ABSTRACT

The Yugoslavia constructed by Tito after the Second World War was a specifically coherent creation in so far as the ideology of self-management, fraternity and unity, along with the non-alignment symbolized by President Tito himself, acted as the ‘cement’ of the social fabric. In this ideology, self-management was held to be the highest level of democracy, far ahead of workers’ participation in capitalism; non-alignment was seen as the best chance of overcoming the division of the world into blocs; and Tito was the cohesive authority which guaranteed the equality of all the nations of Yugoslavia and the prospects for society’s prosperity (high living standards, openness to the world, etc.). With Tito’s death, however, came disillusionment. People soon learned that the miracle of the Yugoslav economy had been based on high foreign debts incurred by the state in order to cover the investment failures of industry. Economic collapse was paralleled by significant conflict between Yugoslav nations, at first between Serbs and Albanians in the Serbian Autonomous Province of Kosovo, then among other nations, which finally brought the country to all-out war.