ABSTRACT
Party-army politics may well be the key determinant of post-Tito Yugoslavia. To understand the dynamics of that interaction will be essential for students of the Yugoslav political experiment, scholars of comparative Communism, and those concerned with the implications of the Yugoslav experience for other attempts at expanding worker participation and control in both East and West. From the perspective of Party-army relations, the Yugoslav Party's refusal to behead itself, made the totalitarian model version of civil-military relations even less applicable. The Yugoslav Party and army were partners in a forced isolation. The Soviet-Yugoslav split provided an artificial national unity. But when unity is a function of external threat, the problem is that any lessening of external pressure may bring about the embarrassing reemergence of unresolved differences, as happened in Yugoslavia during the 1960s. The extent to which it continues as a political actor depends far less on military corporate interests than on Party cohesion or the lack of it.
