Croatia in the second Yugoslavia
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Serbian postwar domination
The new federation after 1945 consisted of six republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro) and two provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina) which both had autonomy within Serbia. Each major nation had its own republic or province. Four republics—Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia—were clear nation states, while Montenegro was something of a second Serb republic. However, only Slovenia was relatively nationally homogeneous, all the other republics having a mixture of nationalities alongside the dominant group. Borders were established as fairly as possible, but the mixing of nationalities made it impossible to establish purely national states. In the case of Bosnia, which was completely mixed between Muslim Slavs, Serbs and Croats, there was no dominant nation, though Muslims were the largest group.
While the new federation was a huge step forward for the other nations, it rapidly became Serbian-dominated at a political and military level. The root of the problem was that Tito's regime was Stalinist, the new socialist economic base being saddled with a huge central apparatus with massive privileges, as in other European states, despite a number of more liberal aspects.
This bureaucratic nature of the regime explains why the formal equality of nations after 1945 eventually degenerated, once again, into Serb domination, even if not to the extent of capitalist Yugoslavia. Since the bureaucracy was based in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, it became more Serbianized, while the lack of democratic structures meant that people living in the other national regions were not able to exercise political power and make decisions at the center.
Serbs, around 40 per cent of the population, made up 78.9 per cent of personnel in the federal administration (Croats made up only 8 per cent, the other groups less). Serbs also made up around 70 per cent of the military officialdom of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA). Croats made up only 15 per cent, while the remaining 15-20 per cent was left for Slovenes, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians and smaller groups. Albanians, with 8 per cent of the population, were only 1 per cent of officers.
Similarly, within the Yugoslav League of Communists (LCY), between 50 and 60 per cent of members were ethnically Serb, though this had declined from well over 60 per cent earlier. Since it was the only legal party, its composition reflected the relations between nationalities. Croats were 23 per cent of the population, and in 1946 made up 31 per cent of the LCY, reflecting their big role in the resistance. However, by 1978, this had fallen to 17 per cent, well below their percentage of the population. All the non-Serb nations had even smaller percentages.
Tito's new constitution of 1974 had both positive and negative aspects. Around this time, Muslims (mainly in Bosnia and the Sanjak region of Serbia) were officially recognized as a distinct nation within Yugoslavia, as were Roma’s. Bosnia officially became a tri-national republic of Serbs, Croats and Muslims.
However, because this decentralization was combined with a lack of democracy, plus economic rule by the market in Yugoslavia's system of "market socialism", it gave more power and economic decision making to the local bureaucracies rather than the local people. This gave the republican bureaucracies, including in Serbia, more of a base for nationalism, and helped increase economic disparities between republics.
At the same time, it did not diminish Serbian domination at the federal level. On the contrary, by transferring important functions to republican capitals, it left federal jobs to local Serbs and upwardly mobile Serb immigrants from poorer regions. Ironically, this growing irrelevance of the federal government did not result in a reduction in the size of the federal bureaucracy; on the contrary, employment in the federal administration was growing at 16 per cent annually, in contrast to 2.5 to 4.5 per cent for the country as a whole, in the early 1980s.
Before this bureaucratic decentralization, Tito had made sure it didn't develop into a democratic one by carrying out a massive purge of oppositionists within the party and state in the early 1970s, including much of the new generation of leaders. While Croatia gained more bureaucratic autonomy in 1974, an autonomy movement there in the early 1970s, called the Croatian Spring, led by the Croatian Communists, was crushed, and henceforth the Croatian republic government became dominated by ethnic Serbs. In Croatia, only one in twenty Croats were LCY members, while one in nine from the Serb minority were. Forty per cent of Communist Party members and 67 per cent of the police force were Serbs. Where no other parties existed, party membership was an indicator of who had power.
Rich republics?
While these figures show that political and military power had been taken by Serbs, it is often pointed out that Croatia and Slovenia were the richer republics, while in the south, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia and Montenegro remained chronically poor and underdeveloped. Hence, Croatian and Slovenian demands in the late 1980s for more control over their own economic wealth are often interpreted as the rich republics wanting to look after themselves and not distribute anything to the poorer republics.
