A brief
history of
Tito’s
Yugoslavia
Lecture Outline
This module discusses
 Yugoslavia’s geopolitical position in the Cold War and its
role in allowing Yugoslavia to maintain its internal
cohesion and suppress nationalistic attempts by the
constituting nationalities
 Tito’s leadership and his ability to borrow extensively
from the West, which allowed him to keep Yugoslavia’s
economic problems under check for decades
 The role of the economic crises and international
changes in the early 90s in accelerating the nationalistic
forces in the country and bringing the end of the Yugoslav
state
Yugoslavia was…
 A Socialist country that existed between 1943 and 1991
 Made up of six Republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia) and two
autonomous provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina)
 Was ruled by Josip Broz Tito from 1953 until his death in 1980
Yugoslavia’s Role in the Cold War
 The U.S. and the USSR formed competing blocs—
NATO and the Warsaw pact to balance each other and
exert control over their half of Europe
 Yugoslavia’s geographic position enabled it to serve as a
buffer between the two blocs
 Yugoslavia was a socialist state, but was neutral and did
not side with either superpower
 It maintained its role as an independent socialist state
Tito’s leadership
Yugoslavia was able to maintain its independence from
the Soviet influence and reap the benefits of the fierce
competition between the two blocks due to the political
acumen and popularity of Marshall Bros Tito, Yugoslavia’s
leader
Tito’s rhetoric about the creation of a supranational
Yugoslav identity through “Brotherhood and Unity” was
accepted by the West that saw socialist Yugoslavia as a
prosperous state and as an antidote to the “evil” Soviet
empire
Tito-Stalin Split
Tito with Stalin and Molotov
Having defied Stalin in 1948, Tito became the first communist
leader to openly stand against the dictator and the fearful empire
he had created. Tito rejected Stalin’s desire of controlling
Yugoslavia and made it clear that he wanted to create a neutral
and independent country, which, despite its ideological
closeness to the Soviets, would retain its sovereignty
Tito’s Credibility in the eyes of the
Westerners
 Tito’s courageous defiance
of Stalin and the creation of
the consequent Yugoslav
type of socialism
 Nikita Khrushchev came to
visit Yugoslavia in 1955 and
approached the Yugoslav
leadership with conciliatory
rhetoric
Tito’s meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary
of the Soviet Communist Party, 1955
Geographic Location
 Yugoslavia served as a
buffer zone between the
Western bloc and the
USSR
  Tito realized the
geopolitical importance
of Yugoslavia in
preventing the USSR
from reaching the
Mediterranean
Yugoslavia’s ethnic diversity
Yugoslavia’s location and its geopolitical realities played an even
more important role in the country’s domestic politics. The fierce
competition between the U.S. and the USSR, with Tito keeping a
distance from both, allowed the leader of Yugoslavia to draw from
virtually unlimited “amounts” of external threat, and use it to put a
check on ethnic struggles.
Ethnic struggles in Yugoslavia
 Tito’s strategy to assuage the ethnic struggles was
to mythologize the fact that every ethnic group had
contributed to the liberation war against the fascists
during the World War II
 The new enthusiasm that followed the end of World
War II faded and Tito’s myth of a unified Yugoslavia
became less appealing
 The new generation together with the disillusioned
communists became increasingly more demanding
of reforms, most often advocated along ethnic lines
Croatian protest against the Yugoslav state
http://www.flickr.com/photos/69226252@N05/6551163563/
 Opposition voices against Yugoslav policies became loud, especially
in the fall of Rankovic, the head of the secret service, in 1966
 Student organizations (e.g. Croatia’s Praxis), intellectuals, and
members of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia began criticizing
the federal economic and cultural policies
The Croatian opposition
 The Croatian opposition was led by both the communists
and the intellectuals, referred as the Croatian Spring, was
a period of student protests, inflammatory nationalistic
rhetoric and political crisis in the country
 Tito and his collaborators realized the real danger the
renewed Croatian nationalism posed for the stability and
the unity of Yugoslavia
The External Threat from
Soviets
  The Yugoslav people were prone to believe that the
potential weakening of Yugoslavia, which might invite a
Soviet invasion, could be far more debilitating effects on
their regions
 Tito used the external and exaggerated threat to
dissuade regional leaders from pushing for major reforms
along nationalistic lines
Tito’s last attempt to satisfy all the
nationalities
 After the alarming crisis of the 1960s had been partially
resolved, Tito and his cabinet produced a new
constitution for Yugoslavia
 The new constitution was the fourth one produced in less
than thirty years and it made extensive provisions for
local self-management to the six republics
 The content of this constitution made Yugoslavia a
defunct confederation of six republics and two provinces
unified by the effect of the external threat posed by the
Soviet Union
The U.S. support for
Yugoslavia
According to Warren Zimmerman(1996), the U.S.
