a "new Tito". And among the slogans chanted in mass meetings (of millions of Serbs and Montenegrins) is sometimes heard "Serbia is asking: when will Milosevic replace Tito?" But to think this is a call purely and simply to Milosevic to become what Tito was politically is a complete misunderstanding. Quite the contrary, Milosevic's victory in September 1987 (8th Plenum of the Central Committee) in the apparatus of the Serbian party and its consequence — the suppression of all the recognized constitutional rights of the two autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo — mark a break with Titoism. To what extent is this break irreversible and how deep it goes, what, in the final analysis is the nature of it? To discuss this we have first to look at what characterized "Titoism" in its policies towards the nationalities in Yugoslavia. The Serbs, poor or dominant relations
In estimating that the Serbs have been the "poor relations" of Tito's Yugoslavia, and that in return they have been systematically against their domination of the first Yugoslavia (see above), the Serbian nationalists base themselves on real "facts" but ones which are presented and isolated from a chauvinist point of view. The "unity" of pre-war Yugoslavia, which made it possible for all Serbs to identify themselves with a single territorial unity, was broken, and with it a nationally and socially oppressing framework.
The Serbs were themselves for a long time repressed by the Ottoman empire (Kosovo was the site of a historic battle in the 14th century) and territorially dispersed. The problem posed in reuniting them, in a territory under their exclusive control, was the material impossibility of so doing without at the same time oppressing one or several other nationalities. The problem of a "greater Croatia" reuniting all Croats would be similar. Only Slovenia is homegenous and the Slovenes grouped together; it was their numerical weakness which pushed them into a federal regroupment to resist Italian or German assimilation/oppression. A "greater Serbia" including all the Serbs and ensuring them state supremacy would include Vojvodina (with in particular a strong Hungarian minority), Kosovo (which today is 90% Albanian), and also Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (composed of Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims now considered as an ethnic grouping), and undoubtedly also Montenegro and Macedonia. The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was precisely established after
National questions in Yugoslavia — an indication 27 the revolution in order to balance/attenuate the numerical and state strength of the Serbs, and establish a consensus between nationalities on the basis of a federalism, which was the only way to reunite the co-nations. Montenegro was also treated as a distinct republic. This was justified not by language and ethnic differences with Serbs but by a history which made the territory in question the field of a centuries-long bitter struggle against the Turks, leading to the winning of independence in 1878. The slogan "Montenegro is a jewel in the Serbian crown", " recently heard in the pro-Milosevic demonstrations is significant of the traditional fraternity (non-Serbs say "identity") between Serbs and Montenegrins. Macedonia, an extremely ethnically heterogeneous crossroads, was split between Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs at the end of the Balkan wars. The Macedonian language was consolidated in written form and raised up as a national language (dominating a territory) after the revolution: it was, over and above the controversies about the reality of a distinct ethnic grouping, a way of strengthening the resistance to Bulgaria, which denied all existence of a Macedonian nationality.
Obviously, from the Serbian nationalist point of view, Yugoslavia conceived as a federation of freely associated nations, where the differences were emphasized, was a regression compared to a greater Serbian "unitarism", that is to say in relation to a state based on the reunification and exclusive domination of one nationality which is, as has been shown, extensive. But the Serbian national question had - and continues to have — two possible dynamics. The "solution" to Serbian territorial dispersion could be greater Serbian oppression, but a much more solid solution would be the struggle for a democratic federation where the reunification of the Serbs would be conditioned by their full recognition of the rights of other nationalities. As the other nationalities also aspire to be incarnated in a "state", this implied the recognition of republican territories to each "nation" or of provinces to nationalities that already had a state, like the Hungarians or Albanians. This consensus was the basis on which these peoples unified during the revolution. The Serbian bourgeoisie turning out to be incapable of carrying out such a project, the divisions and struggles in the war were also sociopolitical. The Serbian Communist partisans did not confront only the Croatian Ustachists but also the the resistance of the Serbian Chetniks, supporters of the royalty and of a "unitarist" Yugoslavia. Did the Federation established correspond to what the populations who had massively supported the project expected? The Serbian demonstrations must have surprised those for whom (as certain Croatian nationalists said in 1971) Tito's Yugoslavia was supposed to have ensured "greater Serbian" predom-
28 International Marxist Review inance; in the same way that Stalin based himself on Greater Russian oppression...
If this had been the case we would understand neither the bitterness of the Serbs nor the reasons for which the Croatians, the Slovenes and the Albanians of Kosovo all find themselves today defending the 1974 constitution of Tito (and his theoretician Kardelj against Serbian challenges.