The label of "rich" republics, as applied only to Slovenia and Croatia, was a sleight of hand. According to most analyses, Slovenia's wealth per capita was nearly double Croatia's, whereas Croatia was only slightly ahead of Serbia/Vojvodina. Virtually all analyses agree: for example, Slovenia with 8 per cent of the population accounted for 17 per cent of GDP; Croatia with 20 per cent and Serbia proper with 24 per cent of the population accounted for 26 and 25 per cent of the GDP respectively, not much different. The three poor republics (Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro) had a GDP percentage well below their share of the population, while Kosovo's GDP percentage was only one quarter of its share of the population.
Hence Serbia was one of the "rich" republics; the fact that its main victims, Kosovo and Bosnia, were far poorer shows that the Serbian bureaucracy had the same nature as its Croatian and Slovenian counterparts, but its domination of the federal government and JNA enabled it to do in a far more dramatic way what its rivals could only dream of: by suppressing these poorer regions, it was able to pillage them.
The fund for developing the underdeveloped regions, by which the richer north helped subsidize the poorer south, was ineffective, as the gap widened and the south remained mired in poverty.
However, another reason would seem to be the diversion of considerable republican funds to the central bureaucracy in Belgrade and the bloated JNA. An example of the lavish lifestyle of military officialdom is the fact that, while the average income in 1991 was $400, the average army officer received $2300 monthly, an apartment, medical insurance, early retirement and a pension ten times the average.
As examples of the diversion of funds to Belgrade, in the late 1960s, Croatia created 27 per cent of national income and earned about 50 per cent of Yugoslavia's foreign exchange, largely due to tourism on the Dalmatian coast, yet received only 15 per cent of new investments; while Serbia created 33 per cent13 of national income and 25 per cent of foreign exchange, yet Serb banks controlled 63 per cent of total bank assets and 81.5 per cent of foreign credits.
This naturally created suspicion about "helping the poorer republics". Further, of the four poorer regions, only ethnically Serb Montenegro consistently "received well above its capital investment share" even as the shares of the other "less developed regions" were reduced.
Hence while the local bureaucracies in Croatia and Slovenia strived to loosen bonds of solidarity, as they, like Serbia, moved towards capitalism in the late 1980s, this was not the dominant view among the masses whom they would need to win over. Rather, what did appeal more to the masses was growing opposition to diversion of their republican funds to pay for what they saw as a bloated, Serb-dominated, irrelevant JNA, which ate up two-thirds of the federal budget.
Re-centralization
When Tito died in 1980, Yugoslavia had a $20 billion foreign debt amassed by the bureaucracy. The IMF and World Bank were brought in and laid down draconian conditions of austerity and free market radicalism to try to squeeze the debt out of Yugoslav workers. The Yugoslav federal government essentially became the internal agency of these imperialist financial institutions. While a description of the economic disaster is outside the range of this article, these conditions eventually helped pave the way for various bureaucratic nationalist warlords to explain the disaster to the workers of "their" nation as being the fault of the "enemy nations" rather than of the bureaucrats themselves.
Furthermore, this process came on top of an already highly deregulated form of "market socialism" which Yugoslavia had been experimenting with since the 1960s. This had already resulted in massive unemployment and other features which were absent from other East European socialist states. Hence there was nowhere further to go other than outright restoration of capitalism.
While much of the Western left continues to insist that imperialism "broke up" Yugoslavia, this only reflects continued illusions in bourgeois—not socialist—Yugoslavia. In reality, Western powers continued to insist not only on the maintenance of Yugoslav unity to the bitter end, but in fact on the strengthening of the central apparatus.
This was due to the demands of the IMF and World Bank for greater central authority to force repayment of the $20 billion foreign debt, to carry out a "free market" transformation and privatization of the economy, to overcome republican barriers to an unrestricted Yugoslav-wide market for the flow of Western investments and goods, and to remove the republican veto on federal economic decisions dictated by the IMF. This stubborn insistence on centralization eventually led to the Yugoslav break-up for the opposite reason—the non—Serb republics could no longer bear the increasing weight of the central regime.