ambassador to Yugoslavia, the U.S. supported Yugoslavia
in order to encourage and promote socialist countries to
maintain their independence and develop alternative nonSoviet models of socialism
Foreign Borrowing
  The key role that Yugoslavia played during the Cold war enabled
both its federal and its republican leaders to borrow extensively
from foreign banks and international monetary organizations
  The U.S. controlled International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank were more than happy to assist Yugoslavia in its
modernization with extremely favorable loans
  The extensive borrowing had the intended effect in the short-run as
it ameliorated the internal economic crisis, which was deepening
by the time the oil shock occurred in 1973 due to wrong economic
policies, ineffective bureaucracy and decreasing productivity
  The borrowing had devastating long-term economic and political
effects
The Debt Crisis
  With Tito’s death, Yugoslavia lost its respected leader
and the brand name that had provided the country with
much credibility
  The crisis was deepened because the republics had
borrowed individually and uncontrollably from abroad
after gaining significant control over their regions from the
1974 constitution
 From the total amount borrowed, the central government
had borrowed only 35 percent while the six republics and
the two autonomous provinces had borrowed the
remaining 65 percent
The Debt Crisis cont’d
 The richer republics of Slovenia and Croatia, due to the
disproportionate contributions they were obliged to make for
servicing the debt, became increasingly nationalistic
 As the gap between the richer and poorer regions increased,
richer ones also refused to make transfers to poorer republics
and provicnces
 By the end of the 1980s, the economic crisis had become so
serious that living standards had fallen by 40 percent inflation
reached at one point 2000 percent in 1989
 The cheap loans that Tito provided helped ameliorate the
domestic interethnic tensions, but the failure of repaying them
gave rise to nationalist and chauvinist forces
 Other major changes were occurring in Europe as the
political and economic crises of the 1980s were
worsening in Yugoslavia
 Socialist regimes were falling one after the other and
Europe was swept by nonviolent revolutions
 Gorbachev made it clear that the USSR was not going to
intervene in any of the Warsaw Pact members’
international affairs, thus removing the threat that had
helped to keep Yugoslavia united
Yugoslavia and the international
system in flux
 As a result of the developments in the international context,
Yugoslavia lost its special international position as a buffer zone
between the two blocks
 Slovenia and Croatia, which had grown extremely nationalist during
the 1980s were convinced that their dreams for independent
republics had a real chance in post-Cold War Europe
 Yugoslavia, thus, could not count on the two greatest contributors to
its internal stability—the external threat and the financial support of
the U.S.
 The U.S. shifted its interest away from the region and passed its
watchdog role to the European Union, which had a confusing
strategy towards Yugoslavia
The end of Yugoslavia
  Both Croatia and Slovenia were the first to declare
their independence in 1991
 Macedonia followed months later and finally Bosnia
 These changes marked the end of Yugoslavia and
the beginning of the worst bloodshed in post-World
War II Europe
 Montenegro declared independence in 2006 and
lastly Kosovo in 2008