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Yugoslavia Government and Politics
YU040001.
Josip Broz Tito
THE SOCIALIST FEDERAL REPUBLIC of Yugoslavia (Socijalisticka
Federativna Republika Jugoslavija--SFRJ) came into existence in
1945 as a state with nominally socialist political institutions,
dominated until 1990 by a single communist party. In that fortyfive -year period, the country's political structure evolved in
three major stages: as an orthodox member of the monolithic
Soviet-led communist bloc (1945-48); as a nonaligned communist
dictatorship (1948-80) whose slogan was "brotherhood and unity"
among its constituent republics; and as a decentralized
federation, with no dominant leader and most aspects of political
power centered at regional levels.
During the last two stages, Yugoslav political life
emphasized "development from below," a principle that gave
substantial economic and political decision making power to local
communes and self-managed industrial enterprises. This feature,
unique to Yugoslavia and present even during the powerful
dictatorship of Josip Broz Tito (1945-80), focused political
power in official and unofficial local groupings. Also unique to
Yugoslavia was the concept of statutory autonomy in nearly all
governmental functions for each of the six republics in the
federation. The inefficiency of the national political system was
masked until 1980 by the charisma of Tito, who provided enough
national unity for economic and political reforms to be
accomplished when necessary.
As early as 1948, the Yugoslav system experimented with
political configurations unknown in previous Marxist or Stalinist
practice. Although Yugoslavia began political reforms far ahead
of other European communist states, opposition political parties
only became legal in the late 1980s, a development stimulated
partly by reform elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The League of
Communists of Yugoslavia
(
LCY--see Glossary) retained substantial
control over the government's appointive and legislative
functions, but innovations made party control of the country's
diverse ethnic and economic groups problematic as early as the
1960s; the political management of economic reform, urgently
needed by 1980, was complicated by the same factors.
Tito was aware that without him the Yugoslav political system
would be a fragile entity. Therefore, in his last years of power
he attempted to restructure the system. His preparations for the
regime that would follow him emphasized decentralization of power
to accommodate the unique structure of the Yugoslav federation:
six republics and two provinces of widely varying political and
ethnic backgrounds, as well as contrasting economic levels. To
prevent yet another occurrence of the hostile fragmentation for
which the Balkans had become a symbol, Tito tried to equalize the
political power of the republics, minimizing the potential for
domination by one republic that might stimulate others to secede
from the federation.
The institutionalized political balance that followed Tito's
thirty-five years in office had several effects. Regional power
meant that federal decision making required unanimous consensus
among the republics. The veto power of each republic promoted
pressure politics and negotiations outside statutory institutions
in the process of reaching consensus; public accountability for
decisions was thus obscured. At the same time, the unanimity
requirement and equal rotation of top government positions among
the republics and provinces fostered regional participation,
provided an image of national unity, and prevented the emergence
of a new dictator. In fact, no strong national leader emerged in
Yugoslavia throughout the 1980s. The system gave the six
republics free exercise of formal and informal political leverage
on behalf of their own agendas, which often clashed.
Historical regional animosities and ambitions resurfaced in
the first post-Tito decade. Serbia, with the strongest leadership
of any republic, revived the concept of a strong centralized
state under Serbian domination; but other republics, defending
their sovereignty in a decentralized Yugoslavia, used Tito's
consensual policy making apparatus to block Serbian ambitions. In
the process, the LCY, sole legal all-Yugoslav party for fortyfive years, split in 1990 over the question of how much political
diversity should be tolerated at the national level. At that
point, the viability of the federation (whose demise was widely
predicted as early as 1980) came under even more serious
scrutiny.
Data as of December 1990
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