Political commentary in sections of the Western media known to be close to government policy emphasized the need for greater central authority far more than "democracy". The US Congress assessed that "some strengthening of federal powers" would be necessary and that "unless there is a reduction in those geographic barriers [i.e. republican borders], economic reform in Yugoslavia will have to wait. Such an eventuality could be catastrophic."
This centralizing push had an echo in the JNA, which was the strongest federal institution. The "hard-line" JNA strongly supported the neo-liberal economic reforms. In 1987-88 the JNA centralized its command structure in a way that similarly undercut republican rights, replacing the eight units based on republics with four which completely cut across republican borders.
After the IMF/federal government and the JNA, a third force was pushing for centralization—the Serb nationalists. This was contradictory, given that Serbia is a republic itself, and nationalism would have a fragmenting rather than unifying effect. Yet the difference was Serbian domination of federal institutions—increased central powers meant increased Serbian power. This push for re-centralization thus struck at the very basis of the federation of equal nations.
Whereas the JNA argued for unity from a traditional Titoist point of view, the Serb nationalist intelligentsia attacked the entire postwar order. In 1986, the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences released its "Memorandum" which claimed that the "Communist-Croat alliance" represented by Tito had set out to destroy the Serb nation by imposing an "alien" (federal) Yugoslavia upon them, and that the division into federal republics divided the Serb nation.
This reflected the ideology of the growing Serbian capitalist class, wanting to free itself from the shackles of the ideology of "Communism", "federation" and "brotherhood and unity". As with all rising bourgeois classes, naked nationalism was the ideology that could best justify its attempt to seize control of as much of Yugoslavia's resources as possible; it was also necessary to divert the Serbian working class from the enormous class struggle it was engaged in in 1987-88, in alliance with the working classes of all Yugoslav nations, against the IMF/federal government austerity regime.
In reality, the so-called "division of the Serb nation" worked to its advantage. As Serbian academic Vojin Dimitrijevic points out, "the proliferation of 'Serb' federal units offered a chance to the Serbs, or the Leagues of Communists dominated by them, to appear in the organs of the federation under various hats".This applied not only to the two autonomous provinces and ethnically Serb Montenegro, but also even in Croatia, where the 11 per cent Serb minority dominated the regime.
Unfortunately, this Serb nationalist propaganda has rubbed off onto some on the left. For example, Peter Gowan, writing in New Left Review, claims "the Serbs were split up between Serbia proper, Croatia, Bosnia, Vojvodina and Kosovo". While admitting this was "more in form than in fact", he claims that this division became "more of fact than of form in the context of Yugoslavia's break-up". However, the same points could be made about the division of the Croats between Croatia, Bosnia and Vojvodina, of Muslims between Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro and of Albanians between Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia (let alone Albania). The reasons the supposed rights of Serb minorities elsewhere became an issue were, firstly, that independence would reduce their position from a privileged one to an equal one, something not the case with the other nationalities; and secondly, the fact that the Serbians had overwhelming military dominance meant that they could force the issue.
The assault by the Milosevic regime on the federal order and the national rights of non-Serbs in 1988-89 needs to be seen in this context. Milosevic organized large crowds around the banners of Serbian nationalism in an "anti-bureaucratic revolution" which overthrew the Communist governments in Montenegro and Kosovo and Vojvodina. In these demonstrations expressions of openly bourgeois and reactionary ideology were seen for the first time since World War II—Chetnik, royalist and Serbian Orthodox banners.
Milosevic put his stooges in power in these republics/provinces. The high level autonomy of the 1974 constitution was reduced in 1989. Autonomy was abolished outright in Serbia's 1990 constitution. Nevertheless, the seats of the formerly autonomous provinces were maintained on the federal presidency, giving Serbia and its satellites four out of the eight votes. The fact that this was in accord with the re-centralization pushed by the IMF and imperialism perhaps explains why there was little fuss made by Western powers over this assault.
