Yugoslavia: The Limits of Reform
Denitch, Bogdan
Mass popular and nationalist demonstrations throughout the Republic of Serbia, an inflation reaching over 230 percent, faltering economic performance, and growing public acrimony within the...
...The recent history of the Province of Kosovo has led to a fundamental realignment of politics in Serbia and the growth of a dangerous populist and officially sanctioned nationalism...
...Both require major moves toward legality and a civil society independent of party and state...
...The second, democratization, is a far messier, more turbulent, and contested process...
...As a matter of pride, young Albanians have been refusing to learn even a minimum of Serbo-Croatian, the language spoken by eighteen out of twenty-four million Yugoslays...
...For example, the greatest of all privileges is a large, modern house or apartment distributed through political channels and generally not a result of mere "income differences...
...The danger here is that forces may be unleashed that historically have turned out to be hard to control and often antidemocratic...
...Not only is the small private sector not a base for the restoration of a capitalist class, it is clear that a popular check on those who control the public sector is necessary...
...It is therefore mere demagoguery to say, as do politicians from the less developed parts of Yugoslavia, that the present privileges and social differences are the product of democrati zation and decentralization...
...It has gone the furthest in decentralizing the state and providing for genuine autonomy for its national groups...
...The question is, which forces...
...It is not clear how much of the trouble is the result of bad decisions made by Yugoslav leaders or the result of an unfavorable international economic climate since the oil shock of 1973...
...Is it because of or despite self-management and market socialism that Yugoslavia is in the present mess...
...The first presupposes the maintenance of the party monopoly, a sort of communism with a human face...
...Exporting more in an era of growing protectionism in both the European Community and the United States is increasingly difficult, especially since Yugoslavia's Third World customers are over their heads in debt and unable to pay for past orders...
...At the same time, Yugoslavia has an average of four hundred political prisoners at any given time...
...Most of Yugoslavia's intellectuals, including most democratic and socialist critics of the regime, believe that the road to reform and democratization runs in good part through the party rather than outside and against it...
...Liberalization and Democratization When discussing reforms in communist oneparty political states it is important to distinguish between liberalization and democratization...
...This creates a curious situation...
...Cutting the living standard of workers is hard to achieve, given the already low standard in most of southern Yugoslavia...
...At this moment it is the cutting edge of the struggle for civil society and civil liberties in the country as a whole...
...Bedeviled by Nationalism The Yugoslav revolution was successful in good part because the Communist-led PartiWINTER • 1989 • 81 sans, unlike their civil-war opponents, accepted the fact that theirs was a multi-ethnic society and proceeded to organize the postwar federation on that basis...
...Nove argues that a properly organized socialist economy should be a combination of centralized planning, self-management, regionally owned public enterprises, cooperatives, and a small-scale private sector...
...Everything about that region, from its history to its present situation, is tragic...
...Of course, this does not mean that the local sections of the LCY are themselves internally democratic...
...It also has more of a possibility of evolving to a democratic and socialist polity than any East European state...
...These pressures are particularly explosive in a context where political and economic elites are making no equivalent material sacrifices...
...It requires an alliance with the more skilled and active workers and technicians and the democratic intelligentsia...
...Poor as it is (and its per capita income is one-sixth that of Slovenia), it is still better off than Albania...
...And probably most significantly, it has gone the furthest in opening the ruling party to internal debate and, willy-nilly, a kind of pluralism...
...And since this is occurring in the context of an expanding democratization, protests and strikes will also continue to expand...
...Serbs are the largest national group in the federation (almost 40 percent) and also the largest group in the army officer cadre...
...Heretical books are published on historical materialism, "decadent" 84 • DISSENT and nonobjective art and poetry have their place...
...But, since that subsidy is invisible while their contribution to federal funds for the underdeveloped regions is very visible, Slovene public opinion regards its republic as a victim of the present Yugoslav economy and political system...
...For those who want to speculate about the outer limits of possible change in the one-party communist regimes, Yugoslavia can be seen as a case study regarding the limits of glasnost and perestroika...
