yugoslavias implosion

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ChApter 1
stagnated until the mid-1960s. This socialist version of Yugoslavism
was being developed for the purpose of keeping national exclusiveness
at bay. The dominant idea at the time was that Yugoslavia
would develop from a federation of republics into a federation of
communes.
Between 1961 and 1962, a lengthy and public debate erupted about
national identities. On one side of the debate was Dobrica Ćosić, a
strong supporter of Tito at the time and a man who would become
the most influential Serbian nationalist of his generation. Ćosić
argued for a stronger role for the federal authorities and closer cultural
cooperation between institutions throughout Yugoslavia. On
the other side, Dušan Pirjevec, 22 a writer from Slovenia, pressed for
greater decentralization and local autonomy.
Because Yugoslavia increasingly fostered certain features of a
market economy as a result of its ties with the West while simultaneously
retaining many characteristics of the Soviet model, it became
the chief lever of international Socialist power. Unrelenting pressure
from the Soviet Union, which kept a vigilant eye on Yugoslav developments
and made frequent threats, forced the Yugoslav leadership
to create a specific model for Socialist economic development. The
concept of self-management by workers led to structural changes in
Yugoslav society, albeit under the umbrella of the state—in fact, the
concept of self-management marked the start of the democratization
of Yugoslav society.
In the first postwar years, the nationalization of industry, transport,
commerce, and banking, along with agrarian reform and the
new political organization of society, had created an institutional
22 Pirjevec objected to the view that socialist Yugoslavism was a prelude to a supra-national
integration, with the Slovenes and Macedonians being the first to be fused into a Serb-Croat
linguistic community . Socialist Yugoslavism as a supranational integration, he argued, was
completely unnecessary given that all nations were directly integrating into world processes .
For this reason, he said, there was no need for the Slovenes to integrate into mankind through
such Yugoslavism . It was published in the Slovenian journal Naša sodobnost .