In truth, nationalist spectacles (whether they be Serbian or Croatian), make it possible at best to understand certain moments or certain aspects of the Yugoslav system. They lead to overall viewpoints which are completely polarized (the Serbs as poor relations versus the dominant Serbians) which illustrate their systematically unilateral approach. They thus do not make it possible to interpret all post-revolutionary Yugoslav history, and even less its overall dynamic up to the end of the 1970s, and obscure an understanding of the present crisis and the turning point it represents. The revolution and the national struggles
Tito's regime was the product of an authentic revolution, not of a counterrevolution, like Stalinism. What is more, this revolution was in direct conflict with Stalin's orientation. His intention was to protect the bureaucratic dictatorship in the USSR through subordinating the world workers' movement to Kremlin diplomacy. The "line" set for Yugoslavia was the anti-fascist alliance with the royalist resistance and power-sharing, and certainly not a social revolution. But the bourgeoisie (and the royalist resistance) had been much 100 weak to tolerate any alliance with the Yugoslav communists. These latter had paid with their lives and in the camps for the successive failures of the "lines" set by the Kremlin, from the ultra-left positions to the popular front. We can say that the revolution was the only way of carrying out the tasks that the bourgeoisie had not accomplished (national industrialization and emancipation, the agrarian question), but also of putting an end to a bloody dictatorship and fratricidal combats. Let us add that for the Yugoslav CP, the revolution was the only way of escaping both a massacre by the class enemy... and liquidation by Stalin, who had considered submitting the Yugoslavs to the same fate as the Polish (dissolution). The powerful movements of national and social emancipation during the war did not simply "bring to power" a passive leadership (no more than there was, in the completely contrary vision which is today advanced in Yugoslavia like elsewhere, and in the Soviet Union about the Bolsheviks, a simply military putsch by a leadership Which took power without any social base). The spectacular numerical
National questions in Yugoslavia — an indication 29 growth of the party and the people's army forged in the struggle bears witness to this. The Yugoslav Communist leaders had actively prepared a victory based on three aspects of a conscious strategy: a) raising a mass army of partisans; b) organizing in the liberated zones a second power which would ensure an immediate improvement in the life of the population through sharing of land, cancelling debts, local administration; and c) the unity of the different nationalities for the defence of their rights and identity: the Yugoslav Communist Party was the only force able to unite under its leadership all the nationalities of the region. It could only do so in explicitly recognizing the importance of the national demands and the oppression suffered in Yugoslavia in the interwar period.
While it is true that the Comintern in the 1920s had forecast the breaking up of the first oppressive Yugoslav state, through the secession of the Croats in particular, the revolution had only been victorious because of the conviction that the federative alliance of these populations was the condition for a victorious resistance against foreign oppression; this would continue to be true against Stalin. In truth, the existing borders of Yugoslavia had nothing either definitive or ideal: several peoples were separated by borders that were the result of the history of war and oppression in this region. A socialist federation of the Balkans also including Albania, Hungary, Bulgaria, would have been much more a perspective in which all the different nations could have seen their place. The considerable attraction of such a federation was a direct threat to Stalinist hegemony over the peoples concerned. (Tito was welcomed with enthusiasm in the surrounding countries and even the Bulgarian Dimitrov went so far as to vaunt the perspective of this federation in an interview in Pravda. He had to make a hasty self-criticism for this.) For Stalin, the excommunication of the Titoist clique was a necessity from this point on, followed by new trials to bring into line the CPs of the region. The socialist federation of the Balkans was dead and buried. But, at least the (badly-named) Yugoslav federation remained the condition for many nationalities in this region to defend their rights under attack. In other words, the strength of resistance of the new revolutionary regime came on the one hand from its class content, and on the other from the (freely accorded) federation of the nations it represented. The Albanians of Kosovo were the only ones not to gain from the start from the establishment of a Yugoslavia separated from Albania; the break with Stalin put an end to the promises of unification of Kosovo and Albania. They would moreover suffer harsh repression during the most centralist phase of the regime, up to the fall of Rankovic, a Serbian leader hostile to the 1965 reform. The (relative) improvement of the later fate
30 International Marxist Review of the Albanians in Yugoslavia in comparison with the depressing and repressive Albania (particularly on the question of religion) would have an important effect on the (up until now non-separatist) dynamic of their demands.
