yugoslavias implosion

and the republics. His book System and Crisis 74 provoked a broad
debate throughout Yugoslavia, whose inhabitants were becoming
increasingly vocal in their demands for the “one person, one vote”
electoral system, an option favored by the Belgrade elite.
The response of Serbian intellectuals and politicians to the
Yugoslav crisis varied from advocacy of a national agenda to urging
greater unity in culture and politics. Yet they were all basically in
favor of either a Yugoslavia according to Serbian wishes or a Serbia
within the borders being drawn by Vuk Drašković and Vojislav Šešelj,
who essentially embraced Moljević’s World War II territorial ambitions.
The sanu Memorandum was the turning point toward a clear
definition of the Serbian national program because it summed up the
history of the Serbian people, catalogued and articulated their grievances,
and laid down the direction in which Serbian national policy
was to proceed. Once such a clear course of action was adopted,
nearly all the differences among Serbs on how the Yugoslav crisis
should be resolved were obliterated.
The SANU Memorandum
The Serbs regarded any attempt to refashion Yugoslavia as the
loss of their state. The slogan “First the State, then Democracy”
shows the relative priority they attached to democratization. In the
mid-1980s, the Serbian elite officially reverted to its national program,
which had been in preparation at an informal level since the
early 1970s, as expressed in the sanu Memorandum.
In June 1985, sanu established a Committee to Prepare a Memorandum
on Social Issues. Although the official version of the Memorandum
was never released, a draft version appeared in the daily
newspaper Večernje novosti, causing an immediate public uproar. In
Serbia, the Memorandum divided the political leadership; in all the
other republics, the Memorandum was considered an articulation of
74 Jovan Mirić, Sistem i kriza (System and Crisis) (Zagreb: CEKADE, 1984) .
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