The Croatian and Slovenian response
Far from rushing headlong into independence declarations, the first reaction of the other republics was to appease Milosevic. Thus in October 1988, the federal presidency, with the votes of all the republics, accepted constitutional amendments reducing the provinces' autonomy. However, when Milosevic then pushed this through violently against the will of the Kosovo assembly in 1989, thus violating the constitution, other republics began to worry that they might be the next victim.
As Milosevic and the federal Markovic government tried to push IMF-backed constitutional changes in 1989 to strengthen federal powers over the republics, Slovenia came up with its own opposite amendments, reaffirming Slovenian "sovereignty" (consistent with the Yugoslav constitution) and proposing the loosening of federal powers, turning Yugoslavia into a confederation of sovereign states. The Croatian government, on the other hand, said little throughout 1988-89; this was known as the "great Croatian silence".
However, following Markovic's introduction of an even more drastic IMF austerity and privatization package in January 1990, which virtually stripped the republics of any cash, the three dominant republics went into revolt in their opposite directions. Part of this was fierce competition over the spoils of privatization.
In Serbia, the League of Communists changed its name to Serbian Socialist Party, claiming to be based on western European social democracy, while in practice being based on the principles of pre-World War II Serbian reaction. A new constitution made the Serb nation dominant without any mention of other specific minorities.
Ominously, the constitution declared Serbia's right to intervene in other republics "to defend Serbs". It was declared that "border changes" might be necessary if republics seceded. If a re-centralized, Serb-dominated Yugoslavia could not be achieved, the push was on for a "Greater Serbia". Such a Serbia would tightly control the Albanian, Muslim, Croat and Hungarian minorities within Serbia and the former autonomous provinces, yet would incorporate the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia wherever they existed in a majority or a minority, any land deemed to have previously been occupied by Serbs and any strategic territory to connect these disparate areas, no matter who lived there. The Montenegrins and Macedonians were considered to be bogus nations who were in reality Serbs, so their republics would also be part of Greater Serbia. Only Slovenia, which had no Serb minority, and part of Croatia would be free to leave this "Yugoslavia".
Croatia and Slovenia held elections in April 1990, in both cases the League of Communists losing to center-right coalitions. The new governments officially put forward a proposal for the transformation of the federation into a confederation. They let it be known that if Milosevic continued to obstruct such a process, they would declare independence. In December 1990, Slovenia held a referendum on independence in which around 90 per cent voted in favor. Slovenian leader Kucan made it clear this would be activated in six months if no progress was made. In any case, in a secret meeting in January, Milosevic let Kucan know that he had no problem with Slovenian independence as long as Slovenia put up no obstacles to Greater Serbia. In June 1991, Croatia had its own independence referendum, with 94 per cent of the population voting in favor.
Nevertheless, there were a number of difficult issues. The first was the nature of the regime of Franjo Tudjman and his Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). Like Milosevic, Tudjman was a former Stalinist bureaucrat turned nationalist. He was routinely referred to by Milosevic (and many Western leftists) as a revival of the Ustasha, despite having been a Croatian partisan.
It was widely felt by Croats that their secondary position in Yugoslavia resulted from their being unfairly singled out as disproportionately responsible for crimes by Nazi collaborationist forces. A certain nationalist symbolism returned under Tudjman—as under Milosevic. The most controversial was the revival of the traditional Croatian checker board flag. This flag had been used for hundreds of years in Croatia. However, many minority Serbs saw it as a "Ustasha" flag, because the Ustasha had also used the checkerboard as part of its flag. Serb fears were not allayed by Tudjman's rapid changing of street names along nationalist lines, his direct methods of reversing minority Serb domination of the police and media, and his bigoted statements. The regime was right wing, nationalist and anti-Communist.
The other complex issue was the Serb minority, some 600,000 people. Much has been made of the transformation of the Serbs in Croatia from officially a "nation" to a "minority" under Tudjman, and of the alleged denial of their right to use Cyrillic script.