...They are more skeptical about the place of the market under socialism than the official LCY and government spokesmen...
...Thus we are given absurd counterpositions: plan or market, rigid 80 • DISSENT egalitarianism or the dolce vita of the West, complete dismembering of the federal central agencies of the state or rigid centralism, etc...
...All of this has to be solved without enraging the Serbs, who believe that historically Kosovo is theirs and, with considerable validity, that their conationals are being driven out of Kosovo by pressure from the Albanian majority...
...they also sometimes win...
...Socialism and democracy are on the agenda of many intellectuals, academic experts, and large sections of the membership—even, in some cases, the leadership— of the League of Communists...
...The unpredictable places are Slovenia and Serbia— that is, Serbia proper, without the two autonomous provinces...
...The major Yugoslav national groups each have their own republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina...
...In the Soviet Union greater tolerance brought a Great Russian nationalist and hard-line faction into public life as well as a WINTER • 1989...
...While it may bore people, it does open political infighting to public scrutiny...
...In Poland traditional anti-Semitism has reappeared...
...By a socialist polity I mean a society in which the working class (in which I include both the traditional and the new working class) controls the means of production and distribution through its democratic control of the state...
...The current national problems are found in two historically unpredictable places and one, alas, that is all too predictable...
...They are covered in the press and more often than not win at least some demands...
...Multiparty competition is a ways down the road, but there will be open tendencies in the party and contested elections through the broad front, the Socialist Alliance...
...This is one reason for the disturbing national populist demonstrations...
...Or, put another way: The real political subjects of the Yugoslav Federation are the republics and their political elites as well as the official mass organizations rather than either the citizens or "cross-cutting" autonomous institutions of the working class...
...1988 Peter Hannan 82 • DISSENT army...
...Last but not the least, all this has to be done through a consensual political system where individual republics can veto unacceptable measures...
...It is the cradle of Serbian nationalism, the battleground where the medieval Serbian kingdom was conquered by the Turks, ushering in almost five hundred years of Turkish (Moslem) rule over the Balkans...
...The Yugoslav economy is in very deep trouble: hardly any growth in the national product since 1980, an inflation rate of over 100 percent for three years in a row, continued decline of living standards, and growing unemployment among the young...
...Stipe Suvar, the president of the collective presidency of the League of Communists, to apply the criteria of economic efficiency to the Yugoslav economy would require dismissing two million out of eight million employed...
...the second presupposes independent unions and social movements as a step toward party pluralism...
...Most strikes are wildcat, usually against the local government or against decisions of the central workers' council...
...It is focused mostly on the defense of fellow nationals against the intolerable pressure of the Albanian majority in Kosovo...
...Short of multiparty democracy, there are three possible choices...
...Yugoslavia is also the only country in Eastern Europe where major criticism and 78 • DISSENT discontent are still expressed within an explicit socialist framework...
...I must here be brief and oversimplify a very complex situation...
...But one cannot have a police regime in Kosovo and democratization in Belgrade...
...What Will the Party Tolerate...
...Presumably in Yugoslavia this could mean that the railroads, post, and telegraph would be run federally as public utilities...
...If this reminds Dissent readers of the tangled mess on the West Bank, it should come as no surprise that nationalist Serbian intellectuals formed the Serbian-Jewish Friendship Association this year...
...We may then ask: Is selfmanagement, combined with a market economy— that which is specific to the Yugoslav system—typical of the successful republics like Slovenia or of the unsuccessful ones like Macedonia...
...The privileges simply are more visible today...
...It is important to note that in Slovenia democratic protests and alternative movements are backed by both the government and the party...
...As a consequence, it was the target of a trial last summer in which a noncommissioned army officer and three journalists were charged with handling secret army documents...
...They represent a reaction to the pressures from Yugoslavia's creditors for economic policies that lower the living standards and attack job security...
...In effect, the struggle for further democratization is being held hostage to a reborn Serbian nationalism that, in turn, is mesmerized by Kosovo, now charged with a symbolism so powerful it seems impermeable to any rational solution...
