Yugoslavia's Crumbling Federation

...Tito has been aware throughout his years of political experimentation that the country's disparate nationalities cannot be held together or effectively controlled by a force exerted from the center—especially not from a Serbian center...

...Once Tito departs the nationality conflict will burst into the open, and his life's work, his effort to forge the conflicting groups into a single nation, will be threatened...

...Hungarians and Italians (known officially as "nationalities" rather than "minorities...

...The era of "political enterprises"—plants built in depressed areas, financed by the northern republics and run on heavy subsidies—is over...

...A Party front organization which has mustered some eight million members, it is closely related to the League of Communists but is a separate political entity...

...A technical director of the petro-chemical plant at Ljubljana explained: "Theoretically the Workers' Councils can vote themselves unlimited pay increases and bonuses from the rising profits, but there are various safeguards in the laws, you might call it the small print, which prevent that...

...And when the final tabulations were in a surprising number of old Party faithfuls with "safe" seats found themselves out on the street, replaced by more popular local figures—doctors, educators, lawyers or engineers...

...It appears that they are wedded to a lost cause...

...The other half of the electorate votes in two years, halfway through the Parliamentary term...

...There are indications today that Tito's grasp is failing, though...

...Official forms, identity cards and passports require a statement of nationality but the label "Yugoslav" does not appear...

...Now it is the same conservatives, fearful of losing their power and their very jobs, who cling desperately to federalism...

...In the far south "Moslem" is often used where a family is not certain of its precise origins under the Turkish occupation...

...A senior Communist party official in Zagreb said to me recently: "I am a Croat, of course...

...Eighteen years ago, following Tito's break with the Cominform, the first radical step toward decentralization was taken in the economic sector when self-management of industrial enterprises was introduced through the re-invention of Workers' Councils...

...The introduction of an "opposition" into public affairs actually dates back to the revitalization of the so-called Socialist Alliance...

...Signs of the coming fragmentation can already be seen, and the danger increases daily that the facade will fly apart...

...Nationality differences, lightly masked by the Federal structure (after all, only a little over 20 years ago they were fighting a civil war), are also aggravated by vast economic differences between relatively highly industrialized Slovenia, Croatia and northern Serbia, and the rest of the country...

...He has been the father and the architect of Yugoslavia's two decades of experimentation, of the attempt to devise a new form of Communism-Socialism...

...It also set the pattern for a process which has worked itself deeply into the fabric of the nation...

...Yugoslavia, in fact, probably has a disproportionate number of Marxist philosophers working overtime to square the Old Master's dictums with modern conditions and prove that fundamentally he favored most features of capitalism, so long as they were consonant with public ownership of production means...

...Moreover, many of those already in existence that were unable to run without a subsidy have been closed down, putting yet another 300,000 people out of work...

...A period of indiscriminate overinvestment in unjustifiable projects, plus an absolute riot of consumer spending, has left the Yugoslav economy violently overheated and teetering on the brink of recession...

...It is now generally admitted that the politically motivated policies of the past are at the root of the nation's present economic ills...

...Thus time has stood history on its head in this country...

...Indeed, one is struck by the ambivalence and confusion that dominate the scene as Marshal Tito attempts to reconcile a policy calling both for "a broader spectrum of public participation" and continued central control by the League of Communists...

...The step from Workers' Councils to Peoples' Parliaments was a short one, both being manifestations of a belief in "direct democracy" and of a latent desire to break the supremacy of the Party in public life...

...There is much talk here now of Yugoslavia becoming the first Communist state to introduce full currency convertibility, and it is hoped this will be achieved within the next three years...

...More than 300,000 Yugoslav workers, who would otherwise be unemployed, are currently living in Western Europe and sending home in excess of $65 million annually in hard currency...

...The dichotomy of national development under Tito has produced the curious example of a nation facing in two directions at once: Tito, by some bizarre ambivalence, has succeeded in anchoring his state firmly to the Western economic system while remaining staunchly oriented toward the Eastern bloc in foreign affairs...

...His dreaded organization, controlled from Belgrade and composed largely of Serbs, not only had unlimited power over all republican agencies but had infiltrated every facet of public and private life...

...It has Kenneth Ames, a veteran correspondent, covers Central and Eastern Europe for the London Economist...

...Known ironically as "our Southern brethren" by the Slovenes, they can be seen in any factory—where they constitute about 20 per cent of the labor force—or glowering of an evening on street corners, saturnine and hirsute...

...noises over Vietnam, and takes a generally favorable view of its Communists neighbors in any dispute—save for a dubiously successful attempt to remain aloof from the Sino-Soviet quarrel...

...their chauvinism not at all...

...But this does not include the tens of thousands from the "Southern states" who emigrate north to Slovenia and Croatia in search of better wages and working conditions and to escape the unemployment in their own underdeveloped areas...

...PARTY POWER, ECONOMIC ILLS, AND NATIONAL BIAS Yugoslavia's Crumbling Federation By Kenneth Ames Belgrade It would be an overstatement to say that Yugoslavia has "reached the crossroads" or the "dawn of a new era," but the country is obviously grappling with the elements of a second revolution...

...During Yugoslavia's difficult early days, after World War I, it was the conservatives who held out against federalism and centralized control...

...The move could prove to be the salvation of the country's economic and monetary structure...