The evolution of the rights accorded to all the nationalities would be, in fact, very pragmatic — on the basis of the pressure exerted — but was guided above all by the desire to consolidate the political legitimacy of the regime. Political power above all
The national question was in some ways imposed de facto on a party which had for a long time relegated it to the level of a petty bourgeois or bourgeois perspective. The Titoist leadership also evolved in a pragmatic fashion in the institutional measures it took to answer the tensions that arose in the period after the war. Only one thing was certain: the unity of the system could not be realized through Serbian domination. Any attempt to re-establish this could only provoke an explosion: this is still deeply true today.
In this context, to interpret the Tito regime as being "greater Serbian" is an absurdity: the proof is the growing extension of the rights of other nationalities (and the nationalist frustrations of the Serbs). To interpret this same regime as hostile to the Yugoslav project because it was obedient to the policy of the Comintern (as the Serbian nationalists say today) is just as absurd. Tito drew his power from the establishment of post-revolutionary Yugoslavia. This would be to confuse Yugoslavia with its "unitarist" past (taken as a model). To say, finally, that it was a regime hostile to the Serbs as such, would be to ignore the social and political divisions which ran through the Serbian people themselves. The "rereading" of the past which is today prevalent in Serbia (put in writing in a memorandum by the Science Academy which has sanctified the sad union of the the ex-Marxist left with the nationalist currents) is for the first time giving greater value to the resistance of the royalist Chetniks to the detriment of the "bloody" Communists and, as a consequence, to the "democratic" virtues of the Serbian people. The Tito regime did not do down (and still less mistrust) the Serbian people. But it certainly put into question the idea that Serbian sovereignty should be affirmed to the detriment of others. But I see this as a political concern, not as a proof of democracy: it is obvious that the political regime would collapse if the national tensions increased. This is why the answers of Tito were characterized by a combination of concessions and repression, of decentralized rights and of continuity in the Sta-
National questions in Yugoslavia — an indication 31 linist practice of a single party. The limits of the break with Stalinism
Certainly, the break with Stalin had beneficial long-term effects on the Yugoslav political regime which rapidly distinguished itself from its neighbours by much greater cultural and religious liberalism and liberalism in the circulation of ideas and of people. Trotsky's works have been available in the party bookshops for a long time, and, during the 1960s, Marxists from the everywhere in the world could assemble each year on the island of Korcula to discuss many questions in an open and critical way. The philosophers from the review Praxis, Marxists of a very high reputation at the time, animated these seminars. Marxism, thanks to the break with Stalin, remained lively and influential in Yugoslavia among the youth of 1968, those who mobilized against the American intervention in Vietnam, against the "red bourgeoisie" and the market reforms, against privileges of function or of money, for "self-management from top to bottom". At the university of Belgrade at the time, one found Rouge and its associated pamphlets, and the students could invite leaders of the Fourth International to present their ideas. The ideas yes. But as soon as they began to turn into collective strength, in organizations, in demonstrations, then there was repression. There was Stalinist repression...against those who defended Stalin after the break, just as there had been against those who attacked him beforehand. The review Praxis was suppressed when its influence took the form of university occupations converging with workers' strikes. Those who had the misfortune to apply the line of reforms were repressed when this was judged negative. And there were trials for "Trotskyism", "nationalism", "liberalism", "Cominternism" and other "isms" against all those who were unfortunate enough to "go beyond" the limits of the official line of the moment, indeed even to express (but alone) this same line. For example, the demonstrations against the coup by Jaruzelski brought several months in prison for the organizers, although the Yugoslav government condemned the repression of Solidarnosc. The different reforms of the Yugoslav system were thus introduced from above and suppressed from above (by the same leaders in power up to the 1980s). However, they expressed both the constraints of a regime produced by a revolution and the limits of a political system which had not fully broken with Stalinist practices. From that point, far from being arbitrary, these turns were on each occasion a way of answering to the pressure from "below" in order to strengthen the popular legitimacy of the regime, while maintaining
The predominant objective, from the taking of power, was to consolidate rapidly this victory through the industrialization of the country. The 1948 break with Stalin, followed by the blockade of the "fraternal socialist countries" could only strengthen this very centralist dimension (at the political, economic and thus national level). Of course, centralized planning changed its form with the introduction of self-management after 1950. But up to 1957, it remained in essence a form of redistribution from the rich to poor regions.