...Yet this structure accurately reflects the distribution of power in a multiethnic state with vast differences in tradition, history, economic development, and political culture...
...0 WINTER • 1989 • 85...
...But they accept the basic foundations of the system: a highly decentralized form of federalism, workers' self-management combined with a basically socially owned market economy, and nonalignment...
...And these polemics spill over into the mass media...
...and the publication of the collected works of Trotsky...
...The top federal positions of the state and the LCY are filled through rotation among the republics and provinces...
...the plants as self-managed and publicly owned enterprises...
...There are three areas in which Yugoslavia has pioneered in reforms...
...But in the last few decades the major disputes in Serbia have been between the dominant "liberals" in the LCY leadership, the democrats inside and outside the League, on one hand, and the LCY hardliners, on the other...
...Kosovo has become, in Serbia, an emotional equivalent to a combination of Northern Ireland and the Wailing Wall...
...The federal bias against raw material producers and high import duties on manufacturing has subsidized the Slovene economy...
...The local party leaderships of the republics argue publicly for alternative policies...
...In the present intrarepublic disputes, the army has remained apart...
...On the other hand, there are no capitalists...
...They may object to current economic policies...
...Economic reforms will require sacrifices, and the ruling party no longer has the ability to mobilize or bully sufficient public support for these sacrifices unless it enters into a partnership with Economic Crisis, Nationalism, Inner Strife other social and political forces...
...But then no republic is ethnically homogeneous, and the Croatians are also distributed through three or four federal units...
...The degree of democracy varies enormously from republic to republic and within the republics, but there is a publicly acknowledged wide and open diversity of views within the League of Communists...
...As a result Slovenian public opinion is defensive about its special role, which includes both greater democracy than the rest of Yugoslavia and a growing intolerance toward uncultured "southerners...
...Without such a sharing, no basic economic and social reforms are really possible...
...Democratization is the battleground for a civil society and a legal social order...
...Because the Albanians are both heavily rural and overwhelmingly Moslem, they resist birth control and the emancipation of women...
...Violent polemics take place among economists about appropriate economic programs and theory...
...is no longer obliged to retreat after losing a vote...
...This power is all the more real since these units reflect the multinational character of the state and are not mere administrative units...
...The first, acceptable to new middle classes and technocratic elites as well as to the more modern sections of the party leadership, is taking place in Poland, Hungary, and in the Soviet Union...
...This group is not the creation of market socialism so much as of greater prosperity and a consequent division of labor...
...The "cost" here is the establishment of genuine unions controlled by workers and a state based on legality, with an increasing number of autonomous social groups and movements...
...However, this year there have been massive workers' demonstrations outside the Parliament attacking the policy of austerity...
...And it all has to be done without outraging the Slovenes and Croats, who would have to pay for a considerable part of the economic bill...
...The republics have not yet worked out effective mechanisms for joint economic policies when there are political disagreements pitting one republic against another...
...Serbia is a more complicated case...
...The swing toward populist nationalism has included the active support of many previous radical democratic and socialist critics of the LCY in Belgrade...
...Mass popular and nationalist demonstrations throughout the Republic of Serbia, an inflation reaching over 230 percent, faltering economic performance, and growing public acrimony within the ruling party, the League of Communists (LCY)—these are a few symptoms of the current crisis in Yugoslavia, a country with an active and contentious press and highly visible and critical intellectuals...
...They do accept the reality of, disagreements and competing interest that have to be negotiated in political life...
...One problem is that the medicine prescribed by the federal government with the approval of the World Bank and other Western creditors constitutes a political disaster for any popular government...
...In either case, there is a need for drastic measures...
...The society, which is by all evidence the freest in Eastern Europe since it permits three things unheard of in that area—freedom of travel abroad, the right to strike, and the right of workers to remove managers of enterprises—has more political prisoners than the more repressive Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia...
...In my view, the cure for Yugoslavia's ills is more, not less, self-management and above all more, and not less, democratization...
...In essence, the Yugoslays do not accept a monolithic party, even theoretically...
