The Missing Historical Dimension in Yugoslavia

Abstract

F OR over a decade, no major European crisis, with the possible exception of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, has produced such a crop of different and often mutually contradictory reactions and interpretations as last December's political upheaval in Croatia, Yugoslavia's second largest federal republic. Was it just another round in the perennial conflict between Yugoslavia's richer and poorer republics, as the importance of the question of the allocation of hard currency among the republics seemed to suggest? Or was it merely the preliminary stage of the succession crisis that was bound to arise after President Tito's death or retirement from the political scene in 1976? If there was a deeper issue of principle at stake, was it to be found in the conflict between the ' liberalisers ' and the 'conservatives '? Or in the more familiar struggle between Croatian 'separatists ' working to detach Croatia from Yugoslavia, and the ' unitarists ' (Croat and nonCroat alike) defending a united Yugoslav state? The almost total lack of consensus about what was really going on in Yugoslavia in 1971 is, to borrow a phrase from the communist political vocabulary, not at all accidental. This article will argue that the confusion and disagreement about contemporary Yugoslavia stem not only from a shortage of reliable factual information (though that can still be very hard to come by even in a relatively liberal communist country like Yugoslavia) but also from the neglect of what might be called the historical dimension of the subject. The great disparity between the rich and the poor Yugoslav republics was a potential source of trouble which the Yugoslav Communists recognised and tried to remove as soon as they came to power. But by the early 1950s the policy of investing heavily in the poorer areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and the Serbian province of Kosovo was beginning to provoke sharp disagreements. Its critics, who came mainly from Croatia and Slovenia, which provided most of the investment capital, argued that the money was being invested wastefully in what often proved to be 'parallel industrial capacity ' that duplicated what already existed in other parts of Yugoslavia. Although the policy of centrally directed investments has been modified over the years, deep disagreements still persist about, for example, how obviously