The resistance of the rich republics was not unimportant in the introduction of greater decentralization from the mid-1960s. However, one should measure the extent to which the lack of real democracy affected the response.
Overall, the location of the federal institutions in Serbia made easier the assimilation of all bureaucratically centralized planning to Serbian domination. It is far from being proved that Serbia benefited from such a redistribution in a privileged fashion (cf the just-below-average per capita income and other figures in Table 1); and it has always been treated as a developed republic (while its standard of living is very inferior to that of Croatia and Slovenia) in order to feed the funds helping the "less developed"
Whatever the situation, the politically most threatening element for the authorities was the mistrust deriving from the greater Serbian past, and thus the lack of openness and of real democracy and thus from the lack of control over the resources distributed, particularly by the rich republics. The bureaucratic wastage in the use of these funds helped stimulate the resistance to this redistributive approach, which was not very obviously efficient.
But the Tito leadership did not answer national pressures with an extension of the democracy necessary to planning. It answered, in 1965, by eliminating planning with the extension of the market, and then by increasing the powers of the republics, without democratizing the regime and the party.
How could the difference be made with the Stalinist model, which had had to be criticized, when the excommunication was announced? The bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR was attributed to the centralism of the state and
32 International Marxist Review the power of the single party.
From centralism to reforms dispute.
the ready perception of centralism as "Serbian"
Liberalism and democracy
. This is part of the
'. But such mistrust fed from
National questions in Yugoslavia — an indication 33 the system of planning, without any criticism of the political system of a single party. Of course, the word "party" was replaced by the word "League" to show that the idea was to influence and convince, and not impose.
And to a certain extent, this was often the way members behaved. But the right to tendencies and political pluralism was excluded. From that time on, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) was run through with social and national differentiations stimulated by the reforms, but losing, over the years, the political coherence which only a democratic and public internal life could create.
In addition, if there was not a fundamental differentiation from Stalinism on the question of the single party (there was even open regression with the declared "leading role", in the 1970s); then other models could only be found in the combination of more market and decentralized rights. This was applied both for self-management, not the subject here, and for the republics. Unfortunately for the regime, market mechanisms had a divisive effect and deepened inequality. They also introduced a process of differentiation in the League of Communists along both national and social lines. Bureaucratism fed from all the limits imposed on democracy and reforms: more market and and more decentralized rights also meant more political power and careerism in the name of the "nation". The question of the market and of the nature of the socio-economic system became increasingly intertwined with national questions. From the Prague Spring to the Croatian spring
The dominant idea (defended in Yugoslavia by supporters of the market reforms) is that these reforms were interrupted (in 1971, after the rise of Croatian demonstrations) because the leaders of the regime were tending to lose power. Tito was allegedly in a certain way the equivalent, if one can put it like that, of the Soviet troops interrupting the Prague Spring in 1968 (in this particular case therefore of the Croatian spring). This is a rather superficial analogy which only takes part of the truth into account. Aside from the fact that Tito and Kardelj were not, in their relationship to the population, simple Brezhnevs, the market reforms that were really applied in Yugoslavia between 1965 and 1971 went well beyond what the Czech reformers could have dreamed of (elimination of planning by elimination of the central investment funds and and increase in the share of the surplus remaining in the enterprises and banks; decentralization of the banking system not ruled by the principles of profitability; adaptation of internal prices to world prices along
34 International Marxist Review with a reduction of protectionism in opening up to the world market, extension of the private sector).