...they may—as did parts of the public and legal press—call for the resignation of the prime minister and the entire Cabinet...
...This system represents the federal units, not the citizens as individuals...
...But it is also an area in which modern Albanian nationalism was born in the nineteenth century and where a huge Albanian majority deserves the same degree of self-determination as the other Yugoslav national groups...
...The decision on which form of public or private ownership to opt for should be based not on abstract principles but on the nature of a given activity...
...There is a growing middle and professional class not dependent on politics for its income and status...
...A fair and universally applied tax structure would prevent excessive accumulations of wealth, particularly with powerful inheritance taxes to stop the entrenchment of economic privilege...
...In addition to the sharp differences among the republic parties, there are public journals that polemicize violently with each other...
...The standard World Bank formula is to produce and export more while cutting down on social spending and the real wages of workers...
...It is the region with the most important monuments of Serbian medieval culture...
...Thus, Yugoslav authorities, for example, permit a gay disco club in the capital of Slovenia...
...the sale of journals like the Economist, Time, Newsweek and also Playboy, in the major cities...
...79 rebirth of Armenian and other nationalisms...
...This is particularly true since those who hold power through the manipulation or intimidation of the elected bodies of the workers' councils, are invariably linked with the party structures...
...The cumbersome federal structure, a system based on a consensus among the political elites of the six republics and two provinces, makes it almost impossible to take unpleasant and difficult actions...
...The demonstrations in Serbia combine an explosive mix of egalitarian economic WINTER • 1989 83 demands with a national assertiveness that frightens the more advanced republics...
...This formula has been used in Poland and is currently favored in the Baltic Republics, Hungary, and Serbia...
...That must include the removal of the constant nonlegal, informal, but ever-present, interference in the economy and in decision making of selfmanaged enterprises by the local and republic party elites...
...In addition to the six republics there are two autonomous provinces within the Republic of Serbia—Vojvodina in the north with a Hungarian minority of some 25 Cp 0 cz.t.c A 14 e„-r Apercent and Kosovo in the south with an Albanian majority of close to 85 percent...
...One cannot yet, for example, form legal and open factions within the LCY...
...Unfortunately, it also means that no institution or elected body can be effectively held responsible for mistakes in economic decisions and allocations...
...What they reject is the party's continued monopoly of power...
...Soccer stars and pop singers can be individually wealthy, but no enterprise with more than fifteen workers can be owned privately, and joint ventures must still have workers' councils and trade unions...
...But there have been potential nationalist problems, one of them the fact that the Serb population is divided among four republics and two provinces...
...Alex Nove's The Economics of a Feasible Socialism represents an excellent antidote to the usual dogmas about the place of plan and market...
...The result is that they are locked into a self-made economic ghetto...
...In addition, there are three or four "cross-cutting" political "tendencies" or currents...
...Slovenian resentment was intensified by the fact that the army insisted on holding the trial in SerboCroatian in the capital of Slovenia...
...Legal and constitutional protection for free debate and the organization of autonomous social movements, including alternative trade unions, are foreseeable in the near future...
...It was the first to introduce the concept of a market economy linked to the world market and combined with workers' self-management and, less willingly, the right of workers to strike...
...The presence of these immigrant workers, who are often Moslem, poorly educated, and speak Serbo-Croatian, has spurred Slovenian nationalist resentment because the Slovenes are a small and prosperous nation of less than two million out of twenty-four million in Yugoslavia...
...During the struggle for democratization people are more likely to be jailed than under the classic one-party dictatorship since the boundaries of acceptable dissent are continually challenged, tested, expanded...
...It requires a conscious decision by the party to share power and responsibility...
...612.E ecE...
...In any case, funds for the effective development of Kosovo are simply not available, and without a drastic reduction of the birthrate, they would do little good...
...In the months following this exposé no one has denied the facts...
...It is the least demanding group politically, but the social cost of such an alliance is great, since it would increase the class divide and the workers' resentments...
...If Serbia is complicated, Kosovo is tragic...
...No one's career is jeopardized by error—which in turn leads to considerable cynicism about the official appeals for more responsibility...
