Batović, Ante Benjamin Bilski (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 384 Batović, Ante. The Croatian Spring: Nationalism, Repression and Foreign Policy Under Tito. Translated, edited and expanded by Ante Batović and Benjamin Bilski. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2017. xiii + 352 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £69.00: $100.00. This is an extremely important book that illuminates how the ‘Croatian Spring’ of 1971 evolved within the context of the democratization, de-centralization and economic reform of Communist Yugoslavia. Ante Batović, a graduate from Zadar/Zara on the Dalmatian coast, provides an excellent and succinct survey of post-war Yugoslavia to 1965, before moving on to analyse the reforms that were eventually stalled when the ‘Croatian Spring’ was repressed. In an otherwise extremely detailed account, the one missing element is an analysis of the leftist student protest of 1968, which might be intentional, as their views never made it into the mainstream and were discarded equally by unitarists and nationalists. Instead, Ante chronicles the endless economic debates of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and examines how they related to or inspired national grievances. During the autumn of 1971, the Croatian leadership was either removed or forced to resign, while a similar fate followed soon after for Serbian and other liberal Communist functionaries. Offering a broader perspective, Batović also considers Yugoslavia’s international role during the Cold War — the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Prague Spring and Soviet military intervention — and its relations with the Soviet Union and the United States, taking in President Nixon’s visit in October 1971, right in the middle of the crisis. In addition to his research in Belgrade and Zagreb, Batović incorporates substantial material from the British, American and NATO archives as well as the literature and memoirs of key participants. This level of detail brings fresh insights and new conclusions to the debates, especially concerning American and British anxieties about the potential scope of Soviet Russia’s response to any sign of a weakening Yugoslav regime. Whilst this might simply be an expression of their own interests and bias, it is an important element in considering Yugoslavia’s international status, something that has rarely been considered in previous scholarly studies. Batović quotes the British and American diplomats stationed in Belgrade and Zagreb extensively, which gives his narrative a certain distance, a sense of the outsider’s point-of-view, as well as a vitality and immediacy that is often lacking in the bureaucratic language of official sources. This material, along with foreign press reports, forms a compelling and substantial component of Batović’s analyses and conclusions. Even though the book’s focus is on the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, its index reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ for Croatia in the 1990s. Student leaders reappear twenty years later but often on opposite sides, with former REVIEWS 385 Communist candidates featuring at high levels in Tuđman’s nationalist establishment, whilst the most prominent non-Communists, such as Ivan Zvonimir Čičak and Dražen Budiša, opted either for the opposition, or human rights and minority protection activism. Yet Batović offers nothing on the links between the Communist leadership of Croatia and the more radical and nationalist Matica Hrvatska, which was a beacon for intellectuals and student activists. Nor is there any consideration of how realistic the demands for hard currency and language sovereignty were, given that Yugoslavia had central price and currency control and Croatia had a large and powerful Serbian ethnic group. Meanwhile, a full evaluation of the Soviet Union’s role awaits the opening of their archives. With the Croatian question a key issue for both the first and second Yugoslavia, it is surprising that this is the first scholarly monograph to appear on the subject. The text has been impeccably translated into English and is meticulously packaged and presented with only a handful of typos and problems with Slavic diacritics. The endnotes are so rich that they function as an annotated bibliography of Croatian/Serbian- and English-language literature that goes far beyond the declared focus of the book to cover the entire history of Socialist Yugoslavia. Batović’s study would have benefited, however, from a discussion of its...