yugoslavias implosion

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ChApter 1
publication of the sanu Memorandum, the trend assumed a predominantly
Serbian national character.
Despite the criticism, the party was resolved to preserve its economic
monopoly. The dogmatic wing, which had prevailed in nearly
all the republics during the 1970s, branded maverick intellectuals as
“special war” agents. This line was particularly strong in the ypa,
which continued to defend the Socialist system. In Croatia, Stipe
Šuvar published the White Book in 1984, in which he tried to discredit
the critical-minded intellectuals and focused on Serbian nationalism
as the major threat to the Yugoslav federation.
Efforts in the political and cultural arena gradually fused into
a very broad front, with Ćosić playing a key role in fomenting
anti-federation sentiments and arguing that Yugoslavia as a state
framework was no longer adequate as far as the Serbian people were
concerned. He saw a way out of the “Yugoslav existential crisis in a
democratic reform of the entire social, economic, and state organization
of Yugoslavia, whose elementary agent would not be a sovereign
state as a ‘bureaucratic kingdom,’ but man as an individual, a
free citizen.” 54
A Vacuum after Tito’s Death
The death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980 deprived Yugoslavia of its
only central political arbiter and rendered further monolithic unity
impossible. The key question became what method to use to address
contentious issues. The struggle for Tito’s inheritance had actually
begun in the 1970s, when it became clear that Yugoslavia could
not be preserved as a centralized federation, though that was precisely
what the Yugoslav Serbs wanted. Those Serbs who held power
in Serbia saw every attempt to transform Yugoslavia as an attack on
themselves. The 1966 Brioni Plenum, the student demonstrations and
54 Dobrica Ćosić, ‘Srpsko pitanje’ (The Serb question), address at an assembly of the Writers’
Association devoted to the discussion of a new draft constitution, March 27, 1988 .