...Unless the party "hards" carry out a currently unimaginable coup with the help of the military, Yugoslavia will continue to evolve toward a more pluralist state...
...Mass demonstrations and petitions have stopped the construction of a nuclear power center near Zadar, and the federal legislature has voted to phase out nuclear power within a decade despite sharp objections from the government...
...Nor does it help that these same leaders keep attacking Slovenia for its greater tolerance of social movements, political opposition, and a somewhat countercultural and activist LCY youth organization...
...Those appeals become ever less effective as grotesque waste and inefficiency come to light in an increasingly independent press...
...Consider: As a concession to their constitutional rights, the Albanians in Kosovo complete their education in their own language, a language understood by no one outside their ethnic group...
...Whether one agrees with the inparty reformers or the critics outside the party, it is clear that the road to a reformed and democratic socialism lies at least in part through the League of Communists...
...Unless women are taken into the work-force, the birthrate will continue to explode and a larger pool of better educated and bitter unemployed young people will be created...
...Another problem that bedevils Yugoslav and indeed all East European reformers is the tendency to apply abstract norms to proposals on how to run economies...
...Well-known dissidents like Milovan Djilas travel, get published, are interviewed in at least the youth press, speak publicly, and appear on television...
...On the other hand, we should keep in mind that the system of self-management and decentralization that is commonly, and I believe mistakenly, blamed for the present economic mess works successfully in the developed northern Republic of Slovenia...
...The rage of workers who face wage cuts and read about this scandal can easily be imagined...
...liberal technocrats, hard-line traditionalists, populist nationalists, democratic pluralists, etc., are all expressing themselves through the press and media, in a contentious debate about the Yugoslav system...
...It is also a system that has produced spectacular growth, matching that of Japan and South Korea, during the two and a half decades before the year of oil shock and world recession...
...In the past, this led to minor nationalist unhappiness, mostly among writers...
...Without that break, it is unlikely that economic reforms can succeed...
...Extensive efforts are made to maintain an equality of the languages...
...Attempts to enforce Yugoslav laws are regarded as an assault on Albanian culture and religion...
...Powerful autonomous social movements exist, primarily in the north...
...Traditionally the center of the more liberal-minded political elites in the LCY, it is the one republic whose nationalism might be fatal for the survival of the federation...
...Kosovo and Yugoslavia are fated to remain together...
...But stormy sessions of the Central Committee in the largest republic, Serbia, are held on television...
...The Yugoslav League of Communists today leaves large areas of civic and cultural life outside of its direction and concentrates on the few crucial political matters where it tries to maintain firm control...
...To improve the economy, the small-scale private sector in Yugoslavia should be expanded considerably, above all in the field of crafts and services, since it is in services that socially owned enterprises have proved so inadequate...
...Sentences were imposed ranging from six months to three years, and this outraged democratic public opinion everywhere in Yugoslavia...
...This may be one reason Western capital has not rushed to establish joint ventures in Yugoslavia...
...Many critics, both inside and outside the system, believe that the Yugoslavia today probably has less centralized planning than might be useful...
...There are at least eight "factions" in the League of Communists at any given moment based on the powerful autonomous party organizations of the republics and provinces...
...The government prosecutors repeatedly lose censorship cases in courts...
...smaller plants and workshops and, above all, many services as cooperatives or privately owned businesses...
...Strikes in Yugoslavia, for example, are not illegal...
...Yugoslavia must solve the problem, for Kosovo is a demographic time bomb...
...It is within the League that much of the battle toward firming up a civil society and for a genuinely pluralistic society will be fought...
...The third, the most difficult and most promising, I would call the socialdemocratic option...
...The most important problem lying behind the current reforms in Communist societies is how to break the monopoly of party control over the economy, society, and the state...
...Although substantial economic differences do exist, they also existed—and in far worse form—during the harsh orthodox period immediately after the Second World War...
...The second possible candidate is populist nationalism, where the party comes forward as the defender of the nation...
...Albanians in Kosovo have the highest birthrate in Europe...
