yugoslavias implosion

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ChApter 1
In the first postwar years, the federal formula seemed to work;
the national question appeared to have been solved by the one-party
structure, led by Tito, which reconciled opposing national interests.
But though Tito tried to neutralize national conflicts by introducing
a supranational sovereignty, he failed to prevent their recurrence in
the long run.
Because the Yugoslav Federation—even in its loosest form, in the
early 1970s—was subject to arbitration by the federal leadership, individualism
and nationalism were always limited. The economic and
political system was unable to provide a sufficiently sound base for
genuine and permanent economic, political, and cultural integration
within Yugoslavia. Although the end of the one-party system at
the end of the 1980s was greeted by the different Yugoslav peoples as
the beginning of the affirmation of their statehood, society lacked
a sound foundation and institutions that could hold those peoples
together.
The constitutional amendments of 1971 and the debates surrounding
them marked a turning point in the attitude of the Serbian
political elite. Serbia was dissatisfied with the direction in which the
country was drifting. The conservative forces, notably the dogmatic
structures within the party and nationalist circles, saw the dismissal
of Aleksandar Ranković in 1966 and the subsequent trend toward
greater decentralization as a threat to Serbian interests. Discussions
held at Belgrade University’s Faculty of Law in 1971 were the precursor
of, as well as the framework for, all that followed.
A group of professors headed by Mihajlo Đurić put forward the
platform of the Serbian national program. They viewed the prospect
of the confederalization of Yugoslavia as a plot to break up the
Serbian people and argued that Serbia’s boundaries were “neither
national nor historical borders” and that the “boundaries of all the
republics were more of an administrative than a political nature.”
Đurić insisted that recognition of such boundaries as state borders