This was not a restoration of capitalism (the same state which had introduced the reforms was to interrupt them, basing itself on workers' self-management), but there was no lack of pressure in that direction. The markets lacked three attributes to be really "general" (fully capitalist): a labour market (the right to sack workers), a capital market (private property of enterprises, with the corresponding rights and sale of stocks and shares)... and a state which would protect these above-mentioned rights. The socioeconomic effects that the Czech reforming projects had hardly had time to produce developed rapidly in Yugoslavia: inflation, unemployment, increased inequalities, social differentiation. Three forms of distribution were in competition in an "impure" system: "to each according to their post", "to each according to their work", and "to each according to the results of the market"
From that point on, the considerable tensions which led to the interruption of the reforms in Yugoslavia cannot be simply reduced to the Croatian movement (which was in turn something different from a Prague Spring). The rise of social and national tensions
Between 1968 and 1971, there were three types of open conflict in Yugoslavia.
The rise in workers' strikes first of all. These spread to such an extent that the trade unions changed their attitude to them. The official de facto tolerance towards strikes, considered as a "malfunctioning" of self-management, dates from this period. This was undoubtedly also a way of allowing workers' discontent to be expressed against local targets, enterprise managements, which had as much of a tendency to free themselves from central control as did the workers. The market undoubtedly took the edge off the conflicts by allowing the system to be more tolerant of them than was the case for their neighbours (in Poland, prices rises were decided "from above", the smallest economic question took on a political dynamic against the central state government).
Alongside the workers' strikes, there was the rebellion of the left intelligentsia under the dominant influence of the Marxist teachers of the magazine Praxis. June 1968 for Yugoslav students was in many ways the corollary to May 1968 in France (occupation of the main universities, fight for student grants, internationalism, denunciation of the "red bourgeoisie", demand for
National questions in Yugoslavia — an indication 35 self-management "from top to bottom" against both privileges and privatization of the economy, demands against unemployment and the inequalities provoked by the reforms).
Finally, national tensions gave everything an explosive dynamic. These tensions were also aggravated through the process of decentralization which politically stimulated the expression of stifled demands but which also fed them on sharpened socio-economic conflicts (the market deepened divisions between rich and poor). In general, the rich republics (Slovenia and Croatia) wanted more political and financial autonomy, less redistribution of their resources, particularly in hard currency. The less developed regions went in the opposite direction on the socio-economic level. But they converged on the other hand in demands affirming their national identity. At that time, the representation of their respective nationalities was stepped up at local and republic level. From now on there would be state congresses before the federal congress, and not the other way round.
However, this political liberalism was not accompanied by the possibility for democratic confrontation of different interests. At the same time, the differences of interest would in fact deepen: the market relations, far from stimulating association around joint projects, would rather turn the republics outwards. In sales, the last link in the contact with the exterior is tempted to consider the hard currency received as "its" due. The Croatians, having the good fortune to have a splendid Adriatic coast favourable to tourism, easily forgot that the hard currency did not simply pay for "their" work. Aside from the "natural" rent, foreign currency was also paying for the food in the hotels, product of the Serbian province of Vojvodina. "To each according to their work" became more and more in contradiction with "according to sales" Bureaucratism, the often irrational use of the centrally-distributed resources, encouraged the "egoism" of the richest and best endowed. Rather than leading to a demand for control over the use of resources freely placed at the service of all (in other words, rather than leading to demands fior the democratization of the federal state, the party and the plan), bureaucratism fed nationalist and free-market demands. The Croatian demonstrations supported by the local leaders of the apparatus demanded more power against the Serbian "centre" . But they did not in the least respond to the demands of radical democratization put forward by the Marxist left. Nor did they respond to the problems raised by the rise in strikes (including in Croatia) and by a section of the intelligentsia on the effects of the market reforms. At the time, the Croatian working class did not get involved in the nationalist demonstrations (it could do so massively, like the Serbian population today, protected by the
30 International Marxist Review leaders in place). The social base of these demonstrations remained limited to a section of the apparatus, to intermediary layers, to the peasantry and a section of the intelligentsia. (Students were divided on the basis of what they were studying: the philosophy and sociology faculties, having tended to support the internationalist movement in 1968, were, like their teachers of the review Praxis in Croatia, very hostile to nationalism. The commerce or management oriented faculties supported more the market reforms and the Croatan movement.)
