yugoslavias implosion

At the same time, a massive political movement was taking shape
in Croatia in response to the collapse of the 1965 economic reforms.
The Croats insisted that economic stagnation could be solved only
by strictly controlling the distribution of foreign exchange among
the republics and putting all the republics’ books in order, which
would enable each republic to know how much it was paying into
the state coffers and what it was receiving in return. The Slovenes,
too, pressed for greater economic independence, raising the issue
of financing the construction of interrepublican highways in their
state. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, a similar push for increased independence
led in 1968 to the League of Communists proclaiming the
Muslims a “separate nation,” a move designed to counteract pressure
from Serbia and Croatia for Muslims to declare themselves
Serbs or Croats. Nationalist sentiments were also stirring in other
parts of Yugoslavia, with debates about the status of the Macedonian
Orthodox Church (Orthodox churches are national and therefore
identified with the state) and the distinctiveness of Montenegrin culture
prompting Serbian nationalists to deny that either republic was
a nation.
Serbia itself was also affected by the process of self-awareness,
though there was considerable ambivalence regarding the increasingly
vociferous demands for decentralization. This ambivalence
was the outgrowth of the Serbs’ perception of the character of the
Yugoslav Federation, which, according to most members of the
Serbian political establishment, could only be “unitary and centralist.”
However, in that period of dynamism in Yugoslavia, a liberal
and a nationalistic tendency crystallized in Serbia. The liberals
who appeared on the scene in 1969–72 were the first political elite
who understood the significance of a true federation and the equality
of nations in a multinational state. The fact that republican leaderships
were raising the question of national sovereignty was proof,
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