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Yugoslavia The Political Elite and Intellectuals
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a tiny
intelligentsia dominated the process of social and political
change that transformed Yugoslav society. South Slavic writers,
journalists, and scholars articulated popular aspirations and
acted as catalysts for the rising nationalism of the peoples
enclosed by the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. In interwar
Yugoslavia, despite the prevalence of revolving-door cabinets, a
group of about forty to fifty educated and politically
experienced figures formed a semipermanent ruling circle. The
bureaucratic and professional class was a broader middle stratum
of about 200,000 white-collar workers concentrated in urban
centers. Government service, which required secondary and
university schooling, was virtually the only employment
opportunity available for ambitious individuals.
Yugoslavia's interwar ruling elite represented the tip of a
very broad-based social pyramid. Society was overwhelmingly rural
and uneducated; only about half of the population could read, and
less than 10 percent lived in cities. The elite was drawn from
the sons of the middle and upper strata: large landowners and
bureaucrats and a handful of industrialists, financiers, and
military officers. No rising industrial bourgeoisie threatened
their hold on the state apparatus. The elite was also
overwhelmingly Serbian; most Croatian intellectuals and the
minuscule number of educated Macedonians and Albanians were
excluded. Their exclusion from the only path to upward
mobility--the government bureaucracy--exacerbated the bitter
nationalism and separatism of the era
(see Political Life in the 1920s
, ch. 1).
The turmoil of World War II and political takeover by the CPY
brought radical changes to Yugoslavia's ruling circle. The
communists ousted the prewar elite and replaced it with a new
ruling class chosen by party loyalty. During the war, the party
was composed largely of peasants and workers. Party leadership
was significantly more rural than the prewar elite; in 1945 only
5 percent of Communist Party leaders came from Belgrade, the
former bastion of power. In 1952 Yugoslavia's communist political
leadership class numbered about 51,000; it grew to 93,000 in the
1960s and added another 100,000 members in the mid-1970s after
constitutional redefinition of the self-management system.
In the immediate postwar period, service in Tito's anti-Nazi
Partisan forces or pre-1941 membership in the Communist Party of
Yugoslavia were the main prerequisites for a successful elite
career. Over 75 percent of pre-1944 party members pursued
professional political or military careers following World War
II. They also tended to linger in their positions. Active and
retired persons with pre-1941 party membership accounted for less
than one-half percent of total party membership in the late
1960s, but they held over 15 percent of the leading positions in
the party and society at large. By the 1980s, the LCY had lost
its working-class base and become a party of state employees.
Party members accounted for 94.1 percent of the Croatian
parliament in 1982. Communists accounted for over 95 percent of
all government administrators until the LCY abandoned its
monopoly of power in 1990. Until that date, nomination of
delegates to fill positions at all levels of the government--
which led to automatic election--was based on support from the
party elite. The party monopoly led to formation of
uncontrollable and non-elected oligarchies in each of
Yugoslavia's eight federal units
(see Local Government and the Communes
, ch. 4).
With few exceptions, the men who took power in Yugoslavia
after World War II were the sons of peasants and workers. This
pattern persisted through the 1960s, when 68.4 percent of
Yugoslavia's political leaders had fathers who had been peasants
or workers and more than 75 percent had grandfathers from those
backgrounds. The same pattern applied to the country's
professional classes as a whole. In 1960 nearly one-third of all
white-collar workers had been peasants themselves in 1946, and
nearly three-fourths came from peasant or worker families.
As the Partisan generation aged, education became more
important in professional advancement. By the early 1970s, about
90 percent of the country's professionals had gained their
positions at least nominally on the basis of educational
credentials. Older employees upgraded their job qualifications
through continuing-education programs. Expanding opportunities in
higher education, liberal admissions standards, and substantial
public financing for education all contributed to upward mobility
in the 1960s and 1970s. As many more Yugoslavs received formal
educational training and reached privileged positions, however,
mobility declined. The probability that children of workers or
peasants would become university students fell compared to the
chances of the children of professionals.
The rise of a substantial technical intelligentsia was a
major social development in postwar Yugoslavia. The technical
intelligentsia, which provided scientific and management
support for industrialization, came to enjoy considerable popular
prestige. Although they could find higher-paying jobs in the
West, relatively few members of this class joined the massive
worker emigration to Western Europe that began in the late 1960s.
Before Tito's death in 1980, the technical elite--who supported
enterprise autonomy--had a hostile relationship with party and
government officials who favored democratic centralism. In the
mid-1960s, party hard-liners attacked the "technocrats" for their
"petit bourgeois mentality" and labeled them class enemies who
subverted self-management.
The communist regime's relationship with artists and scholars
was likewise a troubled one. Artists and scholars were constantly
at odds with the government's efforts to control nationalism and
free expression. Numerous Croatian intellectuals lost their jobs
or were imprisoned after the Croatian Spring of the early 1970s,
and trials of dissident writers and scholars took place regularly
for the next two decades throughout the country
(see Djilas, Praxis, and Intellectual Repression
, ch. 4). Intellectuals came
to the fore again in the late 1980s, when national differences
divided the Communist Party. Albanians were the most manifestly
disaffected intellectuals in the 1980s, as they fought Serbian
restrictions on autonomy for Kosovo. The Kosovo issue also drew
Serbian intellectuals into the political arena. A "memorandum"
written by leading members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and
leaked to a Belgrade newspaper in 1986 described the Serbian
nation as being in greater jeopardy than at any time since World
War II. Likewise, Slovene intellectuals led the push for
democratic reforms that swept over the country from Slovenia
southward in the late 1980s
(see Intellectual Opposition Groups
, ch. 4).
Data as of December 1990
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