These three types of movement remained distinct. Tito did not leave them time for an osmosis, in particular for the first two (workers and the intellectual left of 1968), whose programmes converged. While repressing the student leaders, Tito praised the socialist aspirations of these young people and approved their hostility to certain social evils of the reforms. Economic liberalism, the official line of yesterday, was denounced all the more because it combined with centrifugal movements. The concessions later made to these different types of movements, did not have any real coherence because, within these movements themselves, two different socio-economic logics were opposed and because the "answers" made were bureaucratic. What turn in 1971?
Tito's answers were in fact addressed to the workers and to the "1968" intelligentsia on the one hand and to rising nationalism on the other. The approach was to dismantle these different movement as independent oppositional forces, each with its own criticism of political monolithism. There was both repression and taking over from the top of the main demands from the bottom (despite certain contradictory aspects) to try to defuse the conflicts.
The 1971 turn was first of all marked by repression accompanied by a mini "cultural revolution". Addressing the people over the heads of the party aparatus, Tito supported the purge against the liberal leaders of Croatia (then of Serbia and Slovenia, to be balanced...) on the basis of a campaign against corruption and millionaires. He borrowed from the Marxist left (having repressed it) a section of its programme (in favour of self-managed planning) while evacuating its democratic content. While Yugoslav Marxism remained lively and popular, the ideological crisis deepened during the 1970s in a period of increased censorship which aimed to bureaucratically reaffirm the "leading role of the party" against all "deviations" (whether they were termed "Cominternist" ", "nationalist" or "leftist"). At the same time as this
attempt to reassert control, the separate representation of the army in the
But the reform was not simply interrupted by repression and it was very different from the Czech normalization. There was certainly a halt to the extension of the market in favour of a new form of planning; but this system and the new constitution introduced in 1974-76, target of the present opposition, incorporates rights accrued by the self-managers and the republics. It is not by chance that Zupanov's sociological studies of the working class of Croatia in the post-1971 period are seen as giving particular value to the status of the worker self-managers. Nor is it anodyne to see Croats, Slovenes and the Alanaian demonstrators of Kosovo basing themselves on this Constitution (identifying with Tito and Kardelj against current Serbian centralism. This should
On the socio-economic level, the Titoite regime, in this bureaucratic attempt to re-establish control, based itself on workers' self-organization against the technocracy of the banks and big enterprises, and against the purged liberal leaders of the three main republics tending to escape from central control. As well as the campaign against corruption which halted the automatic functioning of the market (dismantling of the big enterprises into agement of an income, of the size of a single workshop, supposedly more easily controlled by workers; subordination of the banking system to the enterprises). Planning was reintroduced. But it was not for all this a return to the hierarchical planning of previously: the system took its legitimacy from its break with Stalin, from the introduction of self-management, from its national policy. These were weighty constraints. The "Law on associated work" introduced "self-managing planning" by contract. The deciders of the contracts were supposed to be the basic self-managing organization and, at
In answer to the national tensions and, in particular, to the Croatian demands, there was increased republican and provincial decentralization and thus particularly in the form of planning, in the management of foreign trade and of hard currency. The system became confederal (with the republics having a right of veto on questions which concerned them). In the same logic, it accentuated the autonomy of the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo within
Serbia, these provinces acquired a right of veto on Serbian policy while the inverse was not possible. Serbia is thus de facto split into three entities. This explains the current sentiment of injustice among Serbs today, whose republic is the only one not to control the whole of its territory. Collegial presidenapparatus was strengthened therefore be studied closely.