However, Croatia's constitution of December 1991 proclaims Croatia the "national state of the Croatian nation and the state of members of other nations and minorities who are its citizens: Serbs, Muslims, Slovenes, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Hungarians, Jews and others". Article 12 states: "The Croatian language and the Latin script shall be in official use . In individual local units [i.e. where another group forms a majority] another language and the Cyrillic or some other script may, alongside with Croatian language and the Latin script, be introduced into official use". Article 15 states: "Members of all nations and minorities shall be guaranteed freedom to express their nationality, freedom to use their language and script, and cultural autonomy". Notably, Tudjman offered the post of vice-president to Jovan Raskovic, leader of the nationalist Serb Democratic Party (SDS).
Imperialist policy
The charge that imperialism encouraged secession in order to break up "socialist" Yugoslavia, even if true, would not alter the right to self-determination. If imperialism wanted to encourage secession, it would find much more fertile ground if the nation was oppressed.
But in any case, this view of imperialism is a complete fantasy. The IMF and World Bank strongly pushed Yugoslav re-centralization. In particular, the US, the EC, Britain and France insisted throughout 1990 and 1991 that Yugoslavia remain united. Even proposals for a looser confederation, which might have saved Yugoslavia, were rejected, because they were in total opposition to the IMF's needs. When Tudjman visited the White House in October 1990 to gain US support for the Croat-Slovene confederation proposal, he was told "coldly" by Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and "permanent adviser" Henry Kissinger, that the US supported the maintenance of Yugoslav federalism and unity "at all cost".
Kissinger, Scowcroft and Bush's assistant secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, all had important business connections with Yugoslavia. During the 1991 war, the major Western initiative was to impose an arms embargo on Yugoslavia, which prevented the disarmed Croats from getting arms, while the Serb-dominated JNA was one of the largest military forces in Europe.
Reading the article by Peter Gowan, one might be led to believe that there was a major imperialist bloc, opposed to the US-UK-France bloc, that wanted to break up Yugoslavia. "The forces eager to see the break-up of Yugoslavia through independence for Slovenia and Croatia were the Vatican, Austria, Hungary, Germany and, more ambivalently, Italy". His footnotes for this section are from John Zametica, a paid publicity agent for Radovan Karadzic's Bosnian Serb gangster "state" and a key link between Karadzic and the British ruling class. The supposed role of the Vatican says little about imperialist policy, except perhaps for feudal "imperialism". The attitude of Hungary's bourgeois nationalist Antall regime, which had its eyes on Vojvodina, says even less. Austria had long borders with Slovenia, and may have had a particular economic interest quite separate from other imperialist states, yet Gowan's only evidence, apart from obscure quotes from Zametica, was Austria's open support to "democratic rights" in the two republics.
As for Italy, there was nothing ambiguous. Italian foreign minister Gianni di Michelis made this clear, telling the Belgrade journal Borba in May 1991 that no-one in Croatia or Slovenia should be under the illusion that entry to the EC would be eased by secession from Yugoslavia—that only a "united" Yugoslavia could hope to enter a "united" Europe. Italy has since remained among the closest of west European imperialist states to Serbian and "Yugoslav" interests.
The charge that a newly united Germany "encouraged" Croatia's secession has led to the most enduring left fantasies, especially as it can be simplistically related to a version of World War II. For example, in Susan Woodward's mammoth Balkan Tragedy, many pages are devoted to German assertiveness, without, however, revealing a single fact previous to the outbreak of war in June 1991. In fact, just before that, German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher gave one of the strongest speeches supporting Yugoslav unity at the Council for Security and Cooperation in Europe meeting in Berlin on June 19-20.
That is not to deny the expansion of German economic interests throughout eastern Europe, including Yugoslavia, or to argue for German innocence. Rather, it is precisely because Germany was the dominant economic power throughout Yugoslavia, not just in the northern republics, that the last thing it wanted was a break-up of this market, economic turmoil and new state barriers. Even if it had traditionally stronger links with the north, as long as Yugoslavia remained united, there was no barrier to its further expansion.
