The first free elections in Yugoslavia
Denitch, Bogdan
Yugoslavia is now irreversibly on the road to a multiparty system as the framework in which both the fate of democracy and the future of the Yugoslav federation will be determined. That at least...
...This is why the democratic, socialist, and trade union groups in the West must not cease insisting that human rights, democracy, and the right of political organization are the sine qua non for acceptance into the European Community...
...As in the rest of Eastern Europe, the incumbents have been made to pay...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...The center, organized in a coalition named DEMOS, will form the first noncommunist government in postrevolutionary Slovenia...
...It would worsen the national tensions in Yugoslavia...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...At worst, the stresses and strains on the Yugoslav federation may increase to the point where the federal cabinet will fall and the armed forces feel they have to take a hand...
...What, if any, is the effect of the levels of economic development and literacy on the prospects of democracy...
...Among these are the former Communist youth organization reborn as the Liberal party, the Peasant party, which has long favored coalition with the Communists, the Greens, and the Social Democrats...
...So has the increasingly clear commitment to democratic values on the part of the reformed wings of the League of Communists dominant in Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia...
...The victory of right-wing national populists of the HDZ led by former General Franjo Tudjman is a serious setback to the orderly evolution of a democratic postcommunist Yugoslavia...
...The Yugoslav Minister of Defense chose quite unsubtly to warn voters that their choice was being watched by the federal armed forces a few days before elections in Slovenia and Croatia...
...There is a good bit of truth in that, and Catalonia, Scotland, and Lombardy will assert ever more autonomy within a unified European Community...
...Picking this type of electoral system was another of the strategic errors made by the Croatian Communist reformers...
...That unpleasant detour from the path of democratic change would incur heavy costs in relation to the European Community...
...The right-wing landslide of the HDZ was not due to a popular vote...
...The rest of the country has a Byzantine-Orthodox and Moslem heritage disSUMMER • 1990 • 303 Report from Abroad...
...At the end of this year, if all goes according to plan, multiparty free elections are mandated for all Yugoslav federal units...
...That at least is quite certain, although the fate of neither democracy nor Yugoslavia is certain...
...Or does the survival of democracy require negotiations between federal units (republics) that are internally democratic, practicing one person one vote but insisting on consensus among the federal units where all have an equal say...
...In this popular desire for a confederal Yugoslavia, the Slovenes are joined by the new Croatian government formed by the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ...
...While no longer enforced in most of the country, the laws that permit prosecution for verbal crimes are still on the books...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...And since they wanted to monopolize the space on the left, they delayed the legalization of alternate parties to the last possible moment and entered the election with the burden of the unpopular nomenklaturas on their backs...
...In Croatia, as a result of a grotesque electoral system recommended by legal experts and picked by the Communist-controlled outgoing legislature—a two-round system much like that of France, combined with a winner-take-all in the second round—there has emerged a sharply polarized electorate...
...However, the reform Communists in Yugoslavia did much better than their opposite numbers in Eastern Europe...
...Per capita income ratios are six to one...
...Most of the rest of the votes were distributed among left-of-center parties committed to further democratic development...
...Therefore, Slovenia seems likely to stay in Yugoslavia on terms acceptable to its electorate...
...Are such loose confederations capable of surviving in a world economy that demands efficient economic policy-making by the center...
...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...q A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...Can such diverse traditions create sufficient civic cohesion for democratic decision making to have any legitimacy...
...HDZ has the feel of ugly nationalism about it...
...Alas, the mistake may be paid for by democracy and inter-ethnic tolerance...
...It will cohabit, French style, with a president who is clearly left...
...With the European solution in the distant future, decisions have to be made about the economy today...
...Despite the free multiparty contests in two republics, Slovenia and Croatia, in spring 1990 and others announced for the rest of the federation by the end of the year, conditioned reflexes reflecting the "old ways" still permeate too many Yugoslav institutions...
...At most they are willing to make economic concessions to what they perceive the West wants, by opening up the economy to market forces and private property...
...What happens to civility during democratization in ethnically homogeneous environments (Slovenia) as against ethnically divided ones (Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Macedonia...
...The nationalist genie is out of the bottle, and how it is managed will affect the fate of democracy...
...Unlike the others, they won power through prolonged civil war combined with a war against the Nazi occupier and did not come to power on the back of Soviet tanks...
...torted by centuries of Turkish misrule and prolonged bloody struggles against that rule...
...The argument is that within a European Community economic policy-making is settled on a supranational Community level, so that on other issues one can have regional autonomy...
...The results of the first free elections in communist Yugoslavia are mixed...
...it only received about 40 percent of the vote...
...In Slovenia, Milan Kucan, leader of the reform Communists, won a large majority, over 58 percent, making him the first freely elected Communist head of state in Eastern Europe...
...Despite an ever freer press and political life, many old institutions continue functioning as if nothing has changed...
...A crude pseudomachiavellian cynicism prevails among them...
...SUMMER • 1990 • 305 306 • DISSENT...
...Nationalists and separatists did poorly in that republic, although the Communists and their immediate allies received only 22 percent of the vote...