"basic organizations of associated work"
the level of the federation, the republics and provinces.
National questions in Yugoslavia — an indication 37
, small units of production and man-
38 International Marxist Review cies (with an egalitarian representation of the republics whatever their size, and the annual rotation of the president were introduced), aiming to prevent the domination of one nationality over the others. Finally, with the notable exception of the "unitarist" army (we will come back to this), where the language of "communication" (language of repression in the case of recent military trials of young Slovenes) is Serbo-Croat, all the state, political, scientific, cultural institutions of the different republics are dominated by the corresponding ethnic group, language and teaching programme. Kosovo, despite its relative economic backwardness, has more students per inhabitant than the other Yugoslav regions in its Albanian university of Pristina. The Albanization of the apparatus in the autonomous province was encouraged in the 1970s by a policy of quotas which undercut the privileged position of the Serbs. The nationalities all have their schools and publications. The two alphabets, Cyrillic and Latin, are widely used. The religions (mainly Catholic in Croatia and Slovenia, Orthodox among the Serbs, and Muslim) are practised
The progressive character of these transformations cannot be denied. But, overall, the new system emphasizes the decentralized rights given to the workers and nationalities without political and economic mechanisms stimulating mutual confidence, a coherence of choices and an arena for the expression of common interests. There is no real chamber of self-management at a federal level for example. On the political plane in particular, the Tito leadership counted on containing the centrifugal tendencies by a (repressive) centralization of the party. But repression reinforces all the turning inwards and encourages careerism. The party itself became more and more confederal, run through by mass corruption and ambitiousness (because only party members can hold a responsible post and because national rights are given increasing value, there was a rise of new corrupted national cadres, or of those working simply for their own power and prestige. In this context, everybody will defend their own short-term local interests. The regional feudalisms, the extreme recourse to self-management (encouraging the "good" workshops not to associate with the "bad") emphasized all the irrationalities, all the costs and imbalances and thus also the foreign indebtedness (the world crisis, the oil price rise, dramatic for a country which had based its growth strategy on the world price indexes, only worsened the internal casues of this indebtedness). Thus, the broadening of the republics' rights in the 1970s and the progressive aspects of the 1974 Constitution on this level were accompanied by a dramatic regression for the socalist future; the Albanians of Kosovo are the
National questions in Yugoslavia — an indication 39 first to pay the price. The crossroads
Increased rights for self-management and to the nations and nationalities were recognized at each stage of the post-war Yugoslav regime up to the end of the 1970s, despite the fact that they were contradicted in practice by the lack of real democracy. The turn which started at the beginning of the 1980s, for the first time put on the agenda regression in these rights both for self-management and for the republics and the nationalities. The paradox is that it was in the name of the market reunification of the system that these threats were advanced.
In other words, market reforms were yesterday (in 1965) identified, by those who put them forward, with more self-management and more national rights. Today, there has been so much trouble in applying these reforms since the beginning of the 1980s precisely because they come up against recognized rights. At the same time, the society has reached a state of advanced social, moral and political decay which gives force to the rise of chauvinism and free-market ideas within the intelligentsia and the state/party apparatus.
Yugoslav society is at stake in the play of powerful antagonistic forces of which none is clearly dominant. There is even greater opacity because the party card does not mean very much in a single-party system which is inevitably run through by the revolution and the counter-revolutions).