...The upkeep of this monster car park and wages for personnel add up to just about the two billion dollars a year it takes to service the Yugoslav international debt...
...Given a degree of decentralization and an explicit recognition by the party that it does not run everything, every challenge to authority is not automatically a challenge to state power...
...In Yugoslavia all three options are being tried, in different republics...
...In any case, such cases no longer have predictable outcomes...
...This past summer major journals publicized the fact that in the middle of an economic crisis one hundred and sixty thousand cars, many with chauffeurs, are owned by the government and its bureaus...
...It often comes from the top down, although sometimes it is a response to existing or anticipated pressures from below...
...Most of what remains of the old Praxis circle and various democratic or humanist-Marxist groupings still talk in terms of a democratic federal Yugoslav state based on social ownership and selfmanagement...
...According to Dr...
...In such a society, the major role of the state would involve planning on a macroeconomic level, and the demands of the people, however varied, would be democratically fought out in a political arena with alternative policies available...
...The critical point here is that it shows that the party can permit a certain amount of autonomy in the civil society, culture, and economy yet retain political power...
...The predictable place, and the problem which makes the most stout-hearted optimist quail, is Kosovo...
...Although Kosovo has received the lion's share of federal and republic economic aid for decades, it has fallen steadily behind the rest of Yugoslavia...
...the translation of numerous anti- and non-Marxist social scientists...
...Further, the forces that come to the surface during the opening up of a society are not by any means only or even most often those that favor more democracy...
...Unemployment and underdevelopment led to nationalist demonstrations in 1981, which were repressed with massive arrests that left the province smoldering...
...It has less than 2 percent unemployment in contrast to the Yugoslav average of over 14 percent, and close to one-tenth of its workforce consists of immigrant workers from the less prosperous southern republics...
...Since the revolution it has been one of the least nationalistic areas if for no other reason than that its nationalism has tended to be Jacobin, that is, democratic and centralist...
...Also, it is no longer just the political elite that now enjoys privileges...
...That does not help, since the Kosovars quite properly compare their living standard not with a country they do not live in, but with that of the country in which they do live...
...Popular resentment in Slovenia has also been fueled by the general assumption that their republic pays an unfair share of the federal budget and that those funds are systematically mismanaged by the local political leaders in the less developed regions...
...Slovenia is the most advanced and prosperous republic...
...The Yugoslavia press writes about the privileges of the political elites with a freedom that could not have been imagined duririg Tito's lifetime...
...This practice of televising sessions of the leading League bodies was extended to the Central Committee in October 1988...
...The provinces are in most political respects equal to the republics...
...and an autonomous network of enterprise committees with freely elected shop stewards would defend workers in the plants and run strikes when necessary...
...Independent trade unions run by workers themselves would protect general workingclass economic interests, especially above the enterprise level...
...Whether Yugoslavia will soon evolve into a society with a plurality of parties is less certain...
...the banks and power companies as public utilities by the republics...
...Of course, all such basic economic reforms have as their essential precondition the destruction of entrenched pockets of privilege enjoyed by the politocracy...
...The first candidate for partnership is the technical and managerial intelligentsia, efficiency-oriented and enthusiastic about the modernization of the economy, which it sees promising an improvement in its economic and social status...
...In Yugoslavia mass rallies in Serbia are heavily influenced by a nationalism which calls for repressive action against the Albanian majority in Kosovo...
...The questions central to a pluralist polity and democratic socialism are being posed openly, ever more urgently, even acrimoniously in public debates...
...The only genuine federal institution is the Yugoslav ,6n \/ I M LES f 00 Hutt\16( 5vo re'," Z.,•lrel, • VOIV00i NA tk — —5 / • cola \ pOSNiN . 41 -oVieNA 6 SE51, '1 Sftro'r.vo •nnnn•nn••••nn•n••• • Pristine KOSOVO / MACEDONIA...
...The Slovenian LCY youth organization, through its lively journal, Miadina, has been attacking sacred cows, including the arm, and the revolution itself...
...The defeated group (faction...
Vol. 36 • January 1989 • No. 1