...Although the press is not under League of Communists control and is reasonably free in Slovenia and Croatia, a massive press purge, directed by the supporters of the local Communist leadership, is still going on in Serbia...
...But this is not well understood by Yugoslav politicians...
...Old habits and systems die hard and new ones are developing with many false or ambiguous starts...
...The political tradition in Slovenia and Croatia is federalist, Catholic, and legalistic...
...These institutions have vastly improved the political atmosphere...
...The nationalist terrain, in turn, had been well prepared by relentless nationalist bullying from the hard-line Serbian leadership...
...The Communist politicians believe that Yugoslavia's role in the dormant nonaligned movement and as the first independent Communist state still counts...
...Thus a double referendum took place in Croatia: one on the League of Communists and the other on the Serbian leadership of Slobodan Milosevic...
...The founder of the centrist Croatian Social-Liberal alliance withdrew from leadership because of growing anti-Semitism in his party...
...Can an ethnically diverse Yugoslavia permit majority votes to determine the outcome of major disputes between regions and national groups...
...Localism will continue to develop as Europe unifies...
...Slovenia's population comes to over 8 percent of the Yugoslav population, and the republic accounts for some 25 percent of all Yugoslav exports...
...This is a grim lesson for those democrats who still believe that "technical" questions like the electoral system make no difference...
...Though fundamentally reformed, the Croatian League of Communists appeared in the election as the all-too-familiar local cadres...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...Delaying the legalization of the new political parties maximized the advantages of those who would play on ethnic xenophobia and national grievances...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...All this seems decidedly familiar when we look at the future of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...
...This is because the federated and heterogeneous nature of the country permits observers to follow the same processes operating under sharply different conditions...
...The good news is that these organizations, journals, and even official institutions do exist and function vigorously...
...10017 (212) 595-3084...
...Some examples: In the same spring 1990 Yugoslav diplomats joined Third World authoritarian regimes in voting against condemning human rights violations in Cuba and China...
...It would set back essential economic reforms...
...Yugoslavia, now going through the difficult process of developing into a postcommunist society, remains a fascinating laboratory for the rest of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...
...Still, the Croatian Communists did twice as well as any East European Communist party in the first free elections, reflecting the "difference" that distinguishes the Yugoslav Communists from their East European opposite numbers...
...The Croatian elections are, in part, the bitter fruit of democratization too long delayed, too reluctantly embraced and of the reckless games that the Serbian Communist leadership has played with Serbian nationalism over the province of Kosovo...
...In Croatia the anticommunist victors openly threaten a purge in television, radio, and press, not to speak of the civil service, judiciary, and police...
...We can already answer such questions as what difference does it make if the first free elections are held using proportional representation (Slovenia) or a winner-take-all single-district two-round system (Croatia...
...The Croatian Communists and their allies won around 32 percent and the center coalition some 15 percent...
...After all, the range of development in Yugoslavia is roughly from that approximating the less developed parts of Austria in the northern republic of Slovenia to that of the Soviet Central Asian republics in Kosovo and Macedonia...
...But the path to democratization is nowhere smooth...
...How one manages in the "meantime" will determine in good part how long it will be...
...Those of the anticommunist right believe that it is enough to vote out the Communists and privatize much of the property in order to be embraced by Western Europe...
...Two of the six republics and one province spent centuries in the Austro-Hungarian Empire with its mix of relatively efficient and uncorrupt bureaucratic authoritarianism and its link with Catholicism and Central European culture...
...What the fate of human rights is, will help determine the degree of support Yugoslavia will have from the European Community...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amouont or a particular asset...
...Yet the international and Yugoslav press treated the election as a right-wing landslide...
...To be sure the distorted election system ended up giving Tudjman's right-wing HDZ almost two-thirds of the legislature...
...Thus it 304 • DISSENT Report from Abroad was in effect not possible to vote for the left without voting for the Communists, and a large number of voters saw the election not as a choice between competing programs but as a referendum on the League of Communists...
...If Yugoslavia is to survive as a state, it will do so as a confederation, for there is no other way to keep Slovenia in voluntarily...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...Unfortunately, entry into Europe is a long way off for Yugoslavia and other East European postcommunist states...
...They overlook the powerful role of the social democratic parties and trade unions in Western Europe as well as the record of the European parliament regarding human rights...
...Part of the answer is given by invoking the present deus ex machina: entry into the European Community...
...Even under these unfavorable circumstances the League of Communists of Croatia (now the Party of Democratic Change) did well, particularly in the less provincial region of the port cities of Rijeka and Istria, and also in the areas where the Serbian minority lives...
...He thus helped the local right-wing separatists and hurt the broad reformist left in general and the locally reformed League of Communists in particular...
...That means Yugoslavia will not only be a multiparty state, it will also be a loosely confederal multi-ethnic state, and, as such, a possible model for a possible Soviet Union...
...The formal and informal watchdogs of human rights will have their hands full in Yugoslavia...
...The immediate casualty may well be a moderate politics of transition toward democracy, with the ability to compromise, tolerate differences, and refrain from attempts to settle historical grievances...
...There is some perverse justice in all this, since the system was chosen by the Communists...
...in Serbia, centralist, Jacobin, and secular...
Vol. 37 • July 1990 • No. 3
