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Yugoslavia Political Innovation and the 1974 Constitution
Finally, Tito (himself a Croat) quelled the separatist
movement by purging the Croatian party in 1972. The Croatian
purge stemmed the demand for veto power by individual republics
and paved the way for party recentralization and ratification of
the constitutional amendments promoted by Tito. The State
Presidency was added to the federal structure with Tito as its
head, once again the sole symbol of both party and state
leadership. In general, beginning in 1972, interregional
consensus came more easily, although members of central party
organs still were chosen by regional, not central, decision. In
the following years, Tito was able to create a consensual system
of inter-republican debate and compromise, with constitutional
amendments as required. That process culminated in the 1974
Constitution, which ratified and adjusted preceding changes and
attempted to construct a system that would survive Tito's
passing.
The 1974 Constitution, which remained in effect through the
end of the 1980s, only partially reversed the extreme
decentralization of the early 1970s. With 406 original articles,
it was one of the longest constitutions in the world. It added
elaborate language protecting the self-management system from
state interference and expanding representation of republics and
provinces in all electoral and policy forums. The Constitution
called the restructured Federal Assembly the highest expression
of the self-management system
(see Government Structure
, this
ch.). Accordingly, it prescribed a complex electoral procedure
for that body, beginning with the local labor and political
organizations.
(see
fig. 12). Those bodies were to elect communelevel assemblies, which then would elect assemblies at province
and republic level; finally, the latter groups would elect the
members of the two equal components of the Federal Assembly, the
Federal Chamber and the Chamber of Republics and Provinces. Like
its predecessor, the 1974 Constitution tried to refine the
balance between economic and ethnic diversity on one hand, and
the communist ideal of social unity on the other.
The new Constitution also reduced the State Presidency from
twenty-three to nine members, with equal representation for each
republic and province and an ex-officio position for the
president of the League of Communists. The party tried to
reactivate its role in guiding national policy through automatic
inclusion of the party chief in the State Presidency. That
practice was discontinued in 1988, when the political climate
called for further separation of party and state functions. This
reduced the State Presidency to eight members. The 1974
Constitution also expanded protection of individual rights and
court procedures, with the all-purpose caveat that no citizen
could use those freedoms to disrupt the prescribed social system.
Finally, Kosovo and Vojvodina, the two constituent provinces of
Serbia, received substantially increased autonomy, including de
facto veto power in the Serbian parliament. This change became a
turbulent issue of inter-republican debate in post-Tito
Yugoslavia
(see Regional Political Issues
, this ch.).
In practice, despite nominal dispersal of power, throughout
the 1970s the power of the LCY rested entirely on the personal
leadership of Tito and his chief theoretician, Eduard Kardelj. In
1974 Tito was elected president for life of the LCY, and the new
constitution gave him increased powers as state president. The
new provision strengthened the legitimacy of the Yugoslav regime
as defender of Marxism-Leninism.
After personally intervening in the Croatian crisis in 1971,
Tito gradually withdrew from the domestic decision--making
process. He continued making inspirational speeches to party
cadres and appointing officials of the party Presidium, but by
1976 he no longer presided over meetings of the Presidium or the
State Presidency. In the last four years of his life, Tito's
contact with day-to-day government operations decreased, and he
no longer used his immense prestige to break policy deadlocks.
In 1977 Kardelj attempted to lay the ideological groundwork
for a diversified post-Tito political system. In his The
Directions of Development of the Political System of SelfManagement , Kardelj admitted that pluralism was an inevitable
fact of Yugoslav political life, but he insisted that this
pluralism had nothing in common with the pluralism of the
bourgeois democracies of the West. In Yugoslavia, he said,
conflicting interests could be accommodated within the scope of
the LCY. Kardelj correctly identified one of the strongest forces
of pluralism as the principle of self-management of economic and
political organizations, which was greatly expanded in the 1974
Constitution. The trend continued in 1976, when the Law on
Associated Labor prescribed the basic organizations of associated
labor (BOALs) and self-management agreements of enterprises with
the government. That law and the Constitution not only provided
new building blocks for the Yugoslav economy, they also codified
political decentralization by removing centralized control and
stimulating the growth of nonparty interest groups
(see Adjustments in the 1970s
, ch. 3). "All-Yugoslav" interests,
already endangered by regional differences, suffered further
fragmentation with the political reforms of the mid-1970s.
Individual communists, theoretically given the role of
integrating society for the common good of the working class,
succumbed to divided loyalties and weak central leadership.
In 1979 the Presidium, chief executive body of the LCY, began
annual rotation of its chairmanship. After Tito died, his power
to name Presidium members devolved to a special Presidium
commission including regional party leaders. This additional step
toward party decentralization further revealed the unique stature
of the former leader. Rotation of the Presidium chairmanship
continued through the 1980s on a regular schedule, following the
"nationality key" that divided the position equally among the
eight federal jurisdictions; the rotation has been called "the
most elaborate quota system in the world." Although he devised
the rotation system to prevent party domination by one
individual, Tito placed great importance on a strong central
party surviving him. By 1980, however, the centrifugal political
forces gradually building in the previous fifteen years had
already eroded the single party structure. And the example Tito
set in 1948 by abandoning a monolithic world communist movement
spoke more loudly for pragmatic diversification than any of his
pleas thirty years later for national party unity.
Data as of December 1990
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