Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia: Tito, Communist Leadership and the National Question by Hilde Katrine Haug (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 929 his book with a discourse on why Gagarin chose to say ‘Poekhali! (Let’s go!)’ before being launched into space. I can’t think of anything else to say, and I’m not sure it’s like saying ‘Geronimo!’ in English. In any event, poekhali! Colby College, Maine Paul Josephson Haug, Hilde Katrine. Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia: Tito, Communist Leadership and the National Question. I. B. Taurus, London and New York, 2012. ix + 455 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £65.00. One can only admire Hilde Katrine Haug’s perseverance in researching and writingherstudyoftheYugoslavCommunistParty’schangingstrategytowards the national question; in addition to consulting a wide variety of secondary sources, she seems to have ploughed through hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of arcane and soporific party congresses and conferences, turgid ‘theoretical’ writings, often incomprehensible official documents, and longwinded speeches party leaders made over a fifty-year period. Unfortunately, there is not a lot new to show for such diligence: for the most part, the debates and discussions she describes are well known and have been covered in some detail elsewhere. Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia is thus a useful — if poorly written and edited — recap of the twists and turns of party debates and policies dealing with the national question in Yugoslavia. Descriptions of debates, including some long forgotten ones, are accurate, detailed, fair and multisided, and the author makes an almost heroic — albeit not entirely successful — attempt to explain and clarify Edvard Kardelj’s theories. Her discussion of the evolution of the thinking of Serbian political elites and intellectuals in the face of the special difficulties the republic faced in trying to govern itself with two autonomous provincesisparticularlyinteresting;heraccountoftheambiguitiesandchanges in where the locus of sovereignty was placed in the successive constitutions and amendments testifies to just how contested this question was. Nevertheless, the volume contains surprisingly little theoretical or causal analysis. Dr Haug accurately details the various forks in the road and who favoured one direction over another, but gives us little sense of why one policy or leadership choice was actually selected over an alternative. For example, Haug explains Slovene objections to ‘socialist Yugoslavism’ quite clearly, but why those objections led to the wholesale abandonment of federal attempts to develop a ‘Yugoslav’ civic identity that would reflect and complement — without replacing — the individual national cultures is not explained. Likewise, the policy and preferences of the ‘liberal’ Serbian leadership that came to power in 1968 are clearly and perceptively outlined. Quite unlike their counterparts in Croatia, Nikezić and Perović seemed to have the situation in SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 930 Serbia under control and were carrying out exactly the measures demanded in the post-Ranković order. A good explanation for why they were so abruptly forced out in 1972 has never really been given — but none is forthcoming in this study, either. Dr Haug does suggest that quite a number of apparently arbitrary decisions, including this one, were made by Tito personally. It is easy to believe this was indeed the case, but she does not really attempt to find an underlying rationale to his choices at various key junctures. Similarly, the volume deals at length with the constitutional revisions of the 1960s and ’70s, but why they were initiated at all is never directly confronted. In particular, why decisions to give enterprises more autonomy and market forces greater sway in the economy also entailed transferring huge swathes of regulatory power to republic governments is never examined. But it was precisely the use (or abuse) of just such powers by the republics that sabotaged economic reform everywhere, exacerbating the economic problems the reforms were designed to address. In this regard, perhaps the volume’s most serious shortcoming is its failure to take serious account of Yugoslavia’s postwar economic performance, a factor inextricably interwoven with national and regional disagreements at every stage. Insofar as the attraction of socialism in a country like Yugoslavia was precisely its promise of rapid economic development and diminishing regional inequalities, the Communist Party’s initial claim that socialism ‘solved’ the national question was not so obviously implausible. And indeed, even in Yugoslavia, national tensions remained manageable as long as the economy was growing...