The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

longer returned to the countryside. Young people no longer wanted to
stay in places where there was only hard physical work, but nothing that
was important to modern people: schools, jobs, modern technology,
shops, cinemas and discos.
The Third Way
After the collapse of relations with Stalin, the Yugoslavian Communists
had to find their own way. Tito co-founded the movement of non-aligned
states, which provided Yugoslavs with still more pride in their country,
and with recognition abroad, while also helping the development of the
country. The recipes for reconstruction and industrialization came from
the West, and enabled a growth rate which was at times higher than
that of Japan.
In 1950, the phase of centralism was ended, and replaced by “workers’
self-management” as a home-grown type of “socialist market economy”
system. A self-managed society in free association was to
emerge, in which the role of the state was to be restricted in the areas
of economic, social, cultural and educational policy, so as to achieve the
long-term goal of the “withering away of the state”. To safeguard the
access of all citizens to capital, “socialized property” was introduced.
The means of production were subordinated to work collectives as common
property.
The first crisis of the economy became visible as the development
phase came to an end, and quality and competitiveness were also required,
rather than merely production on a massive scale. The key positions
of political and economic power remained in the hands of the party,
which thus controlled the profits of the enterprises. The contradiction
between the party’s monopoly on political power and the proclaimed
grass-roots democracy became even more obvious when workers’ selfmanagement
was extended to the entire society. The time-consuming
system and the demand for uniformization, in the guise of “solidarity”,
hampered the release of private initiative and the efficiency of production.
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