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Yugoslavia The Society and Its Environment
YU020001.
Folk dancers
THE MANY FACETS of the ethnic lens through which Yugoslavs
view
the universe have magnified the divisions in Yugoslav society and
obscured its few unifying elements. The obvious cultural and
economic contrasts were only the starting point of differences
that existed on many levels. In the alpine north, Baroque
Catholic altars reflected Slovenia's cultural affinity with
Austria and Italy, but modern glass-and-steel skyscrapers
revealed Slovenia's aspirations toward a role in modern Europe.
In the Balkan south, the ancient stone churches of Macedonia
reflected a rich Byzantine tradition, while acute poverty and a
low literacy rate were part of the legacy of Ottoman domination
that had insulated Macedonians from the influences of the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution.
The forces of war and external threat bound Slovenia, Macedonia,
and the patchwork of cultures between them into a single country,
but they allowed scant opportunity for consideration of how
ethnic differences could be overcome.
Despite the ethnic and cultural cleavages that continued to
divide Yugoslavia in 1990, the country made great social progress
after World War II. On the eve of the war, Yugoslavia was a
backward, predominantly peasant land with a few developing basic
industries mostly located in its northern regions. Paved roads
were rare, schools few, and almost half the people illiterate.
Infectious disease was frequent, infant mortality was very high,
doctors were few, and hygiene, medical facilities, and child care
were poor, especially in rural areas. The strong kinship ties
that undergirded society were the only social welfare system
available to most people. Meanwhile, rural overpopulation
fragmented landholding, and poverty frayed the fabric of the
family. While educated citizens in the northern cities might
watch ancient Greek drama in theaters, many of their compatriots
in the southern mountains actually lived according to Homeric
traditions of blood vengeance, the buying, selling, and stealing
of brides, practicing rituals of blood brotherhood, and reciting
epic poems to the music of a crude single-string instrument.
Before World War II, Yugoslavia's small upper class was
composed of a Serb-dominated bureaucracy and military and a few
professionals, entrepreneurs, and artisans. Like the Habsburg and
Ottoman domination of earlier centuries, the Serbian hegemony
established after World War I frustrated the autonomy of the
country's other major nationalities. Preoccupation with issues of
nationalism prevented effective solutions to the country's grave
social problems. Animosities among the Yugoslav peoples exploded
in civil war after the Nazis occupied the country in 1941. World
War II claimed 1.7 million Yugoslav lives and inflicted deep
wounds on all national psyches. Atrocities were committed by all
sides, and more than half Yugoslavia's war dead were killed by
other Yugoslavs.
After World War II, Yugoslavia's communist government
promoted the slogan "Brotherhood and Unity" and moved
energetically to smooth over ethnic antagonisms. Josip Broz Tito
and his revolutionary regime eradicated wartime collaborators
along with many innocents, ousted what remained of the old
Serb-dominated elite, nationalized private property, and
established a new party-based governing class. Membership in the
wartime
Partisans (see Glossary), rather than competence or
education, became the key to a successful career. The new
government, led by a ruling circle steeped in Marxism and
Leninism, undertook radical steps to modernize the country: first
reconstruction, then rapid industrialization. Modernization
continued apace after the Yugoslav communists ended their
alliance with the Soviet Union in 1948 and introduced workers'
self-management, a unique version of socialism. Thousands of
peasants migrated to urban areas in the decade following World
War II. Patriarchal extended families broke down at an
accelerated rate, and women began to find jobs and a new identity
outside the home. New schools and hospitals opened, and
universities began training teachers, doctors, and engineers.
Although Yugoslavia's economy expanded rapidly, by the
mid-1960s it could not absorb the large number of individuals
emerging from the educational system. Tito opened the borders to
emigration, and within a decade about a million Yugoslavs had
left to take jobs in Western Europe. Massive capital
redistribution from relatively rich northerly regions to the
less-developed did not mitigate the huge differences in
development between them. The economic downturn of the late 1970s
and 1980s slowed the entry of qualified individuals into the
working and managing classes. In the 1970s, the northern
republics began to complain about the contributions to
development in the southern regions mandated by the central
government. An entrenched bureaucracy sabotaged economic and
social reforms in the 1970s and 1980s, and by the late 1980s
economic and political stagnation had eroded many of the earlier
improvements in Yugoslavia's standard of living. As the concept
of the centrally planned economy waned throughout Eastern Europe,
Yugoslavia turned to the West, causing further tension between
tradition and change. In 1990 political victories by
non-Communist parties in Slovenia and Croatia promised a fresh
approach to old and new social tensions and regional disparities.
Such changes portended a complete restructuring of the Yugoslav
federation.
Data as of December 1990
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