Yugoslavia in 1989 and after

Abstract

The year 1989 marked a turning point for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). But unlike other places in the region, that year saw a turn towards growing political conflict which soon led to violent warfare. This paper identifies and discusses three processes that led to this outcome. The first process was the impetus towards reform of the Yugoslav federal state, its political and economic system. The second was the conflict over the future of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez komunista Jugoslavije – SKJ). The third was the shifting meanings of ethnic and nonethnic labels and the ways in which putative “national” and “ethnic” interests came to be aligned with specific political options. By the end of 1989 these three processes had come together to spell the end of the SKJ, of the SFRY, and of “Yugoslavism” as a political identity. In their places, ruling parties threatened by changes within their own societies, as well as by pressures created by the 1989 revolutions in the region, resorted to strategies of conflict and violence in an attempt to forestall the kinds of changes and elite turnovers seen in other socialist countries.

Keywords:

• Yugoslavia
• 1989
• Serbia
• Croatia
• SKJ

Acknowledgements

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the conference “The 1989 Revolutions: Routes, Course, Legacies,” at Stanford University, 14–15 March 2008.

Notes

Latinka Perović, reformist head of the Serbian ruling party in the late 1960s and early 1970s, refers to these two groupings as “authoritarian” and “democratic” tendencies or currents (465).

Obviously this does not mean that every member of the nationalist party was a former communist. But what is striking is the extent to which even the anti-communist nationalist parties like the HDZ or the SDS (both Croatian and Bosnian parties) were made up of former communist officials, especially from the lower and middle level of the parties (on Croatia see Gagnon, Myth 144).

The leaders of both Croatian and Serbian parties at the time stress how conservatives exaggerated and fabricated concerns about nationalist dangers. Indeed, Latinka Perović, then-leader of the League of Communists of Serbia, subsequently described the purges of Croatia's reformist leadership on charges of “nationalism” as a mistake (Perović; Tripalo, “Možda” 58; idem, Hrvatsko proljeće; Dabčević-Kučar).

As explained above, the terms reformist and conservative refer to positions taken regarding fundamental changes in the structures of power, especially economic power. They do not refer to positions taken towards centralization or decentralization, nor are they related to ideological positions, as a communist could be a conservative just as well as an anti-communist; the common thread is their desire for an authoritarian state and continued control over economic resources by an authoritarian ruling party.

These polls were undertaken by a number of social science and research institutes in Belgrade and Sarajevo. For details see Gagnon, Myth 42–43, 45. The failure of Marković's political attempts in the Bosnian elections in 1990 are beyond the scope of this article; suffice it to say that the conservatives’ strategy of provoking violent conflict in Croatia and then Bosnia proved quite effective in silencing support for Marković.

Of course, this shift was limited to Croats. Many Serb conservatives joined the nationalist Serbian Democratic Party (SDS). It is important to note, however, that some conservatives – one could perhaps label them “true believers,” both Croats and Serbs – stayed true to their communist beliefs and refused to join the nationalist parties. Examples would include Stipe Šuvar, Dušan Dragosavac, and especially initially Branko Mikulić.

These figures are from social science polling undertaken by a range of academic institutions in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia over the course of the 1980s and the early 1990s. For details see Gagnon, Myth 31–51.

To be sure, this Yugoslav orientation as protest was focused especially among younger people and more urban areas, which contained the most developed, wealthiest and largest parts of the population. The situation in poorer, rural areas was not necessarily the same. But it was the very marginalization of rural areas, and the fact that rural areas were perhaps those that had the most to lose in a reformed economic and political system, that led to large numbers of rural people supporting more conservative politicians. Yet one should also remember that the conservative parties (both socialist and nationalist), which received the support of more rural, poorer parts of the population, appealed as much and sometimes more to their economic self-interest as to their national or ethnic interest. And often it was communist elites from these rural regions who were Milošević's closest allies, and who worked assiduously to help mobilize their locals against reformists and reformism.