...By last July, the steadily mounting friction between these groups finally resulted in a major political realignment and revealed the essential issue facing the country: the problem of nationality...

...The present malaise, of course, is not a sudden phenomenon...

...That break, and the Workers' Councils that grew out of it, contained the seeds of the heretical ideas now afoot...

...This gave rise to two distinct and divergent schools of thought inside Yugoslavia: the conservative centralists, who advocate retention of federal control by the Party...

...But whatever happens, there can be no one successor to President Tito, who is now 75 years old...

...The April elections, the first under the new electoral law, gave half the Yugoslav voters the semblance of a choice...

...What the original Soviet architects of workers' self-government and their Belgrade copiers did not realize—but Lenin and Stalin did—was that the system could not really operate without seriously eroding the Party's political power...

...We only describe ourselves as Yugoslavs for the benefit of foreigners when we go abroad...

...The law on self-management inaugurated a huge and unique experiment in what has been termed "direct democracy...

...And these have been exacerbated in recent months by an uncomfortable recrudescence of xenophobia within its six highly disparate republics and three very considerable national groups—the Albanians...

...and the liberal fragmentists, who want to abandon controls and put more power in the hands of the republics and provinces...

...grown gradually out of the desire to find an acceptable middle way between a Marxist economy and a market economy, out of the effort to adapt Communism to a more humane way of life...

...At present Tito is the focal point between the two opposing groups...

...The system does have its controls, however...

...And this was not merely one man's view...

...The Yugoslavs had succeeded in moving their Parliamentary system one step nearer democratic principles with their "looking-glass opposition...

...After Tito, the second revolution seems almost certain to reach its climax, and to replace federation with confederation...

...I am married to a Slovene, and my children were born in Croatia—I don't know what nationality they are...

...It remains to be seen how Rankovic and his pan-Serbian faction will recover from the setback they were dealt last July...

...They were also set up everywhere —factories, hospitals, schools, railways, mines, agricultural holdings, cafes, restaurants, transport systems, shops and warehouses...

...Their distrust of others died hard...

...Professor Rudolf Bicanic, a distinguished Zagreb economist, voices the views of many experts when he admits that "Our economic problems, which are at the center of our political problems, can only be solved abroad and with foreign assistance...

...Even more, as soon became apparent, it could not be carried to its logical conclusion unless the Party was prepared to virtually read itself out of business altogether...

...Hostility toward the once all-powerful managers and directors is now rife among rank-and-file laborers...

...Many leading political figures are irked by this contradiction and would like to see a little more consistency...

...Many of the Alliance's members ran for office in April, and even though there was no real choice between parties, the voters were at least given a choice between personalities...

...If they fail, it will present a victory to the conservatives, of whom Rankovic is the figurehead, and could lead to a return of central planning and control...

...Very often they will overrule advice from management or technical directors at Council meetings merely to show their independence, disregarding the fact that their majority decision may not be good business...

...For despite 50 years of federation you scarcely have to scratch a Yugoslav to discover a Serb, Croat, Slovene, Bosnian, Montenegrin or Macedonian...

...Provisional estimates, already incorporated into current economic planning, put the figure of required foreign capital between now and 1970 at $1.5 billion—not a particularly large sum in global terms but one that will be difficult to raise unless the Yugoslavs can devise a program that will be attractive to foreign capital...

...They have done much to speed up economic development, but more important, the Workers' Councils have contributed substantially to the political liberalization of the regime...

...The key figure in that upheaval was Vice President Aleksander Rankovic, longtime friend of Tito, Serb nationalist, and head of the secret police...

...Nobody claims the Councils are the perfect solution: They tend to present a solid front when dealing with outside authorities, yet sink into a morass of dissent when dealing with internal issues such as wages and bonuses...

...Hence the recent decision to have Edvard Kardelj develop legislation that would make foreign investment possible without damaging public ownership...

...Why else, they ask, did we bother to break with the Cominform back in 1948...

...True, the Worker's Councils were the brainchild of archrevisionists, but they came to be regarded as a faithful expression of the Marxist dictum: "To the workers the factories, to the peasants the land...

...The liberal reformers are hard-pressed to show that the economic reforms first introduced 18 months ago can work...

...One professor of economics has commented: "We seem to spend more time sharing out the gains than working for them...

...I am the child of Austro-Hungarian parents," explained a woman from Ljubljana...

...It is no secret that Moscow, which takes an extremely jaundiced view of Tito's experiments, finds greater comfort in the views of the conservative centralists...

...Today it is recognized in Belgrade that there can be two quite legitimate, though different, points of view on any given subject...

...For almost two decades Yugoslavia has been the innovator of the Communist world...

...The Councils have created a new class war, too, between white-collar workers and no-collar workers...

...His removal at the Party Central Committee plenum, and the purge of the secret police, made it possible for millions of Yugoslavs to relax their nervous guard...

...The Yugoslav press dutifully castigates the Western powers, makes the required anti-U.S...

...Vast economic and political problems remain to be solved, and no viable, stable political system has yet evolved under Communist rule...

...There is even a Catholic priest in Ljubljana who has formed a Workers' Council to run his church affairs, though this sounds strangely like the Anglo-Saxon idea of a parish council...

...Yet today it is confronted by a plethora of new economic, political and social problems...