Why did Yugoslavia disintegrate? Is there a conclusive answer?

Abstract

Yugoslavia, the State which Withered Away: The Rise, Crisis and Fall of Kardelj’s Yugoslavia (1974–1990), I shall argue, offers a very well-argued and coherent explanation of the political processes that led to Yugoslavia’s disintegration but not a conclusive answer to our question. The book—published in the same language both in Zagreb and in Belgrade—tells the story of a failed attempt to impose the Marxist conception of the withering away of the state to a multinational society of former Yugoslavia. According to the doctrine elaborated by Edvard Kardelj, Tito’s second in command, the state, during the socialist transition, should, in all of its non-coercive functions, be replaced by associations of workers who were referred to as ‘self-managing (or free) producers’. The two founding legal documents embodying this doctrine, the Yugoslav federal Constitution of 1974 and the Law on Associated Labour (1976) generated more than 5 million laws and regulations which were supposed to govern all aspects of public life in former Yugoslavia, both at the workplace and in the more traditional political sphere. More importantly, as Dejan Jović argues, this doctrine of socialist self-management shaped the ideological outlook of the Yugoslav communist elites well until the effective dissolution of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (the Yugoslav Communist Party), at its last and aborted extraordinary congress in January 1990. But the book offers not only a story of a failed communist experiment, but also an explanation of the disintegration of the federal Yugoslav state. Its author, in the first chapter, examines and partially rejects eight competing explanations of the disintegration each of which postulate one of the following as the dominant or decisive causal factor in the disintegration: the economic crisis, ancient hatreds among the peoples of Yugoslavia, nationalism/nationalist ideologies, cultural differences among the peoples of Yugoslavia, changes in international politics (the end of the cold war), the role of individual political