yugoslavias implosion

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for separate national armies, resulting in the compromise reached
with them that 20 percent of conscripts should do their military service
on the territory of their home republic.” 335 The debate on the
amendments that would result in the 1974 Constitution had begun;
the common denominator in all the republics was the desire for
greater economic and political decentralization. For Ćosić, Albanian
demands for substantive economic and political change were
unacceptable because they did not square with his unitarian view of
Yugoslavia. The speeches of Ćosić and Marjanović were condemned
as nationalistic, and both men were expelled from the Central Committee.
The episode marked the beginning of the reawakening of
Serbian nationalism; Dobrica Ćosić remains its chief proponent and
ideologue to this day.
Ćosić wrote in his diary at the time:
335 Ibid.
The world being as it is, and Yugoslavia being as it is, the Albanians
have every right to fight for the unification of their dismembered
nation. One cannot live serenely in a “community” ruled by economic,
ideological, personal and political Slovene-Croat hegemony; one cannot
live peacefully in a “community” in which the republics’ new
“self-management statehood” is being constituted and the members of
a religion—Muslims—proclaimed a nation, while at the same time the
Yugoslav Albanians are forbidden to unite with their mother country.
It is thanks to this Yugoslav “democracy” that the Yugoslav Albanians
in Kosovo have been made the national avant-garde and the
Piedmont of the scattered Albanian people. The way things are developing
at present, there is no other outcome and no other solution but to
demarcate ourselves, to give the Albanians the possibility of self-determination,
to recompose Yugoslavia’s territory and to set up homogeneous
nation states in the Balkans. For in this “preserve of Tito’s” all