The mass character of these demonstration, in Serbia and Montenegro, certainly expresses the accumulated popular bitterness faced with the economic crisis, a bitterness that has been reinforced by observing the enriching of the state/party apparatus (from this point of view there is nothing to cry about in the forced resignation of hated leaders in Vojvodina and Montenegro). But all this should not hide the essential political dynamic and ideological content of these movements. "Kosovo is ours!", "Hang Vilasi!" (one of the Albanian leaders currently repressed as "responsible" for the strikes... after having himself some time ago characterized the Albanian movements as "counterrevolutionary"), "Slobodan, we are yours, only the traitors are against you!" "We are all Serbs!", "Give us arms!", "Death to Albanians!", "We will kill Vlasi!", "Slobodan Milosevic, don't abandon the Serbian domain!". At the moment there is a (temporary?) convergence between a wing of the party. apparatus which has distanced all its opponents in a Stalinist fashion, "greater Serbian" nationalist currents, and eminently anti-Communist pro-Chetniks, and finally a popular anti-bureacratic component that the demogagic rhetoric
40 International Marxist Review of Milosevic, playing up the "mission" of the Serbs against all the (other) bureaucrats, has won over for the moment. The philosphers of the former Praxis review have joined this movement, finding in it a possibility for expression that they had lost since the early 1970s.
This composite grouping is in a general way soldered together by antiAlbanian hatred fed by a passionate campaign on the "genocide" allegedly perpetrated in Kosovo against Serbs and Montenegrins who are in a minority there. It is by the abuse of the term genocide, turned from the real causes of the exodus of Slavs from Kosovo, that is to say the tensions arising from the cultural and political Alabanization of this region, which the Serbs wish to keep as "theirs" and a socio-economic exodus due to the poverty of the region. The status of republic demanded by the Albanians is the only one which can protect them from the colossal regression in rights which is already affecting Macedonia. It would give them the dignity of Yugoslav citizens on a footing of equality with the other nationalities. The vote which has just taken place approving the constitutional amendments that recentralize Serbia are only the beginning of a logic which will lead to dramatic fratricidal confrontations.
In solidarity with the Albanian miners, the Slovenes rose up massively against what they saw as a risk for themselves: a challenge to the rights recognized in the 1974 constitution. All the state and party institutions and all the independent organizations in the republic took positions in favour of the Kosovo miners. The political democratization of Slovenia is a sign of hope for the Yugoslav future. But it obviously combines different logics, some turned towards capitalist Europe, others which rest attached to democratic socialist values. An essential component of the movement, among young people particularly, has already forced the regime's institutions to accept the alternative movements (pacifists, feminists, homosexuals...). It has opposed the logic of liberalization simply for Slovenia, by fighting for a democratization of Yugoslavia as a whole, the only condition for it not to break up. Because such a break up would reinforce the polarized evolution of neoStalinists on one side and pro-capitalist on the other. They come together on this level with a section of the Croatian intelligentsia which has just formed a Yugoslav Association for Democratic Initiative, composed in particular of the former Croatian members of Praxis. They demand that Kosovo should be provisionally put under the guardianship of the Federation and that after a democratic discussion a vote of self-determination be organized in the province. The Kosovo miners were the ferment of this development. The solidarity of the Slovene miners perhaps indicates a certain hope: that the workers
National questions in Yugoslavia — an indication 41 themselves will finally create collective forms of independent expression of their own interests. The drama for Yugoslavia is the atomization provoked by the market reforms. But the overall character of the crisis has increasingly transformed workers' struggles into political struggles. A Yugoslav Solidarnosc would be the only thing able to break with both the reactionary nationalist logic and and the existing pressures towards a full restoration of capitalism.
The Yugoslav army remains an unknown factor in many respects. On the one hand, its national composition is (for historical reasons) very massively Serbian in the ranks of the officers, although the top leaders of the army respects the "ethnic key" '. It is likely that in the case of an open conflict, it would weigh in favour of a Serbian project, because of this composition. This hypothesis, although "statistical", cannot be excluded. It would mean the immediate fragmentation of Yugoslavia. But the most likely from the political point of view is that the army would remain marked by more "Titoist" than Stalinist or greater Serbian traditions. If this variant wins out, then we can expect a "balanced" repression of Serbs... and Slovenes (and eventually, if they start to move, of Croatians, which does not exclude a revolt of Serbian officers). There would be a great risk of civil war in any situation if there was an attempt to impose a solution by force.
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