Aftermath
On August 2, 1992 over two and one-half million Croatians, representing seventy-five per cent of the electorate, again went to the polls in elections closely monitored by international observers headed by Lord Finsberg of the Council of Europe. In first-time direct elections for the Presidency, Franjo Tudjman received fifty-seven percent of the vote in a race contested by eight major candidates. The second-place candidate received twenty-two per cent of the vote. The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) was returned to power in a Parliament reflecting a half-dozen political parties and all of Croatia's major ethnic groups. Croatia chose democracy.
Serbia chose Communism, expansion, war, and the continued the myth of Yugoslavia. The Serbian leadership chose to launch an all- out war of aggression against her neighbors to force them to accept the Myth. When the entire free world finally recognized that Yugoslavia was indeed a myth, Serbia simply recreated it with the stroke of a pen backed by a few thousand tanks.
References
Hashi, p. 73.
Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, Brookings Institution, Washington, 1995, p. 109.
Susan Woodward, Socialist Unemployment, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995, p. 356, quoting Zagreb daily Vjesnik, September 8, 1982.
Veselica, p. 12.
Noel Malcolm, Bosnia, A Short History, Papermac, London, 1994, p. 216.
Sissy Vovou (ed), Bosnia-Herzegovina—The Battle for a Multi-Ethnic Society, Deltio Thiellis, Athens, 1996, p. 19, table.
Malcolm, p. 202, from 1971 census.
Jack Anderson, "The Price of Balkan Pride", in the Washington Post, December 29, 1991. Figure for all Serbia, including provinces.
Dijana Plestina, in John Allcock, John Horton and Marko Milivojevic (eds), Yugoslavia in Transition, Berg publishers, New York, 1992, p. 140.
ibid., pp. 144-46.
James Gow, Legitimacy and the Military, Pinter Publishers, London, 1992, p. 105.
ibid., p. 103.
Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 115.
Leonard Cohen, Broken Bonds, Westview Press, Boulder, 1993, pp. 55-6.
World Bank, Industrial Restructuring Study: Overview, Issues and Strategy for Restructuring, Washington, June 1991, p. 8.
Foreign Broadcast Information Bulletin—Eastern Europe (FBIS-EU), p. 39.
Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 59.
US House of Representatives, Committee on Small Business, Economic Restructuring in Eastern Europe: American Interests, 101st Congress, First Session, September 1989, p. 12.
Branka Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, Verso, London, 1995, pp. 199, 201. The Memorandum demanded that the Serbian nation re-establish its full "national and cultural integrity . irrespective of the republic or province in which it finds itself". In particular, Kosova had to be crushed, to prevent the ongoing "genocide" against the local Serbs.
Vojin Dimitrijevic, The 1974 Constitution as a Factor in the Collapse of Yugoslavia or as a Sign of Decaying Totalitarianism, European University Institute Working Paper RSC No. 94/9, Florence, 1994, p. 24.
Peter Gowan, "The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tragedy", New Left Review 234, March/April 1999.
Amnesty International, Yugoslavia's Ethnic Albanians, New York, 1992.
Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, November 2, 1989, p. 19.
Such as his notorious statement that he was glad his wife was neither a Serb nor a Jew.
The Constitution of the Republic of Croatia, December 22, 1990.
Gowan, p. 87.
Mark Almond, Europe's Backyard War, Mandarin, London, 1994, p. 43.
See, for example, Sean Gervasi, "Germany, the US and the Yugoslav Crisis", Covert Action, Winter 1992-93, pp. 45, 64-65, where he argues strongly that a new German imperial drive was responsible for encouraging Croatia to "disassociate" from Yugoslavia.
Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, pp. 183-89.
It was after this meeting that US secretary of state George Baker visited Belgrade and insisted on Yugoslavia's "territorial integrity and unity", calling any unilateral secession of Croatia and Slovenia "illegal and illegitimate", which would "never" be recognized by the US.